Yes new cars are expensive in general but current Tesla prices are around or slightly below median new car prices.

On a road trip, range is never an issue for me as I don't have a 200 mile bladder let alone the 400-600 miles people keep screaming they need. Most of the time the car is charged and ready before I'm finished with food and rest stops.

Recently I flew to Santa Cruz and rented a Tesla. Ideally I wanted to stay someplace that I could charge overnight but that didn't work out. As a result I did spend several (3-4) 20 minute Supercharger sessions during a week of driving up and down the coast and to/from San Jose.

If you are a "cannonball run" person who drives 400 miles at a sitting and doesn't eat, then an EV will definitely slow you down.

Teslas simply plug in to a Supercharger. Nothing else needed, no phone, no App.

The car automatically tells the Supercharger the Credit card on file for the owner.

I've never seen a Cash charger of any kind.

It would take weeks to point out all the errors in this "Study" but just from a quick scan:

The study itself: https://www.nber.org/system/fi...

Follow the Money

"We are grateful to the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago and NSF grant SES-2117158 and SES-2214949 for research support."

So who is Becker Friedman?

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/news/...

"The Becker Friedman Institute Announces $1 Million Grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation"

So who is Peter G. Peterson?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"The Peter G. Peterson Foundation is an American billionaire-funded foundation established in 2008 by Peter G. Peterson, former US Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon Administration and co-founder of the Blackstone Group"

Back to the source paper:

Appendix A.1 Externalities

"CO2 and local air pollution emissions from driving. For EVs, we compute the damages from generating electricity to charge the vehicles"

"For GVs, we compute the harms from tailpipe emissions"

So their baseline assumption is that electricity rquires infrastructure but gasoline magically appears!

As a fun and better study:

EV or Gas, What Pollutes More? - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also, it's unfortunately common to mix the terms incorrectly.

You have that completely backward!

Capacity, i.e. energy is watt-hours!

Watts is rate of delivery, or power. Batteries store energy in watt-hours, they are filled and discharger at a power rate of watts.

Researchers, who include academics from the US, Iceland, Sweden and Switzerland, say they want to develop a way to seamlessly reroute internet traffic from subsea cables to satellite systems in the event of sabotage, or a natural disaster. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Science for Peace and Security Programme has approved a grant of as much as €400,000 ($433,600) for the $2.5 million project, and research institutions are providing in-kind contributions, documents seen by Bloomberg show.

That's how the Internet works now!

That will be $400,000 please!

I'm confused? SMS is not encrypted. It's never been encrypted, it's still not encrypted.

That said, some Apps encrypt the content before putting data in an SMS message but that is outside the purview of any Telecom and they do not have the ability to decrypt it.

Classic Optics does indeed show that you can't concentrate light to a higher intensity than the source, but it's unrelated to thermodynamics and has an implicit assumption that can be avoided. The assumption is "imaging optics". If you are working with "non-imaging" light concentrators, the optics equations no longer apply. The very term "focusing" no longer applies because it is in reference to imaging, although centralized concentrations might casually be called a focus albeit technically incorrect. The other casual reference to the second law of thermodynamics incorrectly confuses heat capacity with temperature. You certainly can concentrated temperature to a higher level than the source over a lesser area in the case of light or a lesser volume in the case of a heat pump. Temperature is not the same as energy, just like concentrating an input force into a much smaller area can produce a greater force over the limited area but it's not more energy so no violation of physics.

The article opens with an image of a hand holding a phone. The caption is:

"A ChatGPT prompt is shown on a device near a public school ..."

Oh my god, someone is using a phone within sight of a school! (From a roof top)

"The phone can send the age bit along with the evil bit."

I liked it, but Slashdot is not the Geekdom it once was, plus I too am old.

I looked at your Homepage rant on bad physics texts. I was reminded of the instructions I gave to my children and now give to my grandchildren.

"Every test question is actually two questions. The first is whatever the test says. The second is always the same regardless of subject, "Guess what I'm thinking!"

Make no mistake, Proton controls your PGP keys!

Unlike normal PGP in which you control your own secret key, in the case of Proton mail you don't have one on your machine, Proton has it.

Yes they encrypt it with a key derived from your account password and supposedly can't access it. Even assuming all that is accurate, the way Proton works is they deliver your encrypted key with JavaScript for your client browser to decrypt on your machine outside of the Proton infrastructure. This all works nicely and is very secure as long as Proton remains ethical. Should circumstances change, a trivial addition to the Proton provided JavaScript could copy your decrypted key back to the Proton servers. Should that happen on a large scale it would be exposed in a hot second, however on a limited targeted account level it would likely pass unregarded.

I like Proton, it's probably the best available, but don't confuse the security level.

"... insufficient parental controls, no "robust" age verification systems ..."

Age verification implicitly means identification and tracking for everyone, not just children.

Conceivably a Children Only nework could be implemented but that breaks down in a hot second when the kids realize they can use the adult network anonymously. Even worse, if you somehow magically identify children, congratulations now you have a child tracker.

I appreciate the desired intent but wishing is not an implementable technology. You might just as well go all out on your wishing and demand a malice detector.

Absolutely!

I was a developer on some of these late 70's early 80's military projects. At the time we were pushing the state of the art and beyond. Only U.S. parts could be used and even those had to meet Mil Spec for extreme conditions.

The military was far and away the primary buyer at the time and we were the premier software developers for this new hardware. Then came the rest of the world.

In a very few years the resources of the world easily surpassed our little enclave of special people with special hardware. You couldn't recruit developers to kill their own futures to work on obselete hardware and custom software that no one else used. Even though price was no object for the DoD, becoming the worlds expert in a specialty item of no interest to anyone else was not a good career move.

I recently learned some of my early work is now displayed in The Smithsonian. 8-)

@angel'o'sphere is correct!

MAC addresses are part of level 2 ethernet protocol, which does not have ports.

Level 3 IP protocol, which defines ports, does not use MAC addresses.

The confusion comes about from an application using level 3 IP protocol sending data over UDP Port 5353 that contains the MAC address. In this instance it's simply data on a port. In principle it could have been anything but the developers chose to use the value of the MAC as the data to be sent.