An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is "skeptical." But be honest -- would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer?

Epikar, a South Korean company that cooks up digital management solutions for car dealers, has named its new AI invention the Pikar Genie. The idea is that customers can talk to this device, ask it product questions, and basically do everything you'd do with a car salesman except for actually closing the deal and signing paperwork. Renault, BMW, and Volvo are already using some Epikar products at South Korean dealerships, but this new customer-facing AI product is still in its infancy.

AN reported that "Renault assigns three salespeople to its Seoul showroom enhanced with Epikar automation compared with six for other Renault showrooms in South Korea," according to Epikar CEO Bosuk Han. The company's now looking to expand into America and is apparently already testing its products at at least one dealership stateside. Car-dealer consultant Fleming Ford (Director of Strategic Growth at NCM Associates) said U.S. dealerships "aren't ready for fully automated showrooms."

"The showroom isn't just where you buy a car," Automotive News quoted him saying. "It's where you decide who to trust to help you to choose the right car."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC: A billionaire investor keen on buying TikTok's US operations has told the BBC he has been left in limbo as the latest deadline for the app's sale looms.

The US has repeatedly delayed the date by which the platform's Chinese owner, Bytedance, must sell or be blocked for American users. US President Donald Trump appears poised to extend the deadline for a fifth time on Tuesday. "We're just standing by and waiting to see what happens," investor Frank McCourt told BBC News...

The president...said "sophisticated" US investors would acquire the app, including two of his allies: Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and Dell Technologies' Michael Dell. Members of the Trump administration had indicated the deal would be formalised in a meeting between Trump and Xi in October — however it concluded without an agreement being reached. Neither TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance nor Beijing have since announced approval of a sale, despite Trump's claims. This time there are no such claims a deal is imminent, leading most analysts to conclude another extension is inevitable.
Other investors besides McCourt include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Shark Tank entrepreneur Kevin O'Leary.

Imagine this. Lightning sparks a wildfire, but "within seconds, a satellite dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm," writes the Los Angeles Times. "An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and AI to generate a plan of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that. Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger than 10 square feet.

"This is the future of firefighting." On a recent morning in San Bernardino, state and local fire experts gathered for a demonstration of the early iterations of this new reality. An autonomous Sikorski Black Hawk helicopter, powered by technology from Lockheed Martin and a California-based software company called Rain, is on display on the tarmac of a logistics airport in Victorville — the word "EXPERIMENTAL" painted on its military green-black door. It's one of many new tools on the front lines of firefighting technology, which experts say is evolving rapidly as private industry and government agencies come face-to-face with a worsening global climate crisis...

Scientific studies and climate research models have found that the number of extreme fires could increase by as much as 30% globally by 2050. By 2100, California alone could see a 50% increase in wildfire frequency and a 77% increase in average annual acres burned, according to the state's most recent climate report. That's largely because human-caused climate change is driving up temperatures and drying out the landscape, priming it to burn, according to Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior advisor with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who served as California's state fire marshal from 2007 to 2010.... "[T]he policies of today and the technologies of today are not going to serve us tomorrow."

Today, more than 1,100 mountaintop cameras positioned across California are already using artificial intelligence to scan the landscape for the first sign of flames and prompt crews to spring into action. NASA's Earth-observing satellites are studying landscape conditions to help better predict fires before they ignite, while a new global satellite constellation recently launched by Google is helping to detect fires faster than ever before.
One 35-year fire service veteran who consults on fire service technologies even predicts fire-fighting robots will also be used in high-risk situations like the Colossus robot that battled flames searing through Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris...

And a bill moving through California's legislation "would direct the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to establish a pilot program to assess the viability of incorporating autonomous firefighting helicopters in the state."

Amazon Prime is launching a new Shark Tank-style competition show where contestants pitch products to a panel of celebrity investors and a live audience called "The 100." If a product wins audience approval, it gets featured in Amazon's Buy It Now Store, accessible via QR codes during episodes. The show, called Buy It Now and hosted by JB Smoove, premieres on October 30, 2024. You can watch a trailer for it on YouTube. The Verge reports: The company announced the show earlier this year but has now released a trailer showing what it will look like. Contestants pitch their ideas to the audience. If the crowd votes for them, then the panelists pick which ones will show up on Amazon's Buy It Now Store: a new storefront launching alongside the show that viewers can reach using a QR code that shows up during episodes. One presenter per episode will get a $20,000 prize, too.

