"What if your electric vehicle could be refueled in less than 5 minutes? "

Problem is that right now only the first car to arrive at a H2 station will get filled up that quickly. If there are multiple cars forming a line to be refueled there's a serious delay every time while the station builds up the 700bar pressure required for refueling from the much lower ~50bar storage pressure.

So you can easily spend much more than 5 minutes at a H2 station waiting for your turn to refuel. Add to this that a H2 station is more expensive to set up than an electric charger station, so that there probably will be less stations per H2 car ...

See e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/automobiles/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-return-for-another-run.html

> ; could be that abstract thought just isn't your thing.

"Abstract" only gets you that far in engineering, at some point you not only have to learn how to talk the talk, but also how to walk the walk ...

That thing is not "active", it does not have a power source of its own. Power has to be fed into it by the reading device, and it basically communicates with the reader by modulating the amount of power it pulls from the readers field.

That limits the communication distance to about 10 centimeters, double that if you're lucky.

Not useful for any location tracking unless you manage to get it into peoples feet.

A device that size, but being able to communicate actively, and over a long period, without running out of power, would indeed be an engineering marvel that would many other practical uses, too, that would revolutionize our tech world, the previously mentioned micro batteries alone ...

(Having four chipped cats myself, and a cat flap with chip reader. 10cm range is already optimistic on these things ... and if Mr. Longhair comes home really wet the flaps antenna ring at times does not recognize him (or actually his chip) at all.

"Oh, wait, current smartphones no longer have easy accessible batteries."

At least up to the Moto G5+: no problem.

Bought one some three years ago, replacing my good old Galaxy Nexus as that had started to show its age and had become slow, but mostly as I had an upcoming trip to Japan and needed a dual SIM device.

Battery died a few weeks ago, but I could replace it for ~10€ within 48 hours.

Phone performance is still good, the only thing I'm missing is a true magnetic compass. But even that's only really an issue with Google Sky ...

No, the general decision was already taken on January 16th 2020, before Covid19 even became a thing.

Yesterday was just the day where the legislative process started in January was brought to completion.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausstieg_aus_der_Kohleverstromung_in_Deutschland

"There has never been a vaccine developed for coronavirus."

Well, work on that had started back in ~2002-2004 when SARS-COV appeared, things were just not completed as in the end that corona variant was brought under control and didn't spread any further.

SARS-COV-2 is not the same thing, but similar enough, so it is not "work from scratch", we actually have a head start on this one. And we know more about vaccines and the immunte system than we did when the mumps vaccine was developed, tested, and brought to marked.

So I still have hopes that with the work previously done, the current state of bio technology, and some adjustments to the testing regulations we may have access to some working vaccine within this year.

I wouldn't bet the whole farm on it, but I don't think it is impossible either ...

with circles giving you easy control over what taget audience sees what, and a rather text centric stream.

Nice alternative to facebook ... but then they failed to built up on that differentiation, and rather tried to become more like facebook themselves.

There was no need for a second facebook that's just the same though ...

MariaDB can't change the license of the server, at least not without consent of the upstream copyright holder. That being Oracle ... well ...

No, we closed the last one at the end of 2018, and the local mines had been on a decline for several decades already as imported hard coal was so much cheaper than digging it up from up to a kilometer deep under a densely populated area.

German brown coal on the other hand can still be retrieved from open pits rather easily (once you got rid of settlements and protected forests that may be in the way).

That's why the share of electricity produced by hard coal has been going down quite a bit over time, while the share of brown coal has declined only minimally so far.

But despite having no more hard coal mines of our own hard coal plants are still providing about 15% of our electricity so far, they are just operated by cheaper imported coal than what we could bring up from the deep locally

Well, so far we still have a net surplus to sell to our neighbors, even though we already managed to cut nuclear to less than half of its original production, and coal slowly on the decline for a decade already, too.

I don't see us becoming a net importer any time soon.

At the same time France sees the majority of their nuclear plants coming to an age where they eventually need to be shut down...

"As coal is only about 30% - 40% of Germany's energy production, changing that to gas, or even combined cycle gas has only a minimal effect."

It may have a rather small impact on CO2 emissions, but as a large part of it is domestic brown coal retrieved from open pit mines in a rather densely populated country, this also triggers repeated discussions about whole villages and small towns having to be relocated, and about the impact on local ecosystems.

Also its emission footprint of other substances than CO2 is bad compared to natural gas.

And last not least, gas plants can be much smaller than coal plants, and don't have to be close to the coal mines, so having the option to put then to a second use with
power-heat cogeneration

For such small scale projects efficiency does not really matter that much as there are several chemical plants that produce significant amounts of H2 as a by-product.

So getting the hydrogen needed for two trains is not an issue. Getting enough hydrogen to replace all current diesel-electric train engines would be a completely different story though.

Well, even the high speed German ICEs got rid of heavy locomotives quite a while ago. Starting with the ICE 3 series in ~2000 they switched to distributed motors, usually on every 2nd coach, and have passenger space from front to back all the way.

You can even have a peak over the engine drivers shoulder when in the first section of the front coach there (he can set the glass front between him and you to non-transparent though).

Here in Germany almost everything long and medium distance is electric (minus e.g the ill-fated ICE-TD that's no longer in operation).

Local lines that operate aside from the electrified main tracks still often run diesel-electric though. Especially the single track local lines are usually not electrified, and at times even signals and switches are still operated by someone locally pulling big levers (although that's been mostly phased out over the last two decades).

"Had Germany relied only on renewables they would have had thousands people dead from hypothermia."

Electric heating is not very common in Germany, at least not for central heating. You may have an additional electric heater here and there, but these are secondary, not primary heatings.

There is a small fraction of homes that still use "night storage heaters" which were subsidized in the 1950s to 1970s or so. These heat up storage ceramics at night and release the heat over the day. These were subsidized as they only used electricity at night when demand was low, so that nuclear and coal base load plants could be left running at night.

This form of heating is only used by a pretty small minority of households these days though.