If I'm following the description correctly, it causes heat to move across the special substance, which can make it cold on one side and hot on the other.

Nepe. It's a chunk of dielectric in a capacitor that gets hotter as the capacitor is charged and colder as it's discharged. You have to bathe it in a fluid and pump the fluid past it and to the cold or hot ends of the system at the appropriate times in the charge-discharge cycle (or do some other auxiliary heat-moving thing).

Peltier systems work similarly,

Nope. Different system entirely. Moving charge carriers carring differenct amounts of heat between hot and cold ends, vs. locked-in-place atoms becoming more or less spin-aligned, and hotter or cooler, as a field is applied and revoved, with the heat moved to the hot end or from the cold end by a pumped fluid.

You can add a little heat, or pull out a little heat, but it's not gonna make ice in the desert.

Or you can stack them in series in a shrinking pyramid and reach cryogenic temepratures. (Such coolers are used for some infrared cameras to cool the sensor so it can detect cooler things.)

But Peltier systems are mostly not used when there's room for other solutions because they're terribly inefficient,

Commonly tethering is detected by a different ttl, as the connected device will have an extra hop on the way to the carrier router. Some software can be had to alter this count which may evade detection.

Why weren't they already doing that? Is it simply cost?

Almost certainly. (Could be the current output of their one mine is already committed elsewhere, so it had to wait for other mines to be opened or that one to be buy another truck or the like.)

If worst came to worst we could just MAKE it from any convenient carbon source. But that would cost about twice as much - give or take a tad depending mostly on what form you needed for your process' feedstock.

But why pay $2 for what you could buy from China for $1, or from any of several other sources for maybe $1.15? Until China decides to keep itheir production for themselves. Then there's a flurry of price fluctuations as the other suppliers ramp up or start up and the customers get other suppliers under contract.

So get it from Canida:

Mine production: 15,000 MT

Canada's graphite production rose by 3,000 MT in 2022 over the previous year. Interest in Canada as a source of graphite has been rising for the past few years, particularly since Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) said it plans to source the lithium, graphite and cobalt it needs for its Nevada-based lithium-ion battery gigafactory from North America. The Lac des Iles mine is the only mine in Canada that is producing graphite, but there are a number of graphite projects under development.

(I've posted this in more detail before.)

Essentially all the real problems the Network Neutrality proposals try to address are misuses of technical capabilities (which were designed to enable improved network performance) to implement anticompetitive or consumer fraud schemes.

The FCC is good on technical issues, but is generally rotten on consumer protection. This is not a technical issue, and technical tweaks to address it also tend to re-break the network issues it was built to fix. Expect trouble if you try to fix this stuff via FCC regulation.

The FTC is a consumer protection agency with a track record of taking on large companies (including technical ones - AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, ...) often imposing serious beatings that mitigate or solve the problems or at least mitigate them for years or decades. IMHO they are the agency that could handle the job.

They'd also like to handle it. But right now there are two issues: They read the law as blocking them from ruling on the Internet, and they are currently underfunded and understaffed for the task.

IMHO the FTC seems the right agency to handle the job, while the FCC seems like to break it worse rather than fix it once they're turned loose on it. It would just require a legislative tweak to make it clear they have a go-ahead, and perhaps a bit of appropriation to staff them up.

Much as I hate to encourage government interference of any sort, if you intend to pass and enforce laws to turn the dogs of law enforcement loose on miscreants, you should turn loose the breed of dog that has a track record doing the right thing.

I think that's only true of automatic transmissions. (Manuals have the gears and shafts immersed in oil.

The problem is when a manual is in neutral, the lower gear shaft does not spin and bring oil up but the top gear shaft thatâ(TM)s not engaging is still attached to the spinning drivetrain so it results in a lack of lubrication issue.

OK, I see how that would be a problem. (I thought they had both (sets of) shafts immersed and/or had a "gear" that was always turning and at least partially immersed, even when in neutral, so they wouldn't fry when a user tried to save gas by putting them in neutral and stopping the engine on a long mountain downgrade.)