Apart from Smoove -- who you may remember from Curb Your Enthusiasm and Harley -- the show will feature "a star-studded rotating panel of celebrity panelists," including Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Anderson, Tabitha Brown, Tony Hawk, and Christian Siriano. It will also include three Amazon executives, and Ring founder and current CEO of Door.com (formerly Latch) Jamie Siminoff will serve as the "resident judge and entrepreneurial panelist." Oh, and those panelists will be selling their own products on that Buy It Now Store.

Coming soon: Amazon sellers duking it out on TV to get their wares prime placement at the world's largest online retailer. Think "Shark Tank" meets Home Shopping Network. From a report: The e-commerce giant plans to introduce a new competition show next month in which entrepreneurs pitch their products to a studio audience as well as to judges including Amazon executives and celebrities like Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow and designer Christian Siriano. Finalists will have their inventions sold in a new Amazon "Buy It Now" online store, and the winner of each episode will earn $20,000.

The show is the retailer's latest attempt to marry content and commerce. Persuading consumers to shop through Internet-enabled televisions has long been a goal of traditional entertainment companies, but getting viewers to scan the QR code can be difficult. By creating shows that highlight its sellers and their products, Amazon has a better shot at getting viewers to shop -- especially younger audiences who are already doing this on apps like TikTok, said Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik. "This feels more elegant than QR codes," Shmulik said of Amazon's new game show. Over the past few years, Amazon has introduced ads with QR codes in about 100 shows and movies, including "The Summer I Turned Pretty," "The Boys" and, more recently, NFL football games.

"Five years ago, Brian Frye set an elaborate trap," writes Decrypt.co. "Now the law professor is teaming up with a singer-songwriter to finally spring it" on America's Security and Exchange Commission "in a novel lawsuit — and in the process, prevent the regulator from ever coming after NFT art projects again." Over and again, the SEC has sued cherry-picked NFT projects it says qualify as unregistered securities — but never once has the regulator defined what types of NFT projects are legal and which are not, casting a chill over the nascent industry... [In 2019] Frye, an expert in securities law and a fan of novel technologies, minted an NFT of a letter he sent to the SEC in which he declared his art project to constitute an illegal, unregistered security. If the conceptual art project wasn't a security, Frye challenged the agency, then it needed to say so. The SEC never responded to Frye — not then, and not after several more self-incriminating correspondences from the professor. But in due time, the agency began vigorously pursuing, and suing, NFT projects.
So 10 months ago, Jonathan Mann — who writes a new song every day and shares it online — crafted a song titled "This Song is A Security." As a seller of NFTs himself, Mann wrote the song "to fight back against the SEC, and defend his right — plus the rights of other artists like him — to earn revenue," according to the article: Frye, who'd practically been salivating for such an opportunity for half a decade, was a natural fit.... In the lawsuit filed against the SEC in Louisiana earlier this week, they challenged the SEC's standing to regulate their NFT-backed artworks as securities, and demanded the agency declare that their respective art projects do not constitute illegal, unregistered securities offerings.
More from the International Business Times: The complaint asked the court to clarify whether the SEC should regulate art and whether artists were supposed to "register" their artworks before selling the pieces to the general public. The complaint also asked whether artists should be "forced to make public disclosures about the 'risks' of buying their art," and whether artists should be "required to comply" with federal securities laws...

The Blockchain Association, a collective crypto group that includes some of the biggest digital asset firms, asserted that the SEC has no authority over NFT art. "We support the plaintiffs in their quest for legal clarity," the group said.
In an interview with Slashdot, Mann says he started his "Song a Day" project almost 17 years ago (when he was 26 years old) — and his interest in NFTs is sincere: "Over the years, I've always sought a way to make Song A Day sustainable financially, through video contests, conference gigs, ad revenue, royalties, Patreon and more.

"When I came across NFTs in 2017, they didn't have a name. We just called them 'digital collectibles'. For the last 2+ years, NFTs have become that self-sustaining model for my work.

"I know most people believe NFTs are a joke at best and actively harmful at worst. Even most people in the crypto community have given up on them. Despite all that, I still believe they're worth pursuing.

"Collecting an NFT from an artist you love is the most direct way to support them. There's no multinational corporation, no payment processor, and no venture capitalists between you and the artist you want to support."
Slashdot also tracked down the SEC's Office of Public Affairs, and got an official response from SEC public affairs specialist Ryan White.

