My understanding is that home batteries are not UPSes, they don't go through the battery. They have a switch between power company, solar, or battery. I think that means would be exposed to surge from power company.

You can install a whole house surge protector. Those go in the panel and would protect from different sources.

Starshield means multiple things, or really it is SpaceX business unit with military. Starshield is the name for US military buying Starlink service. It is also SpaceX building Starlink-based satellites for the military. This doesn't have to be communications, the first ones were missile defense trackers.

I think the custom satellites came first and they rebranded the communications after it.

There isn't much demand for using phone as computer. If you are at home or work, you can buy a desktop computers for cheap. If you are traveling, you need to find a monitor and keyboard. You could carry small monitor and wireless keyboard, but then you are carrying as much as laptop. People who need to work on the road get a laptop. People who need to send email get iPad and keyboard.

Good example of the economics is that Macbook Neo or iPad Air are cheaper than new iPhone.

iPhone should export display, but more for showing videos or presentations. My Pixel 10 has USB-C display and I haven't used it, but I have computers for all purposes.

Apple should spend more effort making the iPad usable for work. It would be good candidate for USB-C display, but with iPadOS.

FWIW, you can plug your iPhone into an external monitor to do a Keynote presentation. You need a USB-C (or Lightning) to HDMI dongle in most cases, but it works fine.

- https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote-iphone/present-on-a-...

I'm always reluctant to do non-standard stuff for presentations. There's enough that can go wrong even with a direct HDMI out. I've done it in a pinch but pretty much always carry a laptop with me when I'm presenting along with local copies of my presentations. I've actually gotten a text in the middle of the night asking me if I can fill in for another speaker who forgot and are in a different country :-)

Imagine an executive placing their phone on a magnetic dock as they sit down, which automagically connects to the screen and gives them access to everything they were doing before. Also easy to imagine a university computer lab where everyone brings their own compute and IT doesn't have to manage physical desktops.

I'm skeptical that there's "no demand" for that kind of functionality rather than a lack of good implementations. Look at how popular wireless CarPlay and Android Auto are. They're essentially the same functionality, but tailored to an in-car experience instead of desktop.

Imagine executive tapping their phone down on reader, and it pops up everything they were doing, and they get to keep using their phone.

The first flaw in the idea is that computing is cheap. You can make a computer the size of a phone for people to carry around, that has been tried but failed. The second flaw is that everything is in the cloud, only developers and offline need local access to their files. The cloud also means that can desktop in the cloud.

You can make a computer the size of a phone. That's what the latest macbook neo is. The rest of the space inside is battery and peripherals. I'm not sure what cloud has to do with this discussion.

Re: keep using phone, that's exactly what's already possible with CarPlay and AA.

On an upcoming trip I'm actually going to give an iPad with magnetic keyboard I bought a couple years back, assuming different travel patterns than I've had, a try. It seems to work fine. An iPad is also great for plane/train entertainment without a keyboard. But, honestly, it's no lighter than a MacBook Air would be and if my ancient MacBook Pro dies--have a newer one up in my office--that's what I'll probably buy.

I have traveled with just my iPhone and can get by but don't really love it.

How can there be demand for something that doesn't exist?

If Apple releases a $300 lapdock tomorrow, basically a screen, keyboard, battery, that allows using your iPhone as a normal general purpose computer with OSX - why would anyone buy a laptop/desktop?

Why would anyone buy that instead of Macbook Neo for $600? Macbook doesn't need a iPhone to use.

If you are doing serious work, which are the people who want a dock, then you need the power of Macbook Air or Macbook Pro.

For most people, iPad or iPad Air with keyboard is a better option since you get tablet for fun and can do some light work.

There are lots of places that have IPv6-only networks and access IPv4 through NAT64. It makes sense for new company networks that can control what software gets installed.

The main limitation is software that only supports IPv4. This would affect your proposed solution of doing the translation in the stack. There is no way to fix an IPv4-only software that has 32-bit address field.

Yes there is, you have the device the software is on do the translation transparently. The software thinks its talking to 1.2.3.4, it's actually talking to ::ffff:1.2.3.4, but the application doesn't need to know that as the translation is occuring in the network stack (driver, module, whatever).

> There are lots of places that have IPv6-only networks and access IPv4 through NAT64

I've just deployed a new mostly internal network, and this was my plan.

The network itself worked, but the applications wouldn't. Most required applications could cope, but not all, meaning I need to deploy ipv4, meaning that there's no point in deploying ipv6 as well as ipv4, just increases the maintenance and security for no business benefits.

36-bit is still too small for the future. We are at 30 billion connected devices. We will probably hit 64 billion in decade or two.

The most likely alternative would have been 64-bit. That's big enough that could have worked for a long time.

A flat address space causes problems tracking it. Think of the IPv4 space which is fragmenting towards having a completely separate route for every /24 (the smallest unit). Longer addresses enable levels of aggregation which is good for routing, hence 128 bits.

There aren’t enough IPv4 addresses to give everyone one. That is why ISPs use CGNAT to hide multiple customers behind one IP address.

Something that just uses IPv4 won’t work without making the extra layer visible. That may not have been apparent then but it is now.

HVDC is more efficient than you think, 3.5% losses per 1000km. Which means intracontinental is obviously good, and intercontinental will work in some situations.

Nuclear power is expensive, enough that “what about night” is solve by building extra solar and batteries. Also, renewables wreck the economics of base load power that needs to run all the time to pay back loan, but can’t compete with solar during the day.

Coal was abundant. British coal was mined out. The coal that is left isn’t economical to mine.

People said the same thing about many gas & oil fields in the Permian Basin back in the '70s.

How'd that work out?

Hungary is a parliamentary republic, Orban is the Prime Minister. Turkey was parliamentary system until was changed in 2017 to presidential system with more power for Erdogan.

I agree about parliamentary systems being better, but they are still vulnerable. It doesn't matter if the electorate is in favor of strongman.

iCloud backups are encrypted, and can be end-to-end encrypted.

Also, backups have nothing to do with the messages being end-to-end encrypted. Like if you don't use a passcode on the phone, the messages are still encrypted.