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....

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?

>>> 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... )

I have Linux Mint running on my self-built 5900x, X570 system. No problems at all with the CPU.

My Radeon 6600 however, works fine except for coming out of suspend. I get a black screen with a functioning mouse cursor, but no login prompt. It's there, of course - if I type in my password, everything straightens out and life is good.

>>> The contacts they currently use are only rated for 200A (400A peak)
So what purpose does the current rating on a connector serve? It's to keep it from getting so hot that things around it start catching on fire, or (pushed to the extreme) that it starts to melt. How can you use a connector for higher power? Keep it cool enough that none of the bad things happen, monitor it to make sure that you're coolant supply hasn't failed, and shut it down if anything looks out of the ordinary. Perfectly normal engineering. Don't quite see why you're throwing shade here.

And V4 superchargers are expected to support up to 1000V at 1000A - a good, solid MegaWatt. And with all the pedestals and high-voltage AC electric connections already in place, upgrading a V3 supercharger installation of say 8 chargers is probably an afternoon's worth of work.

What's that again about an obsolete standard?

And, by the way, there is no charging standard "CCS" - there's CCS1 in North America, and CCS2 in Europe, and the two are incompatible. So it's a bit disingenuous to decry North America using a different standard than Europe, because that was going to happen in the CCSx future anyway. It's just that we'll get the sexy, slim, easy-to-use connector and Europe is gonna be stuck with the CCS2 monstrosity because of early standardization (and why didn't Europe settle on the existing ChaDeMo conector anyway?).

Well, you can either count brands - 20 different brands each selling a couple hundred EV's a year, in which case Tesla is 5% of the market.
Or you can count EVs built a year - in which case Tesla is 60% of the market, which is certainly a majority in my book.
Or you can count EVs actually on the road - which in 2 minutes of looking I couldn't find a good reference for, but let's call it 80%. Umm, yeah.

No, the offer was a patent non-aggression agreement - you don't sue me for my use of your patents, and I won't sue you for your use of my patents. Everybody deemed it a bad choice.
IIRC, there was a second clause - you had to be willing to pony up your share of the cost of building out the Supercharger network. At that point, I think all the legacy automakers were of the opinion that "We don't build gas stations, why should we build EV charging stations".

And so here we are today - Tesla eating everybody else's lunch. Seems like everybody made a bad choice.

To put 250kW through a pin, it requires more-or-less the same chonky contact whether it's AC or DC.
>>> So either your everyday AC connector is chonky, or your connector can't handle very high power.

I'd hardly call Tesla's everyday AC connector "chonky", especially compared with CCS1/CCS2. Have you ever actually touched one?

I have a strong suspicion that the reason Tesla is stuck at 250 kW is that present-day battery packs simply can't effectively make use of higher power. Have you ever charged a nearly depleted Tesla at a 250kW station? Sure, it goes from 10% to 40% in just a few minutes, but it has to throttle back at that point, and up to 90% doesn't occur any faster than a lower-rated Supercharger. Lithium-Ion chemistry simply doesn't scale well above 1C charging rates today.