The design can be changed; but this design is as it is in large part because of how much surface area it needs to collect enough sunlight to sustain even its distinctly frugal operation.

Improvements are likely, with better solar panels, better batteries, or both; but you don't beat the fact that optimal insolation is 1366w/m^2; and real world values typically lower, at least on average. A liter of Jet A is 35.3 MJ, so ~9880watt/h. Even at peak insolation, a square meter of solar collection takes a little over 7 hours to amount to as much energy as a liter of jet fuel. Jet engines are, of course, hardly perfectly efficient; but you get some sense of perspective from the fact that a relatively modern design, aimed at fuel efficient operation, like the 787 still has storage for in excess of 100,000 liters of fuel, a big 747-400 more like twice that.

On the plus side, your sunlight supply doesn't weigh anything, or require any volume(though your batteries do, and barring major improvements their energy density is dreadful compared to hydrocarbons); but even given perfectly efficient solar hardware, there just isn't that much energy to work with, by the standards of hydrocarbon aircraft. Any possible design is going to reflect this through some combination of gigantic wing area per unit capacity and a flight plan that sticks relatively carefully to maximally efficient speeds.

That's why I expressed curiosity about pH, rather than temperature. We know that some amount of temperature variation leads to survivable bleach/recolonize cycles; but a shift in the direction of making calcium-based structures more expensive to build and maintain under water could be quite different in impact.

It's pretty profoundly useless as a replacement for a commercial airliner or cargo plane(basically the wingspan of a 747; but transports a single pilot at a painfully tedious 50-100km/h); but suitably automated versions of the very-long-endurance solar aircraft concept have other uses. Longer life, and greater control, than balloons; but markedly cheaper to launch, and lower ping, than anything in orbit.

As a manned aircraft it's a pure novelty; but its performance is increasingly close to 'like a small satellite; but closer to the ground and requires only a large strip of pavement for launch and recovery', which could definitely find some takers.

The difference is that merely being a dickhead is relatively low risk, so it's annoying but not surprising that people do it when it suits them. Waving a selfie stick around is an excellent way to lose a phone, at minimum, and potentially do yourself some actual damage.

I'm not expecting civility here; but even relatively dumb animals learn to avoid aversive stimuli; and the slightly smarter ones sometimes even anticipate and avoid them.

I wouldn't want to be riding during testing; but the combination of tight quarters and fairly substantial air currents from passing coaster cars in an enclosed roller coaster would be a pretty neat challenge to watch a drone work through. Extra credit for drones capable of exploiting passing cars(riding their air currents in some controlled way, maintaining position immediately behind them if a relatively static trapped air region is available, 'roosting' on a beam and using regenerative braking on their rotors to recharge the batteries, etc.)

I imagine that there are parts of a given ride where you can safely deploy a 'selfie stick'; but what kind of idiot waves a pole around when moving at nontrivial speed near walls, beams, etc. that the pole can catch on? Roller coasters are designed not to subject you to unsafe levels of acceleration or deceleration; but that does not include sticking to speeds that are safe it a modestly rigid pole abruptly couples your moving, and squishy, body to an immobile structural element.

If you are lucky, you bought a cheap crap stick, and it will snap(and not send a sharp end into anyone's eye) before some part of your body does; but that's not really a gamble you want to take just for a lousy picture of yourself.

The little racket of selling pictures of the riders, taken by fixed cameras installed at strategic points, probably helped contribute to this decision, doing well by doing good and all that; but what a stupid idea.

Do people also take care to wear ponytails and/or ties when near rotating equipment? And dangle loose clothing over any exposed gears and belts they find? Or do we have people who've never met a machine more dangerous than an iPad or a minivan and just don't think?

I would find it extremely surprising, though more extremely surprising for some areas of their workforce than for others. However, the 1 woman figure is among new black employees only(of which there were only 7); not new employees workforce wide, for which TFA doesn't give a number; but provides some percentages indicating a modest increase in proportion of female workforce.

