It's a fair point, but also keep in mind the target - A $100,000 anti-missile missile system does more than stop $1000 rockets - it stops $1000 rockets from taking out potentially multiple millions of equipment, which itself might have very high economic differentials - e.g., the target saved may itself be say a piece of field artillery lobbing $2,000 155mm shells taking out $2,000,000 tanks for example. There is also a situational or time component - spending $100k to stop a $1k rocket might be well justified if that is providing cover to an advancing force or spearhead. Or just the possibility may make rocket attacks futile to the point they don't continue to happen.

Watching drones in the Ukraine conflict feel new in terms of economic imbalance, but propose it is not really. Consider a 5.56mm bullet is just shy of a buck (say). To impose a combat injury or fatality which takes an enemy off the field takes say about 2,000 bullets by some estimates - roughly $2k per soldier downed. The cheapest investment in conscripts I could find is still ~$3k investment, a US soldier, $25k in direct basic training costs - or, if in theatre, well over $500k with indirect deployment costs. Or the cost of a lifetime of economic potential. However you cut it, bullets are cheap relative to the life it can take. It's really just the same calculus.

That said, lobbing missiles at drones and drones at ships, the overall point certainly stands - there is a strong economic advantage to the powers whom are able to effectively and efficiently deploy (and/or counter) such cheap systems.

It does seem ridiculous, but there are ways it could be plausible. If you have a watch that is set without intervention to an external reference - WWVB, or GPS, cell tower, or sundial - then time warping everything except the watch becomes explainable, perhaps expected.

I get the sense that is not the scenario being portrayed here though.

BB10 was quite nice, particularly as it was on the Playbook, and the Passport was a really nice phone, and did run Android apps within. The passport in particular is pretty easy to break down with modular components easily replaced. If it had the equivalent of 'root' access, I'd still be using it & really miss that keyboard - it was a great phone. The writing was on the wall though, as 2016 was the last OS update and their switch to Android was already begun.

Except, Blackberry's did have a backdoor for the most part, unless you're using BES. In which case, they shouldn't - that's the intent - but likely still did. Roughly contemporary: https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

Almost anytime one is thinking about having a "dark mode", the better solution is to have "themes" - let the user have it whatever way they want.

This exists, actually. Take a look at the Mahindra Roxor, based on the original, licensed produced to current day. They can be had in NA now as ATVs. There are kits available to make them road legal.

Well, Google Play Services are system files.. I'm not sure how much of this is necessary, but I used a Magisk module to install MicroG, and use an Xposed module for the signature spoofing. I imagine at a minimum, root would be required to remove the Google apps in the first place. I would suggest trying it on a unlocked "old beater" phone first.

Might not be the answer you're hoping for, but it is in MicroG, which now uses OSM for mapsv2. Not quite the same as bring to pick and choose, but you can get to OSM with a weeee bit of work :)

You are close to right. Battery packs are heavy, and not very energy dense compared to heavy fuel or marine diesel. They take up space (as do the control panels): typically, rectilinear and seperated by bulkheads (compared to liquid fuels, whose tanks can be con-formal, fit around what otherwise might be difficult spaces for human use). They take up weight: in addition to displacement usually being directly equatable to money-making cargo carrying capacity, increased weight means a larger hull & correspondingly greater structural weight and increased resistance (& therefore, more propulsive power required).

For this, you also get a much, much shorter range and higher CAPEX to get things up and running.

There are vessels, though where this is a worth-while trade-off. Short-distance, regularly scheduled sailings from known points - such as many car ferries - works well, where shore power is available regularly between sailings. Pilot boats with limited speed requirements, crew boats, near-shore maintenance vessels also have typical operational profiles where there are short trips with extended downtime suitable for pure-electric on todays technology.

Hybrid can also be an option, but somehow have to get past the mechanical energy conversion losses. Often, large highly-efficient low-speed or medium-speed diesels directly shafted with either a shaft alternator off a PTO/'booster' motor, or in-line shaft motor/generators, usually end up way more efficient by fuel, and lower in most NOX/SOX emissions, than generation+storage with batteries or combinations of generator sizes. If these save anything, it's really a matter of operational profile, or other considerations (vibration mitigation, speed regulation, other power draws such as DP systems, torque handling as on ice breakers).

All-electric ships are likely the future, I'm sure. To be competitive with liquid fossil fuels on an even footing, battery technology and control systems (VFD's and the like) have a long way to come yet, order of magnitude in many cases. Still, there are applications.

It will be in a sense. Traditional hard drives continue to add capacity, but remain quite slow, so their rebuild times continue to grow. At some point, additional drives are required to maintain suitable resilience against data loss as the probability of multiple drive failures increases. That narrows the price difference between the two. If their two respective trajectories continue in terms of price, capacity, failure rates and rebuild times, SSD's will at some point cross a point where they are still more expensive per TB, but less expensive in an array.. more so when cooling, power consumption, and man-hours to swap failed units out, and sheer volumetric density are factored in. We're looking at a future where SSD's supplant hard drives and traditional hard drives supplant tapes .. generally.

They won't take care of it now.

There is no revenue in it. They'd rather you use OneDrive, under subscription, or rather, use the free OneDrive and then get Office 365 as the straight-up OneDrive price is a bit rich.

Windows is a full multi-user OS, under the hood.

Unfortunately, something like Aster is required to allow the user to use it as such, and that program is not compatible with the Windows license (should that bear any weight on you). Some DRM also tends to fail pretty hard, i.e., Steam.. but that is third-party.

Again, here, no rosey future - rather than allow/support multi-seating, they are pushing DaaS/Azure based instances.. again, for subscription.

That depends on how the ads are added.

The days of podcasters reading something they half-heartedly believe in at the half-way mark are dying. Podcast advertisers are seeking ways to track and profile listeners, and to determine if and how their ads are actually played (i.e. Remote Audio Data [RAD]), and 'customized' ads are currently being injected on-the-fly by redirecting downloads to advertisers (adswizz.com) for some podcasts.

For now, one can get podcasts from an RSS feed. It's not improbable to see a future where podcasts are only available through walled gardens, played on authorized players, with non-skippable ads, following in the footprints of .. basically.. all other media.

YALP works, it's on F-Droid.

In order to really work without Google though, one needs also to replace play services, location services, cloud messaging (GCM/firebase), disable the hotspot checking, disable safetynet checks, etc., it's more than just not signing in - there are a pervasive number of googley tie-ins.

Need root + firewall + something like MicroG and a healthy dose of paranoia to seperate Google and Android.

Well, there is (was?) one easy way to differentiate such files. I found a marked improvement with higher bitrate MP3's when played through the surround sound setup I had at the time, an early Pro-Logic (matrix) add-on unit. With typical MP3 bitrates of the day around 128kbps, the back/surround speaker(s) were often just a jumbled mess - and the effect was not subtle.

It's not something I can recall occuring since, with Pro Logic II or such, but did greatly inform my decision to rip my CD collection to Ogg-Vorbis files with a relatively high quality setting (despite the relative limitations of storage space at the time).

Oh, they can be made to go. Nothing Google on my phone.. just need root.