An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: One e-toy for every person on Earth -- that's the staggering amount of electric trains, drones, talking dolls, R/C cars, and other children's gadgets tossed into landfills every year. Some of what most consumers consider to be e-waste -- like electronics such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and speaker systems -- are usual suspects. Others, like power tools, vapes, LED accessories, USB cables, anything involving rechargeable lithium batteries and countless other similar, "nontraditional" e-waste materials, are less obviously in need of special disposal. In all, people across the world throw out roughly 9 billion kilograms (19.8 billion pounds) of e-waste commonly not recognized as such by consumers.

This "invisible e-waste" is the focal point of the sixth annual International E-Waste Day on October 14, organized by Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Forum. In anticipation of the event, the organization recently commissioned the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to delve into just how much unconventional e-waste is discarded every year -- and global population numbers are just some of the ways to visualize the issue.

According to UNITAR's findings, for example, the total weight of all e-cig vapes thrown away every year roughly equals 6 Eiffel Towers. Meanwhile, the total weight of all invisible e-waste tallies up to "almost half a million 40 [metric ton] trucks," enough to create a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam stretching approximately 3,504 miles -- the distance between Rome and Nairobi. From a purely economic standpoint, nearly $10 billion in essential raw materials is literally thrown into the garbage every year. Further reading: Half a Billion Cheap Electrical Items Go To UK Landfills in a Year, Research Finds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Denmark's Lego said on Monday that it remains committed to its quest to find sustainable materials to reduce carbon emissions, even after an experiment by the world's largest toymaker to use recycled bottles did not work. Lego said it has "decided not to progress" with making its trademark colorful bricks from recycled plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, known as PET, and after more than two years of testing "found the material didn't reduce carbon emissions." Lego enthusiastically announced in 2021 that the prototype PET blocks had become the first recycled alternative to pass its "strict" quality, safety and play requirements, following experimentation with several other iterations that proved not durable enough.

The company said scientists and engineers tested more than 250 variations of PET materials, as well as hundreds of other plastic formulations, before nailing down the prototype, which was made with plastic sourced from suppliers in the U.S. that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority. On average, a one-liter plastic PET bottle made enough raw material for ten 2 x 4 Lego bricks. Despite the determination that the PET prototype failed to save on carbon emissions, Lego said it remained "fully committed to making Lego bricks from sustainable materials by 2032." [...] Lego said it will continue to use bio-polypropylene, the sustainable and biological variant of polyethylene -- a plastic used in everything from consumer and food packaging to tires -- for parts in Lego sets such as leaves, trees and other accessories.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The number one movie in North America is Warner Bros. Discovery's Barbie, which Deadline reports has teamed up with Oppenheimer to fuel a mind-blowing $300M+ box office weekend. ["Oppenheimer Shatters Expectations with $80 Million Debut," read the headline at Variety.]

Now it seems everybody is trying to tap into Barbie buzz, including Microsoft's Xbox [which added Barbie and Ken's cars to Forza Horizon 5] and even Microsoft-backed education nonprofit Code.org. ("Are your students excited about Barbie The Movie? Have them try an HourOfCode [programming game] with Barbie herself!").
The idea is to inspire young students to become coders. But as Code.org shares Instagram images of a software developer Barbie, Slashdot reader theodp remembers when, nine years ago, Code.org's CEO "took to Twitter to blast Barbie and urge for her replacement." They'd joined a viral 2014 Computer Engineer Barbie protest that arose in response to the publication of Barbie F***s It Up Again, a scathing and widely reported-on blog post that prompted Mattel to pull the book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer immediately from Amazon. This may have helped lead to Barbie's loss of her crown as the most popular girls' toy in the ensuing 2014 holiday season to Disney's Frozen princesses Elsa and Anna, and got the Mattel exec who had to apologize for Computer Engineer Barbie called to the White House for a sit down a few months later. (Barbie got a brainy makeover soon thereafter)...

The following year, Disney-owned Lucasfilm and Code.org teamed up on Star Wars: Building a Galaxy with Code, a signature tutorial for the 2015 Hour of Code. Returning to a Disney princess theme in 2016, Disney and Code.org revealed a new Hour of Code tutorial featuring characters from the animated film Moana just a day ahead of its theatrical release. It was later noted that Moana's screenwriters included Pamela Ribon, who penned the 2014 Barbie-blasting blog post that ended Barbie's short reign as the Hour of Code role model of choice for girls.

