Oh my lord -
My first engineering job involved hardware using the 1802, in around 1985, and that POS was completely and totally obsolete even then. This was, of course, a defense program, so the prototypes had been built in the mid-1970's and nothing had changed since then.

You seem to be operating under the misapprehension that paying for a service obviates any chance of you getting monetized. That's patent nonsense.

The modern web run on monetization of everyone who touches a keyboard. Full stop.

Paying on top of that is simply a transaction between you and the site monetizing you - "I'll give you $20 if you won't show me ads". In my mind, that's completely separate from the monetization aspect. Meta's proposal seems to be a weird mixture - "Give me $20, and I won't whore you out as much as I do those who don't pay". Meta is still going to be collecting it's dossier on you, the only difference is there will be limitations on how it can use and share various kinds of information.

>>> The best commercial lithium-ion batteries...have a service life of up to eight years.

Well, I guess my 6 year old / 90,000 mile Tesla is going to be junk here in the near future. Either that, or it doesn't have "The best commercial lithium-io batteries" in it.

One thing I've learned in owning an EV for 6 years - there's a huge battery advance happening every week. Remarkably, very few of them make it to production. I'll believe this one when I see it.

And Vulcan just had a perfect first launch. Yes, it's very possible to do Rocket development on a "Must be Perfect" plan - but it also means you can't do much new and untested, and the simulations and small-scale tests you have to do first cost ridiculous amounts.

SpaceX has chosen a different path - a path whose #1 goal is creating CHEAP launch capability, not just launch capability. SpaceX has built and scrapped more boosters than they've launched as they work on the production process and making the boosters CHEAP. Their goal is to launch 6 times this year, which is a lot easier when the hardware is cheap than when it's expensive. As I write, they have three more ready/nearly ready to launch, and at least three more under construction.

Starship, on the other hand, has had a lot more iterations built and tested - it's more complex that the booster, and expected to do more. The last launch was Starship #28, most of the previous versions having been scrapped as the develop their manufacturing processes.
Heck, they've even scrapped ships #33, 34, 35 and started on 36 and 37, because they didn't believe they'd learn anything from 33-35.

SpaceX has gone into their testing phase with the expectation that things are going to fail, and explode. They feel that they'll make the fastest progress in a hardware-rich environment where they can launch early and often, learn from real launches and not just simulations, and use the launches as part of their manufacturing development. Perhaps they are wrong, perhaps building rockets one-at-a-time that can't be allowed to fail, is the fastest and most reliable way to build new rocket technologies. ULA, Blue Origin, Boeing and Arianespace are certainly taking this approach in the West, so there's no shortage of companies trying to make you happy. In a year or two, we'll see whose approach appears to be working best - ULA's Vulcan Centaur launched in Jan 2024, with six more flights scheduled for this year and seven in 2025; that's a ridiculous but also awe-inspiring schedule, and more power to them if they make it. Aerojet Rocketdyne and Boeing's SLS launched in 2022, with the next launch scheduled in 2025 - that's a ridiculous and awe-inspiring schedule also, but in a different sense. Ariane 6 is scheduled to fly this year.

So, I guess in summary there's plenty of launchers in process that follow the approach you seem to prefer. I'm excited about SpaceX because they're doing it differently - out in the open, with an experimental approach, and an end goal vastly different than anyone has successfully had in space travel. Maybe they'll fail; or maybe in 5 years I'll be planning my next vacation trip to Australia on a regularly scheduled Space Liner and getting there in 30 minutes rather than 14 hours. Or, maybe, I'll be watching watching a SpaceX vehicle landing on Mars and deploying a Tesla Cybertruck to pick up all those samples that the Perserverence rover carefully prepared that NASA can't afford to go retrieve - and collecting an extra ton of rocks to also bring back for study.

