An anonymous reader shares a blog post from Kevin Rooke, investment specialist and co-founder of blockchain marketing agency agency0x: Imagine a startup with $12 billion of revenue, 125%+ YoY revenue growth (two years in a row), and Apple-esque gross margins (30-50%). Without knowing anything else about the business, what would you value it at? $50 billion? $100 billion? More? That's Apple's AirPods business, the fastest-growing segment of the world's most valuable company. Though Apple doesn't share sales numbers for AirPods, industry analysts have converged on estimated sales numbers for each of the last 3 years. In 2017, Apple sold an estimated 15 million devices, each priced at $150. That gave Apple a $2.25 billion revenue boost, only a 1% boost to Apple's $215 billion iPhone revenue.

But in 2018, AirPods sales began to quiet Apple bears. 35 million pairs were sold, still priced at $150. That gave Apple an additional $5.25 billion in revenue, then representing 2.4% of iPhone revenue. And in 2019, Apple has pulled off yet another incredible year of AirPods sales. Apple sold an estimated 60 million units, but in 2019 the prices increased too. Apple's second generation AirPods launched at $200, and their newest variation, the AirPods Pro sell for $250. Assuming an even split of sales between Gen 1, Gen 2, and AirPods Pro, Airpods revenue was $12 billion in 2019. That's 4.5% of Apple's iPhone revenue. Investors are paying attention now. AirPods make as much money as Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify combined. And considering their triple-digit growth two years in a row, I would be shocked if AirPods didn't earn more money than Uber in 2020.

MojoKid writes: Yesterday, AMD launched its new Ryzen 4000 Series mobile processors for laptops at CES 2020, along with a monstrous 64-core/128-thread third-generation Ryzen Threadripper workstation desktop CPU. In addition to the new processors, on the graphics front the oft-leaked Radeon RX 5600 XT that target's 1080p gamers in the sweet spot of the GPU market was also made official. In CPU news, AMD claims Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors offer 20% lower SOC power, 2X perf-per-watt, 5X faster power state switching, and significantly improved iGPU performance versus its previous-gen mobile Ryzen 3000 products. AMD's U-Series flagship, the Ryzen 7 4800U, is an 8-core/16-thread processor with a max turbo frequency of 4.2GHz and integrated Vega-derived 8-core GPU.

Along with architectural enhancements and the frequency benefits of producing the chips at 7nm, AMD is underscoring up to 59% improved performance per graphics core as well. AMD is also claiming superior single-thread CPU performance versus current Intel-processors and significantly better multi-threaded performance. The initial Ryzen 4000 U-Series line-up consists of five processors, starting with the 4-core/4-thread Ryzen 5 4300U, and topping off with the aforementioned Ryzen 7 4800U. On the other end of the spectrum, AMD revealed some new information regarding its 64-core/128-thread Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor. The beast chip will have a base clock of 2.9GHz and a boost clock of 4.3GHz with a whopping 288MB of cache. The chip will drop into existing TRX40 motherboards and be available on February 7th for $3990. AMD showcased the chip versus a dual socket Intel Xeon Platinum in the VRAY 3D rendering benchmark beating the Xeon system by almost 30 minutes in a 90-minute workload, though the Intel system retails for around $20K.