Interestingly, Ribon seems to bear no Barbie grudges either, tweeting on the day of the Barbie movie release, "I was like holy s*** can't wait to see it."
To be fair, the movie's trailer promises "If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you," in a deconstruction where Barbie is played by D.C. movies' "Harley Quinn" actress Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad, Birds of Prey), whose other roles include Tonya Harding and the home-wrecking second wife in The Wolf of Wall Street.

The company behind Flipper Zero expects $80 million in sales this year, which ZDNet estimates at around 500,000 unit sales.

In its Kickstarter days the company sold almost $5 million as preorders, remembers TechCrunch, and the company claims it sold $25 million worth of the devices last year: So what are they selling? Flipper Zero is a "portable gamified multi-tool" aimed at everyone with an interest in cybersecurity, whether as a penetration tester, curious nerd or student — or with more nefarious purposes. The tool includes a bunch of ways to manipulate the world around you, including wireless devices (think garage openers), RFID card systems, remote keyless systems, key fobs, entry to barriers, etc. Basically, you can program it to emulate a bunch of different lock systems.

The system really works, too — I'm not much of a hacker, but I've been able to open garages, activate elevators and open other locking systems that should be way beyond my hacking skill level. On the one hand, it's an interesting toy to experiment with, which highlights how insecure much of the world around us actually is. On the other hand, I'm curious if it's a great idea to have 300,000+ hacking devices out in the wild that make it easy to capture car key signals and gate openers and then use them to open said apertures.
The company points out that their firmware is open source, and can be inspected by anyone.

ZDNet calls it "incredibly user-friendly" and "a fantastic educational tool and a stepping stone to get people — young and old — into cybersecurity," with "a very active community of users that are constantly finding new things to do with it". (Even third-party operating systems are available).

"Instead of looking like some scary hacking tool, all black and bristling with antennas, it looks like a kid's toy, all plastic and brightly colored," writes ZDNet. "It reminds me of Tamagotchis..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for suggesting the article.

Amazon is turning to artificial intelligence to help users find the right product. From a report: The e-retailer recently began testing a feature in its shopping app that uses AI to summarize reviews left by customers on some products. It provides a brief overview of what shoppers liked and disliked about the product, along with a disclaimer that the summary is "AI-generated from the text of customer reviews." A mobile listing for a children's "Magic Mixies" cauldron toy says that buyers gave positive feedback around its "fun factor, appearance, value, performance, quality, charging, and leakage."

"However, the majority of customers have expressed negative opinions on these aspects," the summary states. "For example, some customers have paid over $100 for a toy that wasn't worth it, while others have experienced issues with the product's quality and charging." Amazon confirmed that it's testing the feature. The company didn't share specific details about it works or what AI models are being used to summarize.

Isaac-Lew (Slashdot reader #623) writes: The Lego scene in "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse" was animated by a 14-year-old high school student after the producers saw the trailer he made that was animated Lego-style.
The teenager had used his father's old computers to recreate the trailer "shot for shot to look as if it belonged in a Lego world," reports the New York Times: By that point, he had been honing his skills for several years making short computer-generated Lego videos. "My dad showed me this 3-D software called Blender and I instantly got hooked on it," he said. "I watched a lot of YouTube videos to teach myself certain stuff..."

[A]fter finding the movie's Toronto-based production designer, Patrick O'Keefe, on LinkedIn, and confirming that Sony Pictures Animation's offer was legitimate, Theodore Mutanga, a medical physicist, built his son a new computer and bought him a state-of-the-art graphics card so he could render his work much faster... Over several weeks, first during spring break and then after finishing his homework on school nights, Mutanga worked on the Lego sequence... Christophre Miller [a director of "The Lego Movie" and one of the writer-producers of "Spider-Verse."] saw Mutanga's contribution to "Across the Spider-Verse" not only as a testament to the democratization of filmmaking, but also to the artist's perseverance: he dedicated intensive time and effort to animation, which is "not ever fast or easy to make," Miller said.

