Month: January 2022

Enlarge / Visitors view a 10-meter-tall Pikachu glass and steel sculpture in Shanghai, China On November 28, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Future Publishing)

A California appeals court has upheld the firings of two Los Angeles Police Department officers who failed to respond to a robbery in progress and instead went searching for a Snorlax in the Pokémon Go augmented reality game.

Officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were being recorded by a digital in-car video system (DICVS) when they decided to catch a Pokémon after not responding to a robbery on Saturday, April 15, 2017, according to the California Court of Appeal ruling issued Friday. A board of rights found the officers "guilty on multiple counts of misconduct" based on part on the "recording that captured petitioners willfully abdicating their duty to assist a commanding officer's response to a robbery in progress and playing a Pokémon mobile phone game while on duty," the ruling said.

The former officers appealed, claiming the city "proceeded in a manner contrary to the law by using the DICVS recording in their disciplinary proceeding and by denying them the protections of the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act," Friday's ruling said. A trial court denied the petition challenging the firings, and a three-judge panel at the appeals court unanimously upheld that decision on Friday.

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Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today's kids. The company was responding to a Wall Street Journal report detailing the lock-in and social pressure Apple's walled garden is creating among US teens. iMessage brands texts from iPhone users with a blue background and gives them additional features, while texts from Android phones are branded green and only have the base SMS feature set. According to the article, "Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones." Google apparently feels this is a problem.

"iMessage should not benefit from bullying," the official Android Twitter account wrote. "Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let's fix this as one industry. " Google SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer chimed in too, saying "Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy. Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this."

The "solution" Google is pushing here is RCS, or Rich Communication Services, a GSMA standard from 2008 that has slowly gained traction as an upgrade to SMS. RCS adds typing indicators, user presence, and better image sharing to carrier messaging. It is a 14-year-old carrier standard though, so it lacks many things you would want from a modern messaging service, like end-to-end encryption and support for nonphone devices. Google tries to band-aid over the aging standard with its "Google Messaging" client, but the result is a lot of clunky solutions which aren't as good as a modern messaging service.

Enlarge / A medical worker in PPE works with a patient with Covid-19 in a negative pressure room in the ICU ward at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts on January 4, 2022. The hospital says it is overflowing with patients and doesn't have many beds left. (credit: Getty | Joseph Prezioso)

Hospitals nationwide are once again buckling under the strain of COVID-19 cases as the ultratransmissible omicron wave crashes into health care systems that are already critically short-staffed and exhausted from previous waves of the pandemic.

The current situation is forcing states and hospitals to declare emergencies, deploy the National Guard, delay or cancel elective procedures, institute crisis standards of care, and allow health providers to stay at work even if they themselves are positive for COVID-19 because there is no one available to take their place. Together, the situation has some doctors openly worrying that the omicron wave will cause some systems to collapse in the coming weeks.

"The comforting news that this variant generally causes milder disease overlooks the unfolding tragedy happening on the front lines," Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician and director of global health in emergency medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece Monday.

Enlarge / Formula E's 2023 season will see the introduction of the new gen3 race car. (credit: Sam Bloxham/LAT/Formula E)

The Formula E electric single-seater racing series will see a new manufacturer join its grid next year. The Italian car company Maserati is figuring out its place in an electrified world, with a battery electric coupe, convertible, and SUV on the way—a range within a range called Folgore. And it has decided that an electric racing program would be a perfect accompaniment to that plan.

That's good news for Formula E, which has seen a number of German OEMs leave in recent seasons, including the 2021 championship-winning Mercedes-EQ team. Maserati is not quite Ferrari—Formula E has never made a secret of its desire to get that brand into the series, something rejected by then-Ferrari CEO Sergio Marchionne—but it's certainly the next-best thing. Now, one of the oldest names in racing is returning to single-seater competition with the introduction of the Gen3 car for the 2023 season.

"We are very proud to be back where we belong as protagonists in the world of racing," said Maserati CEO Davide Grasso. "We have a long history of world-class excellence in competition, and we are ready to drive performance in the future. In the race for more performance, luxury, and innovation, Folgore is irresistible, and it is the purest expression of Maserati. That's why we decided to go back to racing in the FIA Formula E World Championship, meeting our customers in the city centers of the world, taking the Trident forward into the future."