Technology

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but there’s a cryptocurrency themed after The Lord of the Rings. It’s dubbed the JRR Token, and its creators have called it “The One Token That Rules Them All.” Upon learning about it, my snap judgment was that it’ll be like The Hobbit’s trilogy of films (pointless and doomed to fail), but that may be unfair. Let’s take a look at the video its creators made to explain what makes it special: [embedded content] Okay, wait. Before we even go into the crypto stuff, I’m wondering what the legal situation is with this video — the video includes images of rolling green countryside overlaid by very Lord of the Rings-esque text, while what sounds like a piano rendition of Howard Shore’s The Shire plays. Even if those don’t turn out to be infringement, they’re ...

Ford’s F-150 was hit by the global semiconductor shortage, and now its flagship Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle is seeing a serious delay too — by a minimum of six weeks for prospective owners who were scheduled to get their vehicle between July 5th and October 1st. That’s according to emails Ford sent to buyers today (via Electrek). It’s not the first delay for the Mustang Mach-E, either, after Ford held back some 4,500 cars in March for unspecified quality checks, and Ford’s handling this delay in much the same way, giving owners an additional 250kWh of free charging at stations in the company’s FordPass Charging Network. That’s on top of the 250kWh they were already going to receive for purchasing the vehicle. Since the Mach-E has a usable battery capacity of between 68kWh and 88kWh, we...

Elon Musk offered SpaceX‘s resources to help NASA manufacture its next-generation spacesuits, following a report on Tuesday that said the space agency’s development program is behind schedule and will cost more than $1 billion USD to produce. “SpaceX could do it if need be,” Musk wrote on Twitter. SpaceX could do it if need be — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 10, 2021 Though SpaceX has made flight suits for astronauts who launch into orbit in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, Musk’s company has not yet developed spacesuits designed for the vacuum of space. Musk proposed his offer in response to a report by NASA’s inspector general — the investigative office that examines the space agency for fraudulent behavior — on the development of Extravehicular Mobility Units, or spacesuits. Since NASA s...

AMC will begin accepting Bitcoin payments for concessions and theater tickets as soon as the end of the year, marking the latest development in AMC’s hard lean into memestock superstardom. During the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Monday, AMC boss Adam Aron kicked off the Bitcoin bullet point by noting, unsurprisingly, that many of AMC’s new shareholders “are quite enthusiastic about cryptocurrency.” (If you’ve been following along with the memestock drama at home, this should come as absolutely no surprise.) He added that the company will have the technology systems in place to accept Bitcoin by the end of 2021. Bitcoin payments will have to be made online but will be widely supported across all of AMC’s US theaters. Bitcoin may not be the only cryptocurrency the company accept...

Blizzard is giving players a couple of chances to try out Diablo II: Resurrected, a remastered version of one of the studio’s most popular titles, ahead of the game’s release on September 23rd. The upcoming betas arrive during a tumultuous time for Blizzard, which is under intense scrutiny following a lawsuit alleging parent company Activision Blizzard has a culture of “constant sexual harassment.” According to Blizzard, people who have preordered the game (or the Diablo Prime Evil Collection, which also comes with Diablo III) can check out the early access beta from August 13th at 1PM ET to August 17th at 1PM ET. Everyone else will be able to play the open beta a week later, from August 20th at 1PM ET to August 23rd at 1PM ET. The betas won’t be available on the Switch The betas won’t be ...

Knuckles the Echidna is set to make his live-action debut in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 next year — and now we know who’ll be voicing him: none other than Idris Elba (Cats and also other movies, apparently). Elba appears to have not yet been completely scared away from showing up in hybrid live-action / animated films with sometimes-questionable CGI. According to a leaked synopsis for the film, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 will actually see Elba’s animated echidna team up with Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik “in search for an emerald that has the power to both build and destroy civilizations.” Elba will join Ben Schwartz, who voiced Sonic in the first film, and returning live-action actors James Marsden as Tom and Tika Sumpter as Maddie. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 will also feature Miles “Tails” Prower (who appeare...