Mahdokht Shaibani at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues have developed a battery with a capacity five times higher than that of lithium-ion batteries. From a report: The battery maintains an efficiency of 99 per cent for more than 200 cycles, and a smartphone-sized version would be able to keep a phone charged for five days. To date, the problem with lithium-sulphur batteries has been that the capacity of the sulphur electrode is so large that it breaks apart over cycles of charging and discharging, and the energy advantage rapidly disappears, says Shaibani. "The electrode will fall apart, and then the battery dies fast." That happens because the sulphur electrode expands and contracts as it cycles, with a volume change of about 78 per cent. Volume change also occurs in electrodes in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars and smartphones, but is about eight times smaller. To prevent the electrode disintegrating in their lithium-sulphur battery, the researchers gave the sulphur particles more space to expand and contract. Usually, lithium-sulphur batteries have materials added that bind the particles together inside so the battery doesn't crack as it expands. Shaibani and her team used a smaller amount of a polymer binding material in their electrode, and created more spaced-out structures between the sulphur particles.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Samsung Galaxy Chromebook is one of the nicest pieces of laptop hardware I've touched in a very long time. Not since Google's 2017 Pixelbook has there been a ChromeOS device this good looking, this powerful, or -- here's the rub -- this expensive. Available sometime in the first quarter, the Galaxy Chromebook starts at $999 and could go much higher if you fully upgrade its RAM and storage. The central conceit of this laptop is that there really is demand for a high-end Chromebook, and while that may be more true in 2020 than it was in 2017, it's not a sure thing. Chrome OS still has a nagging inability to do some of the things you'd want a device that costs more than a thousand dollars to do: run full desktop apps, easily edit photos and video, or play more premium games.

Despite those limitations, Google and Samsung are looking for ways to get Chromebooks to escape the classroom and start appearing in boardrooms. The Galaxy Chromebook could be part of a revitalized effort to do just that. Running down the specs of the Galaxy Chromebook is like hitting a laundry list of the things you might want in a top-tier Windows ultrabook. It has a 13.3-inch 4K AMOLED display and an Intel 10th-gen Core-i5 Processor. There's a fingerprint sensor for unlocking, two USB-C ports, and expandable storage via microSD. The screen rotates 360-degrees and there's an included S-Pen stylus that can be stored in a silo on the device itself. It's built out of aluminum instead of plastic, has a large trackpad, and is less than 10mm thick.

The Verge has been investigating Samsung's "artificial human" project Neon, which seems to be about creating realistic human avatars: A tweet from the project's lead and some leaked videos pretty much confirm this -- although they don't give us nearly enough information to judge how impressive Neon is. The lead of Neon, computer-human interaction researcher Paranav Mistry, tweeted this image, apparently showing one of the project's avatars. Mistry says the company's "Core R3" technology can now "autonomously create new expressions, new movements, new dialog (even in Hindi), completely different from the original captured data...."

In a recent interview, Mistry made clear he thinks "digital humans" will be a major technology in the 2020s... "While films may disrupt our sense of reality, 'virtual humans' or 'digital humans' will be reality. A digital human could extend its role to become a part of our everyday lives: a virtual news anchor, virtual receptionist, or even an AI-generated film star."
Reddit users also found the URLs for videos in the source code on Neon's home page -- and though the videos have since been removed, some of the footage has been archived and analyzed on YouTube.

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: The next big thing in 3D printing just might be so-called "4D materials" which employ the same manufacturing techniques, but are designed to deform over time in response to changes in the environment, like humidity and temperature. They're also sometimes known as active origami or shape-morphing systems. MIT scientists successfully created flat structures that can transform into much more complicated structures than had previously been achieved, including a human face. They published their results last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

MIT mechanical engineer Wim van Rees, a co-author of the PNAS paper, devised a theoretical method to turn a thin flat sheet into more complex shapes, like spheres, domes, or a human face. "My goal was to start with a complex 3-D shape that we want to achieve, like a human face, and then ask, 'How do we program a material so it gets there?'" he said. "That's a problem of inverse design..." van Rees and his colleagues decided to use a mesh-like lattice structure instead of the continuous sheet modeled in the initial simulations. They made the lattice out of a rubbery material that expands when the temperature increases. The gaps in the lattice make it easier for the material to adapt to especially large changes in its surface area. The MIT team used an image of [19th century mathematician Carl Friedrich] Gauss to create a virtual map of how much the flat surface would have to bend to reconfigure into a face. Then they devised an algorithm to translate that into the right pattern of ribs in the lattice.

They designed the ribs to grow at different rates across the mesh sheet, each one able to bend sufficiently to take on the shape of a nose or an eye socket. The printed lattice was cured in a hot oven, and then cooled to room temperature in a saltwater bath.

