The New York Times reports on what the city’s police department calls Digidog, “a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening.”
Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is…
Tag: price
Vast Energy Use of Bitcoin Criticized
The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin’s total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK’s electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the…
Apple’s Powerful M1 MacBooks are Lowering The Resale Value of Older MacBooks
“The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market,” reports ZDNet: Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life? That’s a question savvy…
Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000
In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times. On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling digital goods. In the…
A Digital Firewall in Myanmar, Built With Guns and Wire Cutters
The Myanmar soldiers descended before dawn on Feb. 1, bearing rifles and wire cutters. At gunpoint, they ordered technicians at telecom operators to switch off the internet. For good measure, the soldiers snipped wires without knowing what they were severing, according to an eyewitness and a person briefed on the events. The New York Times: The data center raids in Yangon…
Square Buys $170 Million Worth of Bitcoins
Square said today it has purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $170 million. From a statement: Combined with Square’s previous purchase of $50 million in bitcoin, this represents approximately five percent of Square’s total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities as of December 31, 2020.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: https://slashdot.org/story/21/02/23/2127254/square-buys-170-million-worth-of-bitcoins?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed…
FCC Proposes Rules for Emergency Broadband Program To Keep Struggling Families Online
The FCC has taken a major step toward offering financial support for people struggling to pay broadband bills during the pandemic. If approved, the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program could provide $50 per month to millions of households, and more in tribal lands. From a report: The EBBP was created in the budget passed by Congress earlier this year, which earmarked $3.2…
Bill Gates Questions Societal Value of ‘GameStop’ Mania, Argues It’d Be ‘Good to Get Rid of’ Bitcoin
The price of bitcoin — now over $57,000 — has nearly doubled in the last 7 weeks. Even Elon Musk tweeted that its price seems high — though one analyst tells Bloomberg that Tesla has already made a profit of nearly $1 billion from its recent Bitcoin investment, more than it earned selling electric cars in all of 2020. Yet speaking…
Dogecoin Has a Top Dog Worth $2.1 Billion
The dogecoin market has a pack leader. From a report: Records show that a person, or entity, owns about 28% of all of the cryptocurrency in circulation — a stake worth about $2.1 billion at current prices [Editor’s note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The holder’s identity isn’t known, which is common in the opaque world of digital currencies….
NVIDIA Limits RTX 3060 Crypto Speeds As it Introduces Mining Cards
Worried that the GeForce RTX 3060 will be sold out as cryptocurrency miners snap up every GPU in sight? NVIDIA thinks it has a simple way to help: make the new card unattractive to the crypto crowd. From a report: The company has revealed that it’s cutting the hash rate (mining efficiency) of the RTX 3060 in half for Ethereum miners….