Slashdot: The suit argues that the SEC's approach "threatens the livelihoods of artists and creators that are simply experimenting with a novel, fast-growing technology," and seeks guidance in the face of a "credible threat of enforcement". Is the SEC going to respond to this lawsuit? And if you don't have an answer at this time, can you give me a general comment on the issues and concerns being raised?

SEC Public Affairs Specialist Ryan White: We would decline comment.

Decrypt.co points out that the lawsuit "has no guarantee of offering some conclusive end to the NFT regulation question... That may only come with concrete legislation or a judgment by the Supreme Court."

But Mann's song still makes a very public show out of their concerns — with Mann even releasing a follow-up song titled "I'm Suing the SEC." (Its music video mixes together wacky clips of Mila Kunis's Stoner Cats and Fonzie jumping a shark with footage of NFT critics like Elizabeth Warren and SEC chairman Gary Gensler.)

And an earlier song also used auto-tune to transform Gensler's remarks about cryptocurrencies into the chorus of a song titled "Hucksters, Fraudsters, Scam Artists, Ponzi Schemes".

Mann later auctioned an NFT of the song — for over $3,000 in Ethereum.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: The BBC are reporting sharks have tested positive for cocaine. Thirteen sharpnose sharks which were captured off the coast near Rio de Janeiro. They were tested for the drug in liver and muscle tissue samples — and returned positive results at concentrations as much as 100 times higher than previously reported for other aquatic creatures.

The research was published in Science of the Total Environment. The little-known "sharpnose" sharks were examined because they spend their entire lives in coastal waters. This makes them more likely to be exposed to drugs from human activities than the more cinematic species starring in "Cocaine Shark" or "Cocaine Sharks", two recent productions on the subject featuring hammerheads and tiger sharks (the "trash cans of the sea").

The likeliest source is effluent from drug processing labs inland, though the snorting population of Rio may have added their contribution into the sewers too...

Whether cocaine is changing the behaviour of the sharks is not known. Perhaps it would affect their aim with their head-mount lasers, bringing closer their conquest of the land with it's tasty, tasty humans. Hollywood, hopefully, as the answers.

"It appears the live-service shooter Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is, once again, suffering from a hacker problem," reports Kotaku: Instead of doing absolutely absurd amounts of damage, this time hackers have figured out how to gain access to unreleased characters and skins. And publisher WB Games is reportedly issuing DMCA takedown notices against any assets that have found their way online.

As reported by IGN, one hacker discovered how to play as Deathstroke, one of the four characters developer Rocksteady Studios teased for an upcoming Suicide Squad season... There were also unreleased skins for The Joker and King Shark that folks have somehow accessed, all of which began circulating on Reddit and X/Twitter on April 4.

Not long after, the assets were removed, with folks believing WB Games was behind the strikes. YouTuber TrixRidiculous, who primarily covers DC- and Marvel-related RPGs, had their posts on X/Twitter swiftly taken down by a DMCA strike."I posted three pics to Twitter," TrixRidiculous told Kotaku over email. "Within probably 30 minutes, I received a DMCA strike from WB Games [Kotaku saw a screenshot of this notice]. Please just bring attention to the fact that the leaderboard is riddled with hackers/cheaters that have gone unbanned since launch, as that's all I was trying to do anyway."

This sentiment is shared across the game's official subreddit, with folks posting about "losing interest" in Suicide Squad due to hackers flooding the leaderboards.

Sony is about to delete tons of Discovery shows from PlayStation users' libraries even if they already "purchased" them. Why? Because most users don't actually own the digital content they buy thanks to the mess of online DRM and license agreements. Some of the soon-to-be-deleted TV shows include Mythbusters and Naked and Afraid. Kotaku reports: The latest pothole in the road to an all-digital future was discovered via a warning Sony recently sent out to PlayStation users who purchased TV shows made by Discovery, the reality TV network that recently merged with Warner Bros. in one of the most brutal and idiotic corporate maneuvers of our time. "Due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library," read a copy of the email that was shared with Kotaku.

It linked to a page on the PlayStation website listing all of the shows impacted. As you might imagine, given Discovery's penchant for pumping out seasons of relatively cheap to produce but popular reality TV and documentary-based shows, there are a lot of them. They include, but are not limited to, hits such as: Say Yes to the Dress, Shark Week, Cake Boss, Long Island Medium, Deadly Women, and many, many more. [...] Now, essentially anything you buy on PSN, whether a PS5 blockbuster or, uh, Police Women of Cincinnati, is essentially just on indefinite loan until such time as the PlayStation servers die or the original copyright owner decides to pull the content.