And voila! It morphed into a human face.
"The team also made a lattice containing conductive liquid metal that transformed into an active antenna, with a resonance frequency that changes as it deforms."

"The gigabytes of data we're using -- although invisible -- come at a significant cost to the environment," argues the CBC's senior technology reporter. "Some experts say it rivals that of the airline industry." And as more smart devices rely on data to operate (think internet-connected refrigerators or self-driving cars), their electricity demands are set to skyrocket. "We are using an immense amount of energy to drive this data revolution," said Jane Kearns, an environment and technology expert at MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. "It has real implications for our climate." [Kearns is also the co-founder of the CanadaCleantech Alliance....]

It's not the gadgets themselves that are drawing so much power, it's the far-flung servers that act as their electronic brains... The data centres, often bigger than a football field, house endless stacks of servers handling many terabytes (thousands of gigabytes) of digital traffic. Just as laptops tend to warm during heavy usage, servers must be cooled to avoid overheating. And cooling so many machines requires plenty of power. Anders Andrae, a researcher at Huawei Technologies Sweden whose estimates are often cited, told CBC News in an email he expects the world's data centres alone will devour up to 651 terawatt-hours of electricity in the next year. That's nearly as much electricity as Canada's entire energy sector produces. And it's just the beginning.

Andrae's calculations, published in the International Journal of Green Technology, suggest data centres could more than double their power demands over the next decade. He projects computing will gobble up 11 per cent of global energy by 2030 and cloud-based services will represent a sizeable proportion of that. "This will become completely unsustainable by 2040," Andrae wrote...

The information and communications technology sector as a whole is thought to be responsible for two to three per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions -- roughly on par with the often-criticized airline sector.
The article also notes that by 2018 Amazon had already switched to renewable energy for at least 50% of its cloud computing servers. And it also adds that tech companies "in Canada and abroad...are coming up with innovative solutions to curb the growing problem."

Solutions being investigated include recovering the low-level heat generated by servers and increasing the speed and capacity of data transfers (including one approach involving a quantum dot multi-wavelength laser).

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: If you've been following the steady march of progress from Dell's Linux-first Project Sputnik team, you're no doubt aware that the "Developer Edition" variant of the XPS 13 is one of the finest Linux-ready ultrabooks you can buy. Just ahead of CES 2020, Dell is pushing out a few more improvements including a feature that's been hotly requested: fingerprint-reader support. It's one of several enhancements Dell is promising to Linux users for its 10th-generation XPS 13, including a new maximum of 32GB RAM and a redesigned "InfinityEdge" display that adds even more screen real estate, resulting in an adjusted 16:10 aspect ratio to match... Details on fingerprint-reader support are still a bit vague, but Dell says it will be released shortly after the system's February 2020 launch as an OTA (over-the-air) update, and then as part of the preloaded Ubuntu Developer Edition image it ships with the system.
Dell's lead on Project Sputnik developer systems, Barton George, also blogged about Dell's new 86-inch 4K interactive touch monitor, as well as their upcoming Latitude 9510 notebook and 2-in-1 laptops, promising "a new ultra-premium class of products" offering 5G mobile broadband capabilities, AI-based productivity capabilities, and 30-plus hours of battery life.

The blog post ends by noting that "While project Sputnik is the most visible Linux-based offerings from Dell, it is only a small fraction of the over 150 systems that make up Dell's Linux portfolio."

