You're assuming he wouldn't have eaten some kind of sweet snack instead. To lose weight, you perhaps need to train yourself to like other kinds of less-sweet food.

Here's one I know of with a funky concept that tries to work around these challenges: Wavepiston

The problem is not just corrosive salt water, but the forces involved, due to the density of water.

The generator needs to be built cheaply, be big enough (or otherwise scalable) to make it worthwhile, and last for a long time, again compared to the forces involved. Even with a good design you need to built a lot of them to achieve economy of scale.

Demonstration plants are fine, but if there's no feasible path from the demo to full-scale production of new plants, then they won't go anywhere.

It's a chicken and egg situation. Without faster internet, what's the point of faster wifi and cabled ethernet?

Well, of course not. None of his companies are doing easy things. It's going to take a long time.

The Boring Company got a foot in the door in Las Vegas, so that's probably what they are focusing on at the moment. Busy working instead of dreaming.

No, that's a strawman. I don't have a big problem with Apple not supporting the hardware anymore, although I do think they're cheap that they don't. I have a problem with them locking things down so that others cannot step in. That's what the EU ruling is fixing.

There's a bit more nuance to my story, but I was just trying to make the point that there are people out here who may be helped by the EU ruling.

I'm stuck with an iPad 3 that Apple has bricked due to age. No software updates. There are many sites that don't work at all due to the oldish Safari, which is by the way so buggy that I have to reboot regularly.

Screen, battery etc. still work fine. I just use it to listen to/watch something mindless just before I sleep.

I'm looking forward to the EU order taking effect. I'm never going to own an Apple device again, but I don't want to buy another tablet until this one is dead. I would actually prefer a native Firefox, but Chrome is okay too.

Perhaps I can also get rid of the stupid autocorrect and actually use it to browse forums (it always gets the language wrong). Oh, my.

And he's not writing the headline. You need to separate what he actually said in a certain context, with the media distorting the story in the hunt for the most dramatic angle.

He did an interview with the TED talk owner some years ago where they discussed the plans.

Basically dig small simple tunnels, use off-the-shelf commodities (Teslas on pavement) instead of expensive infrastructure, and hire a bunch of engineers to work on the tunnel boring machine tech to get the tunnels done much faster. Oh, and work out a bootstrap strategy by finding good places to earn some income while working out everything. For instance, they still aren't driving the cars autonomously.

It sounds like you might have something interesting to add, why don't you either write about it or at least link to something?

I'm impressed with the nether portal building.

You could imagine showing a system like this videos of house hold chores, equipping it with arms, like the Tesla bot that might some day arrive, and then it starts doing the laundry?

If anyone out there is considering a degree abroad and it's engineering, let me suggest Aalborg University.

You do one project per semester in a small team (max 7 people). Those people are also your team mates when going to lectures and doing lecture work. Lectures are only a minor part though, most of the time is set aside for the project, which is one your team decides do to. Basically it's like doing 10 half-year Master's theses, with the two last projects being the actual Master's thesis. It's rewarding work, you learn to cooperate (the first two semesters have courses covering this) and you have people that look out for you.

I think in 2019 the engineering department at Aalborg University was ranked 4th place, just below Stanford and MIT and above Cambridge - whatever those rankings are worth.

It looks like tuition is around 7000 USD/semester for people outside EU.

I inherited a book from 1946 on commercial (at the time) fruit production - apples, pears and similar - and cold storage is the basic way of slowing down the ripening. Of course, commercial large-scale operations will have more sophisticated techniques to lengthen the season. For instance with apples you can also shut down the supply of oxygen (the apples are still alive) in a controlled fashion. But none of that is relevant if you're just storing it for a week.

It works wonders for apples. 4 degrees celcius is the recommend temperature - IIRC it's 1 degree celcius for pears. The hardest part is avoiding buying overripe apples from the super market. The day we have autonomous logistics and no more incompetent super market middlemen, I'll be happy.

There are some exceptions with tropical things that can't tolerate the cold. Bananas are a bit special in that their skin will turn brown, with the inside still not ripe. I usually have a FIFO queue of bananas on my counter to always have ripe ones to eat.

It also works for most vegetables.

Just experiment with it and do what works for you. If you goof up and lose $3 of produce, it's hardly the end of the world.

I don't think it's possible to built a nuclear reactor without subsidy in the Western world. So your if is a pretty big if.

Agreed that hydrogen is not as simple as it seems - to be useful, hydrogen needs to be compressed so you need heavy tanks, and you have some failure modes that battery air planes simply don't have. On the cost side, hydrogen through electrolysis + compression is much less efficient compared to charging batteries, so more expensive.

On batteries: Batteries are an improving tech. Currently exponentially improving, and we're just getting started - only a tiny part of the car fleet is on batteries yet. So it makes sense to start with the small easier routes.

I don't know much about airplanes, but I get the impression that some of the experiments with more propellers are only viable with electric air planes because the economics are different there.

Do the same persons use the iPhones versus the Androids? Otherwise you have selection bias in your sample.