Month: November 2019

Enlarge / SOMIS, CA - NOVEMBER 01: The Maria Fire burns on a hillside as it expands up to 8,000 acres on its first night on November 1, 2019 near Somis, California. Southern California has been hit by a series of dangerous, fast-moving wildfires this week as Santa Ana Winds ushered in strong gusts up to 80mph and extremely low humidity. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images) (credit: David McNew | Getty)

In the late hours of October 23, Craig Clements was grading papers when a colleague in Oakland texted him about a rapidly growing wildfire just north of San Francisco. He texted a few of his students, who jumped out of bed and rushed his way. Together they loaded a radar-packing Ford F-250 pickup with gear and hit the road, gathering the Oakland colleague on their way to the Kincade Fire, which would quickly become California’s biggest blaze of 2019.

Clements, a fire weather researcher at San Jose State University, and his team arrived around 1am, driving past fire engines and evacuating locals as they steered toward the blaze. Normally they would check in with an incident command post first, where officials could tell them where the wildfire might be heading, but the conflagration was still too young and chaotic for such organization. So they drove on, trying to position themselves near but not too near the growing plume, searching for a spot not surrounded by brush or traffic, away from power lines that could fall on their heads. On their map they found a road leading to a vineyard—lots of vegetation, sure, but chock full of water and therefore quite resistant to burning—and turned in, landing a kilometer from a ridge line the fire was burning up to.

Enlarge (credit: Caitlin O'Hara/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It's been almost two years since Waymo first announced that it was testing fully autonomous vehicles on public roads. Not long afterwards, the company said it planned to offer a fully driverless service to the public by the end of 2018.

The rollout has been a lot slower than expected. Over the course of 2018, most of Waymo's cars continued to have drivers behind the wheel. When Waymo launched its commercial service in December 2018, every car had a driver behind the wheel.

But now Waymo seems to be cautiously moving forward with fully driverless technology. Last month, Waymo told people in its closed testing program that they'd start getting rides in driverless vehicles. Now in a new piece for Techcrunch, Ed Niedermeyer reports on his own experience riding in a fully driverless car.

Enlarge / Traffic moves through an interchange along Interstate 580 on July 25, 2019 in Oakland, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)

The White House is apparently blinking in a contentious lawsuit over fuel efficiency standards, leaving a number of major automakers that had backed the administration in an awkward position.

The administration is considering abandoning a rule that would freeze fuel efficiency requirements at 2020 levels and instead replacing it with a rule that would require fleetwide improvements of about 1.5% per year, The Wall Street Journal reports today.

The move is the latest twist in a long and complicated standoff that began basically as soon as the Trump administration did. The man himself promised on the campaign trail to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and roll back Obama-era fuel efficiency standards for vehicles. The chain of events so far has led to a faceoff among automakers, as Honda, Ford, Volkswagen, and BMW back more stringent guidelines out of California, and General Motors, Toyota, Fiat Chrysler, Hyundai, Mazda, Nissan, and Kia stand with the White House against the rule.

Enlarge / Mei from Overwatch has become a grass roots symbol of the Hong Kong protests in the wake of Blizzard's decision. (credit: r/hongkong)

Before launching into the weekend-long celebration of Blizzard games that is Blizzcon, company President J. Allen Brack offered a vague on-stage apology for how the company failed to "bring the world together in a tough Hearthstone esports moment about a month ago."

Though Brack didn't delve into the details of that "tough... moment," it's an obvious reference to the company's initial one-year ban for pro Hearthstone player Ng "Blitzchung" Wai Chung after he shouted a statement of support for ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong on a post-match stream. While Blitzchung's ban was later reduced to a six-month suspension and his tournament winnings restored, the damage was done among a vocal segment of Blizzard's fan base.

In the wake of the Blitzchung decision, Blizzard was forced to cancel a public promotional event and belatedly punish a college Hearthstone team for a similar on-stream protest. The company faced both a brief employee walkout and admonishment from a bipartisan group of US legislators.