Apple will once again license technology from Imagination Technologies, the chip designer that used to provide graphics processors for the iPhone and iPad, the UK-based company announced today. The Verge reports: In a short statement posted on its website, Imagination said that it had entered into a multiyear license agreement with Apple, under which the Cupertino, California-based firm will have access to "a wider range of Imagination's intellectual property in exchange for license fees." Apple announced its split from Imagination back in April 2017 when it said that it would start designing its own graphics chips, and it would stop licensing the company's technology within two years. After the split was announced, Imagination expressed skepticism that Apple could design its own chips "without violating Imagination's patents, intellectual property, and confidential information."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [T]he U.S. has traditionally paid for the upkeep of its roads via direct taxation of gasoline and diesel fuel, which means that as our fleet becomes more fuel-efficient, that revenue will drop in relation to the total number of vehicle miles traveled each year. As a result, some states are starting to grapple with the problem of how to get drivers to pay for the roads they use in cars that use less or even no gas per mile. At the start of this year, Utah has begun a pilot Road Usage Charge program, coupled to an increase in registration fees for alternative fuel vehicles. Assuming a state gas tax of 30c/gallon and 15,542 miles/year driven, Utah says it collects $777 a year from a 6mpg heavy truck, $311 from a pickup getting 15mpg, $187 from a 25mpg sedan, $93 from a 50mpg hybrid, and nothing from anyone driving a battery EV.

So in 2020, Utah is increasing vehicle registration fees. In 2019, registering a BEV in Utah would cost $60; in 2020 that will be $90, increasing to $120 in 2021. PHEV fees were $26 in 2019, increasing to $39 this year and $52 in 2021, and not-plug-in hybrid fees have gone from $10 to $15, increasing to $20 next year. An extra $30 a year -- or even $60 a year -- is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, particularly considering how much cheaper an EV is to run. But Utahns with EVs have an alternative. Instead of paying that flat fee, they can enroll in the pilot program that involves fitting a telematics device to the car. The device tracks the actual number of miles driven on Utah's roads. These are billed at a rate of 1.5c/mile, but only until the total equals whatever that year's registration fee for the vehicle would have been; participating in the pilot means you could pay less than you would otherwise, but Utah's Department of Transportation says that participants would not ever be charged more than that year's registration fee. The data will be collected by a contractor called Emovis, which operates toll roads around the U.S. As for Oregon -- another state working to solve this problem, the state is increasing its state gas tax by 2c/gallon, and like Utah, it's also increasing vehicle registration fees. "Now, fees for registering your car in Oregon will depend on how many miles per gallon your car gets; a two-year registration for something that gets below 19mpg will cost $122, rising to $132 for a vehicle between 20â"39mpg, then $152 for a vehicle that gets 40mpg or better, and $306 for a BEV," reports Ars Technica.

Thankfully, if you own a 40+mpg vehicle or a BEV, you can cut that two-year fee to $86 by enrolling in OReGO. However, you will need to fit your qualifying car with a telematics device to track the actual miles traveled on the state's roads. "Those are billed at 1.8c/mile -- Oregon evidently decided its roads are worth a little more than those in Utah -- but you can then get credited for any fuel tax you pay in the state," the report adds.

The dogs, known as Aibos, are companion robots made by Sony -- robots that don't necessarily do much apart from providing company and comfort. From a report: Every Aibo -- Japanese for "companion" -- is manufactured identically, besides a choice between silver and white or a brown, black, and white version. They all have rounded snouts that include a camera for facial recognition capability, large, oval eyes to reveal their expressions, and a body that can turn on 22 different axis points to give them a range of motion. The owner decides the gender when they set them up, which determines the pitch of its bark and how it moves. They're cute. They know when you're smiling. And through machine learning and recognizing people with its camera, Aibos also shift their personality over time based on their interactions with people they spend time with. Soon, they become much more than a store-bought toy.

Still in the "off" position in the cafe, the Aibos' paws remained outstretched and their heads turned to one side. But one by one, as their owners kneeled down to turn them on from a switch at the scruff of their neck, each came to life. The screen of their doll-like eyes blinked open, they lifted their heads, stretched out their plastic limbs, and leaned back on their hind legs before standing on all fours. Almost like real dogs, they shook their heads as if to ward off sleep after a nap, wagged their tails, and barked.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Cameras with artificial intelligence (AI) software that the South Korean government claims can detect the likelihood of crime will be installed in Seoul within the year. The Seocho District of South Korea's capital and Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ERTI), a national research institute, said they will install 3,000 cameras at the district by July. The cameras will use AI software that processes the location, time, and behavior patterns of passersby to measure the likelihood of a crime taking place.

