TIL about fluid amplifiers. That is really cool: thank you.

I am interested in the no-moving parts ventilators but can't find a reference. I found, among other things, a taxonomy of ventilators on PubMed[1] but everything it describes seems to have moving parts, and I can't figure out a way to do any of this without at least the moving parts in a pressure regulator. (And that's just for CPAP, BiPAP is harder.) Do you have a source?

200 cycles at 5x the capacity is 300,000mi, not 60,000mi.

Without cobalt, the battery also has potential to be cheaper, assuming it winds up making it to market at scale.

It isn't just westerns. A disproportionate amount of the best scifi literature comes from the detective tradition. Scifi as a genre can't get you plot, only mechanics. You have to get the plot somewhere else.

As someone who occasionally needs to trailer a motorcycle, the breakpoint for renting vs. owning a tow vehicle, for me, was about once a month. This is assuming that I get no utility out of the tow vehicle except when I am actually moving the bike, too, which not the case. (Groceries, hardware store, commuting in inclement weather, etc all make owning a car practically quite useful, if not strictly necessary.)

You don't use air underground: you use transformer oil. It has a much better dielectric constant than air, but the disadvantage of not being free, like air for an above-ground line.

(There are also some solids that are good for this too.)

I think they're using JS8Call. cf. this article about prior work in the space and the screenshot on the JS8Call software page.

KB3VDK

My read of the Lightning protocol spec is that the meaning isn't obscured. An LN invoice is authenticated, but it isn't encrypted. I may be misinterpreting this spec, which I just found 5 minutes ago and kind of skimmed, but it makes sense: this is a request for a transaction on a fully public blockchain, so there can't really be anything private there.

I can't tell if they're using testnet bitcoins in this, but that would be one way to avoid any commerce happening for the purposes of this demo. It does kind of put a damper on the practical applications, though.

KB3VDK

Professional software isn't immune to this. I've had many many bugs I file and features I request at work languish for an inordinately long time because "we're in the middle of a release push" or "the other project is behind schedule so all resources are behind that" or even organizational infighting.

I think you went the wrong way. 23MJ/m^3 is 23kJ/L.

Having maintained several similar phone systems: this does have the advantage that when an inbound (e.g. client) call forwards to the cellphone of someone in the field, they get the number of the actual client instead of just the main trunk number or their own DID.

Chess is a perfect knowledge game. Integrating a view of the world good enough to play by isn't part of the strategy because you can already see everything. DotA is... not. If your strategy for dealing with not being able to see the entire field of play at once is "We use an API to see the entire field of play at once anyway," you're not playing the same game as someone with limited perceptual bandwidth.

I think you slipped a few orders of magnitude there. I get 17 days for "the initial part." Intuitively, your numbers don't make sense: there is no way that satellite has 100Gbps downlink, or even anywhere in that neighborhood, so the time to download the dataset over a 100Gbps link should not be an appreciable fraction of the total 46-year program duration.

That said, sneakernet may be a better approach here.

People are indeed studying this.

The Alaska Permanent fund also does this on a larger scale, although the amounts of money involved there are probably not enough to make a living except in the Alaskan backcountry, which has limited (but not no) use for money. The Alaska fund is also funded by a severance tax on oil, not a progressive income tax, which seems far less likely to lead to unsustainable fiscal situations or perverse incentives.

The auto industry has strict standards (ISO 26262) for exactly this already, for non-autonomous cars. The safety requirements aren't really any different for level 5 autonomous driving than they are for ABS or steer-by-wire (i.e. they must be "designed to ASIL D," i.e. a failure in any of these systems probably results in an unrecoverable, potentially fatal crash), except that the autonomous driving system is far more complicated.