'The Lego Movie' is inspired by people making films with Lego bricks at home," Lord said by video. "That's what made us want to make the movie. Then the idea in 'Spider Verse' is that a hero can come from anywhere. And here comes this heroic young person who's inspired by the movie that was inspired by people like him."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A team of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Milan recently created a fully rechargeable battery using nontoxic edible components. This is probably the world's first battery that is safe to ingest and entirely made of food-grade materials. "Given the level of safety of these batteries, they could be used in children's toys, where there is a high risk of ingestion," said Mario Caironi, a senior researcher at IIT. However, this isn't the only solution the edible battery could provide. Apart from serving as an alternative to conventional toxic toy batteries, the edible battery from IIT could also play a key role in making health care applications safer than ever. For instance, doctors have to be cautious regarding the use of miniature electronic devices (such as drug-delivery robots, biosensors, etc.) inside the human body, as they come equipped with batteries made of toxic substances. An edible battery could solve this problem. There are also more mundane applications, like replacing batteries in pet toys.

Ivan K. Ilic, first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at IIT, told Ars Technica, "Two main ways a battery damages human tissue when it's inside the body is by doing water electrolysis and by the toxicity of its materials. Water electrolysis is a phenomenon where electricity with a voltage higher than 1.2 V (virtually all commercial batteries) breaks water into oxygen and hydrogen (an explosive gas), and it is very dangerous if it occurs in the stomach. Our battery is way below this voltage, around 0.65 V, so water electrolysis cannot occur. On the other hand, we used only food materials, so nothing is toxic!" Before the battery is useful, however, the researchers will need to first enhance the battery's power capacity. Currently, the edible battery can supply 48 microamperes of current for a bit over 10 minutes. So it can easily meet the power demand of a miniature medical device or a small LED. "These batteries are no competition to ordinary batteries -- they will not power electric cars -- but they are meant to power edible electronics and maybe some other niche applications, so their main advantage is non-toxicity," said Ilic. Here's a list of what makes these edible batteries work, as mentioned by Ars:

- "Quercetin, a pigment found in almonds and capers, serves as the battery cathode, whereas riboflavin (vitamin B2) makes up the battery anode.
- The researchers used nori (edible seaweed that is used in the wrapping of sushi rolls) as the separator and a water-based solution (aqueous NaHSO4) as the electrolyte.
- Activated charcoal is employed to achieve high electrical conductivity in the battery.
The battery electrodes come covered in beeswax and connect to a gold foil (used to cover pastries) that laminates a supporting structure made of ethyl cellulose."

The research has been published in the journal Advanced Materials.

For some of the largest retail companies and brands, the metaverse is losing its luster. From a report: Walmart has reportedly shut down its Universe of Play metaverse experience on Roblox just six months after its launch, according to consumer advocacy group Tina.org. Walmart, for its part, said it discontinued the experience "as planned." Walt Disney has axed the next-generation storytelling and consumer-experiences unit that was mapping out the company's metaverse strategies late last month. This string of news came after social media giant Meta reported that its metaverse division generated a loss of $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter.

These reports have raised questions on the metaverse's ability to yield returns on the investments companies have made in it. Retailers and brands have mainly been using the metaverse to build brand experiences and marketing, but many have yet to report on its conversion rate. In an economic environment where retailers and brands have been attempting to cut costs, experts said that retailers would likely pare down unprofitable areas of their businesses. "One of the biggest challenges was really figuring out the right [key performance indicators] and also just figuring out if there weren't even implications for many brands when it came to their physical product," said Melissa Minkow, director of retail strategy at digital consultancy firm CI&T. "It was just such a big, broad, abstract landscape that it seemed there was kind of a lack of direction."

In recent years, brands saw the metaverse as a means of elevating their virtual experiences, and reaching Gen Z in particular. Walmart launched Universe of Play in September and had mainly marketed it as an immersive virtual toy destination. For Disney, the division in charge of its metaverse strategy was focused on crafting interactive storytelling methods using technologically advanced channels. Retailers of varying sizes were attempting to look for ways to incorporate the metaverse in their strategies. While brands were optimistic about the metaverse, consumers didn't seem to match their sentiment. Minkow, who authored a recent CI&T report, found that 81% of respondents haven't made a purchase in the metaverse and 45% said that they don't ever see themselves shopping in it. Meta initially set a 500,000 monthly active user target for its metaverse offering, Horizon Worlds, by the end of last year but then changed its goal to 280,000, indicating how the company underestimated people's engagement level with the platform.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: About a year ago, Ben found out that one of his friends had quietly started to work multiple jobs at the same time. The idea had become popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, when working from home became normalized, making the scheme easier to pull off. A community of multi-job hustlers, in fact, had come together online, referring to themselves as the "overemployed." The idea excited Ben, who lives in Toronto and asked that Motherboard not use his real name, but he didn't think it was possible for someone like him to pull it off. He helps financial technology companies market new products; the job involves creating reports, storyboards, and presentations, all of which involve writing. There was "no way," he said, that he could have done his job two times over on his own.

