Tesla said Tuesday that it will cut thousands of jobs, aiming to improve its finances amid a period of torrential losses as it accelerates production of its newest electric vehicle.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed the company is shedding about 9 percent of its workforce — “almost entirely” salaried employees but not production-line workers, according to an internal email he posted to Twitter.
The company had 37,543 full-time employees as of Dec. 31, according to a public filing. At that level, 9 percent would equal nearly 3,400 jobs.
The company, based in Palo Alto, California, also plans to end its deal to sell solar panels at home improvement chain Home Depot. Instead, Tesla will focus on selling solar power through its own stores.
The moves come as Musk is facing pressure to ramp up output of the new Model 3 electric sedan and show bottom-line profitability.
Musk said the cuts would not affect the company’s ability to speed up production.
Elon Musk CEO of SpaceX, speaks to the media during a press conference after the Falcon Heavy Launch on Feb. 6, 2018. CRAIG BAILEY/FLORIDA TODAY VIA USA TODAY NETWORK
Tesla founder Elon Musk presenting the new Roadster electric sports vehicle (on background), presented to media on Nov. 16, 2017 at Tesla’s Los Angeles design center. Tesla says the Roadster will accelerate from 0-60 mph in less than two seconds. Tesla says the new Roadster will cost $200,000 and will be released in three years. /TESLA HANDOUT VIA EPA-EFE
PayPal Chief Executive Officer Peter Thiel, left, and founder Elon Musk, right, pose with the PayPal logo at corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., on Oct. 20, 2000. Elon Musk made his fortune off PayPal. Online auction giant eBay Inc. announced Monday, July 8, 2002, it would buy the electronic payment facilitator for more than $1.3 billion in stock. PAUL SAKUMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulates teams competing on the Hyperloop Pod Competition II at SpaceX’s Hyperloop track in Hawthorne, Calif on Aug. 27, 2017. A committee of the Los Angeles City Council on April 18, 2018, approved an environmental review exemption for a Los Angeles-area tunnel that Elon Musk wants to dig to test a novel underground transportation system. DAMIAN DOVARGANES/AP
SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in the world, lifts off on it first demonstration flight. The rocket leapt off Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:45pm. on Feb. 6, 2018. CRAIG BAILEY/FLORIDA TODAY VIA USA TODAY NETWORK
This image from video provided by SpaceX shows Elon Musk’s red Tesla sports car with a dummy driver named “Starman” which was launched into space during the first test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket on Feb. 6, 2018. /SPACEX VIA AP
The twin boosters from SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy make a successful landing at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Feb. 6, 2018. CRAIG BAILEY/FLORIDA TODAY VIA USA TODAY NETWORK
President Trump talks with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, center, and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon during a meeting with business leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Feb. 3, 2017. EVAN VUCCI/AP
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk speaks about the Interplanetary Transport System which aims to reach Mars with the first human crew in history, in the conference given by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk during the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico on September 27, 2016. HECTOR-GUERRERO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveils the Model X at a launch event in Fremont, Calif on Sept. 29, 2015. The Tesla Motors X is an all-wheel drive SUV featuring a 90 kWh battery providing 250 miles of range and will be able to go from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds. ROBERT HANASHIRO/USA TODAY
CEO and Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk shows of his throwback t-shirt of the “Tesla” heavy metal band on January 24, 2015 in Park City, Utah. LILY LAWRENCE/GETTY IMAGES FOR OCEANIC PRESERVATION SOCIETY
Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, discusses new technologies before an event for Tesla owners and the media held at the Hawthorne Airport. In the background is a Tesla model P85D. ROBERT HANASHIRO/USA TODAY
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveils SpaceX’s new seven-seat Dragon V2 spacecraft, in Hawthorne, California on May 29, 2014. The private spaceflight companys new manned space capsule is designed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The capsule was named for “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a jab at those who scoffed when Musk founded the company in 2002 and set the space bar exceedingly high. SpaceX went on to become the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and return it safely to Earth in 2010. ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Elon Musk CEO, Cofounder, Chief Product Architect for Tesla with a new Model S car outside the Tesla customer delivery area at the Tesla Fremont factory on June 21, 2012. /JESSICA BRANDI LIFLAND FOR USA TODAY
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, poses with a Tesla car in front of Nasdaq following the electric automakerís initial public offering on June, 29, 2010, in New York. /MARK LENNIHAN, AP
Tesla Motors president and CEO Ze’ev Drori, left, and Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk, right, pose in the Tesla Motors development facility in San Carlos, just south of San Francisco next to a Tesla Roadster on Feb. 19, 2008. The Tesla Roadster, a $99,000 electric sports car powered by laptop computer batteries, is 100 percent electric, can go from 0-60 mph in four seconds and the electric car gets an equivalent of 135 mpg compared to a gas powered vehicle. Production begins mid-March. The car itself is being made in England. JACK GRUBER/USA TODAY
Elon Musk stands in front of parts of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket at the company’s headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. on Sept. 18, 2007. DAN MACMEDAN/USA TODAY
“Tesla has grown and evolved rapidly over the last several years, which has resulted in some duplication of roles and some job functions that, while they made sense in the past, are difficult to justify today,” he told workers in the email.
Tesla representatives were not immediately available for further comment.
“The pressure is on for Tesla to cut the red ink as the third quarter approaches,” AutoPacific analyst Dave Sullivan said. “Cutting your way to profitability as you try to grow and launch vehicles is very difficult. It’s hard to believe Tesla had enough fat to trim in their salaried ranks. I expect Musk to push and pull more levers in the next few months as the push for profits continues.”
CLOSE
Tesla reported its worst-ever quarterly loss and said its Model 3 production target remains on track. Aleksandra Michalska reports. Newslook
Musk said the cuts won’t slow the rate of production, which is happening at Tesla’s assembly plant in California and its battery factory in Nevada. Delays at each operation have prevented the company from rapidly fulfilling paid customer reservations for the Model 3.
“It’s notable that they left the production teams alone because it’s vital that they get the Model 3 production rolling,” Autotrader analyst Michelle Krebs said.
Musk said June 5 that it’s “quite likely” the company will reach its goal of making 5,000 Model 3 cars a week by the end of the month.
Since then, Tesla shares have gained nearly 18%, closing Tuesday at $342.77. The historically volatile stock had been in a slump since late March, when it briefly dipped below $250 as investors grew concerned about Model 3 production delays, Tesla spending and safety investigations.
The automaker has lost more than $1.7 billion over its last four complete quarters, raising the financial stakes for the compact car.
“What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable,” Musk said in the email. “That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla’s history to date.”
Tesla’s growth has made the company the pre-eminent maker of electric vehicles. But it has come at a steep cost.
Musk has admitted several mistakes with Tesla, including too much automation on the production line and an “out of control” network of third-party contractors.
“So we’re going to scrub the barnacles on that front. It’s pretty crazy,” Musk said on a conference call in May. “You’ve got barnacles on barnacles. So there’s going to be a lot of barnacle removal.”
Musk has also lashed out against the media in recent weeks, criticizing many reporters as unethical and blasting what he perceives as unfair scrutiny of Tesla’s partially self-driving vehicle technology.
The Home Depot agreement that’s ending involved sales of Tesla solar-energy products at about 800 stores. Tesla employees based at those locations will be removed.
“Our relationship with Tesla will continue through the end of the year, but this change doesn’t affect our plans to continue offering solar options to our customers,” Home Depot spokesman Stephen Holmes said.
Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.
Your email spam filter works overtime to keep sketchy investing opportunities and cheap Viagra offers out of your inbox, but you’ve probably seen some scams sneak through. That’s because email fraud operations are a multibillion-dollar business, often run by Nigerian-based syndicates that have members—not to mention targets—around the world. And on Monday, US officials announced a massive international initiative, Operation Wire Wire, that resulted in the arrest of 74 alleged email fraudsters.
The move is significant given that email scamming has gone mostly unchecked for years, but Operation Wire Wire still represents a small drop in a massive ocean of fraud. And while it particularly targets some of the money mules who underpin criminal payouts, the overall infrastructure behind these spamming campaigns is massive and inveterate. It would take major disruption to see a noticeable improvement.
Nigerian email rackets predictably target individuals, especially vulnerable populations like the elderly, but they also increasingly generate cash from a type of fraud called business email compromise, which fleeces companies of all sizes. BEC scams focus on employees with financial authority, and position fraudsters as company executives or third-party vendors that a business works with or could conceivably contract with. Employees complete a bill or invoice payment like normal, but the money really goes to scammers.
The Department of Justice—working with the Department of Homeland Security, Department of the Treasury, and Postal Inspection Service—arrested 42 people in the US, 29 in Nigeria, and three in Canada, Mauritius, and Poland who are allegedly connected to spamming operations and particularly money muling.
“Fraudsters can rob people of their life’s savings in a matter of minutes,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “The Department of Justice has taken aggressive action against fraudsters in recent months…[and] we will continue to go on offense against fraudsters so that the American people can have safety and peace of mind.”
The initiative comes at an important time, as email fraud continues to grow and evolve. The email security firm Agari found last month that 24 percent of email scams now focus on BEC, and 96 percent of businesses end up being targeted by one scam or another. And fraudsters attempt to trick targets into making sizable payments, with requests averaging $35,500, Agari found. The federal Internet Crime Complaint Center reports that in recent years BEC losses in the US have totaled over $3.7 billion. Operation Wire Wire seized an impressive $2.4 million in stolen funds, and recovered $14.4 million more from wire transfers, but the scale of the problem overall is much larger.
