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.

According to TFA:
"The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a âoedevice capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model.â

Umm, that sounds like a CNC mill to me....

Don't they do several orders at once? A single family could easily be around $200

I'm not a corporation with IT staff and a DC. I'm just a human with two or three computers in my house. It's gotten more complex over the years to easily network them and share files (Yes, I remember and used WFW). This sounds like the death-knell for my usage.
Oh, well, I guess people will never really have "personal" computers anymore anyway.

>>> and if Israel were to start losing, they could believably use nuclear weapons.

I don't think you can tar only one side with that. Israel is the only state there currently believed to have nuclear weapons, but a losing Arab state could believably use nuclear weapons also - perhaps ones currently hidden from the world, perhaps ones borrowed from a known nuclear power who has an interest in propping up the birthplace of Islam, or who simply has an interest in watching the world burn.

Where an exchange of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would spread to is an...interesting question. What would happen to the world in the case that roughly 1/3 of world oil production was disrupted is also...interesting.

Identifying obviously encrypted messages is pretty easy - especially from well-known apps like Signal and WhatsApp.

What they're selling is the connection map - who's exchanging encrypted messages with whom. Tells a government about 90% of the people that they want to surreptitiously monitor, and provides some intel based on traffic statistics - "The 'terror cell' in western downtown is sending 3 times as many messages as normal, after the leadership exchanged twice as many messages as normal last week".
What those statistics really mean is that the Mom's group that opposes the mayor is organizing this weekend's cookie sale at the park, but hey, you gotta break a few eggs to crush an uprising.

Ignorant, as Pinky's Brain didn't claim energy capacity in GW, but instead referenced 500 GW for 5 min, which is approx 42 GWH, a perfectly cromulent measure of energy.

Sea Dragon is an interesting idea, but the concept of a "simple" 350 MN engine is a bit disingenuous. The Saturn V F-1 engine had about 8 MN of thrust, and they had terrible difficulties resolving combustion instability in the chamber, a problem that gets worse as engines get bigger. With modern computers and CFD codes, they might have luck doing so on an engine with 45 times the thrust, but I'm having trouble with that. Avoiding combustion instability is one of the main reasons for SpaceX developing the smaller, cheaper Raptor engine. With a small chamber, combustion instability is a tractable problem, and they expect to be able to build them for about $0.25M apiece - compared with a roughly $40M cost for the RS-25 (used on the Space Shuttle and SLS), which has roughly the same thrust as Raptor.

Remember that SpaceX intends to launch 9M dia SuperHeavies for a per-launch cost of a couple of million dollars - basically, the cost of the propellant. You're not gonna build a 23M diameter expendable two-stage rocket with enormous engines and fill it with fuel for that cost per launch.

Yes, sand grains contacting whatever your heat source is will come into thermal equilibrium quickly. I posit that the rate of heat flow in a solid material is vastly faster than the rate of heat flow in the same material broken into sand-grain sized chunks, as the contact area between grains is vastly smaller than the contact area between grain-sized areas in solid rock.

If you're adding heat by using low-pressure hot water or air, then sand is probably better because air/water can surround each grain and quickly transfer energy. But that limits your storage temperatures to a bit above 100C if you use water, higher if you use air (but you have to use a LOT of air). If you're adding heat by piping industrial fluids through the medium, avoiding direct contact, then solid rock is probably your best option.

So a sand "battery" is simply using the thermal mass of sand to store heat. Great. I guess if I had a source of high-grade heat that I wanted to store and turn into low-grade heat, it's not a bad choice. But if all you want is thermal mass, why not use blocks of granite? You'd get roughly twice the mass density, which would give roughly twice the thermal density.

The question really is, how big of a block of stone do I need to store enough heat in the summer to heat a neighborhood of homes in the winter?

"Electric VTOL air taxi" seems like marketing buzz rather than a description.

I guess this is really just an electric quadcopter. And that's fine from a technology point of view, but the speed and range seem limited so I can't imagine people using this to travel more than 30 miles/50km or so, so wondering who they want to sell this to.

UK rail prices are high but we seem to be looking at about twice the price of the equivalent German rail journey rather than 5 times, and not substantially slower.

Sure, the London-centric nature of the rail system is a problem, especially because changing involves faffing about on the tube, but on the whole, the UK's rail service is pretty average for Europe.

>>> City MPG is always less than highway MPG
Only for ICE vehicles. They expend chemical energy to create kinetic energy, then throw it away as heat every time they touch the brakes.
EV's, on the other hand, expend chemical energy to create kinetic energy, then recycle most of the kinetic energy back to chemical energy when they slow to a stop.

Tesla Model 3 - 141 city, 127 highway ( https://www.fueleconomy.gov/fe... )