Can you heat up a pan to 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit? That's the burning question at the center of this proposed class action lawsuit, which claims the advertising for SharkNinja's nonstick cookware violates the laws of physics and thermodynamics. From a report: While SharkNinja is the company best known for its Shark robovacs and Ninja kitchen gadget, this lawsuit takes issue with the Ninja NeverStick Premium Cookware collection, a line of pots and pans it advertises as having superior nonsticking and nonflaking qualities thanks to its manufacturing process.

Instead of making its pans at a measly 900-degree temperature that other brands use, SharkNinja says it heats up the cookware to a maximum of 30,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That process, according to SharkNinja, fuses "plasma ceramic particles" to the surface of the pan, "creating a super-hard, textured surface that interlocks with our exclusive coating for a superior bond." But Patricia Brown, the person who filed this lawsuit, isn't buying it. As cited in Brown's lawsuit, NASA recently said the "surface of the Sun is a blisteringly hot 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit," meaning SharkNinja's manufacturing process reaches about three times that temperature.

A writer for the Atlantic complains that their HP printer is shaking them down like a loan shark. I discovered an error message on my computer indicating that my HP OfficeJet Pro had been remotely disabled by the company. When I logged on to HP's website, I learned why: The credit card I had used to sign up for HP's Instant Ink cartridge-refill program had expired, and the company had effectively bricked my device in response....

Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program that purports to monitor one's printer usage and ink levels and automatically send new cartridges when they run low. The name is misleading, because the monthly fee is not for the ink itself but for the number of pages printed. (The recommended household plan is $5.99 a month for 100 pages). Like others, I signed up in haste during the printer-setup process, only slightly aware of what I was purchasing. Getting ink delivered when I need it sounded convenient enough to me....

The monthly fee is incurred whether you print or not, and the ink cartridges occupy some liminal ownership space. You possess them, but you are, in essence, renting both them and your machine while you're enrolled in the program.... Here was a piece of technology that I had paid more than $200 for, stocked with full ink cartridges. My printer, gently used, was sitting on my desk in perfect working order but rendered useless by Hewlett-Packard, a tech corporation with a $28 billion market cap at the time of writing, because I had failed to make a monthly payment for a service intended to deliver new printer cartridges that I did not yet need....

There are tales of woe across HP's customer-support site, in Reddit threads, and on Twitter. A pending class-action lawsuit in California alleges that the Instant Ink program has "significant catches" and does not deliver new cartridges on time or allow those enrolled to use cartridges purchased outside the subscription service, rendering the consumer frequently unable to print. Parker Truax, a spokesperson for HP, told me, "Instant Ink cartridges will continue working until the end of the current billing cycle in which [a customer cancels]. To continue printing after they discontinue their Instant Ink subscription and their billing cycle ends, they can purchase and use HP original Standard or XL cartridges."
"Nobody told me that if I canceled, then all those cartridges would stop working," complains another owner of an HP printer cited in the article. "I guess this is our future, where your printer ink spies on you."

But the article ultimately concludes that the printer's shakedown is "just one example of how digital subscriptions have permeated physical tech so thoroughly that they are blurring the lines of ownership. Even if I paid for it, can I really say that I own my printer if HP can flip a switch and make it inert?"

joshuark writes: A Las Vegas surgeon reports tech workers are paying $70,000 to $150,000 to get surgery to increase their height by 3-inches. The doctor is paid to break their legs (both femurs) and then inserts adjustable metal nails that are slowly tweaked over time. "I joke that I could open a tech company," Dr. Kevin Debiparshad told GQ. "I got, like, 20 software engineers doing this procedure right now who are here in Vegas. There was a girl" -- because girls can be tech bros too. -- "yesterday from PayPal. I've got patients from Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. I've had multiple patients from Microsoft."

A new twist, borrow $70K to $150K from a loan shark in Las Vegas, and they'll break your legs later... "Since the onset of the pandemic's work-from-home era, the LimbplastX Institute (where Dr. D performs his procedures) has been seeing twice its normal number of patients, and sometimes as many as 50 new people a month," reports GQ. "That claim is backed up by a BBC report suggesting that hundreds of men in the U.S. are now undergoing the procedure every year."