“I applaud any and all action against these guys,” says Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at the security firm Crowdstrike, which has tracked Nigerian email scammers and business email compromise for years. “That said, 2.4 million dollars seized is a drop in the bucket.” Meyers also notes that money mules are relatively low on the criminal totem pole. “The key is to keep the pressure on and continuously arrest these actors at every opportunity,” he says.
‘It might be a slower start, but once the dominoes start falling you’re going to notice a more significant impact.’
James Bettke, Secureworks
There are growing signs that law enforcement agrees with this strategy. Operation Wire Wire represents increased international collaboration, and its 29 arrests in Nigeria by the country’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is an important step. A longtime hurdle to addressing BEC and Nigerian email scams in general has been jurisdictional and international law issues that limit access to Nigerian perpetrators. And the DOJ says it worked with law enforcement agencies in Poland, Canada, Mauritius, Indonesia, and Malaysia as well to carry out Operation Wire Wire. Scammers “are often members of transnational criminal organizations, which originated in Nigeria but have spread throughout the world,” the DOJ explains.
“The FBI is taking this very seriously. I’m aware of future endeavors that are in the works,” says James Bettke, a counterthreat unit researcher at Secureworks, a security firm that has tracked Nigerian email scammers for years. “There were no repercussions before. Scammers would just keep stealing and stealing, because they thought they were untouchable. Now that these arrests are happening they might have second thoughts.”
If the DOJ is in fact building out its investigation to eventually take down more crucial players, businesses and individual email users could eventually see a real improvement in their safety online. For now, though, Operation Wire Wire probably won’t result in a noticeable difference in your inbox.
“It might be a slower start, but once the dominoes start falling you’re going to notice a more significant impact,” Bettke says. “All of these underground economies are so interlinked that once you get through one you can really start mapping everything else out. You can start pivoting from person to person and work your way up fairly quickly.”
That provides small consolation to victims who have already lost thousands or millions of dollars in email scams. But a small step toward solving the problem is better than than none at all.
Stains are the scourge of our clothes’ existence. They’re inevitable, they’re ugly, and they can ruin our favorite things. It hurts to have to spend money to replace a closet staple—if it’s even possible. So, if you spot a stain, don’t worry. We’re here to help you remove it.
Stain removal basics
Obviously, different kinds of stains need to be treated differently, and we’ll explain that in a moment. But when it comes to stains, there are three basic rules:
1. Act quickly.
The sooner you can begin treating a stain, the better your chances of removing it. If it’s a solid stain, scrape it ever so carefully with a butter knife or spoon. If the stain is liquid, blot it, and starting from the edge, work toward the middle. This will not remove the stain, but may prevent it from getting larger.
2. Avoid heat from the dryer.
Heat can cause a stain to “set”, so that it becomes a permanent part of the fiber. If you find a stain on a piece of clothing as you unload it from the washer, resist the temptation to toss it in the dryer. Your best chance of taking out the stain is to retreat it, and launder again. Since it may be hard to see a stain when the garment is wet, don’t even think of putting in the dryer until you’re certain it’s gone.
3. Be gentle on the spot.
Don’t scrub vigorously. Patting the appropriate solvent into the stain will be more effective. Don’t be rough—be patient.
Before you toss the clothes in the washing machine, you have to treat the stain. Here are some suggestions.
White shirts and socks with or without stains that come from the human body
Pretreat with a whites/color brightener.
Sweat stains and bad smells
Pretreat with an odor fighter.
Oil-based food stains
Pretreat with a detergent with OXI cleaner.
Mystery stains
Pretreat with a stain releaser, and wash in cold water. Clue: Hold the garment up to the light. If the stain is translucent, it’s probably grease, and you can treat it as such.
Removing stains
Nobody knows stains like a detergent company, so we talked to the biggest one: Proctor & Gamble. They sent us a gigantic 11-page chart packed with info. So, we boiled it down to a compact version for your reading convenience, and a larger version you can print and hang up in your laundry room. (Hey, you with the clumsy hands! You may want to bookmark this page.)
Find the stain type in the chart, pretreat, and soak. Then, wash the clothes at the temperature it says on the label, and rinse at the recommended temperature.
When you’re working on a stain, make sure you turn the garment inside out and lay it down on an old towel. Flipping the fabric will help get the stain out, not push it further into the fibers. The towel will to give the stain something to soak into, someplace other than your clothes.
Now that you know how to get it done, good luck removing the stains from your clothes. You’ll not only be prolonging their lives, but you’ll also feel better about wearing them when they’re no longer covered with spots.
It’s Tuesday, which means the E3 show floor is now open. It also means we’re finally at the end of a four-day slog of press conferences from some of the gaming world’s largest publishers. While Activision Blizzard still doesn’t do its own pre-E3 event, just about everyone else does, which means these 96 hours have been a deluge of announcements and reveals that we did our best to get our arms around. We didn’t even cover them all: the Square Enix press conference was basically devoid of new information, and the PC Gaming Show, while compelling, was mostly a long list of indie game announcements—some of which we’ll be getting to later this week.
So, for now, here’s everything you need to know about every press conference you need to know about. Get through this, and you’ll be ready for all the other E3 news that starts….well, now.
Electronic Arts
E3 kicked things off on Saturday (yes, Saturday) with a quiet, largely uneventful press conference from Electronic Arts, broadcasted from their annual EA Play event at the Hollywood Palladium. The presser opened with Battlefield V, set during World War II, which will have heavily destructible environments and a Battle Royale Mode a la Fortnite. Respawn Entertainment gave up some details about their in-progress Star Wars game—more on that shortly—and a bit of an update on the ongoing service for Star Wars: Battlefront II.
In new games, EA revealed Unravel 2, a follow-up to its game about a precocious, cuddly little yarn man (this time, he has a friend!) and Sea of Solitude, a compellingly brooding small game introduced by a compellingly earnest German developer. The publisher also took the wraps announced a mobile Command & Conquer game and gave a lengthy demo of Anthem, BioWare’s upcoming shared-world mech game that seems to be aiming to be a Destiny killer. Even better, Anthem now has a date: February, 22, 2019. (Also FIFA was there, because FIFA is always there.)
Biggest Surprise: We got a name for Respawn’s new Star Wars game: Jedi: Fallen Order. Respawn has made great first-person shooters with the Titanfall series, so it’ll be interesting to see what they can do with the Star Wars license.
Biggest Missed Opportunity:Jedi: Fallen Order was announced sans logo or even concept trailer, which felt like a letdown. It’s hard to get excited about a name, even when it’s a good name.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s last couple of Xbox press conferences haven’t exactly succeeded at articulating the future of the Xbox—even if that future is unexpectedly bright. This year, then, was a pleasant surprise: Microsoft brought a lot of material, and a lot of surprises.
First, the publisher has quietly been getting very acquisition-happy, and is hoping to bolster its first-party games with a slew of studios that they now own. These include Ninja Theory, who made last year’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Undead Labs (State of Decay), Playground Games (Forza Horizon), and Compulsion Games (We Happy Few). It’s hard to say whether or not acquisitions like this are good for studios; creators get a payday, but history is riddled with instances of big publishers buying small studios and slowly running them into the ground. Time will tell whether or not this is good for gaming, but it’s certainly a good move for Microsoft.
Then, there were games. A lot of games. There’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, a game about ninjas from the developers of Dark Souls, coming in 2019. Forza Horizon 4, a new installment that takes the racing franchise to Britain. The Division 2, which brings the shared world shooter to Washington, DC. Devil May Cry 5, with the franchise’s original creator back at the helm. Dying Light 2, a sequel to my favorite zombie parkour game. Gears of War 5, a Gears of War tactics game, and a Gears of War themed, uh, Funko Pop game. And Halo: Infinite, a new installment in the Halo franchise that we know just about nothing about. Also, fans got a new trailer for Kingdom Hearts 3, which is officially coming out January 25, 2019.
Biggest Surprise:Halo: Infinite could be a big deal, as could the expanded effort into Microsoft Game Pass, a subscription service that gives subscribers the Netflix-like ability to download and play a swath of the Xbox library for a flat monthly fee. But after Microsoft made so much noise about the PC at last year’s press conference, this year’s relative silence spoke volumes.
Biggest Missed Opportunity: Offering just about no details on a new Halo title made the announcement fall pretty flat.
Bethesda
The Bethesda E3 Showcase was huge this year. We got a closer look at Rage 2, a massive open-world shooter co-developed by id Software and Avalanche Studios, complete (?) with an on-stage appearance by Andrew WK. A short trailer played for Doom Eternal a sequel to the excellent Doom 2016 reboot; just like the old-school Doom 2, Eternal is apparently set on Earth. QuakeCon in August should provide many more details in that realm.
There will also be a new Wolfenstein game next year, set in an alternate-universe 1980s and starring the twin daughters of Nazi-murder-machine BJ Blaskowicz. And then there’s the big stuff: a lengthy look at Fallout 76, an impressive-looking, fully online, open-world Fallout game coming November 14; Elder Scrolls Blades, a mobile phone game that strives to be a fully featured, complete Elder Scrolls experience; and two projects much farther out on the development pipeline, sci-fi title Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI. Both are unlikely to show up on the current generation of consoles.
Biggest Surprise: Any glimpse at Elder Scrolls VI is a bit of a surprise, actually. As was the jokey-but-maybe-real Announcement of Skyrim: Very Special Edition for the Alexa.
Biggest Missed Opportunity: Andrew WK, whose presence seemed to confuse and even tranquilize the crowd. (To be fair, this is mostly a missed opportunity for Andrew WK.)
