Of course we should worry about the slippery slope here. But as long as this is viewed and used as a punishment, I think it is excellent use of digital surveillance. If you commit a crime, you lose some privacy as you are put under extensive surveillance which also detters from committing more crimes.

When looking at violent crimes (in Sweden), 1% of the population committed nearly 2/3rds of all violent crimes. I would be happy to put that 1% in a digital police state to protect the more lawâabiding 99%.

Starting with criminal immigrants makes some sense. When the system is up and running, it should be expanded to include everyone convinced of serious crimes or repeat offenders. If you - for example â gets three years of digital surveillance for a car burglary, there is a good chance that you won't commit any more burglaries. So it will probably prevent lots of crime.

I wish someone would create a laptop optimized for online meetings. With a really good camera system, good microphone, voice-optimized speakers, meeting-specific buttons and indicators and dual hdmi outputs.

Tanks are essentially land battleships. Yes, they are useful still useful but they are also very expensive to build, transport and maintain and requires lots of logistics support. They are sensitive to attacks from ATGMs. ATGMs can be fired from infantry, attack helicopters, all vehicles, drones and aircraft from long distances. Tanks can also be destroyed by artillery from far away. With the fast development of guided missies, destroying a main battletank will not be much harder than destroying any armoured vehicle. Maybe a little more difficult, but not so much more difficult that it justifies the cost of a tank.

The future is drones and missiles.

Javelin missiles are ~200000$ per missile, but why? Probably because mostly fixed costs are distributed over a small number of missiles. If the volume is increased by 10x, the cost is probably not increased very much. Drones can probably be produced in millions with mostly fixed costs except for raw materials.

I expect to see swarms of antipersonell drones soon. Maybe even nonlethal ones for capturing a city. Could be used against civilians for total dystopian but nonlethal occupation.

Meta is only possible because very few people understand how much information they collect about us. When given a fully informed choice, most people reject the privacy invasion. This is not a fair deal but rather a fraud, and that cannot be a sustainable long-term business model. GDPR is closing in, and other legislators have also seen the business model for what it really is.

Facebook must, and will, be replaced and destroyed. The sooner, the better.

All there comparisons with subways and buses reveal a lack of understanding of what kind of system this really is.

Small-diameter tunnel enables cheap tunneling.Tunneling costs is highly dependant on amount of materials moved which increases with the square of the diameter.

Cars enable door to door personal transport, which is inherently superior to station-to-station public transport.

Automatic vehicles enables robotaxi system.

This is the LOOP system, which - when finished - extends the current surface road network with high speed, low cost personal door to door transport superior to any bus or subway system and much cheaper to build and operate.

However, right now the partial loop system is running in a subway/bus station-to-station mode as a proof of parts of the concept and a step in the system's development.

Then add in near-vaccum tunnels with maglev rails and near-vaccum, maglev-enabled electric cars. Then you have further extended the LOOP system with HYPERLOOP, which enables personal emissions-free global door-to-door personal transport at total travel times faster than air travel.

A problem that I have with online shopping is unsatisfactory product information, which have caused me to return items. Many products just have a photo or two, and a few lines of text describing it. More through product information would allow me to make much better purchasing desicions. Films, more photos, measures, manuals, clothes on serveral different models etc. Can this be a competetive advantage?

Also, providing photos of broken stuff on warranty makes it obvious that some items don't need to be returned. I have been offered refunds or new items several times without having to return stuff.

Musk's boring company could have a niche here - drill underground for optical fibres (and all other type of installations). Digging a huge trench with an excavator is inefficent, intrusive and expensive.

I really like the widebody design. It is similar to the conceptual silent aircraft of the silent aircraft initiative. The worst environmental problem of hydrogen aircraft is probably noise.

http://silentaircraft.org/sax4...

Also, the fuel cell instead of batteries approach is very good. Today, fuel cell drones have serveral times longer flight time than battery drones. Fuel cells in aircraft is a good idea the should be implemented as soon as possible. However, water vapor in the stratosphere might not be good and fuel cells will dump the same amount of water vapor as kerosene aircraft. But emissions will still be sharply reduced.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fu...

There are no good corporate-centric smartphones on the market that I am aware of. All phones are inherently personal devices requiring Google or Apple accounts.

Privacy and security is turning into a killer feature. Having a phone centered around those features should be a huge market niche.

That does not make sense. Norway have had 250 Covid deaths in total and Sweden have had 5000 deaths with around 50% of the deaths in nursing homes.

I think that the swedish strategy might not be a strategy at all, but just explanation to the failure to do anything useful. Because there was not much we could do. I'm quite happy that we did not lockdown because that doesn't seem to work and the side effect is not good and lockdowns would hardly have made the situation better. The problem with the Swedish situation is the rotal lack of preparation and the terrible treatment of our elderly.

Swede here.

The problem is not really the Covid-strategy but the low-level care nursing homes have. The have very few medical personell and many worker are payed hourly and cannot afford to stay home when ill. The also did not have any protective equipment, no oxygen installed (that had been dismantled) and they did undertook to few protective measures. Many workers are also migrants that does not even read or speak Swedish. Migrants are also infected at a much higher rate than Swedes in general.

This situation have been built up over three decades and are essentially everyone's fault. Both the politicians and the voters who have allowed it.

SpaceX have essentially leapfrogged all launch competitors by creating reusable rockets. But which technologies could potentially leapfrog SpaceX?

Emdrive? Yes, if it works.

Spaceplanes? Probably, since air breathing engines are much more efficent than rocket enginges.

Some kind of nuclear rocket (fission or fusion) that actually is usable for launches?

ESA should put some money into every opportunity while making their rockets reusable.

It is true that we need nuclear power but what needs to be built is not reactors, but a massive nuclear industry. On a global scale, we need to deploy 3 reactors per day (@ 1 GW) for at least 15 years to replace all fossil fuel.

Is that possible? Probably not by 100%, but what need to be created is a massive industry that produces large number of small nuclear reactors for generating electricity, heating industries and power ocean shipping.

Getting rid of dirty coal is of course great, but there are many downsides to renewables.

- Biofuels is essentially wood. It produces lots of pollution and ashes and consumes lots of wood, of course.

- Hydropower almost totally eradicates fish and destroys beautiful waterfalls. Dams are almost dead waters.

- Wind power might be the worst. They kill massive amounts of birds and insects, turns the nature into an industrial area and as they degrade over time many tons of microplastics with bisphenol-A from the wings spreads into the environment. The wings are put into landfills when the windmill is decommisioned and the concrete foundation is left underground.

- Solar power uses lots of rare earth minerals and when solar farms are deployed large amounts of land is cleared of life.