You do realize UTOPIA offers a free market set of ISP's to connect to, right? And it's not even free? Certainly much more competition, choice, and free market than, say, the electrical grid of the entire USA where only one set of wires is allowed to come to the house.

Oh right, you're just a troll trying to piggyback a snide political comment on a technical discussion. Never mind.

Most of the rest of the US does not have that option.
UTOPIA is newsworthy because it's enabling that option for places that are decidedly NOT the SF bay area.

Please read closer. Utilities are already underground - that means there are already tubes running to each house, no trenching required.
So I'm sure any intern would be capable of tying fiber to the tube's rope and pulling it through the tube. Say 10 minutes per house? Oh the humanity.

You lose the bet. Whole neighborhood was built in like the 1960's. Ah but it's the next block, great excuse for not continuing to roll out fiber to a middle class neighborhood with basically zero construction costs when you can be a crappy cable company and keep raking in the money with old technology.

Utopia is a really great model, I wish something like that was in my city. Meanwhile, a family member in California has a house that is like 4 houses away from fiber service (as the crow flies, but literally close enough that a direct ethernet cable would likely be in spec) and has had underground utilities for 20 years (so no excuses about telephone poles or backhoe prices) and fiber isn't offered. Because we're the cable & phone company, so screw you, you'll take what we offer and like it, OR ELSE. Not so much as a projection of how many more years until the service gets expanded.

Well obviously, but while it's a fairly common element in the earth's crust, a lot of the concentration is in a few far-flung locations. Australia, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia come to mind. China too, of course, but China has already used export limitations on mined minerals not in fully finished products, aka commercial advantage, so that source is already, excuse the pun, a literal red flag.

I think the law of supply and demand would have greatly increased the price of lithium batteries by now regardless, except A) BEV's (using lithium) are still a relatively minor part of the overall car market, and B) I understand that Tesla acted early and wisely to secure ownership or long term pricing on supplies.

Yes, most of my post was about Sodium batteries. You even quoted a part. I just don't know the exact reason why Tesla isn't using them yet.

Only for the exact same weight/volume of battery. It's rather common for BEV's to have (or announce for future) two sizes of batteries for the exact same frame of car. The limiting factor on the lesser range car is the $$$$$ to pay for the bigger battery. As far as bigger batteries than the greater range car, I'm sure a bigger battery space could be engineered, if there were really that much of a problem of getting 300-500 miles of range using a battery whose cost has dropped by (using your number) 70%.

Side info: There were lots of numbskulls talking about how the Cybertruck's battery pack is "only half full" as if it could be entirely full, when the reason it's "half full" is clearly to allow crumple zones/damage, not because Tesla didn't see fit to fill the entire space with battery. However, I'm sure it would be trivial to modify design so there's MUCH more battery on board, were there a sufficient need & market for it.

Hydro: mountains with lakes at both the top and bottom are in very short supply.

Peaker Batteries: I think a giant slice of the next 20 years of battery research will be centered on making batteries that don't have Lithium (and to a lesser extent Cobalt, Nickel, and a few other things) in them. Lithium-Iron-Phosphate was a great advancement in cheaper (although a bit worse in some categories besides energy density, like cold weather response) batteries, but we really need good rechargable batteries that don't use Lithium, yet avoid nightmares like NiCad and Lead-Acid. (for reasons of 'memory' degradation and Pb poison, respectively)

I don't think there's all that many people that appreciate that Lithium wasn't chosen for battery research because it's the cheapest and best thing to make batteries out of, but because it's a pretty good thing to make LIGHTWEIGHT batteries out of. Low weight is great for things people carry around, but the way EV builders are pac-manning up Lithium from mines, it's surprising it hasn't gone up in price like a rocket. Time to diversify, particularly for batteries intended to sit in the middle of nowhere (next to a power plant, or grid interconnect line, of course).

Supposedly BYD is selling Sodium based batteries in their cars, but it's so new I haven't heard anything as far as reliability, although it seems to be at least somewhat functional and pretty inexpensive. If there's one thing this planet has, it's plenty of Sodium, available worldwide, with a few even higher waste sodium sources could be tapped, maybe like water purification discharge. A couple of salt water lakes that could use less metal in them, come to think.