Ubisoft
Ubisoft’s presser opted for meatiness, giving fans a long look at Beyond Good and Evil 2, which looks to be a huge earthy space opera, though detail are scarce about gameplay or release. As Microsoft also revealed, The Division 2 will be set in Washington, DC, and will feature raids and free DLC as it tries its hardest to become the Tom Clancy-verse Destiny-killer it aspires to be.
New properties showed up as well. There was a lot of Skull & Bones, a gritty pirate adventure in a shared online world, and Starlink: Battle for Atlas, a sci-fi toys-to-life game (think Skylanders) bringing its dogfight-heavy combat to the Nintendo Switch—and featuring Fox from Star Fox. Finally, there was a big look at Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which takes place in Ancient Greece and lets the player choose between two characters. Also, you can talk to Socrates, so … there’s that. Odyssey comes out October 5.
Biggest Surprise: Unlike the past couple of years, Aisha Tyler didn’t host. Aisha! Where’d you go? (Probably one of your gazillion jobs.)
Biggest Missed Opportunity: Despite teasing it with recent DLC for Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Ubisoft did not announce a new entry in the Splinter Cell stealth game franchise. Color me disappointed.
Sony
Sony’s Monday-night press conference this year was a bit odd. It started in a small “church” set, which ended up being a recreation of a location from The Last of Us, Part II, which was also the first game shown of the night. The showcase focused on lengthy demos for a handful of major Sony titles: The Last of Us; Ghost of Tsushima, a samurai game developed by Sucker Punch, which looks like a Kurosawa fan’s dream game; Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima’s surrealist eco-pocalypse starring mo-capped digital versions of Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen along with what was, frankly, a weird number of babies; and Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man, which is looking like quite a romp.
Between each of these big showcases, we got canned commentary along with other announcements: A Resident Evil 2 full HD remake, coming next January 22; va sequel to the samurai Souls-like Nioh 2 developed by Team Ninja; and Control, a fascinating-looking game from Remedy Entertainment (Alan Wake) about the director of a supernatural agency. There was also another Kingdom Hearts 3 trailer, showcasing a Pirates of the Carribean world, which brought the week’s KH3 trailer total to three (so far).
Biggest Surprise: The footage of The Last of Us, Part II, along with being just as dizzyingly hyperviolent as its predecessor, featured what might be the first and only lesbian kiss ever featured on an E3 stage. The presentation of queerness in a game by a company like Sony isn’t without reproach by any means, but that’s honestly still pretty cool.
Biggest Missed Opportunity: Fair warning: I’m not going to stop hollering about Bloodborne 2 until they release Bloodborne 2.
Nintendo
Nintendo’s press conference somehow felt both huge and underwhelming. First, we got some new announcements, in the form of Daemon x Machina, a neat-looking mech action game, coming in 2019; some DLC for Xenoblade Chronicles 2; a new snazzy-looking Fire Emblem; and Super Mario Party, which will include the novel feature of linking together two Switch consoles to make one big board-game simulation. Next: that game you like is coming back in style! Yes, it was the Nintendo Switch port montage, featuring a ton of games, like Dragon Ball FighterZ, Hollow Knight, Wasteland 2, and the JRPG classic The World Ends With You (which we’d heard about but was still nice to see).
The rest of the show was devoted to one title, and one title only: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which arrives for the Nintendo Switch December 7. They ran down the characters (all of them, from every Smash Bros game ever, are here), and went over a long list of very detailed changes that are sure to delight hardcore fans but might have been a bit dull to everyone else. And that was, uh, it.
Biggest Surprise: Ridley, the giant dragon alien baddie from Metroid, is coming to Smash Bros, which seems like a logistical nightmare for the developers.
Biggest Missed Opportunity: Nintendo completely failed to mention Metroid Prime 4, which the company had announced last year, or their online service, which is supposedly still slated for this fall and yet is still a huge unknown.
— Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY’s newsroom and any business incentives.
Board games are an underrated adult activity, in my humble opinion.
They’re perfect for those nights when you don’t feel like going out, yet don’t want to sit mindlessly in front of the television either. Board games are an ideal combination of fun and competitive, not to mention that there are lots of unique, addicting new games that come out every year.
So yeah, I’m really into board games, and I think you will be too if you give them a chance.
If you’re looking for a board game that will get you jazzed to play, check out these 16 popular options, including some of my personal favorites. There’s something here for everyone, no matter your age!
1. A best-selling spy-themed word game
Codenames is a top-selling game on Amazon, boasting close to 2,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.8 stars. While the premise of the game may seem simple, reviewers say it can be quite challenging!
To play, you break up into two teams, each with a “spymaster” who gives one-word clues to help their teammates guess the identity of your team’s “agents.” Overall, it’s an awesome party game that’s incredibly addicting.
2. An addicting game to bring out your competitive side
Catan is a favorite among my friends—we frequently hold “Catan nights” that inevitably get really competitive.
This popular board game has a unique design made up of 19 hexagonal “terrain” pieces, so the board is different every time you play. The object of the game is to build settlements around the island of Catan, earning “victory points” as you go, and there’s a surprising amount of strategy and alliance-making involved.
Young children love playing Let’s Go Fishin’, a simple fishing game designed for kids 3 and up. The cute multicolored fish on the board open and close their mouths, all while the base spins. The object of the game is to simply catch as many fish as you can with your rod, and whoever catches the most wins!
4. A Harry Potter-themed edition of a classic game
You probably know Clue—where Professor Plum committed the crime in the library with the candlestick. However, this special edition of the classic game brings a magical twist to the gameplay as you work to figure out who made a Hogwarts student disappear and what spell they used. Harry Potter lovers will definitely appreciate this fun board game!
It’s been around for decades, but Candy Land is still one of the top-selling board games on Amazon. This family-favorite is best for kids ages 3 and up—they’ll love all the colorful characters and sweet illustrations as they navigate around the board.
6. A card-based strategy game with a cult following
Here’s another game that people are low-key obsessed with—Sequence has more than 2,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.8 stars.
The premise of the game is simple: Place five tokens in a row on the game board by playing cards from your hand. However, there’s a lot of strategy involved, and reviewers can’t get enough of this challenging board game!
If you want to figure out who among your friends is a good liar, you should definitely play Chameleon. During gameplay, everyone knows the secret word—except for one person, who is the chameleon!
The object is to flush out the chameleon, but if they’re good at bluffing, you might not catch them. People say this game is surprisingly addicting and great for groups.
If you love Scrabble, you’ll definitely enjoy Qwirkle—a family-friendly matching game! Players draw six blocks, each with a colored shape on it, and then take turns putting down rows of blocks that have something in common. As gameplay continues, you build a Scrabble-like grid, trying to rack up the most points.
The instructions may seem overwhelming at first, but once you get the hand of 7 Wonders, you’ll be obsessed. In this game, you’re the leader of one of the great ancient civilizations, and you race to collect resources to build your city and erect an architectural wonder. It’s a great game for history buffs!
10. A crowd favorite that’s racked up numerous awards
Ticket to Ride has won awards all around the world, and there are dozens of spin-offs and expansions for you to enjoy. During this popular game, players build train routes across the country, trying to create the longest route and cut off competitors along the way. It will definitely bring out your competitive side!
Oh, Pandemic. I have a love-hate relationship with this game. On one hand, I love the cooperative, incredibly challenging gameplay, but on the other hand, I hate that I’m so bad at it!
During Pandemic, everyone works together to save the world from an outbreak of diseases. You have to simultaneously slow the spread for four diseases, all while trying to find the cure. It’s addicting, yet frustrating, and the perfect game for anyone who loves a challenge.
12. Another popular cooperative game—with a spooky plot
Together, you and your friends will explore a creepy old haunted house when you play Betrayal at House on the Hill. You’ll encounter lots of spooky scenarios, and eventually, one player will become a traitor. Reviewers say this game is awesome, but it can take a while to pick up all the rules.
Don’t be fooled by the cutesy illustrations—this game is not as easy as it seems! Santorini can be played by kids as young as 8, and during gameplay, you strive to build a structure three stories high and climb to the top of it. It sounds easy, but the addition of “god cards” will keep you on your toes as you play the Greek mythology-inspired game.
As the world patiently awaits the final season of Game of Thrones, you can hold yourself over with the popular Game of Thrones edition of Risk. Just like in the regular game, you’ll need a solid strategy to conquer the Seven Kingdoms and claim the Iron Throne.
What’s even better is there are two ways to play this game, so it won’t get old anytime soon.
Love Tetris? Then you’ll definitely enjoy Blokus, a strategy game where you use Tetris-style pieces to take up as much space as possible.
Essentially, players take turns putting down pieces on the board, trying to claim territory and block their competitors. The game continues until no more blocks can be put down, and the person with the fewest pieces left in their hand is the winner. Simple, but oh so fun!
Here’s another game with an average rating of 4.8, so you know it’s got to be good! Labyrinth is super fun for anyone age 8 and up (though reviewers say kids as young as 4 can play with a little help).
To play, you have to navigate traps and shifting walls as you race around the maze collecting treasure. It’s an engaging game for young children, and it can help teach them strategy, critical thinking, and cause-and-effect to boot!
An epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign, any player will tell you, can take many hours. It’s not just a few rolls of the dice. Yet there is one D&D quest that’s more difficult than even the most fiendish homebrew game run by the most sadistic dungeon master: Finding an original copy of the module known as “Palace of the Silver Princess.”
“Palace” wasn’t your typical pre-packed, ready-to-play D&D module. It had dragons, sure, but it also featured an illustration of a woman tied up by her own hair—not too family-friendly, especially considering that the vaguely erotic image came at a time when parent company TSR was trying to get the role-playing game out of hobby shops and into big toy stores. The module was yanked almost immediately, doomed to become a piece of fabled D&D lore.
