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.

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?

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.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For those following Huawei's substantial rise over the past several years, it'll come as no surprise that the Chinese government played an important role in fostering the hardware maker. Even so, the actual numbers behind the ascent are still a bit jaw-dropping. Huawei reportedly had "access to as much as $75 billion in state support," according to a piece published by The Wall Street Journal on Christmas Day. That massive figure is culled from poring over various forms, including grants and tax breaks. Huawei, for its part, isn't denying any government support, but said in response that what it received was "small and non-material," in line with the usual variety of grants awarded to tech startups and companies.

Per WSJ's accounting of public records, Huawei got around $46 billion in loans and other support, coupled with $25 billion in tax cuts used to accelerate tech advances. There's also a billion or two here and there for things like land discounts and grants. At the very least, it seems China had a vested interest in the rise of a hardware company that could go head to head with the likes of Apple and Samsung. Certainly it's not unheard of that a government would foster some growth in the form of grants, but there's a clear question of how much.

Japanese fashion retailer Uniqlo has managed to automate 90 percent of its flagship Tokyo warehouse, the Financial Times reports, adding that the facility includes a two-armed robot that can fold and box T-shirts, a job previously reserved for human staff. From a report: The industrial T-shirt folders come from Japanese robotics startup, Mujin. Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing, partnered with Mujin to equip its flagship Tokyo warehouse with the robots, reducing its reliance on human labor in the process. FT says the innovation could enable the factory to completely automate production.

Computer engineer George Hilliard says he has built an electronic business card running Linux. From his blog post: It is a complete, minimal ARM computer running my customized Linux firmware built with Buildroot. It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card's shell. The flash drive has a README file, a copy of my resume, and some of my photography. The shell has several games and Unix classics such as fortune and rogue, a small 2048, and a small MicroPython interpreter.

All this is accomplished on a very small 8MB flash chip. The bootloader fits in 256KB, the kernel is 1.6MB, and the whole root filesystem is 2.4MB. So, there's plenty of space for the virtual flash drive. It also includes a writable home directory, on the off chance that anyone creates something they want to keep. This is also saved on the flash chip, which is properly wear leveled with UBI. The whole thing costs under $3. It's cheap enough to give away. If you get one from me, I'm probably trying to impress you. In a detailed write-up, Hilliard goes on to explain how he came up with the design and assembled all the components. Naturally, there were some problems that arose during the construction that he had to troubleshoot: "first, the USB port wasn't long enough to reliably make contact in many USB ports. Less critically, the flash footprint was wrong, which I worked around by bending the leads under the part by hand..."

Impressively, the total cost of the card (not including his time) was $2.88 -- "cheap enough that I don't feel bad giving it away, as designed!"

A new method for preserving genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials is reported. From a report: The future of digital memory may be inside a small plastic bunny that contains 3-D printing instructions for replicating itself stored in artificial DNA, said scientists Monday, who announced a method for mixing genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials. The scientists sealed the DNA data inside thousands of microscopic glass beads that protected the information as the plastic for the toy was heated and processed. By sequencing a snippet of the toy's DNA-infused plastic, they could extract the instructions and make flawless copies of the figure, they said. They reported the experiment in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

While cumbersome compared with conventional computer hard drives or tapes, the new DNA data-storage technique one day could be used to store digital information in items molded into virtually any shape, the scientists said. It could, for example, be used to make devices that contain their own blueprints or to embed electronic health records in medical implants and prescription drugs, they said. "We wanted to show that you can use this technology to hide information in common objects," said computational genomics researcher Yaniv Erlich, a co-author of the study who is chief science officer at a consumer genetics genealogy company called MyHeritage. The company wasn't involved in the project.

"Present laptop dying, battery of course," writes long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills. It uses proprietary pouch Lithium cells. Wouldn't it be great to just swap in a new set of 18650s? Okay, it may not be a thin laptop but it would save me from turfing a perfectly good laptop otherwise...
The original submission drew some interesting comments -- including one from long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob suggesting a used laptop might be the only option. "This seems to be due to the notion that 'thinner!' and 'lighter!' are more important than 'doesn't periodically turn into an incendiary pillow!' "

But are there other options? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Is there a laptop that uses rechargeable 18650 cell batteries?

Long-time Slashdot reader kackle writes: If you cut your teeth on 8-bit computers during their explosion into the mainstream beginning in the 1970s, you were likely aware of and/or influenced by the work of electrical engineer Charles "Chuck" Peddle, who died this week.

