Author: easyfilo

Artist’s conception of the jockeying for position between EA and FIFA in this licensing fight.

We’ve known for months that EA has been questioning the value of its nearly three-decade-long relationship with FIFA, the international soccer governing body whose name has become synonymous with an ultra-popular video game series. Now, though, newly leaked statements attributed to EA CEO Andrew Wilson detail how “ironically, the FIFA license has actually been an impediment” to some of the ways EA wants to “grow the franchise.”

“Our players tell us they want more modes of play, different things beyond 11 vs. 11 and different types of gameplay,” Wilson said in a November all-hands meeting, according to a Video Games Chronicle report. “I would tell you, it’s been a fight to get FIFA to acknowledge the types of things that we want to create because they say our license only covers certain categories… FIFA is just the name on the box, but they’ve precluded our ability to be able to branch into the areas that players want.”

Beyond gameplay, the FIFA license also limits EA’s ability to include “more cultural and commercial brands” in the game, Wilson reportedly said. FIFA’s existing relationship with Adidas bars the inclusion of any Nike-branded products or imagery in the game, for instance.

Enlarge / The Next Gen Delivery Vehicle looks adorably goofy, but the vast majority of these new mail trucks will belch almost exactly as much carbon dioxide into the air as the old Grumman LLV trucks. (credit: USPS)

In February 2021, the United States Postal Service made a controversial decision to replace its fleet of aging and inefficient mail trucks with a new fleet made up almost entirely of new, inefficient diesel mail trucks. Although the vast majority of USPS delivery routes are ideally suited for electric vehicles, the USPS decided that a mere 10 percent of the planned order would be battery electric.

In early February 2022, that decision resulted in severe criticism from the US Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who accused the Postal Service of failing to properly examine the environmental impact of its decision, as required by law.

This week, the USPS released its final record of decision and record of environmental consideration for the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle purchase. And it’s bad news for anyone who cares about climate change or air pollution, as the Postal Service has dug in and refuses to alter its plans. That means that 90 percent of the 50,000-165,000 NGDVs that are being ordered will use gasoline and will only average 8.6 mpg (28.86 L/100 km) when used with air conditioning.

Enlarge / Screencap from a tweet by @OSINT_Ukraine reporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and incursion into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. (credit: @OSINT_Ukraine)

Twitter said it had mistakenly suspended the accounts of open source intelligence reporters posting about Russia’s military build-up around Ukraine, leading to many of them accusing the Russian state of launching a “bot” campaign against them.

Based on publicly available satellite imagery, open source reporters have used social media to supply a steady commentary on the activities of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border, providing a valuable alternative source of information to Western intelligence reports.

The people behind the suspended accounts said they believed they had been the target of an attack by Russian bots—computers that mimic the activity of human users—that had mass-reported their content as being suspicious. This led their content to be removed automatically by Twitter’s moderation technology.

Enlarge / Honda’s forward collision warning system has always been sensitive. Now the NHTSA is investigating some Hondas for false-positive automatic emergency brake activations. (credit: Honda)

Last week, we reported that Tesla is the subject of a new investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration due to the company’s cars’ propensity to inappropriately activate their emergency braking function. This week, it’s Honda’s turn in the spotlight.

The NHTSA opened a preliminary investigation into the problem on February 21 after receiving 278 complaints about Hondas that suddenly decelerated despite nothing in their path.

The problem affects approximately 1.7 million cars in total, split between model year 2017-2019 CR-V crossovers and 2018-2019 Accord sedans. (It’s worth noting that when we reviewed the 2018 Honda Accord, we specifically called out the sensitivity of its forward-collision warning system, although we did not experience any automatic emergency brake activations.)