“Palace of the Silver Princess” began its life in 1980. Back then, the RPG was on the ascent, becoming the new hip thing on college campuses. It was also starting to attract the attention of religious groups and worried moms who painted D&D as a literal tool of the devil. So even as the game was on the rise, life at TSR headquarters in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was plagued with fears that moral outrage could end the good times at any moment.
And so, to ensure Dungeon Module B3 never became the spark that started that blaze, it was scrapped. Now that D&D is once again cool, we asked some TSR veterans to recount the story of what really happened with “Palace of the Silver Princess.” Like all good adventures, the story involves sex, blood, and thievery. And a backhoe.
The Beginning
What became the “Palace of the Silver Princess” started as a project created by writer Jean Wells in 1980.
Kevin Hendryx, TSR game developer and designer, 1980-81: In essence, the philosophy of management [at that time] was that it was better to have anything to sell today than something of higher quality later, because the market was so hot and the demand so great that TSR was losing money by any delays. So crank out that product and damn the torpedoes.
That sort of outlook in TSR’s flush days was the poison that caused problems like a B3 module, and got up the nose of the product development people.
Lawrence Schick, TSR game developer and designer, 1979-81: Upper management regarded employees as second- or third-class citizens. They were obnoxious to work for. They were in another building uptown; we were downtown. Off by ourselves, it was a fun place to work. But management was high-handed, and not much interested in feedback that contradicted what they had in mind.
Kevin Hendryx: We had a very us-against-them attitude. As much as we were hot-headed little snots and not always the most professional, management was not the most professional either. Most of them were new to being in positions like that. They tended to treat it like a game, like we were just non-player characters being moved around the board.
They were warned. But management did not take these things seriously until the [“Palace of the Silver Princess”] module had been printed and somebody at the other office actually looked at it and flew into a fury.
Why the warnings and strong reaction? The original B3 module featured “The Illusion of the Decapus,” a S&M-styled illustration showing a woman bound by her own hair and tortured by nine demonic-looking characters. And in a time when the “Satanic Panic” was gaining momentum, claiming that D&D was a gateway to devil worship, the image posed a very real threat to the company’s bottom line.
The illustration that caused all the fuss: “The Illusion of the Decapus.”
TSR
Kevin Hendryx: They didn’t want anything that could be seen as or interpreted as in bad taste. They didn’t want anything that could be held up on a TV screen with someone saying, “Parents of America! Look at what your children are reading and playing!” An illustration like that was not going to fly.
The second problem? The original “Palace of the Silver Princess” had a full-page illustration the higher-ups couldn’t figure out at all. Management knew they were likenesses, and they thought they were being made fun of, but they weren’t sure.
Upper management at TSR couldn’t figure out if they were being made fun by this illustration.
TSR
Lawrence Schick: They were caricatures of people in development, not management. There were a lot of in-jokes in there. And if you aren’t “in” on the in-jokes, it can be easily misinterpreted. So it’s perilous to do that sort of thing. If you didn’t know who the caricatures were of, you might guess, and you might guess wrong.
Kevin Hendryx: The illustration alluded to recent terminations and employee unrest. Upper management was very sensitive about mutiny in the ranks at the time and took all these perceived slurs or snoot-cockings as an insult and a challenge.
The third problem? The module was navel-gazing pseudo-porn.
Bill Willingham, TSR artist, 1980-81: I was first to read the damn thing, and I was just shocked at how ridiculous it was. It was clearly the private fantasies of the author [Jean Wells, who died in 2012]. The Silver Princess character was also her persona in the Society of Creative Anachronism—a hauntingly lovely woman who destroyed hearts. I called it to the art director’s attention, and we went upstairs to editorial and Lawrence Schick. And at some point Lawrence, being the head of creative, called over to the business side and said, “Are you sure we want to do this?” And someone from the business side essentially said, “Hey, my wife plays mahjong with her, and she’ll give me shit if we don’t let her do her module. Just publish it. Don’t give us any more crap about this.”
Kevin Hendryx: Some of the people thought it was too suggestive. There was a lot of subliminal, Freudian-level erotica in there.
Bill Willingham: I used to call it “Phallus of the Silver Princess.” It was unprintable. It was badly written.
Stephen Sullivan, TSR editor and artist, 1980-84: Jean kind of straddled two camps. She was a good friend of mine, and very friendly with most of the designers. But she was also kind of part of management, and she was a good friend of [D&D co-creator] Gary Gygax’s. So when Jean sent this through, it came through with the same edict as Gary’s modules, which was, “Don’t touch this language.”
So when this thing came through, and the development people wanted to edit it, Jean went to Gary and said—and I know I’m going to make this sound more harsh than it actually was—”They’re changing my stuff, tell them not to do it.” And Gary reminded us all that we were not to change the designers’ word or intent in the work. We were just to proof it, do the production line, get it done. The artists didn’t want to work on it; it was so bad.
Kevin Hendryx: Most of us asked for our names to be taken off of it. That’s why you don’t see my name in the credits.
Bill Willingham: I quit TSR halfway through it. Someone else finished my illustrations.
Rolling the Dice
Ultimately, B3 was printed. It was given an orange cover and copies were distributed to the staff. Then chaos set in.
Lawrence Schick: There were some text passages that were deemed problematic. There was a tone to many of the illustrations, [staff artist] Erol Otus’ in particular, that were darkly humorous in a way that management didn’t like. But they would have overlooked that if it wasn’t for that one illustration with bondage overtones. D&D was under attack by religious conservatives at the time, and TSR thought that releasing the original B3 would be just throwing red meat to the mad dogs.
Kevin Hendryx: My vague memory is that the module came out late in the week, management caught wind of it over the weekend, and by Monday, they were recalling it. They were seizing the warehouse copies and grabbing the undistributed stock. It happened very, very fast. One day they were handing out our office copies, and one day we were told that supervisors were collecting copies, telling people to turn theirs in. Most of us, having got a whiff of what was going on, were busy squirreling ours away.
The land rush was on. D&D was aboil in the zeitgeist, and everyone knew the “banned” module would be a collectors’ item. Editorial staff members hid their single copies, and rumors persist to this day that management liberated cases at a time. The print run was ordered destroyed.
Stephen Sullivan: I don’t know how many were printed. My guess is between 5,000 and 10,000. I do know someone—who I’m not going to name now—that had direct knowledge of what was going on. The person I talked to said, and I quote, “The modules were buried at the Lake Geneva landfill along with all the rest of Lake Geneva’s trash. This I know for sure.” And I know that they made sure that someone was standing there, watching them get buried, and that person was [late TSR handyman] Dan Matheson. Now whether they had to hire another backhoe other than the usual one that would have been there at the landfill, I don’t know. That’s been a persistent rumor for a long time.
Kevin Hendryx: I find it funny that management was so concerned about anyone filching copies of B3 that they had employees like Dan—who was a big, imposing bear of a fellow, burly and bearded—riding shotgun on the garbage dump. But I don’t think there was a sacrificial pit with glyphs of warding put over it. It was more mundane than that.
The Great Quest
The module was totally rewritten, and four offending pieces of art were replaced. A new version of “Palace of the Silver Princess” was printed, this time with a green cover, in 1981.
By 1984, copies of the original, orange-covered version started sneaking out, selling at auction for as much as $300. By the 2000s, copies were trading for $1,000-$3,000. A YouTube video references a Jean Wells-signed copy that sold for $5,860. Soon fans were starting quests to find more of the modules.
Stephen Sullivan: The rumor was that they buried them behind the [management] building out on Sheridan Springs Road. And this person who I’ve spoken to, who has more direct knowledge of their fate, says that they were definitely buried in the landfill along with all the other garbage.
‘It’s like Bigfoot, except the first edition of this module actually exists. It can be seen.’
Lawrence Schick, TSR game developer and designer, 1979-81
Mark Finn, author of Chance of a Lifetime: I was a hardcore Dungeons & Dragons player back in the 1980s. When Bill [Willingham] was in Austin, we started a weekly meetup group for fiction writers. One day, when telling TSR stories, Bill said, “I’ll tell you about the worst module we ever had to deal with,” and … I didn’t even remember “Palace of the Silver Princess.” But he launched into this whole thing, a backhoe, burying pallets of the module. The story bounced around in my head like a pachinko ball. For a brief moment, I thought, “We should go there! Dig ’em up! We should totally do this!” Ultimately, I chickened out. But I wrote the book.
You know, those are shrink-wrapped. I’ll bet they’re still there!
Stephen Sullivan: I suppose you could excavate the Lake Geneva landfill, like an archaeological dig. I suppose you could try.
TSR has largely made peace with its “Palace” past. The official D&D website even briefly had a full version of the original module you could download. And time provides perspective.
Lawrence Schick: I think that the reaction to the module is more interesting than the module itself. The actual content of it is only mildly eccentric by current standards. It’s more a matter of what a light it shines on the management reaction at the time, and the “Satanic Panic.” It’s like Bigfoot, except the first edition of this module actually exists. It can be seen.
Kevin Hendryx: Too much of this gaming history is liable to be lost if journalists weren’t recording at least a little of it. Thanks.
Mark Finn: It’s very inside baseball. You have to know what this is to go looking for it. That said, I’ve had more than one person give me some iteration of this story: “Hey, I heard about this crazy module they had to destroy. You know anything about that?” I love this piece of gaming history. Nice that you’re giving it a folklorist’s treatment.
