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But now, these platforms have been scaling back on free features. Last month, Google Meet limited its free group calls to 60 minutes. That could be annoying if you’re watching a show or a movie with friends. Thankfully, there are alternatives like Telegram for that. Last month, the chat app rolled out a group call feature. Now, it has extended the maximum viewers limit for a group call to 1,000 participants....

Electric car incumbent Tesla and iPhone peddler Apple found their share prices hardest hit. At their lowest points on September 8, their stocks respectively traded 31% and 20.5% below their highs on September 2. Chipset makers NVIDIA, KLA, and AMD followed closely — they’d dropped 20%, 18%, and 17% respectively. [Read: Tesla dumped $5B worth of its stock in just 4 days — and traders hate it] While the market has bounced back somewhat, no NASDAQ 100 stock has bounced harder than Tesla, now up 19....

Now, not only is Elon Musk’s electricity wunderstock absolutely the most valuable automaker in the world, but its $320 billion market value places it ahead of consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble, and inside the top 10 public companies in the US. To say that Tesla has performed well this year is a serious understatement. After all, $TSLA started 2020 at $424.50, and it’s worth $1,733 at pixel time — a 310% increase in a little more than six months....

According to a report from Reuters, the authorities are considering these revised tax rates for EVs valued at less than $40,000 — inclusive of cost, insurance, and freight. The report noted that for EVs costing more than $40,000, the revised tax rate would be 60% — down from 100%. In July, Elon Musk said he wants to bring Tesla to India, but import taxes are too high. And currently, the company doesn’t have any facility in the country to produce its vehicles....

This suit was co-signed by nine other Republican-led states aside from Texas. Paxton made this announcement through a strange video on a Texas AG’s official Twitter account. He said that this lawsuit is for Google’s “anti-competitive conduct, exclusionary practices, and deceptive representations” to create an ad monopoly. This internet Goliath used its power to manipulate the market, destroy competition, and harm YOU, the consumer. Stay tuned… pic.twitter.com/fdEVEWQb0e — Texas Attorney General (@TXAG) December 16, 2020 The complaint also accuses the Mountain View-based company of reaching an arrangement with Facebook to give the latter an advantage in mobile ad auctions....

For the uninitiated, the in-built Workout app on the Apple Watch has a range of different sports you can select. The idea behind this is twofold. The first is simple: it allows you to easily track how you’ve been exercising. The second is more technical, as by choosing a specific workout, the Apple Watch can track your movement and calories burned better when it understands the movements you’re doing. In my experience, it works well....

Due to uncertainty spurred on by the outbreak of the coronavirus, the Lucid Air EV is not entering production on schedule and is being put on hold until later in the year, Silicon Valley Business Journal reports. [Read: Grab makes e-scooter and cab rides free for frontline coronavirus workers in the Philippines] The company had planned to publicly unveil the vehicle at the Detroit Auto Show. However, the show was canceled late last week, as its venue is to become a Federal Emergency Management Administration building....

Across the first three quarters of this year, Latvians have bought and registered 328% more electric vehicles than they did across the same period in 2019. LETA reports that this is the fastest growth in EV sales in the EU. [Read: Why this security engineer loves working in infosec] Over the first three quarters, 287 electric vehicles were registered in the country. 229 of these were battery electric vehicles and 58 were plug-in hybrids....

If I asked you to list smartphone brands, LG wouldn’t be near the top. But the company is trying to change all that, and its latest attempt? Its new smartphone, the LG Velvet. Now, the latest update is the company will unveil this handset on May 7, something it announced in this video: Unsurprisingly, this will be done digitally, because of — you know — the global pandemic. Despite it being somewhat questionable even releasing a phone during this period, it’s happening....

On Wednesday, Ford’s luxury brand revealed its long anticipated Star Concept, which offers a preview of the designlanguage and possible features of its upcoming electric lineup. Don’t get fooled by its minimalist exterior. Fully-electric concepts from many car makers rely on the idea of a lounge on wheels, but the Star Concept takes the idea to the next level. To maximize the feeling of space, the car comes with suicide doors and a large panoramic roof....

