Month: August 2020

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The F-35 Lightning II fighter has generated a lot of hype and a lot of hate over the past decade. But the next three years will see major changes to the aircraft that will, with any luck, at least mute some of the hate—or otherwise, just add billions more to the cost of the aircraft.

The Tech Refresh 3 program for the F-35 includes an upgrade of the aircraft's core processor and memory and the replacement of the aircraft's Panoramic Cockpit Display—the big-screen display that is the user interface for many of the aircraft's sensors and systems. There are also radar upgrades and some weapons-handling hardware changes in store, but a vast proportion of the upcoming changes will be in software.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The personal car has been sold to society as an engineered expression of freedom, as told through stories as varied as the dust bowl migration of The Grapes of Wrath to the irresponsible road racers of The Cannonball Run. And decades of dependence on fast-flowing liquid hydrocarbons for fuel has left little tolerance for spending many minutes more plugged in and stationary, waiting for lithium-ion cells to recharge. So when it comes to bench-racing electric vehicles, the only statistic most people care about is how far it can go before you need to plug it in again.

The situation isn't exactly helped by the tests used by regulators. In Europe, the WLTP test cycle averages 29mph (47km/h) and generates range estimates that should be considered mere fantasies on North American roads. The US Environmental Protection Agency's test averages almost twice that, but then gets subjected to a fudge factor that heavily penalizes some while flattering others. Which is why it's interesting to see the results of an independent range test of several EVs that involved charging them up then driving them at a steady 70mph (112km/h) until they ground to a halt.

The study was commissioned by Polestar, which wanted to rank its new Polestar 2 EV against three competitors: the Tesla Model 3 Performance, Jaguar I-Pace, and Audi e-tron. The test procedure, conducted on July 28 on a three-mile (4.8km) oval at Fowlerville Proving Ground in Michigan, was quite straightforward.

Enlarge / Joe Biden in Delaware in August 2020. (credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

Steve Scalise, a leading Republican in the House of Representatives, has deleted a tweeted video that contained an edited exchange between Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and activist Ady Barkan. The altered video appeared to show Biden clearly endorsing reduced funding for police, while the genuine clip was more ambiguous.

The segment was part of a longer video that portrayed Democrats as advocates of police abolition and "mob rule." Twitter slapped the tweet with a "manipulated media" label over the weekend.

"These are not my words," wrote Barkan, who suffers from ALS and as a result speaks with a synthesized computer voice. "I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts." He called on Scalise, the House Republican whip from Louisiana, to remove the video. "You owe the entire disability community an apology," he said.

Look closely and you'll see traffic light icons in the middle of each intersection. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

It looks like Google Maps is getting a new road feature: traffic lights. Google has been experimenting with marking intersections with traffic lights for a few months now, but today, as first spotted by Android Police, the feature is getting a wide rollout.

Google Maps traffic light support is just a small, static marker in the middle of an intersection indicating that there is a traffic light there. You have to zoom in really close to see the traffic lights, but if we zoom in far enough, we're seeing them on Android, iOS, and the Web. As always the map features are going to depend on Google's data set, and right now we're only seeing those in the US. They show up when browsing the map or navigating.

For now, it does not seem like Google has a use for the traffic lights other than displaying them on a map. It would be great if navigation could shout out "turn left at the next light" for verbal directions, but that's not happening yet. The state-of-the-art for traffic light navigation can be found in some Audis that, through a subscription service, can pull in live traffic light countdown data and can tell you how fast to go to make the next light.

Enlarge / Horizon: Zero Dawn probably won't be the last game Sony ports from a PlayStation platform to PC.

Horizon: Zero Dawn probably won't be the last former PlayStation exclusive to make the jump to PC. In its 2020 corporate report published late last week, Sony says that it "will explore expanding our 1st party titles to the PC platform, in order to promote further growth in our profitability."

The "explore" wording there is a little bit couched, suggesting that Sony still hasn't completely made up its mind on the specifics of further PC game publishing. And the report doesn't go into detail on which games, if any, Sony considers ripe for porting.

And even if Sony does continue publishing on PC, we shouldn't necessarily expect major PlayStation titles to hit Steam on the same day as the coming PS5. In Horizon's case, Sony waited a full 1,256 days between the game's February, 2017 launch on PS4 and its PC launch earlier this month.