I have seen satellite dishes at the base of isolated cell towers, though I have no idea what they were being used for.

One big drawback for satellite networking is the delay it adds to the transmissions, to travel up to the satellite and get sent back down to a ground station. This delay probably wouldn't be tolerated by a cell phone user, especially if they were talking to another cell phone which would double the delay a second time.

There's also a bandwidth issue at the satellite, if you want to do that with hundreds of thousands of towers there's just no way to have that amount of bandwidth even from a cluster of satellites. The bandwidth problem isn't one of data rate, its one of needing to be able to communicate with the ground on so many different channels because of all the towers, and having satellites at many different geostationary locations. (that's what Musk is trying to do with launching this absurd number of starlink satellites)

High data rate meshing requires directional antennas pointed at other nodes, unlike the more broad-beamed bay antennas the towers use for cellular access. Adding several dishes and a bunch of expensive hardware to each tower would dramatically increase tower cost and maintenance.

It's much cheaper to just run a network drop off a nearby pole or trench a line to the nearest fiber vault. Even the towers out along the open highways tend to get fiber trenched to them rather than dishes networking them together over the air.

Here in the USA anyway, cellular service has been considered "critical infrastructure" for quite some time now, mostly due to the decline of landlines. 9-1-1 having high availability has been legally required for a long time, and those requirements shifted to the cellular network as people ditched their land-lines for cell phones at home. So all the towers have short-term (15+ minute) UPS's and a gas generator that auto starts, with requirements to run periodic tests.

The other part of it though is the towers nowadays require internet access to function. We had a massive storm system move through the area a few years ago with close to tornado-speed "straight-line winds" that took out a huge amount of above-ground internet infrastructure, rendering cell towers functionally disabled despite giving out full bars. There were a few lines still up but everyone's home internet was either down or spotty, and it was hard to get a cell call to connect. Was llke that for 2-3 weeks, really annoying.

So, power's not the only thing that needs to be protected to keep cellular service working.

oh I guess I really hadn't thought about heating needs. The batteries generate heat when being charged or discharged so I was just assuming they never really would need external heating.

I live in Iowa, and I've heard some pretty brutal accounts of bad EV performance when it gets really cold here. All rechargeable batteries perform poorly in the cold though, I remember NiCD batteries being absolutely terrible in the cold.

incorporate advanced refrigerant-based and liquid cooling circuits

That's nothing new, AFAIK, all EVs already do this.

75kW is a lot of heat. Think about the heat from a 100w light bulb (99% of which is heat) Now stack 750 of them and feel the sun!

Also, this car isn't flying down the freeway, forcing massive amounts of air through the radiator to cool it. This one's parked, and only has the forced airflow of the radiator's fan to keep it from melting into goo.

But that 75kW is talking about the charger, which may be able to handle more than one vehicle, or larger vehicles like EV trucks and busses, so the number is likely a lot smaller for the average EV car. But still, lotta heat!

Usually rapid chargers produce quite a bit of heat in the battery, how are they managing this?

I assume the EV stays turned on and runs a cooling loop and blasts hot air out a radiator somewhere, but even that has to have its limits?

"It was hard to figure out how do you balance getting ready to go, not go, all that stuff,"

That must be pretty stressful... "hey you MIGHT be going to space in a few months, but maybe not! Plan accordingly!"

Those are some pretty radically different options there, going to space and staying on earth really aren't two separate scenarios that are easy to come up with a flexible plan that can cover both.

I recall Neil saying he wasn't able to get life insurance when he was flying the experimental planes, and so NASA had to cover him. I wonder how that works with astronauts? I can just imagine making that phone call to your insurance company.... heeeey say I'm going to be flying around the moon next month so... "thank you for letting us know, we've suspended your insurance coverage for the next two months". Gee thanks.

That phrase gets tossed around from time to time and this is why. The only reason we don't have warrantless searches and other intensely invasive government surveillance right now is it's specifically banned in the US Constitution. But of course the founding fathers knew nothing of cell phones, so this one is fair game.

Unfortunately for us, the Constitution, which the founding fathers envisioned as a "living document", one that was periodically updated to address new developments, only very rarely gets updated anymore. And all this modern tech that WOULD be in the constitution (like personal electronic devices, online privacy, etc) if they'd have known about it when it was written isn't, so it all just gets trampled on.

The concept of the Constitution as a "living document" is basically dead, and that's unfortunate for all of us. What we really need right now is a "Technology Bill of Rights". That would breathe some life into this important document, and bring us closer to what the founding fathers envisioned a free people to be protected by.

