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.
I’ve spent most of my adult life working remote (also in tech) and have had some trips like this that were fantastic and others that were big hassles. The determining factor is whether the location you go to is conducive for actually working, otherwise you spend way too much of your time trying to sort out stupid logistical things (where can I hold a call? How flaky is the internet? How do I sync hotel checkout to work schedule? Etc). But some locations are designed for remote workers.
Look on the map specifically for coworking and read reviews and look at pics to get an idea. Consider getting a Spaces membership, which is a very large network of coworking through most of Western Europe and some other countries , where you can drop right in and everything “just works”.
I have a wife and kids now so it’s not as easy for me to float around as much, but I’ve had some excellent week long trips or even just long weekends through much of Western Europe. There are many places with budget flights and you wouldn’t necessarily go to on serious longer holiday, but are awesome destinations for this kind of travel. You get a chance to have a taste of those places and don’t use up your PTO.
A recent place I went like was to Taghazout, a cool beach town with a bunch of surfer tech nomads and lots of coworking spaces. I went in April on a $50 Ryan air flight (in/out Agadir). It was a great trip.
Your overall point is fair, but your math here is off by a factor of 1000 - it would be around 380 GB.