Agreed - for the foreseeable future, the most valuable commodities in space will be:
1. LOX
2. LCH4
3. LH2
4. H2O
All of those will be far more valuable than gold, silver, platinum, palladium. And even if you figured out a way to cheaply redirect a solid gold million-tonne asteroid to earth, an exercise left to the reader is "How much will that gold be worth, when there's only 200,000 tonnes currently available on Earth (most held as wealth and not traded) and new production is about 2000 tonnes per year?"

None of the Scientists polled were in the physical sciences - all life sciences (other than one climate scientist). Hence all the questions are about living organisms.
Of course, the stated goal included "...on Earth", which kinda limits the "knowledge of the universe" questions, although Fusion is most definitely an "..on Earth" kinda question.

>>> You got an incomplete car that needed an OTA to make it work right.

You do realize that when I picked up my 2018 Model 3, it didn't even have a functional radio? IIRC, it was almost a year before a software update enabled the FM radio. That's not to mention all the other advertised features that were missing or badly handicapped.
Now, my wife's 2023 Model 3 is a beautiful, complete vehicle. Far better than my 2018. Of course, 2023 EV's have to compare themselves with a 2023 Model 3, and not a 2018. Despite having 100 or more years of experience building vehicles, other manufacturers are generally still 5 years behind Tesla.

I just had a problem with my 2018 Tesla Model 3 with 82,000 miles.
The headrest cover (a urethane-based fake leather) developed a blister that came apart, leaving an ugly sticky black spot.
I requested a price quote on a new headrest, because I was obviously out of warranty.
$35.60 was the response, and that included a mobile technician coming out to my place of work and doing the swap. The next day, I had a new headrest.

Maybe that's one of the reasons people prefer to buy Tesla's EV's and not anyone elses.
Ruminate for a second on how much that would cost for your car.

>> makers are cancelling ev because poor, first generation versions of EVs that don't measure up to a Tesla don't sell....

Fixed that for you....

https://www.statista.com/stati...
Note that Q4 2023 isn't on the graph....

Well, let's see.
The USA currently uses about 4,000 terawatt-hours of electricity a year (4x10^12 Wh). (https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-consumption-since-1975/). Let's call it 5x10^12 for ease of calculations.
Let's use an average of 5 hours of solar production a day (https://unboundsolar.com/solar-information/sun-hours-us-map), assuming that we build solar installations across the southern US and distribute power northwards via the power grid.
That means we need about (5*10^12 / 5) = 10^12 watts of solar panels.
Large-scale solar installations are currently running about $1/watt installed. (https://www.marketwatch.com/guides/solar/solar-farm-cost/)
That suggests about 10^12 dollars to completely power the US with solar - about $1 Trillion. And this assumes that buying solar panels on this scale doesn't drive costs down further.

The USA currently spends about $6 Trillion / year (https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1829)

So, for 16% of the USA Federal Budget, we could (ignoring certain physical realities) build out enough solar in one year to power the entire country. Or, in a more reasonable approach, let's take 20 years to build it out - that's about $50 Billion / year, perhaps 1/10 of the annual Military budget or 1/4 of the Agriculture budget, or about all of the Energy Department budget. Twenty year build out is a nice approach because the expected lifetime of Solar is around 20 years, so the industrial base we create to build out the system can continue to be used 20 years later to start a rolling replacement of the existing panels. It'd be interesting to see how much we could reduce Federal expenditures if we didn't have to protect our oil supplies.

Now, there are some missing dollars in this analysis. For example, there's no money for storage - the 5 hours a day that Solar is producing needs to provide electricity for 24 hours. But even doubling the cost doesn't make for a untenable situation, assuming we don't do something stupid like trying to create a lithium-ion battery farm large enough for storage. They're great for load-levelling, but not at the scale we're discussing. Pumped hydro or similar bulk energy storage solutions would be far more reasonable.

And this requires no new technology development that's "Just 20 years away from commecialization", only the creation of sufficient factories to crank out panels by the billions (We would be smart enough to build the industrial base domestically, wouldn't we?).

Lots of almost correct there.