In our new paper, published in Neuropsychopharmacology Reviews, we have investigated how to best overcome the brain changes linked to the pandemic. Let’s start with COVID-19 infection. In addition to mood disorders, common symptoms include fatigue, headaches, memory loss, and problems with attention. There may be a number of reasons for these brain changes, including inflammation and cerebrovascular events (a syndrome caused by disruption of blood supply to the brain)....

At the moment though, that stability is proving hard to find. The value of one of the most popular stablecoins, Terra (also known as UST), has fluctuated wildly in the last few days, before dropping dramatically – and is yet to recover. Before the crash, Terra was in the top 10 crypto assets, with a value of over US$18.7 billion. At the time of writing, this had collapsed to less than US$7 billion....

Well, there’s a movement of activists aiming to make it impossible to own a huge, polluting 4×4 SUV in the world’s urban areas. So, they are taking out SUVs and their owners, flattening one tire at a time. I spoke to a representative via email, under the condition of anonymity because of “security risks.” Meet The Tyre Extinguishers Their method is simple: they deflate a car tire. They hope that this “will turn the minor inconvenience of a flat tire into a giant obstacle for driving massive killer vehicles around our streets....

The design industry really is like no other. Designers not only get the chance to be creative and innovative every single day, they also have the opportunity to completely shape the world we live in. ​​One of the main things that attracts people to this sector is the fact that it’s constantly evolving and redefining itself. Not only are we continuously seeing shifts in style, but also in terms of medium and platforms being used....

Even in today’s business climate, there are still some old rules that are just as relevant now as they were going all the way back. One of those is: if you want to advance in your current company or the next, you need to be bringing new skills to the table. For example, understanding how to build and execute a project management plan requires more than just drive and smarts....

If you’re a busy entrepreneur or a freelance professional, booking appointments can turn into a major headache. That’s because it isn’t just about scheduling an appointment. It’s about making sure you’ve included everyone that needs to be included. It’s about everyone knowing where a virtual or in-person meeting is happening. And if your hours are billable, it’s definitely about making sure you’re getting paid for your time. The KarenApp Scheduling Software isn’t just a scheduling app....

Vitalik Boterin is a bot powered by machine learning (ML). It regularly tweets unique nuggets of wisdom that read eerily similar to the real deal, like this one. — Vitalik Boterin (@VBoterin) May 14, 2019 Unlike the organic version, Boterin doesn’t need to eat and sleep, so it can drop knowledge round-the-clock. Here’s another recently shared by the real Buterin (which should be against the laws of Twitter-physics. Apparently, it isn’t....

Cartoonizer is based on a research paper by University of Tokyo researchers Xinrui Wang and Jinze Yu. The tool leverages their open-source implementation to create a publicly-available demo of the method, using GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) servers for the video inference and CPUs (central processing units) for the images. It’s far from the first attempt to turn people into cartoons, but its videos are pretty impressive. Check out this cartoonized scene from Marvel’s Avengers: [Read: This AI spit outs endless new My Little Pony characters]...

In the report “I’d blush if I could,” (titled after Siri’s response to: “Hey Siri, you’re a bitch”) UNESCO notes that voice assistants often react to verbal sexual harassment in an “obliging and eager to please” manner. Having female voices react to harassment in a benign way can undercut the progress towards gender equality. F’xa tries to combat this norm of female servitude in our smart devices, by challenging gender roles in our voice assistants just like they should challenged be in real-life....

However, there aren’t many commercially available tools for such video effects. A new open-source tool takes a crack at replacing the sky with AR effects in clips. The unique thing about this AI-powered tool is that it can also augment objects in the sky and adjust the footage as if it was actually present during the shooting. The model is independent of the shooting source. So, you can use footage captured even from your phone....