No I do not underestimate profit incentives. I just realize that these things are not always so nefarious and there’s plenty of money for people to make by bringing things to market.
Regardless - cost effective, portable desal devices will be dramatically more profitable than sitting on a patent for 20 years (if even enforced!). Most people buying imported bottled water due so because they are lazy not because they are without access to potable water.
Jeeze you guys are so cynical 😂It’s true that many innovations from academic research fail to be commercialized or scaled. But it’s also true that many many successful technological innovations come out of academic research and impact the lives of millions.
The biggest barrier here will most likely be whether it can scale, not patent litigation.
Email is a collection of different protocols: SMTP, IMAP, POP are all different protocols that serve different purposes. Oversimplifying a bit, but - SMTP is used to exchange messages between mail servers. IMAP and POP are used to synchronize mail between a mail server and a mail client.
In other words, they absolutely can shut down IMAP and POP but still send/receive for gmail.com addresses. The main reason reason they wouldn’t do this is that their larger clients on Google Workspace need that functionality, but it’s the type of thing you might imagine them taking away from the unpaid version of Gmail to nudge companies over to Workspace.
Niger is ditching ECOWAS for the security from other states that recently underwent coups. It’s hard to see how this is in the interest of the common person.
Just because France is against the coup doesn’t mean it’s good for Nigeriens.
I share your concern over the risks posed by the loss of sea ice. However, per the Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, even if the entire glacier were to collapse it would amount to around a 65cm rise of sea level, and the majority of that would come in the 22nd and 23rd century.
Your overall point is fair, but your math here is off by a factor of 1000 - it would be around 380 GB.