Bill Willingham: I call shenanigans. You call this an oral history. But you’re writing this down. This is an oral history in the sense that foothills are made of feet, or that a tiger shark is part tiger, part shark. Come to think of it, that could be a cool D&D creature.
Apple’s announcement that it will add significantly stronger privacy protections to its Safari browser should remind everybody, even people not using Apple’s software, that you don’t have to stick with the same old browser.
That’s especially true now that Apple, Microsoft and Firefox developer Mozilla are putting renewed effort into competing with Google’s Chrome — the web’s dominant desktop browser with 62.9% of that market in Net Applications’ measurements and 66.93% in StatCounter’s metrics. It’s also the default browser on most Android phones.
This four-player competition leaves you with some interesting choices to make based on which desktop and mobile operating system you use and the browsers available for it.
• On a Mac, you can switch from Safari to Chrome or Firefox; Microsoft has not shipped a Mac version of Edge.
• On Android, your leading replacements for Chrome as the default browser are Firefox and Edge.
• Sorry, iOS users; you can’t set another browser as the default, and Apple requires that such third-party browsers as the iOS versions of Chrome, Firefox and Edge be built on the same framework code as Safari.
Within those constraints, if privacy is your priority, Safari is the strongest option. It already blocks a lot of third-party tracking by default, and the upcoming version arriving with iOS 12 and macOS Mojave this fall will also block the tracking done by Like and Share buttons of such social networks as Facebook.
(Since USA TODAY’s site includes those buttons as well as Facebook-based comments, expect a dialog asking if you want Facebook to track your activity here before interacting with those features.)
Firefox offers comparable tracking protection, but it’s not turned on by default. To activate, click or tap its three-horizontal-lines menu button, select “Preferences” and then “Privacy & Security.”
Edge was until last fall a Windows-only product and it has offered some thoughtful features like the ability to mark up a page using the cursor, your fingertip or a stylus. Microsoft has also touted Edge’s ability to extend a laptop’s battery life, although recent third-party testing suggests Chrome is closing that gap.
If your biggest complaint about the Web is the visual clutter on many Web pages, Safari, Edge and Firefox offer “reader” views that show just the core text and maybe some images of a page. Safari’s works at more sites (for instance, USA TODAY’s) and even lets you set especially-noisy sites to open automatically in Reader mode.
If you want to keep your bookmarks and browsing history in sync across multiple devices, you’ll have to stick to one company’s browser on all your devices. Note that Chrome’s sync feature requires storing your browsing history with Google, although you can add a passphrase to secure that data from its ad tracking.
Some sites may require Google Chrome or work better in that browser, which is not a good thing for the overall health of the Web as an open medium. That reminds me too much of the bad old days of Internet Explorer dominating that market.
And on that note: If you still use Internet Explorer, stop. Microsoft is putting its energy into the faster, more compatible and more secure Edge; if your PC runs Windows 7 or 8 instead of Edge’s required Win 10, switching to Chrome or Firefox will provide vastly better security on the Web. Yes, I know the browser stats cited above show more people using IE than Edge; that doesn’t make it right or smart.
Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.
Scientists say the coral reef off Australia’s Christmas Island appears to be dying. The scientists say that if the reef doesn’t thrive, neither will local fish, which are a major food and income source for the island population. (April 14) AP
Coral reefs aren’t just pretty to look at: They also act as a natural flood protection barrier from powerful ocean storms.
But with reefs in danger around the world, much of this valuable flood protection could be lost. A study released Tuesday pinpoints the value of coral reefs, finding coastal flood-related damages around the world would be twice what they are now if not for this natural flood barrier.
On average, the entire planet’s coral reefs are worth some $4 billion annually in flood protection, said study lead author Michael Beck, a scientist at the Nature Conservancy and a professor at the University of California – Santa Cruz. Closer to home, he said “the United States receives nearly $100 million annually in direct flood reduction benefits from its reefs.
“The U.S. ranks 8th globally in terms of annual reef benefits to people and property in places such as Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam.”
The countries with the most to gain from reef conservation and restoration are Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico and Cuba. Per capita, the study found reefs provide the most benefits to small island states including the Cayman Islands, Belize, Grenada, Cuba, Bahamas, Jamaica and the Philippines.
The devastating damage from recent tropical cyclones such as Hurricanes Irma and Maria and Typhoon Haiyan would have been much worse without coral reefs, the study found. Coral reefs are best at protecting coasts from the biggest waves during powerful storms.
“Unfortunately, we are already losing the height and complexity of shallow reefs around the world, so we are likely already seeing increases in flood damages along many tropical coastlines,” Beck said. “Our national economies are normally only valued by how much we take from nature. For the first time, we can now value what every national economy gains in flood savings by conserving its coral reefs every year.”
Globally, coral reefs face many threats, including coastal development, sand and coral mining, destructive and excessive fishing, storms and climate-related bleaching events.
Overall, the frequency of severe coral bleaching events has increased nearly fivefold in the past four decades, from once every 25 to 30 years in the early 1980s to once every six years in 2016, a study published earlier this year found.
Tuesday’s study adds to a growing body of research that calculates the monetary value of assets and services that nature provides us for free, Agence France-Presse reported.
Mangrove forests, for example, also protect against storm surges and serve as nurseries for dozens of aquatic species. They are disappearing at the rate of 1 to 2% each year, scientists say. In addition, bee populations that pollinate tens of billions of dollars worth of crops each year are collapsing, AFP said.
“Coral reefs are living ecosystems that can recover if they are well-managed, and this study identifies why and where we should find the needed support for restoration and management,” Beck said. “It is our hope that this science will lead to action and greater stewardship of reefs around the world.”
Tuesday’s study appeared in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Communications.
A handout photo made available by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Australia on March 10, 2017, shows the Great Barrier Reef suffering mass coral bleaching for a second year in a row, at Vlassoff Cay, near Cairns, Australia, March 6, 2017. According to WWF Australia, the Great Barrier Reef has now been hit by four mass bleaching events: 1998, 2002, 2016, and 2017. WWF/BIOPIXEL HANDOUT, EPA
This combination of two photos taken in March and May 2016 released by The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin Seaview Survey shows bleached coral, left, and the same coral which has died in Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Coral reefs, unique underwater ecosystems that sustain a quarter of the world’s marine species and half a billion people, are dying on an unprecedented scale. Scientists are racing to prevent a complete wipeout within decades. Richard Vevers and Christophe Bailhache, AP
The Great Barrier Reef is suffering a mass coral bleaching for a second year in a row, at Vlassoff Cay, near Cairns, Australia, March 6, 2017. WWF/BIOPIXEL HANDOUT, EPA
According to WWF Australia, the Great Barrier Reef has now been hit by four mass bleaching events: 1998, 2002, 2016, and 2017. WWF/BIOPIXEL HANDOUT, EPA
SAN FRANCISCO — In August, Tesla electric cars will offer “full self-driving features,” CEO Elon Musk tweeted over the weekend.
But aside from that brief description, written in response to an owner’s comments about Tesla’s Autopilot suite of driver-assist features, Musk didn’t give any more details about just how autonomous his cars would be.
In the tweet, which addressed a concern about Autopilot wavering in high-traffic lane-merging situations, Musk said “that issue is better in latest Autopilot software rolling out now & fully fixed in August update as part of our long-awaited Tesla Version 9.”
He added that “to date, Autopilot resources have rightly focused entirely on safety (and) with V9 (version 9), we will begin to enable full self-driving features.”
That issue is better in latest Autopilot software rolling out now & fully fixed in August update as part of our long-awaited Tesla Version 9. To date, Autopilot resources have rightly focused entirely on safety. With V9, we will begin to enable full self-driving features.
Just what “full self-driving” means to Musk remains in question. Tesla would not comment beyond the CEO’s tweets.
The Society of American Engineers has a ranking system for self-driving cars, with SAE Level 1 referring to systems such as basic cruise control, while Levels 4 and 5 refer to vehicles that need little to no human oversight.
Tesla’s Autopilot is considered an SAE Level 2 system, which combines adaptive cruise control and lane keeping assist technology. Tesla repeatedly has asserted that its system needs driver monitoring and is not meant to replicate self-driving tech.
Fully and semi-self-driving auto tech has been under a microscope lately as federal investigators continue to investigate crashes of vehicles that were using such systems.
In March, an Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona when its sensors and on-board safety driver failed to notice the woman crossing in the middle of the road in the dark.
And two recent Tesla crashes involved Autopilot, one in which a California driver was killed when his car veered into a highway barrier and another when a distracted Utah driver hit a parked fire truck at 60 mph. Neither had their hands on the wheels for some time before the crash.
Tesla electric cars such as the Model S and Model X are known for their sleek looks, hefty price tags and rapid acceleration. The company is rushing to ramp up production of its entry-level Model 3 sedan.
And there’s a chance Tesla could soon be rocket-ship fast. Musk also tweeted that the new version of his Roadster two-door sports coupe will feature a SpaceX option, a nod to his rocket company.
SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …
“SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car,” Musk tweeted. “These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …”
It’s tempting to see this as a joke. But with Musk, you never know. After all, most people thought he was joking about selling flame throwers, and now they’re in customer hands.
Follow USA TODAY tech culture writer Marco della Cava on Twitter.
