It’s easy enough to just configure TouchID so that it doesn’t work to log into your computer. It’s only used for authorization to do certain operations (like ApplePay), once you have logged on with a password.
I do this on all my devices. And I don’t use FaceID for anything at all. Which makes modern iPhones a bit of a pain, but I do it anyway.
I don’t think these methods are possible anymore in this modern economy of “fire everyone because of AI and then rehire them a few months later at half the salary”.
If you’re not one of the senior managers, I don’t think these kinds of long term investments are feasible anymore.
You can send power without wires, over short distances. Induction charging on devices like iPhones and Apple Watches are common examples of that.
But it gets exponentially more difficult to transmit power wirelessly, the greater the distance between the receiver and the transmitter, especially if you want to send large amounts of power that way. Certain bands of radio waves can be transmitted long distances, and could b turned back into electrical power on the remote end.
But by then you will have successfully converted a multi-kilowatt power source into the source antenna into a few microwatts at the receiver. Not very efficient.
This is not a new concept. You can see a discussion of this technique being used (to a degree) on battleships in WWII, by watching some of the videos on the Battleship New Jersey YouTube channel.
There’s also a Russian torpedo that uses a similar concept to “fly” at supersonic speeds underwater.
One of the reasons why Ipe (pronounced “e-pay”) wood is so fire resistant, is because of its density. You can get Class-A fire resistant Ipe that can be used to build in the Wildland/Urban Interface environment. Other woods like Teak and Rock Maple are also super dense, but I don’t know if you can get them in Class A ratings.
Now, Ipe is very expensive. I would hope this is less expensive than Ipe, and then the trick is to make your starting materials much larger, and being able to account for the shrinkage once the densification process has been completed.
You could also do laminates of this densified wood, in order to be able to use it for beams, plywood type functions, etc…. Or even fire resistant 2x4 boards.
With regards to cerebral palsy, my mind always goes back to Chuck, a guy I knew in high school in 1983-1984. His case was pretty severe, most people couldn’t understand him when he talked. He was able to drive his motorized wheelchair pretty well, but unless you looked closely, it wasn’t obvious how he did it.
Chuck was a bit older than most of the high school kids, due to his challenges. I think he was something like 27 at the time. But he was also the best programmer I have ever known.
We had Apple ][+ and Apple //e hardware in our computer lab, and one was set aside for his personal use. It had a special hardware adapter over the keyboard so that you couldn’t accidentally press two keys at once.
Watching Chuck write a program was wild. His hands would wave around in the air for a minute or so, and then somewhere in there you would hear a “chunk” sound. That sound was him hitting a key on the keyboard. He had a 100% success rate of hitting the key he wanted, every time. Because editing a file would have been too painful for him.
Chuck’s programs were also perfect. They did exactly what needed to be done, no more and no less. And you couldn’t shorten them by a single character, because otherwise the functionality would have been lost.
Chuck spent a hell of a lot of time thinking about his programs before he ever sat down in front of the keyboard. By the time he got there, the program was already completely written in his mind. And it was completely debugged. I think he was the only person to get a perfect score on every test and every program in the computer science class that year.
Over the time I knew him, it became easier for me to understand what he was saying. Towards the end of that time, if Chuck and I were in the room at the same time, his assistant was able to even take breaks to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, she had to be with him 24x7. That wasn’t something that I intentionally enabled, it just kind of developed that way, but I did find out later that she appreciated the time that we were together.
I think a lot of people looked down on Chuck due to his difficulties, but I thought he was amazing. And over forty years later, I still think that he is the best programmer I have ever known.
Salt water is a nasty substance and difficult to handle properly. That salt interacts with metal and other substances in the pipeline, etc….
You might not have to go to fully potable (drinkable) status to get something that will work for cooling, but there’s a lot of processing that needs to happen.
Datacenters need four things: power, water, cooling, and access to the WAN.
A dry desert environment is not very conducive to datacenter operations with regards to those first three items.
If you’re located close to the sea or an ocean, at least there’s a possibility of getting water, albeit perhaps through expensive reverse osmosis. But then you’re operating in a more humid environment where certain types of cooling systems won’t work well, because they depend on water evaporation to function.
If you’re building a multigigawatt AI datacenter, those are two types of environments that you want to avoid.
So, whether it’s Houston Texas or the UAE, I think that’s a very poor location for a datacenter.
I do this on all my devices. And I don’t use FaceID for anything at all. Which makes modern iPhones a bit of a pain, but I do it anyway.