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Opinion: Tesla’s self-induced jet wash

Deadlines, delays, and departures dog Model 3.

Telsa Model Ss in the company's European production center in Tilburg, Netherlands. (credit: Getty Images | Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg)

Wake turbulence can ruin your day. Large aircraft deposit a strong ground-bound vortex that can cause huge altitude losses for other aircraft following them.

In the jet wash of a gob-smacking 325,000 pre-orders—at $1,000 each—for the upcoming Model 3 in just one week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk had bad news for his investors on Thursday. He told them the July 1, 2017 start date for production "is not a date that will actually be met." While this would be the fourth production delay for the Model 3 since the concept was first floated several years ago, the news doesn't stop there. New, more aggressive production goals have been set, even though Tesla is losing primary executive staff responsible for achieving them. The financial performance of the company has also worsened.

Tesla is already struggling to meet production deadlines for its current Model S and Model X units.
Quality glitches with the Model X's "falcon wings" and seat latches have led not just to production delays, but apprehension about the X's positive initial reception. Tesla is actually suing its supplier for the doors.

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Lavie Tidhar’s novel Central Station is a mosaic of posthuman problems

Review: Novel offers a realistically weird picture of life on a far-future space station.

Detail from the cover of Central Station, by Lavie Tidhar. (credit: Sarah Anne Langton)

The scope of Lavie Tidhar's new novel Central Station may be galactic, but each of its many, many co-existing layers of reality are connected by one locale: the ever-present space port of Central Station, an unimaginably massive building that joins the human past on Earth to its rapidly evolving future. Trying to summarize Central Station is like trying to summarize an entire season of a soap opera, except there are no heroes or villains, and, you know, the plot's mysterious baby scandal is about who engineered him in the vat and to what purpose. Adding to the drama is the Conversation: an inescapable, interconnected network that touches (almost) all people throughout the space-time continuum.

Central Station grew out of 13 linked short stories, some previously published and some new, which is what grants World Fantasy Award-winning author Tidhar such a broad canvas. His interwoven mix of human and non-human lives is full of characters crashing into the world and sending out ripples like stones thrown into a pond.

Is the main thrust that prodigal son Boris Aharon Chong has returned to Central Station, with an alien parasite in tow, to face the family, woman, and otherworldly child he abandoned in different ways? (In the cast list at the back of the book, Boris Chong is described as having “issues”—an understatement.) Is the central plot the forbidden battlefield romance between Isobel Chow and a robotnik named Motl, a being that stopped being human as we understand it long ago? Is the story the machination of the Oracle, Ruth Cohen, and the rag-and-bone man Ibrahim, who are all joined with non-human, digital, sentient life forms called Others? What of techno-vampire Carmel and her romance with the least technologically capable human in the story, the node-less and thus data-less Achimwene Haile Selassie Jones? And what's up with the manufactured boys Kranki and Ismail anyway?

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From XCOM to golems—cardboard games with digital brains

Three designers talk about the pros—and cons—of tech-powered tabletop titles.

Board gaming is in the midst of a creative “golden age.” But while games thrive on innovation, a paradoxically conservative streak runs through the hobby when it comes to the most fundamental technological shift of the 21st century: the rise of the smartphone.

While publishers have pushed out digital adaptations of hit games like Catan, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride, this is generally a one-way movement; few digital apps and tools are used in physical board games. But there are exceptions.

One of the first high-profile attempts at an analog-digital hybrid was XCOM: The Board Game. Released in 2015, the game offers a cooperative, multiplayer reimagining of the revered video game series that tasks players with repelling an alien invasion of the Earth. Created by Canadian designer Eric Lang, it uses a smartphone app to coordinate the aliens’ sinister plans to enslave the planet.

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Doppio dual-screen smartwatch concept (video)

Two screens are better than one (sometimes) when you’re using a desktop computer. But what about a laptop? You can get secondary displays for those too.

Let’s go smaller: what about smartwatches?

Maybe one day you’ll be able to get a dual-screen version of that too.

Doppio is a smartwatch concept that incorporates two displays that can be configured in a variety of ways. For instance, one screen can rest on top of the other for a sort of standard, single-screen view.

Continue reading Doppio dual-screen smartwatch concept (video) at Liliputing.

Two screens are better than one (sometimes) when you’re using a desktop computer. But what about a laptop? You can get secondary displays for those too.

Let’s go smaller: what about smartwatches?

Maybe one day you’ll be able to get a dual-screen version of that too.

Continue reading Doppio dual-screen smartwatch concept (video) at Liliputing.

