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.
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.
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.
Beta-voltaic and other nuclear batteries have been around for a long time. The issue, at least so far, isn’t technology, it’s mostly just cost and safety. These things cost hundreds and into the thousands per battery last time I checked. And for that they put out less power than a coin cell.
Outside of pacemakers and space probes where a battery change is difficult to impossible, there aren’t a lot of use cases where the cost is justified.
There actually are other isotopes such as Hafnium 178m2 which have the potential to make much more energy and power dense nuclear batteries, but due to safety concerns haven’t been developed yet.
> 178m2Hf has the highest excitation energy of any comparably long-lived isomer. One gram of pure 178m2Hf contains approximately 1330 megajoules of energy, the equivalent in about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of the explosive TNT. The half-life of 178m2Hf is 31 years
Perhaps this was some kind of rare memory fault where it took a series of photos and there was some kind of corruption that caused elements of each to be merged.
Or perhaps there was some weird fault that meant different sections of the photo were taken at discreetly different times and then stitched together.
My understanding is it has definitely been solved by the use of much thicker gloves or gloves with heating elements. But doing difficult technical climbing at very high altitudes also requires good dexterity and you are often up there for many days. Also lithium batteries don’t work much at all in temperatures that cold.
I could imagine some kind of warm water tube system that takes heat from a heat exchanger on your chest and transports it to your hands and feet, and is pumped by the action of walking. Not sure if that’s been tried before.
There’s a lot of great engineers who’ve done a lot of climbing so my guess is pretty anything that works sufficiently well to keep hands and feet warm, is also too complex, expensive or bulky to be useful in really extreme mountaineering environments.
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.