MangoCats

That's actually another good use, a kind of passive turn signal - though if they're really turning you should be able to notice their reduced speed without a light - and drivers who start depending on the front brake light to read intent to turn might actually have more accidents instead of less.

Just yesterday I watched a car pull out into an intersection less than one car-length in front of a car driving straight through the intersection, slowly. I can't know what they were thinking, but I would guess they assumed that the slow car going straight was about to turn, then they quit paying attention and pulled out just in time for the collision to be un-avoidable.

Well, around here "good drivers" can "read" the bad drivers' intent, and in a setting like a four way stop they can usually avoid getting hit by yielding, regardless of right of way circumstances.

I was having a very hard time seeing any possible benefit of a front brake light, since nobody accident prone ever looks in their mirrors.

I suppose in today's world of automatic transmissions that move the car forward whenever the brakes are released, they might serve some purpose at a four-way stop adding information about immediate intent of the other parties, but even there... that's more of a Darwinian situation where people who get into crashes at four way stops are sorting themselves out from the rest of reasonably competent drivers. If they're going fast enough for injuries at a four way stop, they deserve what they get. If they get a minor fender bender - that's a lesson to read the other traffic better next time.

Buses, as implemented in the US, are vehicles of humiliation and mental torture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZkouut-9RQ

How to waste an entire day? Take a bus trip somewhere that you could drive in a private car in 20 minutes.

Passing a test is very different from internalizing the lessons tested.

Define safe? If everyone drives safely enough that you are more likely to die of suicide than an automobile accident, is that safe enough?

The real answer is to dilute the salt back into the ocean, but even the cost of transport - whether by truck or rail or pipeline - a hundred miles and +3000' of elevation is likely less than building and maintaining a system that distributes that salt widely enough in the ocean to have negligible ecological impact at the points of dispersal.

A thousand smaller desalination plants spread along a hundred miles of coastline each distributing 87 thousand pounds of salt per day (basically: one pound per second) would be more feasible for ocean discharge than anything you might try to do from a single point. The system would also be much more robust / less prone to critical failures. ~10% of the plants might be offline at any given time while still providing full required capacity.

Looking at those numbers, I would propose something like 500 plants, no two closer than 1000' from each other along the coastline, each distributing up to three pounds of salt per second in a 6" outflow pipe at least 500' offshore that's carrying 100 gallons per minute of water with that salt dissolved therein. The discharge could be through a series of 100 1" holes spread 1' apart. I'm sure there would be local ecological effects, but in most areas they should be minimal by the time you're 200' or more down-current from the outflow.

Compared to treated wastewater discharge, I think the salty water discharge would be much less impactful. There's probably some opportunity to combine treated wastewater with the salty discharge to further treat the wastewater, though I wouldn't want to do that in ALL the salt discharge plants (you'd want some to study the salt impact alone.)

If your provider is working for you, then all is good. I suspect they either A) have hundreds of thousands or more e-mail users in total, or B) they work through one of the big providers for you.

If your provider only serves 20,000 or fewer e-mail clients, the costs for them to independently play white-list, black-list, whack-a-mole, pleading to keep their legitimate users' e-mail working smoothly would be prohibitive - upwards of $10 per year per e-mail account just for the employee(s) tasked with negotiating (and solving) those issues behind the scenes for their users (including you), not to mention policing their users to prevent them from abusing the e-mail system.

It's basically a problem of prejudice - if any e-mail account remotely linkable to yours by any metric mis-behaves, some admin somewhere will block it along with anything remotely associated with it - including your e-mail service. Then it's up to you, or your organization, or your organization's service provider, to track down the offended party and somehow negotiate with them to restore the blocked services for the innocent users.

For me, the question of how innovative it is comes down to kW input per gallon output. Doesn't matter to me if the power in is coming from solar, coal, nuclear, or hamsters in generator wheels, the efficiency of the system still comes down to power input and space required.

MIT doesn't lie as often as some sources.

How many suits for these kinds of blatantly fraudulent patents have actually been won? And lost?

If you have a conveniently located valley you're not using, you can make a new great salt lake for a few years. 87 million pounds of salt sounds like a lot, but a cubic mile of salt weighs approximately 9 trillion metric tons, or about 20 quadrillion pounds, or over 600 years of salt at 87 million pounds per day.

I'm sure there are a few people (very few) who would disagree, but a quick glance at a topo map shows Shelter Valley as a possible target for a strategic sea salt reserve deposit that could serve the area for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. San Francisco bay looks like they have salt ponds in what could otherwise be valuable real-estate.