The cameras will automatically measure whether somebody is walking normally or tailing someone. It will also detect what passersby are wearing -- such as hats, masks, or glasses -- and what they are carrying with them such as bags or dangerous objects that have a strong possibility of being used to commit a crime. The cameras will also consider whether it is day or night. They will use this information to deduce the probability that a crime will take place, they claim. If the rate exceeds a certain rate, the cameras will alert the district office and nearby police stations to send personnel to the location. Going forward, Seocho and ETRI plan to analyze 20,000 court sentencing documents and crime footage to deduce crime patterns for the AI software to memorize.

Bloomberg looks back at what tech industry titans predicted would be happening "by 2020." - Here's what Huawei Technologies Co. said in 2015 predicting a "superphone" by 2020, according to ZDNet: "Inspired by the biological evolution, the mobile phone we currently know will come to life as the superphone," said Shao Yang, a strategy marketing president of Huawei. "Through evolution and adaptation, the superphone will be more intelligent, enhancing and even transforming our perceptions, enabling humans to go further than ever before." It's not entirely clear what that means, but it probably hasn't happened yet. In the interim, Huawei found itself in the middle of a trade war, and the Chinese company is focusing largely on mid-priced phones for its domestic market...

- In 2013, Elon Musk outlined his vision for a new "fifth mode of transportation" that would involve zipping people through tubes at speeds as fast as 800 miles per hour. Several tech entrepreneurs heeded Musk's call and went to work on such systems inspired by the billionaire's specifications. In 2015, one of the leading startups predicted a hyperloop spanning about 60 miles would be ready for human transport by 2020. Rob Lloyd, then the CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, told Popular Science: "I'm very confident that's going to happen." It hasn't. His company, now called Virgin Hyperloop One, has a 1,600-foot test track in California and hopes to build a 22-mile track in Saudi Arabia someday. Musk has since experimented with hyperloops of his own, and even he has had to scale back his ambitions. Musk's Boring Co. is building a so-called Loop system in Las Vegas, starting with a nearly mile-long track that consists of a narrow tunnel and Tesla cars moving at up to 155 miles per hour...

- It was barely two years ago when the maker of blowdryers and vacuum cleaners said it would sell an electric car by 2020. Dyson canceled the project this year, calling it "not commercially viable."
Other predictions include John McAfee's infamous 2017 prediction that one bitcoin would be worth $1 million by the end of 2020, "about three weeks before a crash would erase 83% of value over the next year."

And in 2012 Intel predicted that by 2020 we'd have computer chips that consumed almost no energy

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: A North Carolina couple was watching a movie in their bedroom when they suddenly heard loud noises coming from downstairs. Worried that it was an intruder, the two called 911.

The couple waited for police to arrive, hoping their 2-year-old daughter sleeping in her room wouldn't get up to check on the noise, said Thomas Milam, the husband, in his Facebook post shared to Forsyth County Sheriff's Office's page... Minutes after they called 911, police entered the home and began to search for an intruder. When the 911 operator told Milam to go downstairs to talk to the police, he said, the officers just had one question.

"Is this Roomba yours?"

Police had apprehended the suspect: the couple's brand new robotic vacuum. Milam said in the Facebook post that the vacuum had turned itself on in the night and gotten stuck in the hallway, where it had been repeatedly banging against the walls and making the sounds the Milams feared was an intruder.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Los Angeles Times: There was only one job that robots could not do when Fast Retailing, the owner of Uniqlo, replaced 90% of its workers with robots at its flagship warehouse in Tokyo last year. But now, with the help of a Japanese start-up called Mujin, the world's third-largest retailer says it has cracked the final barrier to full automation, a priority for Uniqlo as Japan's aging population creates labor shortages. The two companies have invented a robot with two arms that can pick up soft T-shirts and place them neatly in boxes to be shipped to customers.

