Month: September 2020

Enlarge / Amazon's orange-yellow logo wall. (credit: David Ryder/Getty Images)

New reports released this week serve as a cautionary tale for consumers who shop at Amazon, by far the largest online retailer in the US. While complaints about Amazon's third-party vendor marketplace are by now commonplace, the new reports find that not only did Amazon itself price-gouge customers during the height of the pandemic, but also that many of its white-label, Amazon-branded products are just as likely to be dangerously defective as third-party goods.

Product shortages—both for pandemic-related supplies such as masks and sanitizer and also for basic household goods such as toilet paper—hit nationwide in February, March, and April as the country shut down and everyone who could holed up at home. As tends to happen when demand skyrockets but supply doesn't, prices on a while wide range of items went up. And up. And then up some more.

By March, regulators were desperately trying to stem the tide of price gouging flooding online retailers, especially Amazon's sprawling third-party Marketplace.

Enlarge (credit: Remedy)

Last month, 505 Games announced that it was "unfortunately unable to offer an upgrade path to all existing [console] Control players" for PlayStation 5 and/or Xbox Series S/X enhancements. Today, though, an apparent temporary snafu is showing just how simple such a free upgrade could be for many Control players on current-generation systems, at least.

As reported in a lengthy ResetEra thread, a number of players who previously bought the Control Digital Deluxe Edition on PS4 were surprised last night to find they also owned the Control Ultimate Edition. That new version includes the base game, DLC, and season pass and is the one that "take[s] full advantage of the power and features provided by these new consoles," as 505 Games puts it.

Within hours, though, those same players noted their Ultimate Edition ownership had been revoked and reverted back to the current-generation Digital Deluxe Edition. That version will not get any hardware-specific enhancements when played on next-generation consoles.

Enlarge / Nikola Chairman Trevor Milton unveils the Nikola One truck in December 2016. (credit: Nikola)

Stock in electric truck startup Nikola has plunged for the second straight day after a short-selling investment firm published a bombshell report alleging that the company's December 2016 unveiling of the Nikola One truck was a brazen fraud. Nikola's stock lost 11 percent on Thursday and is down an additional 15 percent in Friday morning trading.

At the December 2016 event, Nikola Chairman Trevor Milton repeatedly described the truck as fully functional. But that wasn't quite true, as Milton admitted to Bloomberg earlier this year. The supposedly hydrogen-powered truck didn't have a hydrogen fuel cell, nor did it have the motors and gears required to drive the wheels. Milton claimed the parts had been taken out of the truck for safety reasons.

The new report from Hindenburg Research claims that the scale of Nikola's deception was even greater than was previously known. The firm claims that the prototype's supposedly functional dashboard display was powered by an extension cord snaking up from under the stage.

Enlarge / Promotional image of Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow emerging from a stylized depiction of the female genital anatomy. (credit: Netflix)

Gwyneth Paltrow—actor, pseudoscience-peddler, empowerer of women, and person who recently learned what a vagina is—will return to Netflix with a second season of The Goop Lab.

The six-episode docuseries of Paltrow’s wellness and “contextual commerce” empire, Goop, has been renewed, according to an exclusive report by Variety.

The first season, which oozed onto the streaming platform in late January of this year, followed Paltrow and her exploited Goopers as they aimlessly took to the high seas of junk science and marinated in snake oil spas. Individual episodes explored important topics such as the bright side of hypothermia, the powers of a magician who can massage your aura with moves he learned watching The Karate Kid, Goopers tripping on mushrooms for pretty much no reason at all, the benefits of a $50 salmon fillet, and how to be a fortune-teller in case you need a back-up career in the circus.

Enlarge / Members of the flight test team pose with the Flying-V model in Germany in June 2020. (credit: Malcolm Brown/TU Delft)

When it comes to new airplanes, the airline industry rarely strays outside its comfort zone. "A cigar-shaped fuselage atop a pair of wings, with three stabilizers at the back" describes pretty much every airliner in service today. Convergent evolution means there aren't even very many double-deckers left, and most planes carry their engines under the wings. Which is why the Flying-V is such a breath of fresh air.

We looked at this weird-looking concept a couple of times in 2019. Originally, it was the brainchild of a graduate student at the Technical University of Berlin, then working on his thesis at Airbus. A year later, it attracted the attention of a research group at TU Delft in the Netherlands, which has worked with Dutch airline KLM to develop the idea as a celebration of the airline's centenary.

Instead of a conventional airliner design, the Flying-V is just a pair of fat wings joined in a V. Passengers would sit toward the front, along the leading edges, with cargo space closer to the wingtips. The jet engines are above the wings, located at the back of each wing opposite a small vertical fin. A full-size Flying-V would have the same width as an Airbus A350—keeping things simple for airports—but would use 20 percent less fuel.

Enlarge / Believe it or not, there is a pretty interesting story that (somewhat) explains what's going on here...

In this article, I'll explain how I went from having basically no idea how to construct a story to making players cry with my story (in a good way this time). There are big spoilers for the Frog Fractions Hat DLC below, so maybe play it first (or keep reading until an explicit warning about spoilers coming up).

When I ran the Kickstarter for Frog Fractions 2, most people probably guessed that I had no idea what I was going to make. I had made Frog Fractions entirely improvisationally and I figured I could just do that again.

The trick is, when you get something right the first time, you haven't learned anything. You have no idea which elements were due to your innate talent and which were accidental. The most important accident, I discovered much later, was that I built Frog Fractions in chronological order, and I designed each scene to follow naturally from the previous ones.