Month: May 2020

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The Trump Administration is putting the final touches on a sweeping executive order designed to punish online platforms for perceived anti-conservative bias. Legal scholar Kate Klonick obtained a draft of the document and posted it online late Wednesday night.

"In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey online," the draft executive order states. "This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power."

The document claims that online platforms have been "flagging content as inappropriate even though it does not violate any stated terms of service, making unannounced and unexplained changes to policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints, and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse."

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  Highly detailed cars have been a feature of Lego's Technic line since it was created in 1977, but they never looked this good back then. [credit: Lego ]

Lamborghini chose last year's Frankfurt auto show to debut its Sián FKP 37 hypercar. Based on the Lamborghini Aventador, the Sián FKP 37 teaches that old dog a new trick through the addition of a supercapacitor hybrid system, adding an additional 34hp (25kW) to help out the 774hp (577kW) V12 engine. Only 63 Sian FKP 37s will be built, and even if you have the $3.7 million asking price, they're already sold out. But from June 1st, there's a cheaper way to get your own Sián FKP 37, as long as you don't mind it being 1:8 scale. That's when the Lego Technic version comes out—a 3,696-piece kit that will cost $379.99.

Highly detailed technical models of cars have been a thing for Lego's Technic line since the late 1970s. Building techniques have changed a lot in that time, as has the array of Technic parts, resulting in a remarkably accurate-looking scale model of the outrageous Lamborghini. But in keeping with more than four decades of Technic car models, this one still has functional suspension, steering, moving pistons inside its engine, and a working eight-speed paddle-shift gearbox.

The Sián FKP 37 is one of the latest in Lego's range of 18+ sets, although that age rating is for the difficulty of the build, not any NSFW content. Building it should occupy at least a weekend, if my experience of the Lego Technic LMP2 car is anything to go by (and no, I still haven't disassembled that one to fix a tiny error that I made early on). Lego and Lamborghini have also put together a series of 13 videos, accessible via QR codes in two included booklets, that it says "delve into the inspiration behind different stages of the design."