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).

No one is using well-known ports for anything legitimate that isn't the associated service. Anything spun up on e.g. 110 that isn't a POP server is going to inherently be questionable.

You'll want to amplify on this, because blocking a well-known port for an insecure protocol has no downsides. Nothing legitimate is going to be spun up on e.g. 110, why would you leave it open vs blocking it?

Porque no las dos?

I don't understand what the endgame is supposed to be for all of this. The numbers being thrown around don't make any sense at all--trillions of dollars in spending chasing billions of dollars in revenue looks insane and even worse than the dotcom era.

There's a meme out there that I can't help but agree with: "The reason RAM prices went up 4x is that a massive amount of not-yet-manufactured memory was bought with money that doesn't really exist to be put into GPUs that haven't been made yet, to be installed in data centers that haven't been built, powered by infrastructure that may never exist, to satisfy demand that isn't actually there, in order to generate profits that are mathematically impossible."

Short of simply outlawing the collection of this kind of data (which is problematic in the US), that genie is out of the bottle and is never going back in. You don't even need license plates, just access to enough cameras. It isn't exactly hard these days to track e.g. a blue 2008 Honda Civic through a well-covered area, and coverage is filling in by the day. Things like supermarket loyalty cards, credit card transactions, property tax records, etc, can answer the "who's doing the driving" part.

Ever growing automation is going to make for nice searchable databases. Which surely will never, ever, ever, be used inappropriately by those with access to them.

This is the most "correlation vs causation" quote ever. If you were in any kind of position of authority related to nuclear weapons, it would be Jurassic Park levels of hubris.

Look, I'm predisposed to be on the side of the farmers rather than Monsanto, but claiming "deep pockets" is the reason these lawsuits turned out the way they did is absurd. See Bowman v. Monsanto Co., 569 U.S. 278 (2013), and Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser [2004] 1 S.C.R. 902, 2004 SCC 34 for the actual reasons for the lawsuits.

Further, Monsanto has explicitly declared that they will not engage in the behavior that you are saying is it issue here: "We do not exercise our patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means." They're certainly capable of going back on their promises, of course, but an innocent farmer would be able to use that statement in their defense... unless this was more than "pollen that came from a neighboring farm."

Monsanto is a shit company that does shit things. Shit on them (rightfully) for that, not the things that are made up or taken out of context.

Swiss Dual Income No Kids Robinson. :)

Presumably they simply disallow more immigration until they fall back below the cap. But, sure, let's go with the horrifically dystopian option that we have no evidence to support.

Context would make this more clear to the average reader. These were not cases where e.g. seeds blew in from another field and the farmer was held liable. These were the cases where the farmers were buying or using second generation seeds (prohibited under the purchase contract with Monsanto) and treating them with Roundup.

Come on. US educational spending is VERY high on both an absolute and per capita basis, as has already been pointed out to you, and US education has been in decline since at least the 1960s. Arch-conservative (/s) Richard Feynman wrote in his autobiography about how shit our textbooks were when he was on the Arch-conservative (/s) California commission to help choose them. FWIW, I recommend reading this bit regardless of your political persuasion. I do have one quibble with it (personally, I think being able to move between at least base 2, 10, and 16 is actually quite useful, but Feynman was a physicist and not a sysadmin so her gets a pass) but it's illustrative of just how terrible our educational system is, and it is NOT a problem of money.

As far as PBS goes, if you want to know why it was defunded, start here. One of NPR's editors (yes, I know NPR and PBS are separate things), Uri Berliner, claimed that in the quarter century he worked there that it had completely lost diversity of thought, and that was a bad thing. The result is he resigned due to overwhelming hostility from his colleagues. When your Sarah Lawrence/Columbia educated editor, son of the woman who was the founding chair of Sarah Lawrence's Women's Studies department, grandson of jews murdered in Auschwitz, is ringing alarm bells and the response is to force him out... maybe you should be wondering if maybe he had a good point.

Note: I am not at all happy that CPB was defunded. As you noted, they do (or, I guess, did) a lot of great work. But the people steering the ship invited this outcome.