Then, last year, he started to hear more and more about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by the research lab OpenAI. Soon enough, he was trying to figure out how to use it to do his job faster and more efficiently, and what had been a time-consuming job became much easier. ("Not a little bit more easy," he said, "like, way easier.") That alone didn't make him unique in the marketing world. Everyone he knew was using ChatGPT at work, he said. But he started to wonder whether he could pull off a second job. Then, this year, he took the plunge, a decision he attributes to his new favorite online robot toy. "That's the only reason I got my job this year," Ben said of OpenAI's tool. "ChatGPT does like 80 percent of my job if I'm being honest." He even used it to generate cover letters to apply for jobs.

Over the last few months, the exploding popularity of ChatGPT and similar products has led to growing concerns about AI's potential effects on the international job market -- specifically, the percentage of jobs that could be automated away, replaced by a well-oiled army of chatbots. But for a small cohort of fast-thinking and occasionally devious go-getters, AI technology has turned into an opportunity not to be feared but exploited, with their employers apparently none the wiser. The people Motherboard spoke with for this article requested anonymity to avoid losing their jobs. For clarity, Motherboard in some cases assigned people aliases in order to differentiate them, though we verified each of their identities. Some, like Ben, were drawn into the overemployed community as a result of ChatGPT. Others who were already working multiple jobs have used recent advancements in AI to turbocharge their situation, like one Ohio-based technology worker who upped his number of jobs from two to four after he started to integrate ChatGPT into his work process. "I think five would probably just be overkill," he said.

The Supreme Court will take a break on Wednesday from the unusually political mix of cases it decided to hear during its current term, to consider a case about poop jokes. From a report: Jack Daniel's v. VIP Products asks whether VIP Products, the nation's second-largest maker of dog toys, infringed upon the whiskey maker's trademarked bottle shape and label when it sold dog toys that resemble a bottle of Jack Daniel's. The dog toy, named "Bad Spaniels," juxtaposes imagery drawn from the whiskey maker's trademarks with a gag about a dog dropping âoethe old No. 2 on your Tennessee carpet." Jack Daniel's seeks a court order prohibiting VIP from continuing to sell this toy.

Jack Daniel's is, on the surface, a very silly case, which prompted some very silly attempts by the whiskey maker's lawyers to explain why their client is so offended by this dog toy. Sample quote from their brief: "Jack Daniel's loves dogs and appreciates a good joke as much as anyone. But Jack Daniel's likes its customers even more, and doesn't want them confused or associating its fine whiskey with dog poop." Lurking below the surface, however, are very serious questions about the First Amendment. And about how far courts should go in second-guessing Congress's decisions about how to balance the needs of the marketplace with the demands of free speech. VIP has strong legal arguments that it should prevail in this case, but Jack Daniel's also raises strong claims that the lower courts did too much to undermine federal trademark law.

Slashdot reader sleeping cat shares a recent FOSDEM talk by a compiler engineer on the team building Rust-GCC, "an alternative compiler implementation for the Rust programming language."

"If gccrs interprets a program differently from rustc, this is considered a bug," explains the project's FAQ on GitHub.

The FAQ also notes that LLVM's set of compiler technologies — which Rust uses — "is missing some backends that GCC supports, so a gccrs implementation can fill in the gaps for use in embedded development." But the FAQ also highlights another potential benefit: With the recent announcement of Rust being allowed into the Linux Kernel codebase, an interesting security implication has been highlighted by Open Source Security, inc. When code is compiled and uses Link Time Optimization (LTO), GCC emits GIMPLE [an intermediate representation] directly into a section of each object file, and LLVM does something similar with its own bytecode. If mixing rustc-compiled code and GCC-built code in the Linux kernel, the compilers will be unable to perform a full link-time optimization pass over all of the compiled code, leading to absent CFI (control flow integrity).

