NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has several cameras that record high resolution footage to give us these never before seen views of our neighbor Mars and the landing process it takes to get there.
NASA and JPL also released this amazing audio giving us an opportunity to hear what standing on Mars sounds like with the noise of the rover filtered out:
and including the noise from the rover:
The ruling on Friday was Uber’s last appeal, as the Supreme Court is Britain’s highest court, and it has the final say on legal matters.
Delivering his judgement, Lord Leggatt said that the Supreme Court unanimously dismissed Uber’s appeal that it was an intermediary party and stated that drivers should be considered to be working not only when driving a passenger, but whenever logged in to the app.
Uber has been exploiting workers for years now by pretending the workers aren’t employees. Uber sets the pay rate, decides who is allowed to drive, what kind of vehicles are allowed to be used, when driving may occur, the price charged to the customer, and is definitely an employer even if the relationship happens through a phone application.
Congrats to the App Drivers & Couriers Union for helping to deliver this victory for labor rights for workers in the United Kingdom especially on this part of the win as they describe it:
The court further clarified that working time for the purposes of calculation of the minimum wage and holiday pay would be from logon to log off including stand by time. The court rejected Uber’s argument that if drivers are workers then working time should only be calculated as journey time with a paying passenger. This decision alone has significant implications for reducing urban congestion, pollution and poverty since Uber will now have the correct economic incentive to efficiently utilise driver and vehicle working time.
Collecting The Lost Vikings, Rock N Roll Racing, and Blackthorne the Blizzard Arcade Collection is out now for Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and the Xbox One with only backwards compatibility bringing the pack to the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
These games are still available as free downloads from Blizzard’s site, and have been for a long time, so it is a little surprising to see Blizzard charging $20 for them now, but you also get them bundled with assorted other add-ons for Overwatch, Diablo 3, and other games, and a few upgrades like widescreen support, the ability to rewind over mistakes, save-anywhere support, and co-op. Blackthorne also got a weird interactive let’s play kind of thing that Blizzard calls “watch mode” where you can drop in at any time and control the game. Neat.
Blizzard doesn’t have a great track record on remasters right now, their Warcraft III remaster was very poorly received, but this is their announcement trailer for a re-make of Diablo 2 and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack for $40 coming to Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One, and the Xbox Series X & S consoles later this year. Sadly, I don’t see any mention of a macOS release, giving up on decades of support by Blizzard.
Blizzard says that Diablo 2’s 2D graphics are revamped with “…full 3D physically-based rendering, dynamic lighting, revamped animations and spell effects…”, they’ve re-shot the cutscenes, and added surround sound for the game’s audio and soundtrack. Like many recent remasters, Blizzard says you can swap between the new and old Diablo 2 graphics quickly.
Vicarious Visions and Blizzard are co-developing the re-master and say that progress is supposed to be portable across platforms for characters and their inventories.
Diablo 3’s console port was awesome, I loved playing it with direct control on a gamepad instead of the sort of indirect control you had on computers with a mouse and keyboard. Hopefully this is an easy slam-dunk for Diablo 2. There’s an “technical test” of Diablo 2 coming soon for Windows players who opt-in and are chosen by Blizzard at their Diablo 2 site. Who loves to get exploited by one of the richest companies in video gaming to test their products without compensation? I guess I do, because I signed up for the test and if it comes without any NDA I’ll write about the experience.
NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory put out a statement after the successful landing:
The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million kilometers). Confirmation of the successful touchdown was announced in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 3:55 p.m. EST (12:55 p.m. PST).
Packed with groundbreaking technology, the Mars 2020 mission launched July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The Perseverance rover mission marks an ambitious first step in the effort to collect Mars samples and return them to Earth.