AMC and Warner Bros. have struck a deal to have the studio’s movies stay exclusive to theaters for 45 days, instead of being immediately available digitally (via The Hollywood Reporter). The news was announced by AMC CEO Adam Aron during an earnings call, and it means that Warner Bros. won’t be making its 2022 movies, which include The Batman and Sesame Street, available at home (or on HBO Max) until just over six weeks after they’re released in theaters. Warner Bros. already had a similar deal in place with Regal Cinemas’ owners, but today’s news truly seems to herald the end of the streaming experiment the studio was trying out in 2021. While HBO Max may not be getting movies the same day as theaters anymore, things aren’t exactly going back to the way they were pre-pandemic: theat...

Apple is gearing up to officially present the forthcoming iPhone models next month. Some of the plans include a number of enhancements to the phone’s camera and video capabilities. Most notably, portrait mode will now feature a video-recording mode as well, Bloomberg reports. One of the iPhone’s hallmarks is its ever-evolving camera capabilities, so it only makes sense for the tech giant to expand some of its popular camera features. The iPhone’s signature portrait mode feature allows users to achieve a depth of field effect that allows photos to be captured with a sharper focus and increased clarity. To execute this same feature in a video format, the new feature will adopt Apple’s ProRes, which is a high-quality video compression format. The format supports video resolutions up to 8K. In...

In response to the blockage of an amendment to the Senate’s current infrastructure package that would have expanded government involvement in cryptocurrency on Monday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took to Twitter to air his thoughts on the benefits of Bitcoin. “#Bitcoin will unite a deeply divided country. (and eventually: world),” he wrote. #Bitcoin will unite a deeply divided country. (and eventually: world) — jack⚡️ (@jack) August 9, 2021 Though it is unclear which country Dorsey is referring to in his tweet, it is likely that he is talking about the U.S. given his recent remarks about the failed amendment. Dorsey has long heralded Bitcoin; in fact, at a Bitcoin conference last month, he cited Bitcoin as a solution to larger societal issues. “My hope is that it creates world pe...

Nvidia is launching its new RTX A2000 GPU today, designed for professional workstations. It’s Nvidia’s smallest Ampere-based GPU so far and can easily squeeze into small form factor workstations. Like Nvidia’s old Quadro cards, the RTX A2000 is designed primarily for professionals who want to leverage ray tracing and Nvidia’s AI capabilities, and it’s the latest in a line of A-series GPUs. The RTX A2000 can deliver 8 teraflops of GPU performance, coupled with 3328 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR6 memory with ECC, and a memory clock of 6001Mhz. That makes it look more capable on paper than something like Nvidia’s RTX 3050 laptop GPU. It also only consumes 70 watts of power, so it’s very power-efficient. Nvidia’s lineup of A-series GPUs.Image: Nvidia The RTX A2000 is based on Nvidia’s latest Ampere ...

After weeks of negotiations, the Senate approved a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package Tuesday authorizing over $500 billion in new spending to improve roads, bridges, and other physical infrastructure like broadband and EV charging. It’s the largest domestic spending bill in over a decade. “It’s taken quite a while. There have been a lot of bumps in the road,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Tuesday. “It’s taken quite a while” Aside from more traditional infrastructure spending like roads, the bill seeks to bolster US broadband networks with an additional $65 billion. It also makes permanent a pandemic-era internet subsidy program called the Emergency Broadband Benefit fund, renaming it the Affordable Connectivity Fund. The fund offers low-income families $30-a-month s...

NASA’s development of new astronaut space suits will be nearly two years late and nix its effort to land humans on the Moon by 2024, an inspector general report released on Tuesday found. Those delays compound a daunting set of schedule challenges NASA already faces — from the development of its new human-rated lunar lander to getting its massive Space Launch System rocket off the ground. An audit from the agency’s Office of Inspector General said NASA is on track to spend more than $1 billion on space suit development by the time its first two suits are ready, which would be “April 2025 at the earliest,” the report said. “Given these anticipated delays in spacesuit development, a lunar landing in late 2024 as NASA currently plans is not feasible.” NASA is trying to return astronauts to th...