zakary

Definitely a lot of potentially very serious and important downsides to this.

I’m trying to think of any possible upsides to this.

- harder for unlicensed people, eg kids, to drive a car and hurt themselves or someone else. - harder to steal a car if you’re not an approved driver, regardless of what you do with a copied key fob. - potentially easier to resolve insurance disputes - harder for people to commit premeditated crimes using cars (eg getaway driver to a robbery)

That said, these things only really happen if almost all cars on the road have this “feature”. Which means if all new cars in china must have this, then for at least 20 years after introduction, people wanting to skirt the law/surveillance will just use older cars.

So then in the end everyone loses out except for the people this is purportedly target towards, who just go around it.

I have worked with some people in the defence industry who got just that from Adobe and a few similar vendors. They had to negotiate with adobe and sign NDAs both ways, and they payed through the nose for it. But you can do it.

Better never means better for everyone. And it always means worse for some.

What’s really needed is some way you can easily tell that a device has been tampered with, but which is also extremely difficult to bypass. And also where even if the OEM was in on the scheme, you could still tell. Like how a hash is used to tell if someone made changes to a piece of software. For consumer products this is a nonstarter because companies will almost never fully divulge info about all the parts of a device required for this.

For defence product where almost everything is fully specified by the customer, it might be possible. If you know all the components in a device, and you can prove they are all genuine, then you can prove the whole device is genuine.

Engraved hashes on every part comes to mind, but that would be ungainly to validate and fairly easy to bypass by simply copying codes from one device to another.

I imagine speed and simplicity. There’s a lot more things that need maintenance on a piston engine

Missiles and Drones. There’s essentially no viable use case for a hypersonic manned jet

It just so happens that one of my colleagues just finished a PhD creating materials which pretty much do exactly this; converting a relatively broad spectrum of light into a much narrower band of light. I’ve seen them in the lab where it’s colourless and clear to start with, and then it will convert any incident light in the blue range into a much narrower band of a specific blue colour. He has recipes for just about any colour, even into UV and IR bands. Not sure what the real world applications are though, maybe something to do with coatings for photovoltaic cells to increase efficiency

Human level touch/somatosensory system is one of the key breakthroughs needed to make humanoid robots truly useful.

As this articles details, touch is a lot more complex than simply “is there force on this spot” and the sheer amount of information our bodies process subconsciously throughout our everyday activities is staggering.

Ever wonder why it’s so hard to use a pen to write something if your hands are too cold, or if your arm has “fallen asleep”? Robots are in that state all the time, and we have to use a lot of fancy tricks to get them to manipulate objects without being able to feel them very well.

Whoever can solve this problem, with a product which is relatively cheap, reliable, and high resolution, will be creating a multibillion dollar opportunity for themselves.

As someone who works in robotics, I’d put my money on arrays of MEMS or microfluidic channels embedded inside a gel membrane.

I’m guessing the author is counting himself as CTO as part of that. $60 million for the CTO and his posse of senior managers and VPs, and the other $40m split between 180 non management engineers for $220k ish each. Still stupidly high costing now matter how you slice it.

Having something audited by an accounting firm doesn’t make me trust the numbers much more. It’s well known that many accounting firms will give you whatever result you want as long as you pay enough

Tall buildings are often demolished floor by floor from the top down. It’s a slow and expensive process. I don’t think anyone has ever demolished a building anywhere close to as tall as this one in a city centre. Luckily for developers of buildings like this, the cost of demolition will fall on either the city or the next developer who wants to make something better on the site. It would probably _only_ cost somewhere on the order of high tens to low hundreds of millions to demolish a building like this.

You’re right that nothing is unlimited. Luckily in this case, the energy of waves and tides is given to the oceans mostly by the gravity of the moon pulling the water as it passes overhead. Also a little bit by the wind which is fed by solar heat energy. The moon is slowly moving away from earth and eventually, in hundred of millions of years, it will impart significantly less energy into the tides.

The energy that the moon gives the tides is essentially the same as how the sun gives energy to the ground with light. That is to say: If we don’t collect it, it just gets turned into another kind of energy that is absorbed by the environment. For tides and waves that would be mostly heat, and a little sound. And most of that heat would eventually be radiated back out into space. So suffice it to say, while there is a finite pool of energy stored in the tides, it is so massive we could never make a difference, and it gets recharged everyday by the moon.

Interestingly, inside your body (in the form of a pacemaker battery) was and is the only legal way to possess plutonium as an individual (in the US)

As soon as you take it out of your body, or if you die, then it immediately becomes illegal to possess again.