Also you'd need to have (or add if not present) the oil cooler radiator on either type of auto transmission car - as with a "dingy-capable" vehicle (one that can be towed behind an RV with all wheels rolling and doesn't accomplish this using wheel-locking hubs.)

Auto gearboxes dont like being towed because they require fluid to be pumped around else gears start grinding pretty soon.

I think that's only true of automatic transmissions. (Manuals have the gears and shafts immersed in oil. Automatics require the oil to be pumped, to provide power for the logic and actuators to lubricate some shafts/beraings that require oil injection because they aren't immersed, and to circulate it through an external radiator and/or heat exchanger in the engine coolant radiator (which then also would like the engine to be running to run the water pump) to cool the fluid which gets heated by the moving parts.)

Older transmissions only have a pump on the front (engine side) shaft. So the transmission isn't cooled and lubed if the engine isn't running. This limits towing speed and duration (unless you disconnect the drive shaft or put the driven wheels on a dolly or raise them off the pavement.) That's why to companies usually haul auto-tranny cars on a platform. It also means you can't push-start the car, because it won't shift into gear without the fluid pressure from the pump.

Some modern automatic transmissions also have a rear pump (on the wheel-side shaft). This provides fluid pumping even with the engine stopped, which lets it be towed longer and faster (especially if the vehicle has a transmission oil cooling radiator), may allow it to be push-started, and lets it use engine braking without rising loss of braking (both engine drag and power brakes) and power steering if the engine stalls and stops turning. ("Tow-haul mode" in vehicles with the towing package.)

So this conversion looks like it would work on a manual or a rear-pump auto transmission, but would also need an extra electric tranny fluid pump on a front-pump-only automatic transmission.

Burton believes he'll be able to offer the product for around AU$5,000 (£2,640)

Google says that's $3,200 USD at today's exchange rate.

intended as sarcasm I think, but I moderated this flamebait because ...

And then commented in the same discussion, which undoes all your current moderations in that discussion (as well as prevent more).

Linux was useful from day one. RISCV is nowhere near that. It is being used in deeply embedded cores to avoid paying arm license fees.

And to avoid being crippled by export restrictions on the other instruction set technology.

Also to avoid the embedded hard-spyware included with cutting-edge processors by rolling your own perfectly adequate (if not bleeding-edge) machine cores for which you have the source and it's being looked at by thousands of others with similar biases against hard-spyware.

I never got the appeal of this bland bitter tasting drink. Is it just machismo to pretend to like it?

I used to think the same. Until one summer day I hiked along a railroad track for a few miles until I got really thirsty - and upon reaching a commercial area side-tripped a couple blocks to a bar and asked for a water or soda. But this bar had none, and recommended their on-tap beer.

It tasted REALLY good, like it had just the right mix of electrolytes, vitamins, and other nutrients to restore my body after hours of hot, dry, non-trivial exercise.

I did not become a beer drinkier. But now I have a gut feeling for what it's about, and why it's popular after work, especially among those whose hysical labor is substantial and in exposed or hot-and-dry environments.

British Isles I'm not familiar enough with: Maybe they'll have to import hops from somewhere in Europe.

Heck. If global warming really takes off there's a LOT of land in Iceland that will be freed of ice and should be GREAT for hops cultivation.

The Yakima tribe and some of the non-tribal people around them used to be major growers of hops. (It was one of the few crops the land there was suitable for.) Then a few decades back several major commercial brewers switched to something else instead of actual hops. Their market dried up and the area has only a little hops production now.

Beer made in the US using actual hops is mainly products of microbreweries these days.

Though hops grew especially well in the northern tiers of states there are beer-worthy cultivars of hops that grow just fine as far south as southern California and the levels of heating predicted for even most of the eco-disaster scenarios correspond to moving crops a couple hundred miles north or to fields at a couple hundred feet greater altitude.

So I'm not all that worried that U.S. beer-drinkers will not be able to find something tasty if the brewers will deign to produce it. British Isles I'm not familiar enough with: Maybe they'll have to import hops from somewhere in Europe.