Month: May 2022

Enlarge (credit: Paramount+)

If the modern Star Trek shows have all felt a little off to you, Strange New Worlds may be what you’ve been waiting for.

The modern era of TV Star Trek has been more than willing to experiment with what a Star Trek show is. Discovery and Picard both focus on heavily serialized season-long plotlines. Lower Decks is an animated sendup of (and love letter to) Trek‘s cultural peak in the ’90s. And the computer-animated Prodigy aims for a younger audience, with simpler storylines, a lighter tone, and tween-y interpersonal melodrama aplenty.

What none of these shows has explicitly tried to do is replicate the format of older shows like the Original Series or The Next Generation—monster/alien/glowing-godlike-being-of-the-week stories where no matter how bad things might look for our heroes, everything will be more or less wrapped up at the end of the hour.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | nevarpp)

The broadband industry has abandoned its lawsuit against California’s net neutrality law after a series of court rulings went against Internet service providers.

The four broadband lobby groups that sued California “hereby stipulate to the dismissal of this action without prejudice,” they wrote in a filing Wednesday in US District Court for the Eastern District of California. The ISP groups are ACA Connects (formerly the American Cable Association), CTIA-The Wireless Association, NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, and USTelecom.

“After losing three times in federal court, the ISPs have finally realized that they can’t overturn California’s net neutrality law and that they should just stop trying,” Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick wrote, calling the development “a historic win for Californians and the open Internet.”

Enlarge / Volta Trucks’ Zero has been designed from the ground up as a battery-electric logistics vehicle. The driver can enter or exit from either side and sits in a central driving position with eyes at the right height to spot cyclists and other vulnerable road users. (credit: Volta | Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

If you live in Los Angeles, you might start seeing some of Volta Trucks’ distinctive-looking electric vehicles driving around, as the Swedish startup plans to deploy a pilot fleet of Class 7 trucks in the city next year. After initially focusing on Europe, Volta Trucks revealed on Thursday that, like Prince Akeem, it’s coming to America.

The Volta Zero was designed from the ground up to be an electric heavy-duty truck rather than an adaptation of an existing internal-combustion platform. The truck features a central driving position, with a minimum of blind spots, that places the driver at an appropriate height to spot vulnerable road users like cyclists. Range is a route-appropriate 95-125 miles (152-201 km)—the Zero is meant for urban logistics, not long hauls.

But don’t think of Volta Trucks as a research project. The batteries and motors are both sourced from leaders in the field, and rather than set up a new factory with plans for world domination, the trucks are being contract-manufactured at the former MAN plant in Steyr, Austria.