First of all, most current phones top out at in the 9-12W range - which puts them at about a 1C charge rate into their 10Wh battery. It's hard to charge much faster, because the generated heat is hard to get rid of. I don't see phones going past 15W any time in the near future because of the heat - not just from Qi inefficiency, but also heat generated in the battery. Tablets, on the other hand, could likely take advantage of higher charge rates simply due to the larger radiating surface area.

BPP nominally allows up to 5W of charging, but can be driven to just below 10W with a bit of gamesmanship. If you see a Qi charger that says it charges at 10W, it is almost assuredly a BPP based charger. Many phones won't take advantage of this higher rate on BPP because the foreign object detection in BPP is primitive - and you don't want a dime under the phone to heat up from magnetic induction to a pretty cherry red. Kinda hurts when you try to pick it up.

EPP nominally allows up to 15W of charging, but could probably be pushed to 30W using the same technique if the charger supported it, but I don't know of anything that does so. There are big issues with trying to do that when you don't have the fine physical alignment between Power Transmitter and Power Receiver coils that MagSafe brings to the table. EPP has more sophisticated foreign object detection, which makes the higher power much safer.

MPP currently goes to 15W, and significantly reduces heat generation due to the better alignment of TX and RX coils, and perhaps due to the higher frequency (EPP transfers power at 100-200 kHz, MPP at around 350 (360?) kHz). I don't have a great deal of experience with it.

The big problem with Qi 2.0 MPP is that it's incompatible with at least some Qi certified chargers and devices on the market. The embedded magnets that are great at aligning the coils can saturate the ferrite shield used behind the coils, causing all kinds of issues when charging power is ramped up. All you have to do is look at forums where Apple users complain that their non-Apple Qi charger won't charge their phone - of course, recent iPhones are NOT Qi certified because of the magnets, but you can't tell an Apple user that. The Qi committee knows this incompatibility, which is the main reason for the major version number bump on the spec - they feel that the alignment benefits of MagSafe outweigh the loss of backwards compatibility.

EV's take much, much better care of their batteries than Phones do (well, at least Teslas do; early Leaf owners might disagree...).
If Phone manufacturers wanted batteries to last 10 years, they'd give you an option to limit the charge to 80 or 90%, because charging to 100% regularly has significant impacts on battery degradation. Phone manufacturers also push the batteries to the limit - 100% charge on a phone battery might be considered 110% or so for an EV battery.
My Tesla Model 3 is five and a half years old with 82,000 miles (130,000 km) on it, and has roughly 90% of the original battery capacity. If it follows the Model S battery degradation curve, it'll have 80% of the original battery capacity at roughly 300,000 miles, as degradation rate dropped drastically on the Model S after the first 50,000 miles or so. I've owned a number of cars past 200,000 miles, and frankly the condition of the fabrics, plastics, trim, and everything else tends to be pretty poor by that time, so a 240 mile range (80% of the original 310 mile rating) will be the least of my worries.

Am I the only one who remembers, in the early days of Google, typing "Hardware Store near me" into Google, and getting a list of hardware stores....in Maine (abbreviation ME)? Believe me, most of the United States was between me and Maine.

>>> the number of 70 year olds is increasing, but the total number of people in health care is decreasing

The movement of AI into health care can't come soon enough. I'm tired of human doctors just going through the motions, I'd prefer an AI that could look at the totality of a patients symptoms, compare them with the totality of the medical literature and with the totality of known human body chemistry, and be able to spit back two or three likely diagnoses to pursue. Maybe this process is guided by a human doctor, but the outcomes would have to be better than what we have now.

Absolutely, for projects like this that don't use any copyrighted code, and for automated takedowns on YouTube, etc.

The Copyright lobby got ridiculous statutory damages enshrined in law ($750 per infringement, which really adds up when you join a Torrent swarm with 1000 peers...), so I think we should push for the same on the content producer side - $750 for each view of a video or use of a project that is impacted by an obviously invalid DMCA filing. If you can show that 10,000 people couldn't see your stream because it got taken down, well that becomes a nice little payday.