Month: August 2020

Enlarge / Ensigns Tendi (Noël Wells), Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), Boimler (Jack Quaid), and Mariner (Tawny Newsome) reporting for duty. (credit: YouTube/CBS All Access)

Star Trek has been many things in the past 54 years: eight television series, 13 films, the better part of a thousand total novels, and the beating heart that arguably created modern fandom as it now stands. But for all the humor—both intentional and not—scattered throughout its storied history, there is one frontier it has not yet explored: the half-hour comedy.

The ninth and newest Star Trek series aims to change all that. Lower Decks is a half-hour animated series set in the timeline two years after the conclusion of Star Trek: Voyager. The half-hour comedy cartoon format is a definite change of pace from ViacomCBS' other recent Star Trek offerings, the heavily serialized dramas Picard and Discovery. The question any fan might have then, is simple: does it hold up?

And the answer is yes, mostly—but don't set your expectations to "stunned."

Enlarge (credit: b k)

In February, BP announced a pledge to (mostly) reach net-zero CO­₂­ emissions by 2050, a noteworthy change of course steered by new CEO Bernard Looney. BP had long dabbled in promoting an interest in greener pursuits, but these promises pointed toward a more serious shift.

On Monday, the company released some specifics for the coming decade, describing “a new strategy that will reshape [BP’s] business as it pivots from being an international oil company focused on producing resources to an integrated energy company focused on delivering solutions for customers.” The new details are focused on investors, as the plan involves about a 50-percent reduction in dividends for shareholders. That money will instead go to paying down debts—partly a response to the economic consequences of COVID-19—as well as funding some of the planned investments.

BP says it will increase investment in “low carbon energy” from $500 million to around $5 billion per year by 2030. That includes building renewable electricity generation reaching 50 gigawatts in capacity, as well as pushing into the nascent hydrogen, biofuel, and carbon capture industries. It also includes betting on the electric vehicle charging business, with a goal of expanding from the current 7,500 charging points to over 70,000.

Enlarge / In still-image form, Horizon Zero Dawn sure is a looker on PC. But it's a video game, not a slideshow, and that brings us to some bad news. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Horizon Zero Dawn was an easy Ars pick for one of 2017's top five video games, but a certain subset of our readers disagreed. This was due almost entirely to the game's PS4 exclusivity. Nevermind that its developers, Guerrilla Games, are a wholly owned Sony subsidiary; we want it on PC, our readers declared.

Historically, Sony Interactive Entertainment (not to be confused with other Sony publishing arms) has been cagey about letting its PlayStation exclusives land elsewhere, but the past couple of years has seen that stance shift, with games like Heavy Rain and Death Stranding making their PC debuts. Death Stranding stands out as a particularly impressive example of a console game's PC port gone right.

I remarked at the time that DS's PC version was good news for HZD, mostly because they share the same underlying tech, Guerrilla's Decima Engine. But today, two days before HZD's "complete" edition lands on Steam for $50, I'm here to report that their shared tech hasn't been paid forward with identical PC-version results.

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski arrives for a court appearance at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and US Courthouse on November 13, 2019 in San Francisco, California. (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

Ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski yesterday was sentenced to 18 months in prison following his March guilty plea for stealing a confidential document related to Google's self-driving technology.

Levandowski's lawyers last week asked a judge in US District Court for the Northern District of California to let him off without any prison time, arguing that a year of home confinement, a fine, restitution, and community service would be sufficient punishment. The federal government asked for a 27-month prison sentence.

While handing down the 18-month sentence, US District Judge William Alsup said that a sentence without imprisonment would give "a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets," according to a Reuters report. Levandowski was originally charged with 33 counts of stealing trade secrets by downloading thousands of documents to his personal laptop in December 2015 shortly before he left Google to work on his startup, Otto, which was acquired by Uber for a reported $680 million in August 2016. In a plea deal, Levandowksi admitted to stealing one document called "Chauffeur TL weekly updates," which tracked the progress of Google's "Project Chauffeur" that later became Waymo. Prosecutors dropped the other charges.

Fans of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—whether Ken Kesey's 1962 novel or the 1975 Oscar-winning film starring Jack Nicholson—know that the sadistic, tyrannical Nurse Ratched is a crucial antagonist driving the story of a rebellious inmate in a psychiatric hospital. Now she's getting her own back story in the form of a new prequel series, Ratched. Netflix dropped the first trailer for the series yesterday.

(Spoilers for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest book and film below.)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is set in a psychiatric hospital in Salem, Oregon, where Randle Patrick McMurphy is sent after faking insanity to escape a prison farm sentence. Nurse Ratched (aka Big Nurse) rules the place with an iron hand, systematically abusing the inmates under her charge. She maintains order by withholding basic necessities, medications, or patient privileges, but McMurphy's rebellious nature challenges her authority, even in the face of shock therapy.

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  On August 5, Formula E returns to action with six races held over the next nine days, all at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Here, we see Audi Sport driver Lucas di Grassi during qualifying. It wasn't a great session for di Grassi, who lines up 21st for the first race. [credit: Formula E ]

On Wednesday afternoon, Formula E returns to action in Berlin. And yes, you read that right—racing on a Wednesday. The electric racing series started its sixth season in Saudi Arabia back in November and managed to run a total of five races (out of a planned 14) before COVID-19 turned up and shut everything down. Tentative plans called for a return to racing in July in New York City, but with the pandemic raging out of control in the US, that turned out to be a non-starter.

Instead, the series got creative. Rather than continue to cross the globe, with all those attendant risks, it has decamped to Germany, a country where public health measures have largely worked to control viral infections. So it will wrap up this season with a total of six more races, held over the next nine days, all taking place at the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin.

To make things more interesting, the series will use three different track layouts in Berlin. For the first pair of races, which take place on Wednesday and Thursday (August 5 and 6), the cars will use a reversed version of the 10-turn, 1.5-mile (2.35km) track used in previous years. The second pair of races, which will be held on August 8 and 9, will use the traditional Berlin layout, the same 10 turns and 1.5 miles, but run counterclockwise, as in years past. And for the final two races, which take place on August 12 and 13, there's a new 16-turn, 1.6-mile (2.5km) layout to contend with.