A nerd challenge: what new technology could provide the benefits of cell phones without the privacy problems? Given the existing information technology and a determined effort not to submit to telephone monitoring (with all its associated conveniences), what new technologies would make life tolerable?
For example, on-line access to bank accounts would have to be validated without cell phones but SIM cards are not that secure anyway, merchants would have to agree to accept digital tokens generated without using SIM card technology, and personal devices that send and receive voice calls and messages over the Internet would have to be developed. The technologies underlying Webcall already support voice and video calls over the Internet and are easy to implement. Given a device with a GPS receiver that could transmit its location to a trusted upstream mapping source, one could easily have real-time GPS guidance without revealing one's location to untrusted observers. At worst, in cities, it could connect to the Internet whenever it encountered a public WiFi network. In memory of Terry Pratchett's Leonard of Quirm, one could call this device something like device-to-talk-and-share-data-without-using-the-cellphone-network.
So I would argue the technology already exists to not use cell phones. The social expectation has been created on the part of government and merchants to expect their customers to have personal ID/tracking devices, and I expect that is the challenge.
Of course, if an alternate communication were developed, the authoritarians would simply require ID in order to access the Internet. That would work so well with criminals.
Thoughts?

Ah, but several centuries elapsed between the development of birth certificates (originally baptismal records in Europe, I would think), passports, and bank accounts; and the discovery of electronics and the development of telephone technology.
I meant my comment as a nerd challenge: given the existing information technology and a determined effort not to submit to telephone monitoring (with all its associated conveniences), what new technologies would make life tolerable?
For example, on-line access to bank accounts would have to be validated without cell phones but SIM cards are not that secure anyway, merchants would have to agree to accept digital tokens generated without using SIM card technology, and personal devices that send and receive voice calls and messages over the Internet would have to be developed. The technologies underlying Webcall already support voice and video calls over the Internet and are easy to implement. Given a device with a GPS receiver that could transmit its location to a trusted upstream mapping source, one could easily have real-time GPS guidance without revealing one's location to untrusted observers. At worst, in cities, it could connect to the Internet whenever it encountered a public WiFi network. In memory of Terry Pratchett's Leonard of Quirm, one could call this device something like device-that-talks-and-shares-data-without-using-the-cellphone-network.
So I would argue the technology already exists to not use cell phones. The social expectation has been created on the part of government and merchants to expect their customers to have personal ID/tracking devices, and I expect that is the challenge.
Of course, if an alternate communication were developed, the authoritarians would simply require ID in order to access the Internet. That would work so well with criminals, of course.
Thoughts?

There was a time when telephones were rare but society functioned anyway. More slowly.
If this proposal moves forward, I will be looking to see what can be done without a telephone in my life.

Class A CDL driver here. The batteries are very heavy but Tesla may have found a way to compensate. Background: conventional wisdom was that EV tractors cannot haul as much as diesel tractors can. The total weight of the tractor-trailer combination is limited to 80K pounds because that's the limit of the design for bridges in the USA. If the EV tractor weighs more, the weight of the trailer it hauls has to be less than if a diesel tractor were hauling it. But the value of the shipment decreases if less weight is hauled.

Per here, the tare weight of the standard and long range tractors are 20K and 23K lb, and the maximum combination weight for EV tractors is 82K lb (increased by 2K lb for EV tractors), yielding maximum trailer weights of 62K and 59K lb, respectively.

For diesel tractors, the manufacturers make it hard to find the weight because the exact weight depends so much on the features of the tractor (for example, sleeper versus day cab). But an online calculator offers 25K lb as a representative weight for class 8 tractors.

So if a typical diesel tractor weighs 25K and the new long-range Tesla EV tractor weighs 23K, weight would appear not to be a factor in the comparison with diesel technology, and the other considerations (charge time, range, safety) would appear to be the important ones.

Not stupid. Cattle are quite clever when it comes to finding food to feed the bacteria in their fermentation vats (the rumen, their first stomach).
The issue is that each pasture has grasses of better and lesser quality. The cattle will eat the better grass before eating the poorer grass. The rancher wants the cattle to eat just the better grasses about 50% of the length of the leaves. If the cattle are moved elsewhere at that point, the better grasses will grow more vigorously so there will be more of them when the cattle return. If the cattle are allowed to stay in the pasture, they will eat the better grasses to the point that they (the better grasses) cannot compete with the poorer grasses, and the pasture's utility will degrade. This is the main reason for rotating pastures.
Cattle are not stupid (with respect to finding food they like) but they do tend to be lazy. Like humans, I would suggest :-)

Agreed also. Cattle rancher here in Central Texas with certified organic ranch and cattle. Another advantage is implementing rotational grazing, in which the herd(s) are moved every day or so to fresh grass. Doing so with fencing requires either a lot of fixed fencing or movable electric fencing. The first is expensive in materials and upkeep, the second in labor (moving the fencing every time the herd is moved). Virtual fencing is an excellent solution.
Another advantage to rotational grazing for organic ranching is that the life cycle of worms requires reingestion of fecal material into a new host within 30 days. By making sure the herd never returns to a given area within that interval removes the need for de-worming agents (which we can't use-we accept decreased growth or treat and then sell severely infected animals). This is good for non-organic ranchers also because routine use of de-worming agents leads to parasite resistance.
Another advantage for all ranchers is tracking cattle. Cows about to deliver will often go off from the herd into isolated parts of the pasture. If they run into trouble and need help with delivery, the rancher first has to find them. With this technology, the rancher can set up a separate virtual paddock and give the cow(s) separation from the herd while retaining the ability to keep an eye on her/them.
For me, the issues are cost and proprietary software. The cost is naturally high, about $350-500 per animal for the equipment and an annual monitoring fee. That's pretty steep for me since my profit margin is low (organic certification alone is expensive). And, the devices communicate with a proprietary service. If the company goes out of business or decides to stop the service, the hardware becomes useless. I don't think I'll be buying the equipment until I find a work-around for that problem.