Elon Musk CEO of SpaceX, speaks to the media during a press conference after the Falcon Heavy Launch on Feb. 6, 2018. CRAIG BAILEY/FLORIDA TODAY VIA USA TODAY NETWORK
Tesla founder Elon Musk presenting the new Roadster electric sports vehicle (on background), presented to media on Nov. 16, 2017 at Tesla’s Los Angeles design center. Tesla says the Roadster will accelerate from 0-60 mph in less than two seconds. Tesla says the new Roadster will cost $200,000 and will be released in three years. /TESLA HANDOUT VIA EPA-EFE
PayPal Chief Executive Officer Peter Thiel, left, and founder Elon Musk, right, pose with the PayPal logo at corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., on Oct. 20, 2000. Elon Musk made his fortune off PayPal. Online auction giant eBay Inc. announced Monday, July 8, 2002, it would buy the electronic payment facilitator for more than $1.3 billion in stock. PAUL SAKUMA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk congratulates teams competing on the Hyperloop Pod Competition II at SpaceX’s Hyperloop track in Hawthorne, Calif on Aug. 27, 2017. A committee of the Los Angeles City Council on April 18, 2018, approved an environmental review exemption for a Los Angeles-area tunnel that Elon Musk wants to dig to test a novel underground transportation system. DAMIAN DOVARGANES/AP
SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy, the most powerful rocket in the world, lifts off on it first demonstration flight. The rocket leapt off Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:45pm. on Feb. 6, 2018. CRAIG BAILEY/FLORIDA TODAY VIA USA TODAY NETWORK
This image from video provided by SpaceX shows Elon Musk’s red Tesla sports car with a dummy driver named “Starman” which was launched into space during the first test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket on Feb. 6, 2018. /SPACEX VIA AP
The twin boosters from SpaceX’s newest rocket, the Falcon Heavy make a successful landing at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Feb. 6, 2018. CRAIG BAILEY/FLORIDA TODAY VIA USA TODAY NETWORK
President Trump talks with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, center, and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon during a meeting with business leaders in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, Feb. 3, 2017. EVAN VUCCI/AP
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk speaks about the Interplanetary Transport System which aims to reach Mars with the first human crew in history, in the conference given by Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk during the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico on September 27, 2016. HECTOR-GUERRERO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveils the Model X at a launch event in Fremont, Calif on Sept. 29, 2015. The Tesla Motors X is an all-wheel drive SUV featuring a 90 kWh battery providing 250 miles of range and will be able to go from 0 to 60 mph in 3.2 seconds. ROBERT HANASHIRO/USA TODAY
CEO and Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk shows of his throwback t-shirt of the “Tesla” heavy metal band on January 24, 2015 in Park City, Utah. LILY LAWRENCE/GETTY IMAGES FOR OCEANIC PRESERVATION SOCIETY
Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, discusses new technologies before an event for Tesla owners and the media held at the Hawthorne Airport. In the background is a Tesla model P85D. ROBERT HANASHIRO/USA TODAY
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk unveils SpaceX’s new seven-seat Dragon V2 spacecraft, in Hawthorne, California on May 29, 2014. The private spaceflight companys new manned space capsule is designed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The capsule was named for “Puff the Magic Dragon,” a jab at those who scoffed when Musk founded the company in 2002 and set the space bar exceedingly high. SpaceX went on to become the first private company to launch a spacecraft into orbit and return it safely to Earth in 2010. ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Elon Musk CEO, Cofounder, Chief Product Architect for Tesla with a new Model S car outside the Tesla customer delivery area at the Tesla Fremont factory on June 21, 2012. /JESSICA BRANDI LIFLAND FOR USA TODAY
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, poses with a Tesla car in front of Nasdaq following the electric automakerís initial public offering on June, 29, 2010, in New York. /MARK LENNIHAN, AP
Tesla Motors president and CEO Ze’ev Drori, left, and Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk, right, pose in the Tesla Motors development facility in San Carlos, just south of San Francisco next to a Tesla Roadster on Feb. 19, 2008. The Tesla Roadster, a $99,000 electric sports car powered by laptop computer batteries, is 100 percent electric, can go from 0-60 mph in four seconds and the electric car gets an equivalent of 135 mpg compared to a gas powered vehicle. Production begins mid-March. The car itself is being made in England. JACK GRUBER/USA TODAY
Elon Musk stands in front of parts of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket at the company’s headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. on Sept. 18, 2007. DAN MACMEDAN/USA TODAY
When it comes to benefiting from the fastest wireless network, the device you hold can make all the difference.
Samsung’s latest Galaxy S9 flagship outraced the iPhone X, according to drive tests conducted in May by PCMag with crowdsourced speed data from Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence.
The Galaxy S9 recorded download and upload speeds in May of 41.80 Megabits per second and 11.36 Mbps, respectively, compared to 31.18 Mbps and 9.88 Mbps for the iPhone X.
But the iPhone X is hardly a slowpoke. PCMag points out that the iPhone X has something called 256QAM, which means it can pack more information into one burst of data than the iPhone 7 did.
Regardless of phone, the cellphone networks are just getting faster.
For the fifth year in a row, Verizon Wireless cemented its position as having the fastest mobile network in the U.S. It won or tied in 19 of the 36 cities tested, leading in every region of the U.S. except the Southeast, where it placed behind the overall runner-up T-Mobile.
AT&T ranked third overall. Sprint, which is waiting on regulatory approval to merge with far faster T-Mobile, pulled up the rear. But even the fourth-place finisher had something to cheer: Sprint’s download speeds rocketed up recently; the carrier led in downloads in five cities.
PCMag reports that T-Mobile’s strength came in mobile uploads, which bodes well for those of you on the network who create a lot of content for social media.
And the good news overall is that compared to last year’s tests, all the carriers are delivering faster and more consistent 4G LTE connections.
PCMag’s analysts spent May 2018 driving within and between 30 cities, with four Samsung Galaxy S9 phones continually running speed tests based on a customized version of Ookla’s Speedtest.net software. Both PCMag and Ookla are owned by publisher Ziff Davis. Testers collected more than 124,000 data points and then balanced downloads, uploads, latency and reliability to create a “Speed Score.”
Verizon’s score was 99. T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint followed with scores of 93, 88 and 75, respectively.
While the tests obviously measure the performance of existing 4G mobile networks, the future is all about 5G, which you’ll increasingly hear more about toward the end of this year and into 2019 and beyond.
Each carrier is embarking on its own 5G course. AT&T and Verizon are going for top 5G speeds over smaller areas. T-Mobile’s 5G, on the other hand, may not prove quite as fast as its rivals, but the nation’s third-largest carrier is looking to blanket the nation.
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter
The nuclear summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has concluded, with each securing something they value. The US will suspend the joint military exercises with South Korea that rattle the Hermit Kingdom. And North Korea has promised to denuclearize. At some point. Probably. But if the past is any sort of prologue, you shouldn’t hold your breath.
On the face of it, the agreement signed by Trump and Kim seems promising. “President Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK, and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the statement read.
But this is not the first time North Korea has promised to abandon its nuclear efforts. (In truth, even this was simply a reaffirmation of a denuclearization pledge Kim had already made in April.) Nor is it the second time, or the third. The offer has resurfaced over the past several decades with surprising regularity. And it has never panned out so far.
“There’s definitely a pattern where the North Koreans agree to denuclearize in theory, but then there’s not really a substantive process that they agree to, to actually hammer it out,” says James McKeon, a policy analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
‘Any notion that we’re simply going to denuclearize North Korea now after the summit, or any time in the very near future, must be dispelled.’
James McKeon, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Those failures don’t necessarily come down to bad faith, or at least not entirely. In fact, the 1994 Agreed Framework between the US and North Korea, in which the North gave up its plutonium enrichment in exchange for aid, resulted in a roughly eight-year stretch of calm. That eventually collapsed too, though, as North Korea’s pursuit of enriched uranium and the George W. Bush administration’s hawkish stance imploded the already shaky scaffolding.
But in general, North Korea uses denuclearization as a bargaining chip in times of desperation. “Usually they suffer some kind of internal crisis, and then start acting in a really threatening way to try to get people to give them stuff,” says Mieke Eoyang, a national security analyst for center-left think tank Third Way.
In this instance, Eoyang argues, Trump gave the longtime US adversary far too much. “It’s substantively worse than what any other president has done,” she says, noting that the joint exercises aren’t just for show. The US rotates troops in and out of South Korea every few years; training with local counterparts helps newly stationed units prepare for potential North Korean aggression.
In return for that real loss, the US gained the same promise North Korea has made since 1985, without a single specific about how to accomplish it. There’s no agreement on inspections. North Korea doesn’t have to declare the facilities it has, much less dismantle them, to say nothing of destroying actual warheads.
“It is much messier at the working level, particularly when it comes to verification,” says John Carl Baker, a political engagement specialist at Ploughshares Fund, a grantmaking foundation that focuses on denuclearization. “As an analyst, I’m skeptical that this is the time that it’s finally going to come together. I’m certainly skeptical of the fact that the North is going to completely denuclearize itself.”
Add to this uncertain stew the fact that Trump very recently tore up a nuclear inspection framework that was actually working in Iran, and it’s hard to see how or why North Korea would go through with a promise that it has broken time and again. Especially this time.
“It sent the the absolute wrong message,” says CACNP’s McKeon of scrapping the Iran deal. “Any notion that we’re simply going to denuclearize North Korea now after the summit, or any time in the very near future, must be dispelled.”
Some North Korea observers did strike hopeful notes; both McKeon and Baker think the summit was an important first step, however symbolic. And it was certainly an improvement over the overt nuclear threats of a few months ago. But this script has been written before, and always with the same ending. See for yourself (and for a more thorough dissection, check out the Arms Control Association’s comprehensive timeline):
What: Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons
When: December 12, 1985
What happened? North Korea signs onto this landmark treaty—190 countries are currently members—but makes its membership contingent on the US withdrawing nuclear weapons from South Korea, which doesn’t happen for several years, buying North Korea time to build its nuclear capabilities.