If Rust is available in the GNU toolchain, releases can be built on the Linux kernel (for example) with CFI using LLVM or GCC.
Started in 2014 (and revived in 2019), "The effort has been ongoing since 2020...and we've done a lot of effort and a lot of progress," compiler engineer Arthur Cohen says in the talk. "We have upstreamed the first version of gccrs within GCC. So next time when you install GCC 13 — you'll have gccrs in it. You can use it, you can start hacking on it, you can please report issues when it inevitably crashes and dies horribly."

"One big thing we're doing is some work towards running the rustc test suite. Because we want gccrs to be an actual Rust compiler and not a toy project or something that compiles a language that looks like Rust but isn't Rust, we're trying really hard to get that test suite working."

Read on for some notes from the talk...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It is the children's toy, invented in Britain, that inspired a passion for engineering, science and technology in generations of youngsters -- and their parents. Meccano building sets filled with reusable perforated metal -- and later plastic -- strips, plates, nuts, bolts, winches, wires, wheels and even motors have been used to construct models and mechanical devices for more than 120 years.

Now the last dedicated Meccano factory in the world is being closed and dismantled. The Canadian company that owns Meccano has said the plant at Calais will close at the beginning of 2024, putting 51 people out of work. It blamed the soaring cost of raw materials and "a lack of competitiveness" for the closure. Spin Master, which bought the brand in 2013, said Meccano toys would continue to be produced by its "network of partners in Europe, Asia and Latin America."

"We have no other choice than to envisage the end of industrial activity at the Calais factory," Spin Master said in a statement, adding that the factory had "never managed to break even" in spite of receiving 7 million euros in investment since 2014.

Meccano was the largest toy manufacturer in the UK by the 1930s. "By the 1920s Meccano Magazine had a monthly circulation of 70,000 and Meccano groups had sprung up around the world," adds The Guardian. "It has been in decline since the 1950s."

In J.R.R. Tolkein's The Two Towers, it's in Elrond's home city of Rivendell that Frodo chooses to destroy the ring of power.

And now Lego has created "a truly grand plastic-brick re-creation," reports CNET — costing $500 (£430, AU$800): The stronghold of the elves is a magical place, a sensation Lego managed to encapsulate in 6,167 pieces of plastic stretching 29.5 inches (75 centimeters) wide. "We know many of our fans have been anticipating a set like this for a long time — but a great Lego The Lord of the Rings set is never late, it arrives precisely when it means to!" said Lego design master Mike Psaiki in a statement Tuesday.

The colorful set is based on the design from the Peter Jackson movies. Lego's vision of Rivendell includes Frodo's bedroom, Elrond's study and the Council Ring where you can assemble the Fellowship. The rest of the set features an elven tower and a gazebo, river and bridge.... The set comes with a large cast of 15 minifigure characters, including Gandalf, Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, Legolas, Gimli and, of course, Elrond.

"The Perl Advent Calendar has come a long way since it's first year in 2000," says an announcement on Reddit. But in fact the online world now has many daily advent calendars aimed at programmers — offering tips about their favorite language or coding challenges.

• The HTMHell site — which bills itself as "a collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites" — decided to try publishing 24 original articles for their 2022 HTMHell Advent Calendar. Elsewhere on the way there's the Web Performance Calendar, promising daily articles for speed geeks. And the 24 Days in December blog comes to life every year with new blog posts for PHP users.

• The JVM Advent Calendar brings a new article daily about a JVM-related topic. And there's also a C# Advent calendar promising two new blog posts about C# every day up to (and including) December 25th.

• The Perl Advent Calendar offers fun stories about Perl tools averting December catastrophes up at the North Pole. (Day One's story — "Silent Mite" — described Santa's troubles building software for a ninja robot alien toy, since its embedded hardware support contract prohibited unwarrantied third-party code, requiring a full code rewrite using Perl's standard library.) Other stories so far this December include "Santa is on GitHub" and "northpole.cgi"

• The code quality/security software company SonarSource has a new 2022 edition of their Code Security Advent Calendar — their seventh consecutive year — promising "daily challenges until December 24th. Get ready to fill your bag of security tricks!" (According to a blog post the challenges are being announced on Twitter and on Mastadon.