How carefully do y'all think they have tested for metal fatigue at the bends created by these big presses?

Old expert systems guy here. In the old days of 1980s, "AI" meant rule-based "if-then" technology. Then came model-based technology, then case-based reasoning. Now neural networks are all the rage because they can accomplish tasks that the earlier systems could not albeit at the cost of opacity and extensive required training. However, the earlier technologies were designed to be, and were, hand-crafted to incorporate human expertise. The starting values of various options were hand-crafted but obviously could be adjusted based on performance. Who is to say that the simulation in question did not use hybrid technology including, for example, a model that included all the elements of the system including the operator, the communication channel, the drone, its weapon systems, the effects of the weapons, and its targets? Then, the "AI" would "understand" these relationships and could take action based on that understanding. It is hard to understand why the simulation did not have a bright red line dividing the good guys from the bad guys. That might be hard to do with a pure neural network but would be trivially easy with any of the earlier technologies. So if we are dealing with fake news here, which is fake: the initial report or the later retraction?

Here's an example: while applying for a job, I was required to use docusign.net. This site carefully offered the option to use paper for all communications, while explaining that doing so would increase processing time considerably. I elected to fill out the application, which contained plenty of highly confidential personal information, electronically. However, when I signed it, docusign.net then EMAILED ME COPIES OF THE DOCUMENTS IN PLAIN TEXT.
Nowhere on the site was there a warning that this would occur, an option for using encryption for email communications, or an option to download completed documents rather than having them emailed.
From this I inferred that the customers of docusign.net are their client entities, and the people who fill out the documents are [fill in your favorite term].
My response? I questioned the integrity of the organization to which I was applying, and vowed never to do anything through docusign.net again.

If the issue is unwanted public *wireless* access, would the following work (note: I am not familiar with this modem)? Wrap the entire box inside aluminum foil to create a Faraday cage. Optionally remove the antennas first. This works great with cell phones. Try wrapping yours up and then call it. Nothing happens until you unwrap enough to expose the phone's antenna. Of course, wIth the modem, there are wires exiting that might disrupt the cage effect. Dunno whether that would prevent this method from working well enough to be useful.

Paper losses like this are not tax deductible. I work with a medical office, and that is one of the first tax-related truths they discovered.

On the other hand, taking advantage of people is unfortunately part of human nature. The nice part about paying cash is you can say, "I will pay you in full now. If you bill the insurance company, you have to submit a claim and pray that they pay and not recoup the payment in the future. And, please give me your best price now because I am going to three of your competitors who are conveniently located in this same neighborhood and will ask them their best price. Then I will choose, and I won't be back if your office is not the winner."

This is called capitalism: make it work for you!

The leadless pacemaker is indeed a real advance, but the summary needs a few corrections, and a comment can be made. I would not want a reader who needs a standard pacemaker to be frightened unnecessarily by the summary as written.
"surgeons sliced open their patients' shoulders and inserted the pulse-generating devices in the flesh near the heart, then attached tiny wires to the heart muscle ... through the femoral artery."

• 1. The incision is made in the skin, not a joint. The implant location is usually the left or right prepectoral region, which is an inch or two lower than the collar bone on the stated side. The pacemaker itself is placed in a "pocket" formed by separating the skin and its attached fat from the underlying muscle. If you have ever eaten chicken, you know that the skin and fat can be separated from muscle. In the uncooked human, of course, separation requires a bit of effort but not much, and a good surgeon will have the area complete numbed up so the patient doesn't feel anything. Thus, the pacemaker is not near the heart: it's outside the rib cage. There are variations on the implant location, but none of them is inside the rib cage.
• 2. The tiny wires (well, pretty tiny) are long, and extend from the area where the pacemaker is through a vein (not an artery, hopefully!) to the heart. The method by which the wires are put in the vein is simple but outside the scope of this post.
• 3. The access is always through a vein (femoral vein, in the case of the new device), not an artery. Blood clots (thrombi, when inside the body) will form on most foreign bodies. From the veins, they can spread only into the lungs, which is relatively safe. From the arteries, even tiny thrombi can cause trouble when they go the brain (strokes), heart (heart attack), gut (ischemic gut), limbs (ischemic arm, leg, etc). Not good.
• 4. The new device can still get infected and still can run out of battery power. What I haven't yet understood is how it can easily be extracted if it gets infected, which is necessary because life-threatening infection can (and usually does) result if an infected foreign body remains in the patient. I guess it's small enough that a new one can be inserted without removing the old one when the battery runs out. There are more technical limitations too that will likely be overcome as the technology improves.

Some physical processes are random, and hardware random number generators based on them can be constructed. Does this report create a larger market opportunity for manufacturers of this type of device? And, competing such devices can be compared, assayed, validated, and combined, all apart from and much more cheaply than CPUs.