I'd really love to hear Telsa announce Sodium batteries, but I haven't heard enough to know if it's just the money arrangements with whoever aren't in place, the fabrication arrangements aren't in place, or there's a long term suitability reason.

The factor all of you are forgetting in this discussion is the effect of government regulations. There were two choices, either the car was small and it had to be MORE fuel efficient (ie, smaller, lighter, etc) or it was for cargo, and got to be heavier and bigger. There were performance and style incentives towards being big and powerful. Presto, the SUV turned from a novelty car into the mainstream big car. And trucks got bigger. I can tell you those old-style little pickup trucks didn't disappear because the owner wanted to have to lift cargo twice the height off the ground to get it into the cargo bed. A week ago I read about a group of people trying to buy those tiny Korean pickup trucks for import into the USA, it's been a struggle trying to get them legalized.

Making rules designed to make vehicles smaller, causing vehicles to become larger... Classic case of unintended consequences in government regulation, and so far as I know nobody has lifted a finger to try and reverse the effect. If you ask me there were a couple ways to do things, including allowing engine power being tied to the ratio between cargo and passenger space, with some sort of "crew cab" tax that gets zapped out by business depreciation.

But the idea that the american consumer only buys what they want to own has an asterisk, of based on what's made available by laws and carmaker motivations.

Well Troll, Considering most ocean plastic comes out of chinese coastal rivers, I suspect you weren't that science-based nor doing much to help the real source of ocean plastic.

yeah except it does have decent playback in a different app (smtube) and I have a hard time believing that's all due to the difference in program overhead, and not at least partly from some difference in the SW decoding.

that is strange. I wonder if they were primarily cutting costs or space. Probably costs.

And just in time: California has lined up another round of banning plastic bags. The last round wasn't too well thought out, so I don't expect this one to improve the results, but they must think there's a lot of shoppers that fly to China and throw their bags into chinese coastal rivers.

so if I have things straight, this is the up-and-coming arch that the raspberry pi os uses, so this would seem to be a good development for pi users?

all I know is that pi seems to have great acceleration/codec support for all sorts of stored media files, but falls pretty flat when it comes to streaming youtube. At least through the default browser. App smtube has great codec implementation or acceleration to watch youtube, but is crappy to navigate.

I know Pi foundation is on a budget and all, but it seems non-choppy playback of youtube would be high on the list of things to get working after the controlling thermostats and robots part of the work is done.

I think you're lumping together with two of the worst categories, which are "first to do it on a computer" or "not first to do, only first to be bold enough to claim doing it on a computer was patentable". There were far, FAR too many patents that were essentially something being done (or something that could have been done) in a pencil-and-paper business world, but because they either had a computer doing it or sprinkled in some internet mumbo jumbo / ecommerce they got a patent issued, or worse, past a court (east texas comes to mind). I was happy when the Supreme Court finally undercut that but it still seems to happen too often.

Once you eliminate those two abusive categories, there's nothing wrong with coming up with something non obvious and being the first to do it. I'm talking about things like RSA and Diffie-Hellman, as worthy examples. I note the following site: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eff.org%2Fissues%2Fstu... A quick look tells me there seems to be patents on 'matchmaking' and 'clocking in when starting work'.

not able to upvote right now or I'd definitely upvote this response too. The poor decisions made by the new management are ultimately inseparable from the fact that the new management is who made them.

There are obviously some subtleties, I'm curious to know what everyone thinks of the presentation by the Wendover Productions video. (For the uninitiated, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...)

for one, their presentation seems to be that the 737 Max problems were a result of 'rebounding' from the partnering business strategy in the 787. If that's correct, I'm inclined to believe that the root cause of the Max design decisions weren't the outsourcing strategy itself, it was just the general focus on profits rather than engineering excellence. But that the failure to put planes together properly (they cover Spirit Airlines prominently) that we're in now is correctly blamed on outsourcing policies.

Q: Hey Boss, a different SWAT team lost a lawsuit for doing exactly what we're about to do. Should we check?
A: Nah, we'll be fine. 100% recovery rate, don't let the haters hate.