The spiky roller is used to perforate the dough, often for bar style American pizza, when the dough hasn't really been proofed correctly. A perforated dough base yields a dry and crackery crust and prevents the gluten strands from baking properly and releasing their full texture and flavor. I think the issue with the Zume pizza was that they were trying to make the pizzas in moving vans, so everything was just sliding around. It seems like the story here is really about the excess of silicon valley investing. We already had this story in 2017 (Juicero), where an expensive and pointless product is over-engineered into a market it doesn't belong in. What kind of people invest in these things? It boggles the mind.

"In J.R.R. Tolkein's The Two Towers, it's in Elrond's home city of Rivendell that Frodo chooses to destroy the ring of power. " I'm not sure what this means, and either way it sounds wrong. the Council of Elrond is in Fellowship, not Two Towers. In fact, Frodo says within the first 100 pages of The Fellowship that he "Really wants to destroy the ring"; the council of Elrond is more about everyone else deciding who is actually going to take the ring to Mt. Doom, as Frodo had hoped that he would only have to carry it to Rivendell. I couldn't find this mistake in the other articles, so it looks like it's Slashdot's error, which is kind of bizarre. Frodo decided to destroy the ring as soon as Gandalf explained it's lore, and he was chosen to be the ring bearer in the Council of Elrond. In fact, he had "Long foreseen" that he would be the bearer, (and it was Bilbo who actually spoke up first and offered to be the ring bearer, until the council said "sit down boomer you too old" in so many words.