• Just as the Perl community spawned another language named Perl 6 — now called Raku — there's also a Raku-themed advent calendar. (It's now at a new URL, though it's been running since 2009.) Day Three's post tells the story of Santa and the Rakupod Wranglers.

• "24 Pull Requests" dares participants to make 24 pull requests before December 24th. (The site's tagline is "giving back to open source for the holidays.") Over the years tens of thousands of developers (and organizations) have participated — and this year they're also encouraging organizers to hold hack events.

• The Advent of JavaScript and Advent of CSS sites promise 24 puzzles delivered by email (though you'll have to pay if you also want them to email you the solutions!)

• TryHackMe.com has its own set of darily cybersecurity puzzles (and even a few prizes).

• For 2022 Oslo-based Bekk Consulting (a "strategic internet consulting company") is offering an advent calendar of their own. A blog post says its their sixth annual edition, and promises "new original articles, podcasts, tutorials, listicles and videos every day up until Christmas Eve... all written and produced by us - developers, designers, project managers, agile coaches, management consultants, specialists and generalists."

Whether you participate or not, the creation of programming-themed advent calendar sites is a long-standing tradition among geeks, dating back more than two decades. (Last year Smashing magazine tried to compile an exhaustive list of the various sites serving all the different developer communities.)

But no list would be complete without mentioning Advent of Code. This year's programming puzzles involve everything from feeding Santa's reindeer and loading Santa's sleigh. The site's About page describes it as "an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like."

Now in its eighth year, the site's daily two-part programmig puzzles have a massive online following. This year's Day One puzzle was solved by 178,628 participants...

South Korea's capital launched its first self-driving bus route on Friday, part of an experiment which engineers said aims to make people feel more comfortable with driverless vehicles on the roads. From a report: The new vehicle does not look like a regular bus and has rounded edges along with large windows that make it appear more like a toy than a technological breakthrough. This design is intentional, said Jeong Seong-gyun, head of autonomous driving at 42dot, the start-up responsible for the self-driving technology that is now owned by auto giant Hyundai. "This is the future," he told AFP, adding that the bus required "a considerable new type of design." The bus looks a bit "like Lego" and is made of composite parts to help keep costs down and make it easy to replicate, he said. It uses cameras and lasers to navigate the way instead of expensive sensors, Seong-gyun added. The company's goal was to make the technology low-cost, safe and easily transferable to many types of vehicle in the future, for example delivery trucks.

Engadget reports that the annual "Monterey Car Week "has been a hotbed of EV debuts this year with unveilings from Dodge, Acura, DeLorean and a host of other automakers." But then on Thursday, Lincoln unveiled its Model L100, paying homage to the opulence of Lincoln's original 1922 luxury car by "redefining" vehicle controls.

A video on CNN explains that "the fully autonomous vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals," emphasizing that it's a "concept car" — a show piece. ("It's not set for production and won't be sold to customers.") But yes, it's an electric car that replaces the steering wheel with what Lincoln is calling a "chess piece controller," a hand-held, car-shaped piece of crystal that sits on a table in the center of the car. Drivers "grab it and move it around and move the actual vehicle," Kemal Curic, Global Design Director for Lincoln Motor Company, tells the Drive. (The table-top surface apparently functions like a kind of map, with the hand-held piece acting as an avatar.) Or as the Drive puts it, "Remember being a kid and pushing a toy car around on a city rug? Lincoln designers do."

The site ultimately concludes that the designs "really speak to one's natural instinct of movement. As humans, whenever we want to move something we just pick it up and move it; so why should our cars be any different...? [C]oncept cars don't have to make sense. They just need to be a cool representation of our wildest ideas."

In addition, CNN explains, "Because the car drives itself, the front row seats can be turned to face the rear passengers."

There's other futuristic features. CNN's video shows what Lincoln is calling "smart wheel covers" which fully encase the tires while offering a decorative electric light show (which doubles as a battery indicator). Even the floor is a massive digital screen, and there's also a full-length hinged glass roof — an upper canopy which according to Engadget "can project realistic animated scenes onto the floor and ceiling."

"Unfortunately many of the ideas presented here will inevitably be cut, going the way of Mercedes' awesome, Avatar-inspired trunk hatch wigglers."