Geforce GTX 1080: Die neue schnellste Grafikkarte taktet extrem hoch

Nvidias Geforce GTX 1080 mit Pascal-Architektur soll eine Titan X locker übertreffen: Der Chip der Grafikkarte nutzt 2.560 Shader, die dank 16FF-Prozess lange nicht mehr gesehene Frequenzen erreichen. (Nvidia Pascal, Grafikhardware)

Jurist Eberl: Bundesregierung soll gegen Paypal-Kontensperrungen vorgehen

Ein Jurist ruft die Bundesregierung auf, keine willkürlichen Kontensperrungen von Paypal nach US-Recht in Deutschland zuzulassen. Er sieht darin bereits einen Vorgeschmack auf das Freihandelsabkommen TTIP. (Paypal, eBay)

Id Software: PC-Spieler müssen 45 GByte von Steam laden

Die Systemanforderungen für die PC-Fassung von Doom liegen vor. Spieler mit einer langsamen Onlineverbindung werden höllisch viel Geduld vor dem Spielestart brauchen: Von 55 GByte befinden sich nur 10 GByte auf der DVD der Handelsversion. (Doom, PSN)

ISP Boss Criticizes Calls to Criminalize File-Sharers

The boss of a prominent ISP in Sweden has criticized moves by the government which could criminalize hundreds of thousands of Internet users. Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung says the country is stuck in the past when it calls for harsher punishments for file-sharing and should instead concentrate on developing better legal options.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

There are very few Internet service providers around the world who could be described as file-sharer friendly. Most will steadfastly do their bare minimum when aggressive copyright holders come calling, with the majority happy to throw their customers to the wolves, guilty or not.

The same cannot be said about Swedish ISP Bahnhof. CEO Jon Karlung has been at the forefront of several arguments over file-sharers for many years, particularly when their activities intersect with a right to privacy.

In 2009, Karlung threw a wrench in the works of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) by refusing to log the IP addresses of his customers. This meant that if a court came calling for the data, none would be available.

In 2011, Karlung was pleasing the masses again, this time by hosting Wikileaks and promising to route all customer traffic through an encrypted VPN service. And in April this year the Bahnhof CEO vowed to protect his customers from copyright trolls.

Now Karlung has turned his attentions to the Swedish government following an open hearing at the end of last month on the subject of piracy in the digital marketplace.

The published purpose of the hearing was to “share knowledge and gain a greater insight into how piracy and other infringements of intellectual property affects both businesses and consumers and society in general” but it appears Karlung was not impressed.

Servers at Bahnhof

Writing in Sweden’s SVT, Karlung said that the meeting was attended by representatives from the film and music industries who sat alongside police and politicians. He says that the atmosphere was good, with everyone in agreement.

“For several hours they repeated, with rising fighting spirit, the same message again and again: ‘We need to block illegal sites! We must strengthen penalties!’,” the Bahnhof CEO reports.

Eventually Sweden’s Minister for Justice took the floor and told those assembled that “theft is theft!” while championing tougher penalties for infringers. He also noted that his first meetings after he took over as attorney general had been with the film industry. This appears to have riled Karlung.

“It is symptomatic that no Internet service provider was invited to the meeting – or anyone else with a broader understanding of digital conditions,” he explains.

The Bahnhof CEO says the exchange reminded him of 2008 when he attended a meeting in Sweden’s Parliament on the topic of file-sharing. Back then too, a politician stood up, declared that “theft is theft”, and left without discussing the issue with the ISP. For Karlung, history is repeating itself.

“In 2016, Sweden wants to criminalize hundreds of thousands of citizens for file-sharing. Now?! When large parts of the film and music industry have already adapted to the digital landscape with services such as Spotify and Netflix?” he questions.

“Consumers are apparently willing to pay. How about adding resources to develop the right services instead of taking a large sledgehammer to the free Internet?”

Karlung says that Sweden used to be at the forefront in that respect, but things have changed.

“Now we are internationally renowned as a place where courts prohibit public art from being shared online,” he explains.

Whether Karlung’s words will have any effect on government policy will remain to be seen but in any event it is extremely rare for the CEO of an ISP to make his voice heard in the way Karlung has for the past several years. Certainly, privacy conscious customers could do worse than check out this ISP.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Autobranche: BMW will Ingenieure zu Software-Experten fortbilden

Die Maschinenbauer von BMW sollen noch mal auf die Uni: Das Unternehmen will seinen Ingenieuren die Möglichkeit geben, IT-Kompetenzen in Aufbaustudiengängen zu erwerben. (BMW)

Die Woche im Video: Regenmangel, Rekord, Re:publica

Ein Weltrekord im Hoverboarden, ein unheimliches WLAN im Flugzeug, mal wieder ein Bitcoin-Erfinder – und die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate wollen einen Berg bauen, damit es regnet: Sieben Tage voller Kuriositäten im Überblick. Und Re:publica war auch. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Kindle)

Ein Weltrekord im Hoverboarden, ein unheimliches WLAN im Flugzeug, mal wieder ein Bitcoin-Erfinder - und die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate wollen einen Berg bauen, damit es regnet: Sieben Tage voller Kuriositäten im Überblick. Und Re:publica war auch. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Kindle)