“A future with flying cars is no longer science fiction,” writes the Los Angeles Times. “All you need to order your own is about $200,000 and some hope and patience.”The Palo Alto-based company Pivotal has been developing the technology since 2009 and is nearly ready to bring it to market… [Company founder Marcus] Leng engineered an ultralight, electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing...

“Apple has gone for a choose-your-own-adventure when shopping for a new Mac,” writes long-time Slashdot reader esarjeant. Macworld explains:Apple has shifted from selling pre-configured Mac models to a fully customizable build-to-order system on its website, allowing customers to select display size, chip, memory, and storage options… This change emphasizes building a machine within budget...

Saturday Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said they still planned a “huge” investment in OpenAI, according to CNBC. Friday the Wall Street Journal had reported that Nvidia’s plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI “has stalled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal, people familiar with the matter said…”[T]he talks haven’t progressed beyond the early stages, some of the...

TechCrunch reports:Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for “no less than two years” in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. The decision puts a temporary halt on a program that Blue Origin has been using to fly humans past the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space, for the last five...

“There’s one big bright spot in the fight against climate change that most people never think about,” reports the Washington Post.”It could prevent nearly half a degree of global warming this century, a huge margin for a planet that has warmed almost 1.5 degrees Celsius and is struggling to keep that number below 2 degrees…”[M]ore than 170 countries — including the U.S. — have agreed to act...

Slashdot reader alternative_right writes: Quantum computers need extreme cold to work, but the very systems that keep them cold also create noise that can destroy fragile quantum information. Scientists in Sweden have now flipped that problem on its head by building a tiny quantum refrigerator that actually uses noise to drive cooling instead of fighting it. By carefully steering heat at...

Several security experts have “questioned the lack of technical detail” in that lawsuit alleging WhatsApp has no end-to-end encryption, reports the Washington Post:”It’s pretty long on accusations and thin on any sort of evidence,” Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, said over Signal. “WhatsApp has been very consistent about using end-to-end encryption. This...

The Daily Beast: “Salacious claims from Jeffrey Epstein that Bill Gates contracted an STD following ‘sex with Russian girls,’ and colluded with the disgraced financier on a plot to secretly slip his wife antibiotics, were revealed in the latest Epstein files release.” The New York Times. (Alternate URL) “A representative of the Gates Foundation said, ‘These claims — from a proven, disgruntled...