If a mapping service knows that a site is of "secret" nature, then so does everyone who's actual job is to know such things in foreign countries. All this blurring does is prevent general public from peeking in, it does squat against state players.

While it's true that politics and legislation is helping electric cars along a lot, it doesn't really change as much as you might think. For comparison from history, one might bring the example of British steam lorries. They used to be hugely popular. Now they would have of course faded to obsolescence anyway, but it just so happened that legislation killed them off before their time. Changeover to petrol lorries might not have been entirely "organic" but it happened anyway. Electric cars are in kind of a similar spot right now.

Due to small size and low utilization rate car engines are pretty inefficient even if you compare it to something as dirty as coal power plant. Practical grids have more than just coal on them too. So yeah, electric cars totally do reduce emissions.

Just eyeballing the sales graph, it looks like adoption rate is about doubling every two years or so. Should these trends hold then next decade electric cars will pretty much take over.

Depending on how you count it US is first or second per capita carbon emitter, not exactly a difficult position to cut down from, yet US still managed to increase emissions.

The problem with straight-A students is that they put a whole lot of effort into drilling tests and exams to perfection, but hardly learn more than B or even C students. It's still the same curriculum, just performed to higher standard. You'll get better results, if you put that above and beyond effort into learning things that actually go above and beyond the curriculum. You'll still get ok grades, just not straight A-s, at the same time you learn more things than your classmates, but you don't get grades for it.

"Electric airplanes are right up there with perpetual motion devices".

Um... no. You can buy an electric airplane such as Pipistrel no problem. And obviously it's possible to scale it up. Question is though, where are the practical engineering and economics limits? Just as obviously as it's possible to scale up electric airplanes, it's currently not feasible to scale it up to rival an intercontinental airliner. But there is a lot of middle ground between a Pipistrel and A350.

You can't really claim right or wrong before you put an idea to the test. But I do claim that this shameless self plug is not newsworthy until the author does so and gets some sort of results. Crackpot physics hypotheses are dime a dozen, some of them even mathematically and logically appealing, doesn't mean they in any useful way describe reality. Worth nothing until you test them.

"does electricity make less CO2 overall?" Unless you concoct some horribly biased comparison scenario, yes. For your average car and your average grid, electric is a clear win in terms of CO2. Not by like order of magnitude or anything, but by a simple fact that bigger heat engines are generally more efficient. Power plants are really big heat engines in comparison to car engines. If you have reasonable amount of carbon free or neutral power on your grid it's an even bigger win.

There's enough playroom in these deadlines, if the tech doesn't get there on time, they won't happen. Depending on lobbying efforts they might not happen regardless.

It's a bold bet, but then again the writing on the wall is as clear as it ever gets for such a long outlook. Electric will take over transport market during the next decade. As such, every sensible carmaker is scrambling to not be left behind. Overbetting on electric can be recovered from, failure to keep up is certain doom. Or at least, that's the current outlook. If self driving cars take off or not, is much more of an open question. There are quite a bit more unknowns on that front.

Heh, sure, Google's result obviously doesn't mean that the work is done and over with, nothing else to there worth bothering with. But it's still a much better tool than what was available before for the given task. And that's just the first result, AlphaGo took quite a while until it was capable of conclusively beating the world master. I would expect their results for protein folding improve. Especially if they combine it with existing models to cover any blind spots.

It's not a physics model, well duh. The other competitors were physics models though and they came second no matter how much compute power they happened to have. Sure, physics models might be able to solve many different problems with lesser modifications, but if AI can be trained to solve a specific type of problem more efficiently than physics solvers could... Well, a more efficient solution is still a more efficient solution, even if it's not an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. If you can solve a problem better than anyone, then that's hardly a parlor trick.

More accurate predictions are useful for verifying actual protein structures though, which you need to know to make simulations about their behaviours. Solving more protein structures very much does have value on it's own. And just because they tried their hand at protein structures, doesn't mean they won't do crystal structures next.

Well, duh. It's trained to predict protein folding, it wouldn't be much good for that if it were trained to play go. But it clearly outperforms the physics model based solutions. Which in turn outperform what you can pull off by scratching your head at the problem. It still wins, which is what the competition is about.