"According to a 2009 study of Australian men, short guys make less money than their taller peers (about $500 a year per inch); are less likely to climb the corporate ladder (according to one survey, the average height of a male Fortune 500 CEO is six feet); and, for the cis and straight among us, have fewer romantic opportunities with women (a 2013 study conducted in the Netherlands found that women were taller than their male partners in just 7.5 percent of cases)," adds the report. "The promise of Dr. D's institute is that, for a price, you too can increase your odds of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO. And people are willing to pay..."

An anonymous reader shares a report: This Saturday was dubbed "National Cinema Day," in which theaters around the US cut their ticket prices to $3 in an effort to keep bringing people back to the movie theater. And it worked! More than 8.1 million people went to the movies on Saturday, Variety found, compared to 1 million the day before and 1.7 million the day after. National Cinema Day brought the biggest crowds to theaters of any day in 2022, which leads to one inevitable conclusion: people will go to movies when movies only cost three bucks. Who knew!

One thing not needed to get the butts back in the seats? New movies. August has been a month-long movie doldrums, the result of so many pandemic shutdowns and general supply chain issues. Tom Cruise always has the answer, though: the top grosser of the day was Top Gun: Maverick, which added about $6 million to its box office haul over the long weekend. (Cruise and co. have been keeping theaters afloat all summer, actually, bringing in $698 million overall since the movie's release in May.) Spider-Man: No Way Home, which came out last Christmas, took second place in the box office. The best-performing new movie this weekend -- Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. -- came in at #14. But the real dark horse, the shark in the water nobody saw coming, was a little flick you might have heard of called Jaws. Playing in theaters around the country, the movie made about $2.6 million over the three-day weekend.

With crypto prices tumbling precipitously, traders have begun increasingly turning against one another to eke out ever-elusive profits. From a report: Many shark traders scour blockchains -- digital ledgers for recording transactions -- seeking information on other traders, particularly those with highly leveraged positions, an anonymous user known as Omakase, a contributor to the Sushi decentralized exchange, said in an interview. The sharks then attack the positions by trying to push them into liquidation, and earning liquidation bonuses that are common in decentralized finance (DeFi), where people trade, lend and borrow from each other without intermediaries like banks. Related strategies may have contributed to the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin, with shark traders making money off price arbitrage between the Curve decentralized exchange and centralized exchanges, according to Nansen, a blockchain analytics firm.

Recent troubles at crypto lender Celsius Network were exacerbated by arbitragers as well. The price of stETh token that Celsius has a large position in started trading at a large discount from Ether, to which it's tied. "As stETH goes down, arbitragers buy stETH and short ETH against it, sending ETH lower, which again lowers collateral values across DeFi," effectively worsening Celsius's position, according to a recent Arca note. As Omakase put it, "In a downtrend environment, where yields are harder to access, what we are going to see is some actors utilize some more aggressive strategies, and that may not be necessarily good for the community." Omakase added: "The environment has become more player vs player."

Keeping people out of rip currents is more about reading human behavior than reading warning signs. From a report: Worldwide, rips cause hundreds of drownings and necessitate tens of thousands of rescues every year. In Australia, where 85 percent of the population lives within an hour's drive of the coast, rips cause more fatalities than floods, cyclones, and shark attacks combined. In 1938, one of the country's most popular beaches, Sydney's Bondi Beach, was the site of an infamous rip-current tragedy: within minutes, roughly 200 swimmers were swept away by a rip, leaving 35 people unconscious and five dead. More often, however, rips take one life at a time, garnering little media attention. For many casual beach visitors, the toll of rip currents goes unnoticed. [...] Although almost three-quarters of beach users said they knew what a rip current is, only 54 percent could correctly define it. In addition, only half of the people she surveyed remembered seeing either the warning signs or the colored flags denoting surf conditions that were posted on or near the main access point to each beach. An even smaller percentage could recall what color the flags had been -- green for calm, yellow for moderate, or red for dangerous conditions. "I was genuinely shocked," Locknick says.

[...] Part of the challenge of preventing rip-related drownings stems from the lack of a simple method to escape them. Rip currents form when waves pile water near the shoreline. The water then gushes back out to sea, taking the path of least resistance. It might flow along channels carved in between sandbars or next to solid structures, such as jetties or rocky headlands. These types of rips can stick around year after year. Others are more erratic, creating fleeting bursts of seaward-flowing water on smooth, open beaches. People often mislabel rip currents as undertows or rip tides. Rip currents are not caused by tides, however, and undertows are a different, weaker current, formed when water pushed onto the beach moves back offshore along the seabed. Some telltale signs of a rip include a streak of churned-up, sandy water or a dark, flat gap between breaking waves.

