Snap Judgments

Enlarge / The Chinese automaker BYD has every other electric vehicle maker worried. (credit: John Keeble/Getty Images) The United States has won an important battle in its war to keep low-cost Chinese electric vehicles from American car buyers. Today, Reuters reports that the Mexican federal government has responded to pressure from the US and will not offer incentives to Chinese automakers, like BYD, that are looking to establish North American manufacturing operations. BYD last met with Mexican officials in January, according to Reuters, where it learned that Chinese automakers would not be offered tax breaks or cheap land to build factories. Until now, Mexico has offered foreign automakers generous subsidies that have made the country a cheap place to build cars.

Enlarge / That is in no way what the Z button looks like or where it goes Apple's decision earlier this month to open the iOS App Store to generic retro game emulators is already bearing fruit. Delta launched Wednesday as one of the first officially approved iOS apps to emulate Nintendo consoles from the NES through the N64 and the Game Boy through the Nintendo DS (though unofficial options have snuck through in the past). Delta is an outgrowth of developer Riley Testut's earlier sideloadable GBA4iOS project, which recently had its own unauthorized clone removed from the App Store.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images) Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised more layoffs at Google this year, and the company is delivering. Business Insider was the first to report the latest cuts are to "several teams" in Google's real estate and finance departments. The report adds: "One current employee said the changes were 'pretty large-scale' and that some roles are being moved abroad." CNBC has a copy of the memo that Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat sent out to employees about the layoffs.

Enlarge (credit: Sergey Krasovskiy) Blue whales have been considered the largest creatures to ever live on Earth. With a maximum length of nearly 30 meters and weighing nearly 200 tons, they are the all-time undisputed heavyweight champions of the animal kingdom. Now, digging on a beach in Somerset, UK, a team of British paleontologists found the remains of an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that could give the whales some competition.

Enlarge / The Mercedes-Benz E-Class is the brand's workhorse, covering millions of km a year ferrying German taxi passengers around. (credit: Peter Nelson) Mercedes-Benz's E Class badge possesses a lot of canon. When asked to picture a '90s-or-newer Mercedes full-size sedan, it's hard not to conjure up mental snapshots of W124-and-up generations schlepping around well-heeled suburban communities.

(credit: Getty Images) Last October, I received an email with a hell of an opening line: “I fired a nuke at the US Copyright Office this morning.” The message was from Elisa Shupe, a 60-year-old retired US Army veteran who had just filed a copyright registration for a novel she’d recently self-published.