You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

This sounds like someone made minute, non-revolutionary advances on standard de-salination and described it as if they were the first person to invent evaporative desalination. People have been doing sun powered desalination for thousands of years.

At small scales.

At large scales, desalination plants use reverse osmosis, which pretty much inherently creates a brine that is released back into the environment. You're not "moving the salt" to any useful industrial process, since it's still rather dilute.

At best, some of those plants use solar power to drive the RO process. But we'd much rather have the electricity to power other things, so a process that uses a non-semiconducting metal surface to perform solar-powered evaporative distillation, without a need to dispose of a brine, and without relying upon solar-electric generation and conversion, is a bigger deal than you make it out to be.

The Neo is the Apple laptop here.

Dells offering is branded XPS. It sounds like you conflated the two.

So the Neo definitely has access to Apple parts - and its been confirmed to use the same SoC that was previously just used by the iPhone line of products.

So why go to the cinema to see that? I will just wait until it comes on streaming - their fuckery with season 3 has already lost my interest, so Im not going out of my way to see this.

I watched The Mandalorian season 1 and enjoyed it.

I watched The Mandalorian season 2 and ... yeah, it was good but I was mildly disappointed in the whole "you should know these characters from other Star Wars media, otherwise they are mildly uninteresting side characters that everyone else is raving about for some reason" thing.

Then .... The Mandalorian season 3 - holy fuck. You had to actually watch an entirely different season of something else first in order to pick this one up, otherwise the ending to season 2 and the start of season 3 do not join up at all. Im out. Im not bouncing between different things just to maintain a hope in hell of understanding whats going on.

Its both.

As you say, previous films had some degree of continuity.

But with Daniel Craigs Bond, we see him earn the 007 designation in the first film, so that makes his Bond a reboot and self contained.

Oh seriously?

I use both Slack and Teams day to day (we use Slack internally, client uses Teams, so we are on both as a result).

Slack we never have any issues with, and can find information from previous conversations easily.

Teams? Fuck teams. Fuck it and then fuck it some more. Its slow, clunky, constantly has issues, very hard to find information unless you still have the chat open somewhere, and chats are spread all over the place (chats, teams, channels...). Teams also requires you to have access to the workspaces OneDrive and SharePoint as well if you want to share files, so if you dont have access to those things then ... you are limited to text only.

Its video call system is sorely limited, and even doing things like zooming in to the presenters shared screen is clunky and shit.

Teams is the worst collaboration system I have ever used, so dont try making out that its better than Slack or Zoom. It is by far the worst of the three.

The argument will be that its not a bank, (I mean, who wants to trust those things?), and the money is merely travelling in a conveyance

I dont see an issue with that, as UK schools also ban a lot of other things during "free time" (its not actually time without restriction), for example leaving the school grounds for most of the school body (when you get into sixth form, you gain more freedoms as you are deemed to be there voluntarily).

Yup, been buying up spares for a year or so now, I started thinking something was up when they had major stock issues, and theyve never really recovered from that so. I have maybe 10 pairs of my favourites tucked away now.

You can do digital preservation without distributing copies to the general public.

Yeah, I know Im going to get downvoted for that, but thats the crux of the issue here - it isnt the fact that the item is being preserved, that can be done entirely privately until the copyright expires, its about the fact that those people involved in the preservation want to release it immediately to the public. They want immediate gratification for their efforts.

Thank the Trump-Lord that coal and natural gas plants are free, eh?

Same.

Most of my email these days is for other “me’s”, its getting to the point that the address is unusable and Ive been considering moving away from it.

It doesnt help that Gmails spam filtering is also shite now, and I get 50-60 spam emails into my inbox a day.