Month: February 2022

Enlarge / After 12 hours, the Tesla CEO deleted the Holocaust joke. (credit: Twitter)

In the early hours of Thursday morning, Elon Musk tweeted a meme that compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with Adolf Hitler.

The tweet, replying to crypto coin enthusiasts, included a photo of Hitler with the phrase "stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau" and "I had a budget," a reference to the industrialized murder of millions of people by the German regime in extermination camps during the 1940s.

(credit: Twitter)

In the past, Musk has tweeted his support for the "freedom convoy" protests, a right-wing movement funded mostly from the US that has been causing civil unrest in neighboring Canada.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks to members of the media while departing from federal court in New York on Thursday, April 4, 2019. US District Judge Alison Nathan telegraphed her initial thoughts as the SEC and Elon Musk's lawyers presented their arguments over whether the Tesla Inc. CEO should be held in contempt for tweets the agency says violated an earlier agreement. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A lawyer for Tesla and CEO Elon Musk claimed in a court filing today that the US Securities and Exchange Commission is harassing the car company and Musk to "muzzle" his criticism of the government. The three-page letter from lawyer Alex Spiro to US District Judge Alison Nathan in New York said the SEC is "weaponizing" the 2018 settlement in which Tesla and Musk agreed to pay $20 million each in penalties to resolve the SEC's complaint that "Musk's misleading tweets" about taking Tesla private caused the stock price to jump "and led to significant market disruption."

The settlement also required Tesla to impose controls on Musk's social media statements. Musk had claimed on Twitter that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 per share, but the SEC said in a lawsuit that "Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source."

Today's letter said the SEC "has been weaponizing the consent decree by using it to try to muzzle and harass Mr. Musk and Tesla, while ignoring its Court-ordered duty to remit the $40 million that it continues to hold while Tesla's shareholders continue to wait. Worst of all, the SEC seems to be targeting Mr. Musk and Tesla for unrelenting investigation largely because Mr. Musk remains an outspoken critic of the government; the SEC's outsized efforts seem calculated to chill his exercise of First Amendment rights rather than to enforce generally applicable laws in evenhanded fashion."

The number of physical console game releases continues to decline even as the number of digital console games explodes.

Anyone watching the game industry knows that the console market is quickly shifting away from games sold on physical media and toward the digital download dominance that PC gamers have known for years. But a new exclusive analysis of NPD Game Pulse data conducted by Ars Technica shows the extent of the decline in physical console game production, even as the number of digital console titles continues to explode.

In terms of distinct game titles released in the United States, the raw number of new games available on physical media (i.e. discs or cartridges) declined from 321 in 2018 to just 226 in 2021, a nearly 30 percent decline (games released on multiple consoles are counted as a single title in this measure).

The number of digital games released each year, on the other hand, remained relatively flat from 2018 through 2020. Then, in 2021, that number exploded to nearly 2,200 digital titles, a 64 percent increase from 2020.

Enlarge / Eve Spectrum 4K 144Hz monitor. (credit: Eve)

While matte screens produce consistent, glare-resistant images in different lighting environments, glossy alternatives can provide a more vivid, colorful image in the right conditions. You can find glossy screens in everything from TVs to smartphones and general-purpose PC monitors. Glossy gaming monitors, though, haven't been available. A small company called Eve plans to change that by making shiny versions of its two gaming monitors.

On Wednesday, Eve confirmed that it will make a glossy coating option available for two of its three 27-inch gaming monitors, the 4K 144 Hz Spectrum and QHD 280 Hz Spectrum (previously 240 Hz). The company did not confirm a price or release date.

Eve explained the difficulties behind making glossy displays. Despite what you may have seen on Reddit or YouTube, producing a good glossy screen is not as simple as removing a monitor's anti-glare coating. Glossy displays also require changes to the LCD module's polarizer filter, which controls the lightwaves.