Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes CNN:

A tall, silver, shining metal monolith discovered in the desert in southeastern Utah — which prompted theories of alien placement and drew determined hikers to its secret location — has now disappeared, the state’s Bureau of Land Management said Saturday.

The monolith was removed by an “unknown party” sometime Friday night, the agency said in a Facebook post.

“We have received credible reports that the illegally installed structure, referred to as the ‘monolith,’ has been removed” from BLM public lands, the post said. “The BLM did not remove the structure, which is considered private property.”

The monolith was first discovered November 18 by officers from the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau. They were flying by helicopter, helping the Division of Wildlife Resources count bighorn sheep in southeastern Utah, when they spotted something that seemed right out of “2001: A Space Odyssey…” Pilot Bret Hutchings guessed it was “between 10 and 12 feet high…”

In an official statement, the Utah Department of Public Safety emphasized that it’s still illegal to install structures or art on public lands, “no matter what planet you’re from.”

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Source: Slashdot – That Mysterious Silver Monolith In the Utah Desert Has Disappeared

Reuters reports:

David Prowse, the English actor who played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films, has died aged 85, his management company said on Sunday…

The champion weightlifter-turned-actor starred as the body, but not the voice, of one of cinema’s best-known villains. Director George Lucas opted to dub another voice onto Prowse’s portrayal of the towering, masked antagonist Darth Vader in “Star Wars”, “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi”.

More from the Los Angeles Times:
Born in Bristol, southwest England, in 1935, Prowse represented England in weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games in the 1950s before breaking into movies with roles that emphasized his commanding size, including Frankenstein’s monster in a pair of horror films [and also in the 1967 comedy Casino Royale].

Director George Lucas saw Prowse in a small part in “A Clockwork Orange” and asked the 6-foot-6-inch actor to audition for the villainous Vader or the Wookiee Chewbacca in “Star Wars.” Prowse later told the BBC he chose Darth Vader because “you always remember the bad guys.”
Physically, Prowse was perfect for the part. His lilting English West Country accent was considered less ideal, and his lines were dubbed by actor James Earl Jones. Prowse was also known to a generation of British children as the Green Cross Code Man, a superhero in a series of road safety advertisements.

An anonymous reader writes:
In 2011 he authored an autobiography titled Straight from the Force’s Mouth (with a foreword by bodybuilder/Incredible Hulk actor Lou Ferrigno), and his differences with Lucasfilm are chronicled in a 2015 documentary about his career titled I Am Your Father. (You can watch its trailer on its page on Amazon Prime, though the full documentary is currently listed as “unavailable.”)

Wikipedia lists some of Prose’s other roles, including:

A Minotaur in the Doctor Who serial The Time Monster The Black Knight in the Terry Gilliam film JabberwockyA small role as Hotblack Desiato’s bodyguard in the 1981 BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Source: Slashdot – Darth Vader Actor From Original ‘Star Wars’ Trilogy Dies at Age 85

Republican congressman Denver Riggleman was once a defense contractor for America’s National Security Agency. But in 2004, he paid more than $5,000 to join an amateur expedition searching for Bigfoot. Not because he believed in the mythical ape-like creature said to live in the woods, according to the Washington Post, but “to indulge a lifelong fascination: Why do people — what kind of people — believe in Bigfoot?”

“Now in one of his last acts as a Republican congressman from Virginia, Riggleman is asking the same questions of QAnon supporters and President-elect Joe Biden deniers.”
Months after his ouster by Rep.-elect Bob Good (R) in a contentious GOP convention, Riggleman has become one of the loudest voices in Congress warning of the infiltration of conspiracy theories into political discourse… To Riggleman, the book, “Bigfoot… It’s Complicated,” mirrors the way pockets of the country are falling into conspiracy wormholes — everything from extremist fringe groups such as QAnon and the “boogaloo” movement to President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. Like the Bigfoot hunters in the Olympic National Forest, they see what they want to see…

Bigfoot believers have plenty in common with political extremists on both the far right and the far left, Riggleman said, lambasting a political ecosystem where, oftentimes, “facts don’t matter.”

“They’re all bat—- crazy. Right?” he said, not really joking. “All of them ascribe to a team mythology that might or might not be true. And they stay on that team regardless. And that is what’s so dangerous about politics today. That’s what I’ve been trying to say.”

Riggleman also criticized political operatives “asking for donations to help in a mythological quest of things that can’t be proven,” arguing this shared mythology can turn into a grift.

“I saw it with Bigfoot. I’m seeing it with QAnon. It’s about money. And sometimes crazy and money live in the same space.”

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Source: Slashdot – What Hunting Bigfoot Taught a Republican Congressman about Misinformation, Political Extremists, and Grift

“Tesla’s Sentry Mode is about to bring things to a whole new level by enabling Tesla owners to remotely see what their cars can see through Autopilot cameras,” claims Electrek — citing a Twitter user named green “who has been revealing new Tesla features found in software updates.”

“It’s not certain when the live camera update would arrive, provided it’s not scrapped,” writes Engadget, adding “Elon Musk has been teasing a ‘hot’ holiday software release, but ‘green’ warned that it might not make that release…”

Some background from Electrek:
For a while now, Tesla has been talking about better integrating its Tesla Sentry Mode feature into its mobile app. Sentry Mode is an integrated surveillance system inside Tesla’s vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car and it has been changing the game when it comes to vandalizing parked cars. On several occasions, Sentry Mode videos went viral, and the vandals turned themselves in after online pressure. In other cases, video evidence helped police identify and find the vandals.

The feature was built on top of “TeslaCam,” a previously released integrated dashcam system with similar capability as Sentry mode, but used when someone is inside the car. TeslaCam helped several Tesla owners with insurance claims by proving that they weren’t at fault in some accidents captured by the integrated dashcam system. In order to activate the TeslaCam and Sentry Mode features, owners have to plug a storage device, thumb drive, or SSD inside their Tesla and activate the features in the settings…

Tesla owners can already have an extensive look at the status of their vehicles, including the doors open or close, same for windows, charge port, and more. Now they are going to be able to see around their vehicles even if no Sentry Mode event has been activated.

That’s only if the update is actually released. How do Slashdot’s readers feel about the possibility of this feature?

Does the world change when Tesla owners can remotely access their cars’ cameras?

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Source: Slashdot – Will Tesla Update Bring Remote Access To Car Cameras?

“Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy,” reports Phys.org:

But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that our planet is plunging towards the black hole. Instead the changes are results of a better model of the Milky Way Galaxy based on new observation data, including a catalog of objects observed over the course of more than 15 years by the Japanese radio astronomy project VERA.

CNET explains:
Over the last 15 years, a Japanese radio astronomy project, VERA, has been gathering data. Using a technique called interferometry, VERA gathered data from telescopes across Japan and combined them with data from other existing projects to create what is essentially the most accurate map of the Milky Way yet.

By pinpointing the location and velocity of around 99 specific points in our galaxy, VERA has concluded that the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A, at the center of our galaxy, is actually 25,800 light-years from Earth — almost 2,000 light-years closer than what we previously believed.

In addition, the new model calculates Earth is moving faster than we believed. Older models clocked Earth’s speed at 220 kilometers (136 miles) per second, orbiting around the galaxy’s centre. VERA’s new model has us moving at 227 kilometers (141 miles) per second.

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Source: Slashdot – Researchers Calculate Earth is 2,000 Light-years Closer to the Milky Way’s Black Hole