It's not surprising that rip currents are often misunderstood by the public because, for decades, beach-safety experts also had an oversimplified perception of their mechanics. In some of the earliest research on rips in the mid-20th century, American scientists watched sticks, pieces of kelp, and volleyballs float out to sea and described lanes of flowing water extending more than 300 meters offshore. This work formed the basis for the popular view of rip currents as jets flowing perpendicular to the beach, shooting out past the surf. To escape the river of current, experts recommended that bathers swim parallel to the beach -- a message once broadcast through education campaigns and warning signs in the United States and Australia. As it turns out, that approach may not always work.

In Shark Bay, off the westernmost tip of Australia, meadows of sea grass carpet the ocean floor, undulating in the current and being nibbled on by dugongs, cousins of Florida manatees. A new study revealed something unexpected about those sea grasses: Many of them are the same individual plant that has been cloning itself for about 4,500 years. From a report: The sea grass -- not to be confused with seaweed, which is an algae -- is Poseidon's ribbon weed, or Posidonia australis. Jane Edgeloe, a University of Western Australia Ph.D. candidate and an author of the paper, likens its appearance to a spring onion. Ms. Edgeloe and her colleagues made their discovery as part of a genetic survey of Posidonia grasses in different areas of Shark Bay, where she SCUBA dived in the shallow waters and pulled up shoots of Posidonia from 10 different meadows. On land, the researchers analyzed and compared the grasses' DNA.

They published their results Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It turned out the DNA of many of those seemingly different plants was virtually identical. Elizabeth Sinclair, also of the University of Western Australia and an author of the study, recalled excitement in the lab when she realized: "It's only one plant."While some of Shark Bay's northern meadows reproduce sexually, the rest of its Posidonia clones itself by creating new shoots that branch off from its root system. Even separate meadows were genetically identical, indicating that they were once connected by now-severed roots. Based on how old the bay is and how quickly sea grasses grow, the researchers surmise that the Shark Bay clone is about 4,500 years old.

Fast Company reviews the Bitcoin 2022 conference held in Miami this week — arguing that it was actually Ethereum that sparked 2021's boom in cryptocurrenies. (And that with NFTs and DAOs, Ethereum still remains the flashier, main driver of popular crypto culture.)

Their conclusion? There's "a real sense of desperation for some kind of star power that can elevate Bitcoin from digital gold for the techno-libertarian set to the true mainstream cultural movement it needs to be in order to actually catch on." In fact, the issue of what influencers or celebrities can do for the Bitcoin community came up directly on Thursday morning, during a panel featuring Odell Beckham Jr., Serena Williams, Aaron Rodgers, and Cash App's crypto product lead, Miles Suter. Beckham and Rodgers have both made headlines recently for taking their salaries in Bitcoin; Williams is heavily involved in the Bitcoin startup world.... It was pretty far away from the high energy radiating from the world of NFTs, and it was clear that the event's bigger names aren't sure what else to do other than just tell the audience to buy Bitcoin over and over again. A lot of people make fun of NFTs, but they're an easier cultural product to point to and talk about than trying to have a fun conversation about lightning networks....

Bitcoin's attempts at going mainstream feel like a real two-steps-forward-one-step-back situation. Its most vocal supporters see it as a war-ending miracle technology. Alex Gladstein, the Human Rights Foundation's chief strategy officer led a panel on Thursday that argued it could lead to peace on Earth. It's not uncommon to hear presenters at Bitcoin 2022 argue that Bitcoin could end all wars forever. But that flies in the face of the conference's wilder, bawdier attractions — the big robot bull statue, the wild after-parties, the endless panels about cancel culture and Twitter drama.

And these competing attitudes within the world of Bitcoin came to a head on Thursday afternoon, when chaos briefly erupted in the conference's main stage when it was announced that Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy had dropped out of his much talked-about panel, titled "Bitcoin Is Fuck You Money". Portnoy has not issued any explanation for why he dropped out, but he did spend the rest of the afternoon live tweeting the PGA Masters Tournament. For someone who claims to be all in on the technology, the so-called "baron of Bitcoin" didn't even stay for his panel.

