This Chinese company just leap-frogged Tesla in the autonomous electric car race

While Tesla engineers have been gradually adding autonomous capabilities to its electric stable, Chinese firm LeEco has gone one step further and announced a car that can do it right from the off.

The LeSEE, announced last night in China, managed to drive itself out of a shipping container and on to the stage with little more than a few voice commands spoken into a smartphone by CEO Jia Yueting. It even reversed, too.

Now, to be fair, you can summon your Tesla via smartphone, but not using voice commands, yet. But this is a big jump for LeEco, a company that has previously produced smartphones and has zero pedigree in the automative space.

Backed Into A Corner: Friendless Beijing Seeks Moscow's Support In South China Sea

China is seeking Russian support in the disputed and increasingly volatile South China Sea, even though Russia is not a claimant in the body of water. However, it is a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, as is China.

On Monday, China and Russia said that the South China Sea dispute should not be internationalized and called for its settlement based on negotiation and consultation, according to a report in China’s state-run media outlet Xinhua.

Of course, the problem with that joint statement is that to date China is not willing, nor will it be willing, to negotiate in the South China Sea unless other nations first consent to Beijing’s claim of historical ownership of the body of water.

You'll Never Guess Who This Little Girl Asked to Meet For Her Birthday — or What Happened Next

A little girl named Brooklyn had a very surprising request for her birthday — she wanted to finally meet a man she's been admiring from afar: her family's garbage collector, Delvar. Or as they've taken to calling him, "our favorite awesome smiley garbage man."

Each Thursday for the past year, Brooklyn, who lives in Bloomington, IL, has anxiously awaited the garbage truck's arrival at their house.

Solar panels don't last forever and degradation varies wildly, study says

A recent study by an international certification body found that how well solar panels stand up to wear and tear varies greatly, but where they're manufactured has little to do with quality.

The report, the PVEL-GTM PV Module Reliability Scorecard was published by Norway-based DNV GL. The tests, performed by PV Evolution Labs (PVEL), included five test categories. The number of photovoltaic module manufacturers taking part varied from 17 to 22, depending on the test.

The modules were tested to determine how their solar conversion efficiency stood up to varying degrees of stress. Solar cell "efficiency" refers to the proportion of energy from sunlight that can be converted via photovoltaics into electricity. On average, today's solar panels have a 15% to 18% solar efficiency rate (the best PVs have as high as a 22% conversion rate). So, each solar panel would be tested based on its beginning efficiency rating.

The world's blackest material makes NASA's ultra-black paint look like it’s not even black

The paint used on the Hubble telescope is one of the blackest materials in space. It's there to reduce stray light so the instrument can photograph the best possible images of our solar system and beyond.

But researchers from British company Surrey NanoSystems have made something much, much blacker.

Their material, awesomely called Vantablack, is so black that they can't even measure how dark it is.

Moving to Utah - Surfing Pornhub - Getting on the Dole

Watching pr0n in Utah makes me ill, now to figure out how to get them to cover my disability. How was I to know that the Internet pumping petabytes of pr0n into my house would turn me into a sick person? Seriously this is more about child pr0n, at least right now it is, but what about next week?

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah became the first state in the country to declare pornography a public health crisis, and called on the industry and businesses Tuesday to help keep "evil, degrading, addictive" materials away from children.

FBI Needs Hackers

I would seriously doubt that this story at the New York Times surprises any HardOCP readers. Hell, the FBI has reached to HardOCP at least twice over the years for help on issues they were having.

In Tuesday’s hearing, Ms. Hess did not provide details on how the F.B.I. ultimately gained access to the San Bernardino iPhone but said the agency had come to rely on private sector partners to keep up with changes in technology. She said that there was no one-stop solution and that the agency generally should not use third parties to hack into systems but lacks the expertise to break past encryption.