Lithium-ion batteries are inherently rather tricky to build. And lithium itself isn't all that widely available, though it's not exactly rare. Zinc, though, is so cheap they make pennies out of it. Lithium has higher density, but for stationary use, who cares? The competition might be sulfur-based batteries. But those run at very high temperatures, and don't scale down well.

The most interesting account I saw was from, of all things, a Pakistani newspaper. It said that the test set off an earthquake. It caused a tunnel to collapse... with about 100 people in it. They may have been many of NK's nuclear scientists. And when they sent people in to try to rescue them, another collapse took out another hundred or so people. So the site is entirely unusable, and they may have lost many of their nuclear scientists in the process.

I guess they had enough physicists but not enough geologists.

Sprint and T-M are basically dead meat under Pai's new rules. The Bells own the wire to most of the cell sites and will no longer be required to provide it to them at any price, or at best with no price cap, just the right to complain to the FCC that $10,000/month to rent a mile of Ethernet is too high.
Telcos make most of their money from BDS, also known by its historic name Special Access. They inherited the monopoly from when they were fully regulated, and letting them have it unregulated is a huge gift. Pai's excuse is that there could be competition if somebody else bothered to pull fiber there. But that's ridiculously expensive if it's not a busy spot with a lot of business customers to share it.

It never was a very good architecture, but there was a VMS port to it.

No, the FCC was right before 2002 and wrong now.
Before 2002, the carriers had to make TELECOM available, but the Internet was unregulated. Telecom is raw bit transmission, and The Internet runs on top of it, as its payload. In 2002 the FCC said that fiber was exempt, and in 2005 DSL was (cable always was), so there was nothing left for competitive ISPs. So the telcos called themselves ISPs.
The FCC should have regulated telecom again, so ISPs could compete over telco wires. But they didn't. The new rules seriously fsck up small ISPs who don't have Comcast's and ATT's lawyers to defend themselves, and make actual innovation in Internet harder. They're designed for Netflix, period.
And the law is against the FCC, but since the telcos and cable don't want the telecom regulated again (as the law calls for), they didn't fight it correctly.

They pay real money for 8" floppies? Even used ones? I have one of those desktop floppy boxes full of them, left over from my PDP-11 days. Maybe I can boot up the old -11 and wipe a few...

There may also be some doctors who will swear on a weed that the bible cures cancer.

Well, doctor of divinity from some bumpkin bible college someplace in Dixie.

The author is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. She formerly taught at UMichigan Law. I don't think she's the brick here.

In the cable business, "homes passed" is a standard metric. It means that service is available to those homes. When Charter is figuring out how much to pay for TWC, they ask about homes passed, because these are potential customers.
Verizon used other meanings of the term, from street English, to mean something else. If it goes a couple of blocks away, it sort of passes, by their standard. If it goes right by the house but they won't offer service, it is still "passed". No cable company would say that, and that's not what the City meant when they negotiated their deal with Verizon.

No, they want control even if it loses money.
General Motors makes cars. They do not own the dealerships. They let dealers sell the cars. This is good for business. If Verizon made cars, they'd insist on owning the dealerships too, and would not let anyone else repair the cars, or sell parts. They might lose customers to other car companies who were more open, but they'd rather have 100% of $x than 80% of 2*$x, even though that's less. It's dumb DNA, but it's ingrained.
What other business routinely prices well above the profit maximization level -- so high that they lose more business than the higher margins make up for? It's like Mikey D's charging $10 for a crappy burger, and when nobody shows up, raising the price to $20 to make up for it.

Telephone company DNA does not focus on making profits. They are, at heart, control freaks, and will gladly give up profits if they can keep control of their wires and the content. These are folks who fought tooth and nail to prevent attachment of customer owned telephone sets, modems answering machines, and other devices, even though they made a ton more money once these new applications expanded use of their networks.
Verizon is now controlled by its wireless subsidiary, which wants to disinvest in wireline except for pulling fiber to the wireless towers. So FiOS investment is ending. They'd sell off the rest of wireline if somebody would take it, but other than FiOS it's terribly run down. The "LoopCo" plan that Susan Crawford suggests is the only practical way forward, as it restores utility status to the fiber and opens it to creative users. But that reduces Verizon's control, so they'll fight it, like the scorpion fighting the frog on whose back it's riding.

Huawei is playing with the 5 GHz band which is becoming crowded, and whose availability has country-by-country exclusions. US rule were just liberalized a smidge but it still has exclusions for radar.

WIGig uses the 60 GHz band (57-64 GHz) which has a lot more space. It is not quite ready for the mass market, price-wise, but becoming possible in the $100 rage soon. It doesn't penetrate walls well but it's fine for cross-room very fast links.

That's multiple bits per symbol, not symbols per period.
1024QAM, for instance, has 10 bits encoded in 1024 possible values of the phase and amplitude. It's one symbol though. High-speed communications uses a combination of techniques, including OFDM (parallel, lower-speed carriers) and MIMO (separate transmitters).

The article seems to refer to conventional fission reactors that use thorium mixed in with uranium. I think Bill Gates has invested in a company that pushes that. McDowell's excellent video is about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, a much safer design that takes a bit of Uranium 233 as its seed and breeds it out of thorium, never creating a high concentration and burning almost all of it before refueling. A conventional reactor leaves over 99% of the energy in the spent fuel; a LFTR leaves very little.

Have you ever tried burying wire in Westford, MA? There's a reason everybody uses poles in New England, the same reason most farmers gave up. The ground has a little soil mixed with lots of big hard rocks. A Ditch-Witch cable backhoe won't work. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile to bury wire here, so it's only done in core cities or to go under some intersections. And with Westford's low suburban/exurban density (gotta love those big expanses of Chem-Lawn and SUV garages, the Amerucan Way), the number of subscribers per mile is low.