A California court has ordered employer-rating site Glassdoor to hand over the identities of users who claimed they had negative experiences working for New Zealand toy giant Zuru. The Guardian reports: In a decision that could prompt unease for online platforms that rely on anonymity to attract candid reviews, Glassdoor was ordered to provide the information so Zuru could undertake defamation proceedings against the reviewers in New Zealand. Glassdoor is an international website where people post anonymous reviews of their current or former employers. Zuru is an international toy manufacturer that was founded in New Zealand and now has a billion-dollar turnover. After an anonymous person or people wrote reviews alleging that Zuru was a "toxic" workplace, the company began pursuing a defamation suit against them -- but first had to find out their identities.

California district court judge Alex Tse wrote in his decision that the reviews refer to Zuru as a "[b]urn out factory" with a "toxic culture," where an "incompetent" management team "consistently talk[s] down" to employees and treats them like "dirt." The judge wrote that the reviews make Zuru "sound like a horrible place to work." Zuru says these and similar statements in the reviews are false and have cost them financially. The company argued that it "has had to expend money, time, and resources in combatting the negative publicity, negative perception, and harm to [Zuru's] reputation that the [r]eviews have caused."

It wants to sue the reviewers for defamation in New Zealand, the country where the company was founded and where the reviewer or reviewers allegedly worked. Tse ruled that New Zealand's defamation laws are the relevant ones in this case, and ordered that Glassdoor hand over identifying information. New Zealand has stricter defamation laws than the US, where there are far greater free speech protections. Tse wrote: "There's good reason to tread lightly in applying US free-speech principles abroad. Our country's commitment to free speech isn't universally shared; and even in other countries that protect free speech, a different balance is often struck between the right to free speech and the right to protect one's reputation. Glassdoor wants to safeguard anonymous speech on its website. Zuru wants to protect its reputation. Both interests can't simultaneously be accommodated." In a statement, Glassdoor said it was "deeply disappointed in the court's decision, which was effectively decided under New Zealand law." They added: "In this and many other cases worldwide, Glassdoor fights vigorously to protect and defend the rights of our users to share their opinions and speak freely and authentically about their workplace experiences."

Glassdoor said it had fought a number of defamation-type cases, and they "prevail in the vast majority of these types of cases. To date, we have succeeded in protecting the anonymity of our users in more than 100 cases filed against our users."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Investment-banking firm Goldman Sachs made an eye-catching move last week: it granted unlimited paid holiday to its senior staff. According to a memo seen by a number of media organizations, partners and managing directors will be able to "take time off when needed without a fixed vacation day entitlement." Junior staff were given two more annual days off, and the company said all workers had to take a minimum of 15 days holiday each year.

At first glance, this looks like a positive initiative from a company known for grueling work hours and demanding culture. Unlimited paid time off (UPTO), after all, could allow overworked staff more time to rest and improve their mental health and overall work-life balance. Plus, a generous holiday policy at the top could trickle down into the wider workforce, potentially making for happier and more productive staff on the whole. Yet what sounds like an amazing benefit comes with major caveats. Workers will likely only take a decent amount of holiday if firms create an environment that encourages them to do so. In some firms with UPTO, workers end up taking less holiday -- not more -- because of peer pressure and perceived expectations around 'acceptable' amounts of holiday.

The latest data, meanwhile, shows UPTO isn't the benefit that workers covet the most; rather than an unlimited amount of holiday, most people prize flexibility, including the option to work from home. Is this recently introduced perk the shiny new toy workers have wanted all along -- or is it the gift no one asked for? "With UPTO, workers are not technically owed any vacation days, since there's no fixed number, and everything must be cleared by the boss on a case-by-case basis," notes the BBC. "For workers, establishing what the 'right' amount of paid time off to ask for often depends on observing the behavior of colleagues and bosses. If colleagues are only taking 10 days per year, asking for more could feel inappropriate."

Companies that adopt UPTO, says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, have "moved from a model where you accrue it -- so you're actually owed the vacation -- to one where you kind of [have to] ask. And there's nothing stopping your boss from yelling at you if you want to take additional time off -- or punishing you if you do."

