Unfortunately it’s very hard to buy a decent dumb TV these days.

That’s absolutely not true. Bluetooth has many “profiles” which define different capabilities. Here’s a list of them. These are all defined in the official bluetooth standards.

Maybe you were thinking of the “core specification” which defines the underlying protocol but doesn’t define the profiles? But that’s just the way they broke up the spec documents. The profiles are still official parts of bluetooth.

Apple’s proprietary extensions for audio are not part of any official specification though.

Not in reliability…

But they’re probably still selling more CPUs to your average buyer who always buys Intel, doesn’t read tech news and never even heard about the controversy.

Intel didn’t actually manufacture the chips.

The chips with the oxidisation issue were manufactured by Intel at their Arizona fab plant.

Celebrities get wide latitude to protect themselves from imitators. Impressionists can do “satire” etc. but this isn’t that. It’s explicitly a reference to her voice in the movie, and as such she’s protected by law from them going around her and hiring someone else to imitate her.

It was explicitly represented as her voice when he tweeted “Her” in relation to the product, referencing a movie which she voiced. It’s not a legal grey area in the US. He sank his own ship here.

He tweeted “Her”, which explicitly tells us it’s a deliberate imitation of Scarlett’s voice in that movie. And he tried to negotiate licencing her famous voice, which she rejected.

So it’s more than just a coincidence, it’s deliberate bad faith behaviour. Legally you can’t misrepresent a product as being from a famous person when it wasn’t, and he very much did that. I guess he was hoping she’d give in and accept the licensing agreement post-facto. But instead it looks he’s in legal deep water now.

All this tells me is that they have a great PR department.

Meanwhile Mercedes has already reached level 3.

They have devices installed which include GPS and an accelerometer. They report back to base via a cellular connection when you drive erratically or aggressively etc.

It’s not just EVs - most new cars have these tracking devices where they sell your data to your insurance company to be used against you.

The STM32WB55 in the flipper has a versatile wireless peripheral built in which can be used to implement various protocols including Bluetooth, zigbee, etc… Support for I2C, I2S and CAN is pretty standard stuff - the ESP32 is nothing special in these respects.

Maybe they chose the STM32WB55 because its wireless support is more flexible than the ESP32 and allows them to implement a wider variety of protocols? Or possibly just better documented, giving them the chance to do things they can’t on the ESP32? I haven’t compared the inner workings of the two chips’ wireless support so I can’t say for sure.

The ESP32s are nice chips, but the STM32s are also really nice to work with and will work fine for this task. Changing to an ESP32 wouldn’t make any real difference to the user so the choice is moot really.

I’ve designed products around both CPUs and they’re both pretty nice. The STM32 has somewhat better documentation, has cleaner low power modes and is a bit simpler when delving into the nitty gritty details. The ESP is more powerful and has some nice if complex features but I don’t like its low power handling as much.

Overall I think I’d choose the STM32 for this task since it’s a little easier to make small, battery powered devices with it.

Or rather bad press for Daihatsu, who this is actually about.

The headline is terrible and misleading.

Trolley buses are a weird niche. They require permanent overhead cable infrastructure like trams do but don’t have the other benefits of trams - higher capacity, greater speed, better ride and no tyre pollution. I figure if you’re going to install a trolley bus route you probably might as well install rails at the same time and get the benefits of trams. (Aka streetcars for the North Americans out there)

The City of London did assessments on trolley buses and found that the added capacity of trams made them the better choice pretty much anywhere trolley buses were proposed, despite the slightly higher install cost.

As far as I know only the US would even humor such stupidity. In my country (Australia) they wouldn’t even let it go to court since the common law right to legal justice overrides contract law.

The name was in common usage a long time before that protocol. I don’t think they can claim any kind of rights over it.

The thing is she randomly got lucky and proven right due to a pandemic that no-one expected. There are a huge number of other scientists out there who were also right but never had that luck.

I’ve seen The White Stripes live at a festival and honestly they were one of the tighter acts there. Sure, they choose to use a lo-fi sound but the actual playing was pretty great.

This isn’t particularly unusual. Huntsmans are pretty friendly and quite a lot of people happily co-habit with them. I’ve known a couple of people who had friendly huntsmans in their cars for instance. I didn’t like the time one of them dropped in my lap while we were driving though.