The general public may not know his name today, but his efforts had a big impact on the cost and availability of computing to the average person at the beginning of the personal computer era.
"More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry," Byte magazine wrote back in 1982. While working at Motorola in the 1970s, management had told Peddle to abandon efforts to build an ultra low price microprocessor -- but instead he'd joined MOS Technology, working on the team that designed their influential $25 650x processors, remembers the Computer History Museum. "The most famous member of the 650x series was the 6502, which was subsequently used in very many microcomputer devices (four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers)."

in 2014 Peddle recorded a four-hour oral history with the museum, and earlier this year Peddle spoke at the University of Maine, where he'd earned an engineering physics degree 60 years earlier.

This week in an online remembrance, engineer David Gray remembers "the joy of creating, inventing and innovating with Chuck on and off over a forty six (46) year period... I am missing your indomitable spirit as I write."

"China is about to start operation on its 'artificial sun' -- a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun," writes Newsweek.

schwit1 shared their report: If successful, the device could edge scientists closer to achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion: near limitless, cheap clean energy.

The device, called HL-2M Tokamak, is part of the nation's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak project, which has been running since 2006. In March, an official from the China National Nuclear Corporation announced it would complete building HL-2M by the end of the year. The coil system was installed in June and since then, work on HL-2M has gone "smoothly," the Xinhua News Agency reported in November. Duan Xuru, head of the Southwestern Institute of Physics, which is part of the corporation, announced the device will become operational in 2020 at the 2019 China Fusion Energy Conference, the state news agency said.

He told attendees how the new device will achieve temperatures of over 200 million degrees Celsius. That's about 13 times hotter than the center of the sun. Previous devices developed for the artificial sun experiment reached 100 million degrees Celsius, a breakthrough that was announced in November last year.

"India has been aggressively pivoting away from coal-fired power plants and towards electricity generated by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power," writes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Lasrick shared their report: The reasons for this change are complex and interlocking, but one aspect in particular seems to stand out: The price for solar electricity has been in freefall, to levels so low they were once thought impossible. For example, since 2017, one solar energy company has been generating electricity in the Indian state of Rajasthan at the unheard-of, guaranteed wholesale price of 2.44 rupees per kilowatt-hour, or 3 U.S. cents. (In comparison, the average price for electricity in the United States is presently about 13.19 cents per kilowatt-hour, and some locations in the country pay far more....) Consequently, with this massive reduction in the cost of renewables, India is able to shift away from the world's dirtiest fossil fuel, and to much cleaner sources.

While western countries continue to baulk at reducing their reliance on fossil fuels, India is accelerating its plans to lock in a sustained, aggressive reduction in the carbon emissions intensity of its economy. In fact, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, is targeting a fivefold expansion of the electricity generated from renewable energy sources by 2030 -- and this from a country that has already doubled its renewable energy in the past three years. This means that India is committed to more than meeting the goals of its national contributions in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement; it is going to "overdeliver," in the parlance of economists... What's more, the Indian government's plans include a progressive expansion of electric vehicles, putting the country on a path to progressively reduce reliance on expensive, high emissions oil imports....

As India benefits from the shift to domestic renewable energy, other emerging market nations are watching, keen to leverage the same benefits for their own countries. And therein lies a key path to global decarbonization and a much-needed solution to limit global warming.

harrymcc writes: Atari's first home computers, the 400 and 800, were announced at Winter CES in January 1980. But they didn't ship until late in the year -- so over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards has marked their 40th anniversary with a look at their rise and fall. Though Atari ultimately had trouble competing with Apple and other entrenched PC makers, it produced machines with dazzling graphics and sound and the best games of their era, making its computers landmarks from both a technological and cultural standpoint.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: [S]cientists at IBM Research have developed a new battery whose unique ingredients can be extracted from seawater instead of mining. The problems with the design of current battery technologies like lithium-ion are well known, we just tend to turn a blind eye when it means our smartphones can run for a full day without a charge. In addition to lithium, they require heavy metals like cobalt, manganese, and nickel which come from giant mines that present hazards to the environment, and often to those doing the actual mining. These metals are also a finite resource, and as more and more devices and vehicles switch to battery power, their availability is going to decrease at a staggering pace.

As a potential solution, scientists at IBM Research's Battery Lab came up with a new design that replaces the need for cobalt and nickel in the cathode, and also uses a new liquid electrolyte (the material in a battery that helps ions move from one end to the other) with a high flash point. The combination of the new cathode and the electrolyte materials was also found to limit the creation of lithium dendrites which are spiky structures that often develop in lithium-ion batteries that can lead to short circuits. So not only would this new battery have less of an impact on the environment to manufacture, but it would also be considerably safer to use, with a drastically reduced risk of fire or explosions. The researchers believe the new battery would have a larger capacity than existing lithium-ion batteries, could potentially charge to about 80 percent of its full capacity in just five minutes, would be more energy-efficient, and, on top of it all, it would be cheaper to manufacture which in turn means they could help reduce the cost of gadgets and electric vehicles. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the group has revealed precious little technical information about their battery's chemistry, configuration, or design -- so those in the field are unsure if IBM has created something truly remarkable, or if they're exaggerating their claims.