The BBC adds, citing Cappelli: "UPTO also removes the safeguards that protect workers' interests if they can't take time off -- there are no leftover days workers are legally required to take by year's end, or carry over to the next year. There's also nothing for workers to cash out if they quit and have days left over, which [...] saves companies money."

Several readers have shared this report: One foggy night in December 2018, David Hill was trying to land a helicopter when a beam of light suddenly overwhelmed his night vision goggles. Mr. Hill, an emergency services pilot, had been called to airlift a teenager who had been badly injured in an all-terrain vehicle crash from a village 35 miles north of Madison, Wis. But now, Mr. Hill was temporarily blinded. Flying about 500 feet above the ground, he tried to get his bearings. It was "like looking into the sun, and all I can see are bright spots," he recalled. A person had pointed a laser at his helicopter. From 2010 to 2021, close to 70,000 pilots reported similar episodes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Last year it recorded more than 9,700 cases, a record high, and a 41 percent increase from 2020. When a laser pointer reaches a cockpit, the light can disorient or "completely incapacitate" a pilot, who on a commercial airplane could be responsible for hundreds of passengers, the F.A.A. said. Some commercial flight paths have been disrupted, causing pilots to change course or even turn around. "What you might see as a toy has the capacity to momentarily blind the crew member," Billy Nolen, the acting administrator of the F.A.A., said. Though no plane has ever been reported to have crashed as a result of a laser strike, Mr. Nolen said in a phone interview that there was always a risk of a "tragic outcome." He added, "This is not an arcade game."

Sam Bankman-Fried, chief executive and founder of Bahama-based crypto-exchange FTX and one of the most influential people in crypto, offered his insights into yield farming, projects that deliver tokens to buyers for staking. An excerpt from the podcast: Bloomberg's Levine: Can you give me an intuitive understanding of farming? I mean, like to me, farming is like you sell some structured puts and collect premium, but perhaps there's a more sophisticated understanding than that.

Sam Bankman-Fried: Let me give you sort of like a really toy model of it, which I actually think has a surprising amount of legitimacy for what farming could mean. You know, where do you start? You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box, they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that's gonna replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing. It's just a box. So what this protocol is, it's called 'Protocol X,' it's a box, and you take a token. You can take ethereum, you can put it in the box and you take it out of the box. Alright so, you put it into the box and you get like, you know, an IOU for having put it in the box and then you can redeem that IOU back out for the token.

So far what we've described is the world's dumbest ETF or ADR or something like that. It doesn't do anything but let you put things in it if you so choose. And then this protocol issues a token, we'll call it whatever, 'X token.' And X token promises that anything cool that happens because of this box is going to ultimately be usable by, you know, governance vote of holders of the X tokens. They can vote on what to do with any proceeds or other cool things that happen from this box. And of course, so far, we haven't exactly given a compelling reason for why there ever would be any proceeds from this box, but I don't know, you know, maybe there will be, so that's sort of where you start.

And then you say, alright, well, you've got this box and you've got X token and the box protocol declares, or maybe votes by on-chain governance, or, you know, something like that, that what they're gonna do is they are going to take half of all the X tokens that were re-minted. Maybe two thirds will, two thirds will offer X tokens, and they're going to give them away for free to whoever uses the box. So anyone who goes, takes some money, puts in the box, each day they're gonna airdrop, you know, 1% of the X token pro rata amongst everyone who's put money in the box. That's for now, what X token does, it gets given away to the box people. And now what happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It's probably not zero. Let say it's, you know, a $20 million market.

Levine: Wait, wait, wait, from like first principles, it should be zero, but okay.

SBF: Uh, sure. Okay. Completely reasonable comments. [...] Describe it this way, you might think, for instance, that in like five minutes with an internet connection, you could create such a box and such a token, and that it should reflect like, you know, it should be worth like $180 or something market cap for like that, you know, that effort that you put into it. In the world that we're in, if you do this, everyone's gonna be like, 'Ooh, box token. Maybe it's cool. If you buy in box token,' you know, that's gonna appear on Twitter and it'll have a $20 million market cap. And of course, one thing that you could do is you could like make the float very low and whatever, you know, maybe there haven't been $20 million dollars that have flowed into it yet. Maybe that's sort of like, is it, you know, mark to market fully diluted valuation or something, but I acknowledge that it's not totally clear that this thing should have market cap, but empirically I claim it would have market cap.