LostXOR

Space kites are the best kind of kite!

Still, hosting costs were the reason for discussing legal liability. Such a server also increases centralization which isn't ideal.

That doesn't solve the cost problem. Now all the traffic is going through that intermediate server, and someone has to pay for that.

Reminds me of something.

GrapheneOS can be rooted, though they don't recommend it as it's bad for security. For an archival device I imagine security isn't a big concern.

I'm tired of people ascribing any sort of intelligence to AI. It's not thinking, it's not seeing you as a threat, it's just predicting a probable response based on its training data.

Seems like a reasonable donation prompt; it's infrequent, unobtrusive, and can be easily dismissed and disabled. Some people are so sensitive to the idea of any sort of soliciting that they forget projects do need money to function.

Now that's an interesting idea; basically external regenerative braking. Not too helpful on a highway, but I suppose it would be useful in the situations you described.

That's a fair point, a device could theoretically harvest energy that would have otherwise been wasted, and that would be green energy. I imagine a wind system could work, though it might result in cars experiencing additional drag from slower wind speeds.

However, the piezoelectric generators mentioned in the article quite clearly do not use waste energy. They compress under the weight of the cars, turning a small amount of gravitational potential energy into electricity. That energy must be made up with extra fuel.

Finally, even if all of the vehicles on the road were powered by clean electricity, it would still be a useless system. Piezoelectrics are nowhere near 100% efficient, so you're just taking electricity from the vehicles at a loss.

Last year the California Energy Commission posted the results of a study aimed at assessing efficiency of deploying piezoelectric systems to generate clean electricity from roadways.

“Based on the laboratory evaluations and road tests, the application of the piezoelectric energy harvesting system in one lane of a one-mile-long roadway has the potential to generate 72,800 kilowatt-hours of energy per year,” the team reported.

How is that clean energy, in any sense of the word? Any system that gains some energy from a passing car must necessarily decrease the (kinetic) energy of the car by an equal or greater amount. And the vast majority of cars get their kinetic energy by burning fossil fuels. Sounds like a more expensive, less direct, and less efficient version of a gasoline generator.

I saw a comment back when they announced they were "canceling" it, saying the same thing. It seems they were right. Microsoft will do anything to get their grubby hands on as much user data as possible; of course they're not going to give up that easily.

Small correction: You'll want to be at the photon sphere, not the event horizon (1.5x the Schwarzschild radius). You can theoretically hover there for an unlimited time, and even escape, as long as you don't mind the immense acceleration necessary. :)