While it sounds easy, the ability to lift soft textiles has been a challenge for clumsy robotic arms. Add to this the need to sort through constantly changing seasonal clothes, in shades that are hard to distinguish and wrapped in various forms of packaging, and humans have always come out on top. The jointly developed robot, which was made by Yaskawa Electric Corp., is already operating in Fast Retailing's main warehouse in Tokyo, but Takino admitted that the robot was not able to handle all of the facility's products, and that it needed further development. For instance, the plastic packaging of the thermal underwear in Uniqlo's Heattech line is relatively simple for the robots to pick up, but this could become more difficult as Fast Retailing aims to switch to more eco-friendly paper bags. The robots are able to pick up belts, but they typically become unbundled as they are dropped into boxes. One solution would be for Fast Retailing to ensure that belts are sold in bundled forms. "We've been putting off working with an apparel company because it's so difficult," said Issei Takino, co-founder and chief executive of Mujin. "But Fast Retailing's strength is its ability to overhaul its entire supply chain to make it fit for automation. If we're going to take on this challenge, we had to do it with Fast Retailing."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Turkey unveiled its first fully domestically-produced car on Friday, saying it aimed to eventually produce up to 175,000 a year of the electric vehicle in a project expected to cost $3.7 billion over 13 years. The project has been a long-time goal of President Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling AK Party as a demonstration of the country's growing economic power. Speaking at the unveiling ceremony, Erdogan said Turkey aimed not only to sell the car domestically but also wanted it to become a global brand, starting with Europe.

Erdogan said the charging infrastructure for electric cars would be ready nationwide by 2022. The new project, launched in October, will receive state support such as tax breaks, and establish a production facility in the automotive hub of Bursa in northwest Turkey, according to a presidential decision in the country's Official Gazette. Five models of the car will be produced, the statement said, adding the government had guaranteed to buy 30,000 of the vehicles by 2035. "We're all together witnessing Turkey's 60-year-old dream become reality," Erdogan said, referring to failed plans in the past to build a fully home-produced car. "When we see this car on roads around the whole world, we will have reached our goal."

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRM'd and internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-win driven, and poor quality console ports pissed off PC gamers. Forced software subscriptions for major software products you could previously buy became a thing. Personal privacy went out the window in ways too numerous to list, with lawmakers failing on many levels to regulate the tech, data-mining and internet advertising companies in any meaningful way. Severe security vulnerabilities were found in hundreds of different tech products, from Intel CPUs to baby monitors and internet-connected doorbells. Thousands of tech products shipped with microphones, cameras, and internet connectivity integration that couldn't be switched off with an actual hardware switch. Many electronics products became harder or impossible to repair yourself. Printed manuals coming with tech products became almost non-existent. Hackers, scammers, ransomwarers and identity thieves caused more mayhem than ever before. Troll farms, click farms and fake news factories damaged the integrity of the internet as an information source. Tech companies and media companies became afraid of pissing off the Chinese government.

Windows turned into a big piece of spyware. Intel couldn't be bothered to innovate until AMD Ryzen came along. Nvidia somehow took a full decade to make really basic realtime raytracing happen, even though smaller GPU maker Imagination had done it years earlier with a fraction of the budget, and in a mobile GPU to boot. Top-of-the-line smartphones became seriously expensive. Censorship and shadow banning on the once-more-open internet became a thing. Easily-triggered people trying to muzzle other people on social media became a thing. The quality of popular music and music videos went steadily downhill. Star Wars went to shit after Disney bought it, as did the Star Trek films. And mainstream cinema turned into an endless VFX-heavy comic book movies, remakes/reboots and horror movies fest. In many ways, television was the biggest winner of the 2010s, with many new TV shows with film-like production values being made. The second winner may be computer hardware that delivered more storage/memory/performance per dollar than ever before.

To the question: What, dear Slashdotters, will the 2020s bring us? Will things get better in tech and other things relevant to nerds, or will they get worse?