(that 16 is 16 of my NiMH AA devices, part of the 20 "nicd/nimh cells")

According to my notes, I have here:

9v: 13
AA: 13
AAA: 17
AAAA: 1
C: 8
D: 2
coin: about 30
SLA/FLA: 5
LIFE: 4
lipo/nimh pouch and pack: 25
lipo cell: 9
nicd/nimh cells: 20
sealed plug-in charged: 16
sealed usb-charged: 27
uncommon disposable: 3

Those are not battery cells, those are devices. So for example, 16 of my AA devices use six AAs. (I have a crap-ton of NiMH AA, well over 100) and all of my C devices use at least three cells. So, sadly for me, there's a huge amount to keep an eye on. I realize I'm somewhat of an edge-case here, but that also makes me a good "how bad can it really get?" case study.

I reviewed all the gadgets in my house that have batteries. Not just non-replaceable or rechargeable, but ALL batteries. I'm a bit tech-heavy here so I was expecting there to be a lot, but the final count still surprised me. (and I'm still finding stragglers from time to time)

The "biggest offenders" I have are flashlights. I've got a few cheap "webcam" lights, as well as several house flashlights that all use built-in lipo pouches, which I can replace, but not the average consumer. And I've had to replace my car GPS batteries several times over the years. I'd bet 98% of these are thrown away as soon as their battery gets marginal. I like to maintain and repair my stuff, and it "grinds my gears" to see these made to be thrown away.

The other thing that annoys me is that most of these gadgets have almost no "battery management". When you plug them in, they charge to full, and hold at full charge if left plugged in, which will inflate a lipo pouch in a few months at most. And many of the others will allow their battery to deep-discharge to the point of battery damage or even placing the device in an unrecoverable loop. My Garmin GPSs are terrible that way. If they get too low, they'd be bricked for most people because they always boot up when their dead battery gets a little bit of a charge in it, which isn't enough to boot the device, and then the boot process crashes, draining the battery faster than it can charge. Recovering that requires removing the battery and manually charging it, which most users can't do since the battery isn't "user" removable.

And then I have the related problem of dozens of infrequently used devices that I could easily go a year between uses on, and when I get them out their battery is dead and probably slightly deeply-discharged. And I can't leave it on charge because it'll cook off the battery by the next time I need it. Which again is really frustrating.

Then there's the "big ticket items like the exploding (pun intended?) market on rechargeable yard maintenance. Be it a hedge trimmer or a mower. Nobody knows how to take care of their batteries, they don't tell you in the manual, and few have management, so they leave them on charge over the winter and the battery is half cooked by spring. Then after another winter on charge the battery is totally cooked and they have to replace a $40-$150 battery. It's quite the scam! Along with removable batteries, built-in management needs to be legally required for batteries over a certain price. Even my quad (DJI Spark)'s batteries are smart and will self-discharge to 65% if not used for 10 days straight - so it's not difficult to do even for smaller batteries, they just refuse to do it because they want to sell you new batteries regularly instead of making the batteries last.

Clearly we're all terrified now, so I'd say their job is done.

They can just sit back and relax and watch us all live in fear.

POTS lines use very little power nowadays. Decades ago they still used very little power, except when ringing. Those electromagnets hitting big bells did take some juice, but the actual power required once you lifted the receiver is very low. Modern (transistor-based, with piezo tweeters for ringing) are much more efficient, all the time.

This is about them having to continue to keep tabs on and maintain equipment that they've been maintaining for decades. This isn't about additional costs, it's about them wanting to cut costs by ditching gear that's expensive to maintain and gets far less use than it was designed for. (it's efficient at scale, and the scale has gone)

I can't say I blame them. Imagine your old house got central air a decade ago, and you still have a window air conditioner in the living room, and you'd like to get rid of it, but the city is saying you can't remove it, and have to keep it maintained and working, and pay for annual inspections.

The only reason we still see around 4% landline usage is simply inertia. Old people don't want to give it up because they don't like change or learning something new, younger people that have it don't have a reason to get rid of it and see it as a cheap "just-in-case" backup, and there's a really small percentage of people (I'd venture a guess at under a tenth of a percent) that have a good reason to keep it.

So the question is "at what point do we tell that tenth of a percent to look elsewhere?" There's tons of other good examples, how about leaded gas? or R34 freon coolant? or businesses accepting cheques? or something closer to home on the issue - pay phones on many street corners? Technology moves on, and the longer you wait to move on once the writing is on the wall, the bigger of a personal hassle it's going to be. (I see this all the time with computers, upgrade people! get rid of that ten year old doorstop! I don't care if "it still works", you need to modernize!)

so the TL;DR of my rant is "it's not about the power use, but the telco doesn't want to come right out and call you a hold-out that needs to get with the times so we can all move on." Power savings looks like something that's "good for everyone" instead of pointing fingers at the stubborn few.

I hope nobody's complaining that it got publicly disclosed because "they only had two and a half years to fix it but hadn't gotten around to it yet"

IMO, "responsible disclosure" taps out after six months. Anything that happens after that is entirely on the devs for not bothering to plug holes that they were privately notified about.