"Fuck you, Dave," the emcee gleefully told the crowd as they cheered and booed in response.
The article reports that other speakers at the conference included:

• Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang
• Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary
• Paypal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel

But the article ultimately argues that the conference "feels like a low-level comic convention that's being held in the same event space as an economic forum."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A British-Belgian teenager became the youngest woman to fly solo around the world on Thursday and the first person to do so in a microlight plane after a five-month, five-continent odyssey in her Shark ultralight. Nineteen-year-old Zara Rutherford landed back at Kortrijk-Wevelgem Airport in Belgium after flying 51,000 km (32,000 miles) over 52 nations since her Aug. 18 departure in the world's fastest microlight aircraft. "It's just really crazy, I haven't quite processed it," Rutherford, smiling broadly and cloaked in British and Belgian flags, told reporters.

After the penultimate leg to a German village on Wednesday, she said it was an exploit she would never repeat. After North and South America, Rutherford was stuck for a month in Alaska because of weather and visa delays. A winter storm forced another long stop in far eastern Russia, before she travelled to South Asia, the Middle East and back to Europe. Her favorite flyovers were New York and an active volcano in Iceland, but there were moments when she feared for her life, including her flight across Siberia's frozen wastes and a narrow escape from entering North Korean air space during bad weather. "They have been testing missiles with no warning," she said of her concerns as she considered cutting across the reclusive authoritarian state during a detour from Russia to South Korea. [...]

To meet criteria for a round-the-world flight, Rutherford touched two points opposite each other on the globe: Jambi in Indonesia and Tumaco in Colombia. Rutherford took the record from Afghan-born American Shaesta Wais, who in 2017 became the youngest woman to fly solo around the world at 30. The youngest male record holder, American Mason Andrews, was 18 when he did it in 2018. She also became the first Belgian to circumnavigate the world solo in a single-engine aircraft, getting through the long days by shuffling through a 40-hour playlist of songs. [...] Rutherford dreams of being an astronaut and hopes her voyage will encourage women in science, technology and aviation.

Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared some fascinating photos and a report from Live Science.

"This rarely seen glass octopus bared all recently — even a view of its innards — when an underwater robot filmed it gracefully soaring through the deep waters of the Central Pacific Ocean." Like other "glass" creatures, such as glass frogs and certain comb jellies, glass octopuses are almost completely transparent, with only their cylindrical eyes, optic nerve and digestive tract appearing opaque. The expedition crew reported two encounters with the glass octopus — an impressive count given that previously there was such limited footage of these clear cephalopods, scientists had to learn about them by studying chunks of them in the gut contents of their predators...

During the expedition, which ended July 8, a crew of marine scientists discovered a handful of what are likely newfound marine animals on nine previously unexplored submarine mountains known as seamounts. The team also completed high-resolution seafloor mapping of more than 11,500 square miles (30,000 square km) around the archipelago and video recordings of five additional seamounts filmed by the underwater robot SuBastian, according to a statement. SuBastian also snagged footage of a whale shark (the largest living fish in the world) and a long-legged crab stealing a fish from another crab.

The expedition sent SuBastian on 21 dives, enabling the robot to record more than 182 hours on the seafloor.
The expedition was run by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit operating foundation co-founded by Wendy and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.

Earlier this week, Netflix announced that it is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a former EA and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Now, according to a recent datamine, the streaming giant may be forming a partnership with PlayStation to bring some of the biggest PlayStation brands to Netflix. IGN reports: Reported by VGC, dataminer Steve Moser appears to have uncovered PlayStation brand imagery and content in the Netflix app code. Moser shared the information via a tweet, including images of both the Ghost of Tsushima box art and some PS5 controllers. It's unclear exactly what this means for Netflix, but if there is a burgeoning partnership between Netflix and PlayStation, it could see Ghost of Tsushima content come to the streaming service in some form.

Moser suggests that the gaming section of Netflix currently has the codename 'Shark', and the placement of PlayStation IP within that suggests a collaborative approach. This wouldn't be the first major deal between Sony and Netflix, as the two companies agreed a deal earlier this year that means movies from Sony Pictures Entertainment will come to Netflix first after their theatrical run. [...] Given that many first-party PlayStation games are narrative-driven adventure games with a focus on cinematic stories, it makes sense to try and adopt games like Ghost of Tsushima and the last of us into movies and TV. Whilst PlayStation already has a games streaming service, PlayStation Now, it could also potentially be looking to push gaming content beyond the PlayStation console ecosystem, as Microsoft has done with Xbox Game Pass.