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has vetoed a bill that would have made electric scooters and bikes legal in the state, citing the lack of a mandatory helmet requirement and other safety concerns. The veto means e-bikes and e-scooters will continue to remain technically illegal across the state, and will further delay any adoption of popular (if polarizing) shared mobility services like Lime or Bird. The Verge reports: The bill to legalize e-bikes and e-scooters was passed in June with overwhelming support, clearing the state Senate by a 56-6 margin and the state Assembly by a 137-4 margin. But state lawmakers reportedly waited to send the bill to Cuomo until this week out of concern that he would try to stand in the way of the proposal. Cuomo has voiced support for legalizing e-bikes and e-scooters in the past, but reportedly soured on the bill after he was criticized by one of its co-sponsors earlier this year.

While the bill would have broadly legalized both modes of transportation across the state, it was also designed to give cities control over e-bike and e-scooter sharing services. Cities would have been allowed to use permits as a tool to control the influx of these sharing companies, which would help prevent them from being inundated like some other cities around the world. It also would have given these local governments leverage to help negotiate their own regulations around shared e-scooters and e-bikes. Crucially, the bill would have helped take pressure off food delivery workers in New York City, many of whom use e-bikes to get around despite technically being illegal. Instead, those workers will continue to be subjected to $500 fines, confiscations, and occasional NYPD enforcement sweeps that at best feel like dog-and-pony shows and at worst unfairly target these workers.

Tesla is closing the year by filing a patent on a new chemistry for better, longer-lasting and cheaper batteries. The new patent is related to the new battery cell that Tesla's battery research partner, Jeff Dahn, and his team at Dalhousie University unveiled earlier this year. The new cell "should be able to power an electric vehicle for over [1 million miles] and last at least two decades in grid energy storage," Dahn said in a paper released at the time. Electrek reports: The automaker, through its "Tesla Motors Canada" subsidiary, filed a new international patent called "Dioxazolones and nitrile sulfites as electrolyte additives for lithium-ion batteries." They wrote in the patent application: "This disclosure covers novel battery systems with fewer operative, electrolyte additives that may be used in different energy storage applications, for example, in vehicle and grid-storage. More specifically, this disclosure includes additive electrolyte systems that enhance performance and lifetime of lithium-ion batteries, while reducing costs from other systems that rely on more or other additives."

The patent application says that the new two-additive mixtures in an electrolyte solvent can be used with lithium nickel manganese cobalt compounds, also known as an NMC battery chemistry. It is commonly used in electric vehicles by many automakers, but not by Tesla. The company used the technology in its stationary energy storage systems, but it uses NCA for its vehicle battery cells. The patent filed by Tesla's battery research group mentions that the technology would be useful for both electric vehicles and grid-storage.

According to TV metrics company Nielsen, a whopping 88% of Americans stare at screens while staring at other screens. Nate Anderson from Ars Technica discovered the stat while combing through Mary Meeker's annual "Internet Trends" report: My attitude, when watching TV, is that a show you pay attention to precludes the use of phone or laptop; if you're using another screen, you're not actually watching the show. Pick better shows to watch, people! And then watch them! [...] I got to thinking about the ways in which we use television, and not all of them involve watching dark prestige dramas with 80+ Metacritic scores. Perhaps you're watching (ugh) live TV, either because you are a masochist or you love sports. (If you are watching baseball, perhaps it's both!) Picking up a smartphone during commercial breaks is arguably better than being bombarded with the consumerism of late-stage capitalism.

Say you use your TV not as a way to consume compelling crafted content, but as background noise that helps you relax. (I highly recommend Sunday afternoon golf for this purpose.) Tooling around on a laptop while the TV plays in the background is now not quite so odd. Or perhaps you watch TV simply as a way to kill time. Perhaps you're in pain, or recovering from illness, or simply bored out of your mind. The goal is not necessarily to direct your full and undivided attention to the screen; it is to get through the day until something better comes along. Using a second screen here, too, makes sense. [...] Still, I can't shake the feeling that the majority of time spent using one digital device while another displays video content nearby is low-quality time, where we aren't really paying attention to what's on either screen and so are using the planet's resources, cluttering our lives with extra noise, and reinforcing our slavish devotions to screens for little to no benefit... Do you ever find yourself browsing your phone while watching TV? If so, can it be explained by one of Nate's reasonings?