My suspicion is that facebook is doing some "good cultural fit" selection; but 1 black woman, of 7 black hires, is much more plausible than 1 woman, of 1,231 hires.

'Genocide'? I am more than ready to roll my eyes at assorted doomed feel-good initiatives; but until I can bask in the warm glow of the honkie ovens, this 'genocide' sounds like puffery.

I think the question is not 'is there a problem?' but 'is it Facebook's problem, or is something else picking them off earlier in the production chain such that Facebook's hiring is simply an accurate representation of the candidates it has to work with?'

Facebook is large enough that it has probably outgrown the most blatant 'Our hiring process is that you were the CEO's frat bro at Stanford, bro.' school of startup HR; but the question remains whether they've gone slightly more subtle, or whether they are even-handedly hiring from a field that, for reasons not under their control, has basically nothing to choose from if you are looking for a 'diversity' hire.

Either way there arguably exists a problem; but assuming that it's all facebook's fault is way easier than addressing the fact that, with rare exceptions, there's a pretty yawning gulf between a good American education and a lousy one.

If your resistors are large enough to have intelligible markings(and you don't have an excuse involving heroically sized bleed resistors for some excitingly dangerous looking apparatus), your ship probably sailed a decade ago, maybe 15 years.

Multiplication is timeless, at least.

Apparently, Facebook outsources a lot of its moderation tasks, via a Mechanical Turk like system, to whatever grim hellhole is cheapest; but still has internet access.

I suspect that they could...impressively boost...their diversity numbers if they were just able to find a way of counting those as 'employees' without actually paying them more. The effect would probably be even stronger than any benefit Apple gets from including their retail sales/support minions in the numbers.

Saving the corals might actually be the easy part: It wouldn't be a fun job, unless you are a real saltwater aquarium masochist; but taking 'cuttings' and propagating them in captivity is reasonably well understood, at least for the ones that have historically merited the attention. Even if you can't modify them to make them more durable, there is lots of ocean currently too cold for a given coral ecosystem that, if warmed, will become a viable location for transplants from the areas that are becoming too warm(the current cold-water reefs, which do exist; but don't get the attention of the tropical ones, may be pretty screwed, Rost reef, in the frigid waters off Norway, will be pining for the fjords).

However, much of the charm of coral reefs is the amount of ecosystem that they support. All sorts of weird stuff, the stuff that eats it, and so on to the top of the food chain. Transporting that, or convincing it to swim in the right direction, will be a much greater challenge. Plus, unlike the fecund swarms of tiny organisms, where 'genetic diversity' fits in a medium fish tank, and could probably re-mutate from a monoclonal strain in a matter of decades; larger organisms lose genetic diversity much more easily as individuals die, and don't recover nearly as easily. Some of the larger fish, say, will be will be a pretty inbred and sorry lot(exquisitely vulnerable to disease, as monocultures always are), if most of them die and a new population is seeded from a few transplants.

If there were some sort of payoff in it, we could probably have 'coral farms' up and running in short order; but they'd have roughly the same resemblance to natural reefs that tree farms producing papermill feedstock do to mature forests, or alfalfa fields do to prairies.

I'd be curious to know how well they deal with pH changes. We already know, from observing coral bleaching during short term warm periods, that they are touchy and somewhat feeble; but the survivors are capable of recolonizing, or building atop depending on the details, the skeletons of their fallen.

If those structures come under attack, or if wringing calcium ions out of the water becomes more difficult and energy intensive, they may have larger problems. As might, unfortunately, a surprisingly large number of other ecologically important aquatic organisms. That could really be a downer.

Deeper seas means exciting new shallow-ocean areas replacing such formerly dessicated locations as 'Florida' and 'The Netherlands, except that they actually believe in civil engineering over there, so maybe not'. This presents its own problems, of course; but the geometry of the earth's land area simply doesn't allow you to deepen-out the existing shallow areas without opening up new shallow areas; unless you have wrath-of-an-old-testament-god-in-a-genocidal-mood amounts of water available.

You know how it is in the handset market, people just stop caring and start phoning it in after a while.