What: Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula
When: January 20, 1992
What happened? North and South Korea sign an agreement that “the South and the North shall not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.” In February of 1993, suspicion that North Korea is violating its commitments creates tension over inspections, leading to further delays.
What: Agreed Framework
When: October 21, 1994
What happened? North Korea promises to stop plutonium production in exchange for much-needed supplies. This mostly holds up until 2002, when the US discovers that North Korea has secretly been enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. By the end of that year, Kim Jong Il kicks out all international inspectors. On January 10, 2003, North Korea officially withdraws from the 1985 nonproliferation treaty.
What: Six-Party Talks
When: September 19, 2005
What happened? After several rounds of intense talks with South Korea, China, Japan, the US, and Russia, North Korea pledges to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” The US and North Korea can’t agree on verification details, though, leading to increased hostilities.
What: Six-Party Talks (Again)
When: October 3, 2007
What happened? In a joint statement, North Korea agrees to declare all of its nuclear programs, shut down those affiliated with its weapons program, and not to transfer “nuclear materials, technology, or know-how.” Once again, stakeholders can’t agree on a verification process.
What: US Agreement
When: February 29, 2012
What happened? North Korea agrees to suspend nuclear tests and uranium enrichment, and said it will allow inspectors, in exchange for food aid. Two weeks later, North Korea announces plans to launch a satellite, which immediately unwinds the deal.
So yes, North Korea has gotten this far before. Trump and Kim haven’t forged any new ground. “The parallels are apparent in the similarities between this statement and many of the previous ones, such as those from the 1990s,” says Baker. “That’s very clear.”
The rest hinges on whether the two sides can iron out not just when North Korea will denuclearize, but how, and the manner in which the rest of the world can confirm it. Or maybe the more apt question is what happens when they don’t.
It may not have been far, far away, but it certainly is from long, long ago.
Scientists have discovered some of the original interstellar dust that formed the Earth and the solar system billions of years ago, a new study said.
The discovery is the “surviving pre-solar interstellar dust that formed the very building blocks of planets and stars,” said study lead author Hope Ishii of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Researchers collected the surviving ancient dust from Earth’s upper atmosphere, where it was likely deposited from comets. As comets pass near the sun, they release dust that can reach Earth’s orbit and settle through the atmosphere, where it can be collected and later studied with electron microscopes.
“These interplanetary dust particles survived from the time before formation of the planetary bodies in the solar system, and provide insight into the chemistry of those ancient building blocks,” said study co-author James Ciston of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
The “dust” is actually tiny glassy grains called GEMS, or glass embedded with metal and sulfides — typically less than 1/100th the thickness of a human hair.
Referring to our current understanding of how planets form, after reading the new study, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel said “our naive picture of a disk that gets very hot, fragments, and cools to then form planets may be hopelessly oversimplified.Instead, we’ve learned that it may actually be cold, outer material that holds the key to our planetary backyard.” Siegel, who was not part of the research, wrote about the study in Forbes.
Lead author Ishii said that “if we have at our fingertips the starting materials of planet formation from 4.6 billion years ago, that is thrilling and makes possible a deeper understanding of the processes that formed and have since altered them,” she said.
Siegel called it “an enormous discovery….If the conclusions stand the test of time, we may have just revolutionized our understanding of how all planetary systems come into being.”
Who wouldn’t enjoy a little X-ray vision, really? You could cheat at cards, for one. And that game where someone puts something under one of three cups and you have to guess where it is. Easy.
Of course, X-ray vision would come with a downside, in that you’d be spraying all your surveillance targets with radiation. So researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, actualizers of all things science fiction, have taken a different tack to seeing through walls: radio waves. By flinging ultra-low-power radio signals, 1,000 times milder than standard Wi-Fi, they can not only detect humans behind a wall, but track their movements in fine detail.
The system works not unlike aircraft radar. But instead of bouncing off planes and returning to the ground, the signal here travels through the wall, bounces off a human (we’re full of water, which radio signals have a hard time penetrating), and comes back through the wall and into a detector.
It’s a simple concept that was difficult to execute—because once that signal makes it back to the researchers, it’s very, very noisy. “You’re not just receiving a reflection from the human body, you’re receiving reflections from everything,” says MIT CSAIL computer scientist Dina Katabi, coauthor on a new paper describing the process. “The reflection from the wall will be much much bigger than the reflection from the signal that traversed the wall and reflected off the human body and traversed the wall again back toward you.”
Yeah, it’s messy. But that’s what neural networks are for. Your classic machine learning relies on labeling to train an AI. So, “this is a cat,” for instance, to get it to recognize objects in photos. Or, in Silicon Valley, “hotdog” or “not hotdog.”
MIT CSAIL
Radio signals are rather more … mysterious: You can’t just look at one and say, “Aha, an elbow!” So the researchers devised a clever workaround. They set up a camera to simultaneously record a person they were bombarding with radio signals. “From that image you can extract the key points of the body,” says Katabi. “We use annotations in the image as the teacher for the neural network that is working just with radio signal.” The AI trained on video could then be matched to the mess of radio signals, allowing it to associate those labeled body parts with the subtle radio reflections coming back through the wall. “Imagine you teaching a kid some math problem and suddenly he becomes smarter, he can solve problems that you can’t solve,” says Katabi.
MIT CSAIL
What you end up with is a human visualized as blobs, which correspond to points on the body, like knees and shoulders. The researchers then turn this into a stick figure that shows a person moving behind a wall in great detail. Such great detail, in fact, that the system could identify individuals 83 percent of the time, by first determining their unique features and movement style.
“It’s not just a location,” Katabi says. “It’s exact movements. So by looking at the gait, that is actually a feature that distinguishes one person from another in the same way your fingerprint distinguishes you.”
Potentially invasive in the wrong hands, sure, but also potentially good for privacy in other applications. (In fairness, all the data they collected so far was anonymous and encrypted.) Imagine using it to non-intrusively keep tabs on the sleeping, eating, and moving schedules of an elderly parent, as well as signs of distress. “Think about the other extreme: You can deploy cameras everywhere in someone’s home and try to get similar information,” Katabi says. This radio system, after all, would be clothing-agnostic, since it only produces stick figures.
Seeing through walls would also be handy for robots—they could peer around corners to avoid running into people coming the other way. (Alternatively, you might see around corners with lasers or even by detecting subtle changes in light.)
Superman would be so proud. Or jealous. One of the two.
If you need tons of graphics power, the XPS 15 will deliver. It may not look like a gaming laptop, but it definitely performs like one. I was able to run Witcher 3 on ultra settings, and it played smoothly, without freezing or juddering. What can I say? The XPS 15 is no joke.
The cool thing about this machine is its 360-degree hinge. You can prop it up like an easel or swing the screen around and use it like a tablet. Whether you want to curl up on the couch and watch Netflix, or share information in the classroom, the XPS 15 can accommodate you.
It’s a very expensive machine, though, so it may not be the best option for the budget-conscious buyer. If you don’t care about playing games, we’d recommend opting for the refreshed model (sans 360-degree hinge). Not only is performance impressive, it’s more affordable too.
Apple will offer more ways for people to limit the time they spend on iPhones. Features introduced Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference aim to address criticism that devices are becoming increasingly addictive and distracting. (June 5) AP
Tech giant Apple has updated its developer guidelines to explicitly ban “mining” cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.
The new rules restrict apps that drain battery, generate excessive heat, or put unnecessary strain on device resources — all of which take place in bitcoin mining.
“Apps, including any third party advertisements displayed within them, may not run unrelated background processes, such as cryptocurrency mining,” Apple said on its website.
It’s unlikely someone could successfully “mine” bitcoin on an iPhone or iPad alone because of the amount of energy and computing power it takes. But Apple’s move could pre-emptively stop future, less energy-intensive digital currencies from being mined on these devices or halt the pooling of multiple devices to accomplish it.
Here’s what Apple’s website says:
“2.4.2 Design your app to use power efficiently. Apps should not rapidly drain battery, generate excessive heat, or put unnecessary strain on device resources. Apps, including any third party advertisements displayed within them, may not run unrelated background processes, such as cryptocurrency mining.”
The guidelines include cryptocurrency but that language remained the same as an archived version of the site recorded in late May by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Apple’s crypto-related guidelines were originally set in 2014 after the app store unlisted Coinbase and other cryptocurrency apps, citing an “unresolved issue,” according to Apple Insider, which first reported the guideline updates Monday.
The report didn’t say when Apple updated its policy, and the company did not return a CNBC request for comment.
Cryptocurrency “mining” is essentially math often done by high-powered computers. In order to trade bitcoin, transactions need to be verified through complex math equations, then and added to what’s known as a “distributed ledger.” In return for solving equations “miners” receive bitcoin.
On a computer, that process generates 1,400 watts — the same as one hair dryer, according to bitcoin mining company Coinmint.
Many apps on the iOS store claim to let users mine with power from their personal devices, including “Crypto Coin Miner” and “Cryptocurrency Cloud Mining.” The latter says it lets users “make money and earn cryptocurrencies “without major investment or hassle from direct involvement with hardware or software.”
Bitcoin hit its lowest in two months over the weekend after a relatively small South Korean exchange said it was hacked. The digital currency was trading near $6,726 Monday, according to CoinDesk.
Samsung is one of the TV companies that puts extra focus on TV design—very successfully, I might add—and as the company’s 2018 flagship, the Q9FN is kind of a peacock. It’s designed to be supremely sleek and minimal, and it pulls it off.