Motorola is slightly delaying its reimagined foldable Razr flip phone, citing an unexpectedly high demand. Android Police reports: Pre-orders were originally slated to begin on December 26th, ahead of the launch on January 9th, but it looks like we'll have to wait a little bit for our fancy blasts from the past. Motorola has stated that it doesn't foresee "a significant shift" from the original launch window, so hopefully the delay won't be too long. With the announcement of the delay coming at the eleventh hour, it might put a damper on some tech enthusiasts' holiday, but at least we'll avoid the mad rush that comes with under-supplying.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Many IT workers worry their positions will become obsolete as changes in hardware, software, and computing tasks outstrip their skills. A former contractor for Siemens concocted a remedy for that -- plant logic bombs in projects he designed that caused them to periodically malfunction. Then wait for a call to come fix things. On Monday, David A. Tinley, a 62-year-old from Harrison City, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of $7,500 in the scheme. The sentence came five months after he pleaded guilty to a charge of intentional damage to a protected computer. Tinley was a contract employee for Siemens Corporation at its Monroeville, Pennsylvania, location.

According to a charging document filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the logic bombs Tinley surreptitiously planted into his projects caused them to malfunction after a certain preset amount of time. Because Siemens managers were unaware of the logic bombs and didn't know the cause of the malfunctions, they would call Tinley and ask him to fix the misbehaving projects. The scheme ran from 2014 to 2016. Tinley will be under supervised release for two years following his prison term. He will also pay restitution. The parties in the case stipulated a total loss amount of $42,262.50. Tinley faced as much as 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Dominion Energy, the utility that supplies the Commonwealth of Virginia with most of its electricity, is about to begin an ambitious plan to roll out electric school buses in the state that will store electricity when not ferrying kids to school. "Earlier this week, it was announced that phase one, which begins in 2020, will start with 50 electric school buses built by Thomas Built Buses in partnership with Proterra and Daimler Trucks," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The buses will be Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouleys, an electric version of one of TBB's existing buses. Each one will carry 220kWh of lithium-ion battery storage for a range of about 134 miles (216km), and they will recharge in about three hours using Proterra's 60kW DC fast charging system.

Dominion Energy says that replacing a single diesel school bus with an EV bus has the same effect as taking more than five gasoline cars off the road, and by 2025 it hopes to have deployed 1,000 EV school buses to the Commonwealth. Should all go well, it wants 50 percent of Virginia's school bus fleet to be battery electric by 2030. The utility is offsetting the costs to school districts, in part because it wants to use the buses for vehicle-to-grid storage when they're not on the school run. In fact, a school district's suitability for V2G is the main determining factor in deciding which districts will be chosen for the first 50 buses.

Russia has launched an effort to build a working quantum computer, in a bid to catch up to other countries in the race for practical quantum technologies. From a report: The government will inject around 50 billion roubles (US$790 million) over the next 5 years into basic and applied quantum research carried out at leading Russian laboratories, the country's deputy prime minister, Maxim Akimov, announced on 6 December at a technology forum in Sochi. The windfall is part of a 258-billion-rouble programme for research and development in digital technologies, which the Kremlin has deemed vital for modernizing and diversifying the Russian economy. "This is a real boost," says Aleksey Fedorov, a quantum physicist at the Russian Quantum Center (RQC), a private research facility in Skolkovo near Moscow. "If things work out as planned, this initiative will be a major step towards bringing Russian quantum science to a world-class standard."

[...] The race is on to create quantum computers that outperform classical machines in specific tasks. Prototypes developed by Google and IBM, headquartered in Mountain View, California, and Armonk, New York, respectively, are approaching the limit of classical computer simulation. In October, scientists at Google announced that a quantum processor working on a specific calculation had achieved such a quantum advantage. Russia is far from this milestone. "We're 5 to 10 years behind," says Fedorov. "But there's a lot of potential here, and we follow very closely what's happening abroad." Poor funding has excluded Russian quantum scientists from competing with Google, says Ilya Besedin, an engineer at the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow.

davidwr writes: If you were going to buy a desktop or laptop computer, how important is it to be able to upgrade memory and storage after your purchase? Is not being able to upgrade an "automatic no-buy," assuming you can get a computer that meets your needs that is upgradeable? If not, would you be willing to pay a little more for upgradeability? A lot more?

Personally, I like to keep computers 4-6 years, which means I prefer to buy an upgradeable machine then upgrade it after 2 or 3 years using then-much-cheaper or not-available-at-all-today parts. What are your thoughts?