Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Workers protest outside a massive Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island on Monday, March 30. (credit: New York Communities for Change)

Amazon has fired an employee after he helped organize a walkout of Amazon workers at a fulfillment center in Staten Island, New York. The worker, Chris Smalls, says Amazon was retaliating against him for his workplace activism.

“Taking action cost me my job,” Smalls said in a Monday interview on Bloomberg TV. “Because I tried to stand up for something that’s right, the company decided to retaliate against me.”

Amazon disputes that charge.

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  The Fitbit Charge 4. [credit: Fitbit ]

Fitbit is still out there living its life and launching products despite a looming acquisition by Google that could upend the entire company any month now. Today Fitbit announced the Charge 4, the latest in its line of Charge devices that kind of sit at the halfway point between a smartwatch and a basic fitness tracker. The Charge 4 has the same body as the Charge 3, just with updated internals.

You won't be installing apps or playing music on it any time soon, but it can sync to your smartphone and show notifications on the grayscale OLED touchscreen. The device is mostly focused on fitness features, with exercise recognition, an activity dashboard, move reminders, and tracking of just about everything, including your general activity, your heart rate, and sleep.

Some big additions to the Charge 4 seemed designed to let you leave your smartphone at home. The first is an internal GPS for location tracking, which will let you log runs without a phone, but it will also severely cut down on the battery life. Fitbit claims the Charge 4 will last up to seven days if you don't turn on GPS, but turning on the GPS will cut that time down to five hours, a stunning 97-percent decrease in battery life. To go along with the new location tracking, there are now seven GPS-based exercise modes. Sync the device to the Fitbit app and you'll see a new "GPS-powered heat map" showing where your toughest workouts were.

Enlarge / Apollo 11 crew members (L-R) Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins are amused by a question posed shortly before launch. (credit: NASA)

Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin soon followed him onto the lunar surface. And Michael Collins? Well, he remained behind, in lunar orbit. Alone.

For 50 years, he was portrayed by the media as the lonely astronaut. "The emphasis in the press was 'Wasn't I the loneliest person in the whole lonely world in the whole lonely orbit around some lonely thing?'" he recalled during an Explorer's Club event in New York City last year.

Collins insists he was not lonely. After being confined in the small Command Module with Armstrong and Aldrin for a few days, he enjoyed the respite while tracking their activities on the Moon's surface.

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Coronavirus. Climate change. Worldwide unrest. Mass extinctions. Killer robots. There's a lot of stuff to worry about, and more things get added to the list daily. (Seriously, the robots—why do the scientists keep making them?!)

So let's get this out of the way right now: I'm not here to give you anything else to worry about. But I am going to ask you to subscribe, because Ars could use your help.

From the forum to the front page

For folks who may not pay obsessive attention to every Ars writer's history, I came to Ars shortly after the site was founded in 1998. I made a forum account in 2000 so I could get help with a computer build issue. (It turned out that I needed to install my motherboard's VIA 4-in-1 drivers—and man, I do not miss that crap). Ars has been my online home for almost as long as I've been using the Internet; I was a subscriber for years before it even occurred to me that I might actually be able to work here.