well yes, but it has been too expensive in the past, over the decades one constant when visiting various countries around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, is that every single building would have a solar panel on the roof, they would be solar-thermal water heaters, because they were cheap and it is an obvious cost saving. These days, as the pricing has improved, I imagine there are a lot of solar-PV panels as well.

They very likely are CT scanners as the bbc news article about Heathrow installing some says that Schiphol already tested them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44925635

I would have thought this was basic IR35 stuff. if you do work only for one employer, wether via a shell "service" company or not, then you are not an independent contractor you are an employee, and all the standard payroll taxes and procedures apply.

If i get a call from what is obviously a call center i just want to hang up, they always start with phony platitudes, asking how am I today etc. I don't know you, anything I could possibly say is meaningless to you, why are you wasting my time even bothering, just tell me what the f. you want and go away. I would so much prefer an automated system if that didnt try to be my friend and just got the hell on with it. Also wouldnt have the background roar of hundreds of other conversations happening in the same room as the caller.

They could cut out the people by just having an online booking service in the first place, either their own, or joining one of the many 3rd party services. It is purely because they haven't done this that duplex needs to exist in the first place. So if the receiving side ever got automated enough so as to have their own duplex call answering then google wouldn't need to call them in the first place.

This also sounds like a lot of effort and hoop jumping just to avoid dependency hell, you might as well just ship rpm/apt packages with statically linked binaries in them, the result would be just as bloated, and you wouldn't lose the conflict avoidance that would otherwise belost by running more than one package manager.

or is it just a NiH attempt at a Docker clone

You are referring to the eCall system, it is mobile phone (GSM) based, and is meant to remain dormant until there is an accident, at which point it calls the emergency services and reports the location and a few other limited pieces of info. There are quite strict rules on data privacy and anti-tracking that go with it.

The thing is that so far they have used the wifi to access only the functions that the wifi system is meant to have access to, those functions are supposed to be limited to the owner so yeah theres a security issue there, a mitm attack it reads like.

but. It doesn't give access to anything terribly exciting, or dangerous. "oooh scary they can drain the drive battery" (by activating the pre-heater), it's a hybrid, it has a petrol engine, that battery drain could cost you whole pennies in extra fuel on your journey. sigh.

If your going to freak out about security then the keyless door entry would be the more tempting attack vector, the old "use a signal booster to unlock the car" trick, then you have access to the OBDII port directly and could maybe cause some real problems.

The ESP8266 Arduino environment has an NTP client as one of the example programs.

Solar fits the demand curve ? Maybe in a hot country where there is lots of air con, but not in the UK. Go check sites like gridwatch for the actual demand curves, peak demand is early evenings, currently around 6pm, long after its dark.

Being able to 3D scan something from your phone would be neat, if a bit niche, but the printer will not be mobile, and just like the current desktop scanners, your highly precise model will only be of the visible OUTSIDE of the object. That might be fine if you just want a cheap plastic replica of that sculpture, but pretty much useless if you wanted a replacement for anything but the crudest of mechanical parts.

Its all well and good it looking for new speed limit signs, but some speed limits are contextual in the UK e.g. National Speed limit (black line crossing a white circle), and most 30 limit areas are not signposted at all as its implied by the urban setting and street lighting.

Cheaper again, ESP8266 wifi board, the NodeMCU firmware is very easy to program with, write a script that on wakeup it connects to wifi and makes a http request to your alerting system, or sends an email, or whatever, then shuts it down to 'deep sleep until reset' wire the big button to the reset line. costs just a few quid, its being hardware reset to wake it up so less chance of it failing, and should run off batteries for months if not years.

Go look at the source code to one of the open source projects like OpenPilot,
they integrate accelerometers, gyros, magnetometers, barometric altimeter and GPS for their navigation system,
modern GPS chips also have anti-hijacking/jamming, eg SiRFstarIV GSD4t consumer device chipset,
and the off the shelf radio control kit can do encrypted spread-spectrum comms.

It is not trivial to stop one by jamming, a shotgun up close is way more effective

Well that explains a lot, a few months ago I discovered that my laptop had started to trip the mains when i took it into the office which had a more modern fuse box than at home. Figured out through trial and error that it was the cable from the wall to the psu, and application of a multimeter showed a measurably small resistance between live and earth when the cable was disconnected. I put it down to wear and tear, chucked it away and bought a replacement. Sounds like i was lucky to spot it early before it caused a fire, as that cable was usually left plugged in at home.