Despite being a full-array local dimming set, the Q9FN’s panel is still compact and fairly thin. The almost bezel-less screen has a seamless, unibody feel: it’s not overly heavy, but still feels extremely durable.
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
Our Q9FN’s included center stand features smooth, brushed metal that’s heavy enough to secure the TV panel without taking up much tabletop space.
One neat thing about the Q9FN is that you can get it with a variety of stands. Our loan unit came with the standard rectangular bar prop that fastens in the middle of the TV, but Samsung also has a “Studio” stand, “Gravity” stand, and a unique wall-mount solution called the “No Gap Wall Mount.”
The Q9FN also includes the OneConnect box, which adds heavily to its minimalist aesthetic. The OneConnect box is an external house for all of the TV’s ports that connects to the rear of the TV’s panel via a single “invisible” cable (this all makes a lot more sense when you see it in person).
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
The Q9FN is a bit thicker than the 2017 QLEDs because it uses a full-array LED backlight.
This year’s OneConnect box is a big one, too, but for a good reason. It not only houses the TV’s four HDMI inputs, three-USB port hub, coaxial, LAN connection, etc., but also serves as a power supply. So while it’s definitely bulkier this year, it’s also finally living up to its namesake.
The OneRemote continues to be about as stripped down as possible while still serving as a functional clicker. Its curved shape and few-as-possible buttons lend to the TV’s air of finely-tooled, premium design. You can also control the TV though Samsung’s “SmartThings” app, if you’re so inclined.
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
The Q9FN’s OneConnect box, which connects to the TV via a long, “invisible” ten-foot cable. The box also provides power to the TV, so definitely don’t lose it.
Even more beautiful when you’re watching it
The first thing TJ and I did when this TV got dropped off was build it, run through the initial setup, and immediately start watching Thor: Ragnarok on Netflix (which is just delightful, if you haven’t seen it).
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
The TV’s normal picture (left) and the effect when “HDR+” is turned on (right)
At first, I turned on the Q9FN’s “HDR+” mode, a picture setting that basically gives any content an “HDR” appearance. More literally, it amps up the TV’s brightness and color, while scaling the non-HDR content so that it doesn’t look too oversaturated or unnatural. It also adds a sharpening effect that every now and again looks a little wonky.
But this was a bit much: both TJ and I were left wincing and shielding our eyes from the Q9FN’s unrelenting brightness.
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
So I switched to Movie mode, turned all the Auto Motion Plus settings off, switched Audio to “Optimized” (during the “Immigrant Song” bit, which is also delightful), set the backlight to the room lighting, and turned the color space to “Auto” to take advantage of those sweet, colorful quantum dots.
And then I totally forgot I was supposed to be reviewing a TV and got sucked right in by Chris Hemsworth’s chiseled… performance.
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
In Movie mode but with the TV’s color space set to “Native,” Thor had a crisp, natural look with a welcome amount of extra color.
My point is, this TV looks great. It’s got enough brightness and color vivacity for a bright room, meaning you can scale it back for dedicated viewing environments, and then pick and choose which aspects to augment or diminish.
The 16:9 black bars were impressively dark, and even the viewing angle—though it looked atrocious during the Netflix boot screen—seemed better than average for an LED TV. The TV’s native color rendered everything with a pleasing vividness. Of course, these were all just first impressions.
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
For a TV with full-array local dimming, the Q9FN has a better horizontal viewing angle than average. It’s still not an OLED, but you can wall-mount it without concern.
As I expected, though, our lab tests corroborated the initial experience. The Q9FN evinces excellent contrast and motion performance—its black levels are especially impressive for an LED TV, and some of the HDR brightness numbers we measured had me seriously considering leaving a pair of sunglasses down in the lab.
The Q9FN is also equipped with some extra features worth jawing about. The menu interface hasn’t changed much from the past couple years. When you hit the “home” button on the remote, the smart features and settings pop up along the bottom quarter of the screen. This is where you’ll access apps like Netflix and Spotify; the TV’s picture, audio, and network settings; and switch source inputs. It’s intuitive enough for anyone to make use of, in my opinion.
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
The menu and smart features haven’t changed much from last year, but they’re still very reliable. We especially like how easy it is to identify and control HDMI devices.
One thing that Samsung’s gotten better at year over year is providing TV software that allows the TV to be the center of your home theater or living room, from a device perspective. Plugging in any number of DVD or Blu-ray players, game consoles, and so on prompts the TV to identify the device and then label it within the input list.
For many devices, you’ll also be able to automatically control them with the remote one they’re identified, which is pretty handy. You might want to keep the original remote nearby though—the OneRemote has so few buttons, it’s not always the most robust control option for source devices.
Credit: Reviewed / Lee Neikirk
New for 2018, “Ambient mode” allows the TV to display an image, or information about weather or news headlines while it’s technically off in a low-power mode.
Finally, the Q9FN TVs have an “Ambient mode” that allows them to display an image and the time or weather while the TV is off. This uses a minimal amount of electricity, but allows the TV to contribute aesthetically to the room it’s in, rather than becoming a lifeless black rectangle while you’re not using it. It’s a simple little addition to the 2018 smart features, but I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to use it, either.
— Our editors review and recommend products to help you buy the stuff you need. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY’s newsroom and any business incentives.
Summertime is possibly our favorite season here at Reviewed. With longer days, warmer weather, and vacations planned, things just seem a little happier around the office. That being said, there are still a few summer struggles we all deal with. Namely, the heat and the humidity.
Thankfully, there are plenty of products that we use each summer to survive the heat and elevate our trips. From our favorite sunscreen to throwaway sunglasses, these are the products we can’t live without in the summer.
1. Sunscreen that actually works
“When it came to sunscreen, I used to use whatever I could find for the cheapest price. But after trying Sun Bum, I’ll never go back to average sunscreen again. I find that it works the best for me, doesn’t have that terrible sunscreen smell, and has some of the best packaging for sunscreen I’ve ever seen.” – Courtney Campbell, Ecommerce Writer (that’s me!)
“I can’t speak highly enough about the Tommy Bahama backpack cooler chair for the beach. My dad goes to Costco and buys two or three new ones each year because we love them so much. It has a small cooler, a big pouch, a cupholder, a head pillow, and backpack straps to carry it all. I can literally fit a six-pack of beer, a sub, a book, snacks, and sunblock all in the chair, throw my towel over it, and carry it down the beach on my back with ease.” – Connor Whooley, Editorial Coordinator
“We take our Klean Kanteens to the beach. Packed with ice water and still cold six hours later. Double-wall insulated for the grown-ups and a 12-ounce sippy for the kid.” – David Kender, Editor in Chief
“I need new beach towels this summer, pretty ones that are comfy to lie on, catching a few rays. The pattern I’ve fallen in love with is this one. And at under $15, I can buy a few of them.” – Cindy Bailen, Senior Staff Writer
“In some of the places I go hiking in the summertime, the mosquitoes swarm up so thick you’d swear they were storm clouds on the horizon. I like to bring a Thermacell with me. It creates a 15-foot bubble around me. Sprays sometimes get diluted by your sweat, or you miss a spot, and the Off! brand is real hit-or-miss with me. I lost mine a while back, and thinking about this list makes me want to get another one.” – Jonathan Chan, Senior Lab Technician
“This Dampit guitar humidifier was recommended by my teacher in undergrad, and I’ve had it for seven years. While not every guitar needs daily humidifying, higher-end acoustic instruments definitely do—and they never need it more than on hot summer days.
Humidifying isn’t just a good idea if you want a better sound: guitars that dry out too much can warp or crack. The same goes for violins, cellos, and so on. At around $25, my Dampit cost me about $3.50 a year, so I’d say it was a good investment.” – Lee Neikirk, Editor
“Cheap sunglasses! I usually buy either 1-2 pairs of cheap wraparound sunglasses, or you can get more basic ones in bulk. I always try to have at least two pairs of cheap sunglasses. That way, when they inevitably get scratched/broken/sat upon/eaten by an alligator, it’s not the end of the world.” – Julia MacDougall, Senior Scientist
“If you’re a dad, your job is to lug countless amounts of unnecessary stuff to the beach. It makes no sense, but you do what you have to do. Having a beach cart makes this job significantly easier. You can stuff toys, umbrellas, balls, frisbees, and all the other stuff your kids won’t actually play with at the beach into one cart that moves pretty well on sand. It also has some compartments for your wallet, phone, and whatever else you may need to get through the day.” – Chris Lloyd, General Manager
“This light has proven its worth for four summers so far. It sits in our living area most of the year, providing soft ambient light. But just lift it by the handle and you have an instant cordless lantern that you can take out onto the deck. It’s a gorgeous design, has 5-10 hours of battery life, and it’s weather resistant.” – David Kender, Editor in Chief
“In a future home, I want an entirely separate bathroom designed specifically for Gold Bond applications. In said room, I want a velvet rope with gold-plated tassels to hang from the ceiling. When I pull the rope, I want four gallons of Gold Bond Extra Strength to dump from the ceiling, all over my awful body. This daily ritual will be accompanied by a Gregorian choir that chants the words ‘Gold Bond’ in Latin, and a cage full of doves released at the exact same moment that the powder hits my face.” – Michael Desjardin, Senior Staff Writer
11. A solar-powered charger that goes where you do
“Every year, I spend a week on a lake doing absolutely nothing. And I couldn’t do it right without this dual-USB solar-powered charger. As long as the sun is shining, it can give your devices a juice boost so you have one less thing to worry about. The panels make it a bit large compared to rechargeable chargers, but it folds flat so it doesn’t take up too much room in your suitcase.” – Samantha Gordon, Managing Editor of Ecommerce
