> Solar panels require an accompanying energy storage system

So put a small battery module under each panel. It's not like much can grow there besides grass, and there's plenty of that between rows of panels.

You've got what, a 2x1 meter plot of land for each panel? If you allow for a 1 meter panel height, that's slightly less than 2 cubic meters of volume you could fill with batteries (allowing for some loss of volume for the module's outer casing). That is a LOT of space, even if what you fill it with is little better than a stack of car batteries. The panel would then simply be mounted directly on top of the battery module's outer casing, with an appropriate tilt of course.

Since the panel is already producing DC, you'd only need a beefy diode on its output, which then leads to the master power rail that feeds the inverting station. The battery module would need a regulator circuit on it since the panel's voltage is by definition variable, and a circuit that'll hard-bridge the battery to the primary rail when its voltage exceeds the panel's (that's the reason for the big diode -- some panels will actually emit light and then burn out when excessively back-fed).

Need more storage? Make the battery module 2 meters tall, and either just adapt your maintenance process to deal with the height, or better yet dig a hole and bury the bottom half, and design the module so that it can trivially be raised out of the ground for maintenance. That would naturally mean sacrificing some of the horizontal dimensions for the lift and the hole's retaining walls, but then you can use as much height/depth as you want, up to the load limit of the ground under it.

The inverting station still has to deal with a variable incoming DC rail, but now it'll be less-variable than before, and it merely has to be regulated, inverted, and sent out onto the grid, without the need for a dedicated battery facility or building expansion. The cost savings on that would surely make-up for the increased cost of having all those per-panel modules.

If a battery module goes down, just shut the damn thing off until it can be repaired or replaced. The panel can keep providing juice, and the inverting facility won't even notice either way (sure, I realize you could do something similar with an all-in-one storage facility, but this seems like it would be easier to deal with).

There, that solves the storage problem pretty well, imho.

The startup is laser focused

No, lasers aren't focused

A laser beam is still just light, and no beam of light exists that doesn't diverge. Just because it's all one wavelength doesn't mean it isn't still composed of photons acting like photons.

When last I checked, all optical drives -- from CD to Blu-Ray, and even old M-O and floptical formats -- have movable lenses, and actually DO focus their lasers onto the media, since the beam has to be tight enough to fit within the width of one track[*] at the point where it lands (or at least, tight enough that noise from adjacent tracks isn't significant).

No two discs are perfectly identical in thickness or flatness, and no two will sit on the spindle at precisely the same Z position, so the drive has to be able to actively compensate for variations in the distance between the reflective layer and the read sensor. You can only do that by explicitly focusing the beam such that its reflection hits the sensor with the intensity range the electronics expect.

Sure, your cat will still happily chase that elusive little red dot whether it's a few millimeters bigger than it theoretically ought to be or not, but on the other hand, that missile you intend to shoot down is just gonna brush you off, and your kickass 100 mile line of sight connection isn't gonna work too well, if half your beam misses its target due to divergence.

[*] or whatever you want to call the adjacent turns of the spiral of bits on CDs and their kin.

Maybe because in the case of computers, even the dumbest user wouldn't mistake that setting/switch for something involving an internal combustion engine, let alone something that compresses air into one.

Besides, many computers have at least one centrifugal fan in them... that's kinda-sorta like an electric turbocharger, if you squint at it just right, and in many cases they spool-up as system load increases. :-)

"SPEND THE ENTIRE COMMERCIAL SCOURING IT FOR ANY SIGNS"

You jest, but there was one glitch: at about 23 seconds in, the boy is walking away from the camera, close-up of his feet. His socks look weird, something's over-enhanced the texture of the fabric and added a sort of outline or border. Makes them look like they have an "edge detect" filter applied over them.

Really, as commercials go, I've seen WAY worse, long before text-to-video AI was a thing (at least, the visuals -- I didn't let the audio play).

That said, Geoffrey (the giraffe) looks weird in that commercial, compared to what I remember growing up. Guess they've changed his look over the years.

Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause and into interstellar space not too long ago, and one defining feature of that phenomenon is that it's where the solar wind stalls-out against the interstellar medium, whatever gases and particles that consists of, resulting in a bow shock.

So while V1 can probably still detect the actual EM radiation from a flare (since we can talk to it, it can undoubtedly see the sun too), it likely wouldn't notice a change in particle density caused by it, nor from the CME that sometimes accompanies a flare, because those would never reach it.

Imagine two boats traveling against a current, one upstream of the other. Occupants thereof can see each other, take measurements, communicate, etc. but the upstream boat doesn't react to the waves being kicked-up by the other, because those waves can't travel very far before they're stopped by the current.

(what, you expected a car analogy? :-P )

Maybe he's not the best example of a role model, but consider this:

Given that Kirk is a character in a science fiction franchise, the writers who gave Shatner most of his dialogue *did* do a pretty decent job making Kirk out to be -- at the bottom of it all -- an upstanding man with generally-good values. Suspension of disbelief plays a role here, too.

Independent of Shatner's own values, any person in the real world sporting the set of values Kirk displayed would probably be worth looking up to, for all the depth of character you can get in sci-fi, anyway. You can even ignore that Kirk sought to snog every other green alien woman he ran across, :-P since that would be strictly private-life anyway (or at least as private as a high-ranking officer can be), and he never mistreated anyone who didn't solidly earn it.

So yeah, it's okay for someone to look up to Kirk, at least until they get to the point in life where they don't need a role model.

Well the solution to that is simple: a coolant pump is small, so put it and the reservoir (if any) inside the battery module instead of mounting them outside, on the car body. Hell, apparently some EVs use an actual refrigeration cycle comparable to your heat pump or fridge, [*googles*] with something called R1234yf as the working fluid, so having a totally sealed cooling system must already be practical.

As for discarding that heat, integrate the radiator/condenser into the bottom of the battery module's casing. The casing is gonna be metal anyway, and assuming a "skateboard" design, there's a ton of surface area for heat exchange, especially if you corrugate it.

Plus, you could design the top side of the casing to maximize contact with the body of the car, and pass the coolant across that area too, using the body as a heat sink. I would hope that's already a thing now, anyway, but maybe it isn't. Apparently, some EVs now pre-cool or pre-heat the cabin while on the charger, just for the sake of driver comfort right out of the gate, so if such contact allows the battery module to warm the cabin up too much, it should be no trouble to compensate for that -- it's on the charger anyway, and that's pretty much the only time the battery module gets particularly hot (unless it's blazing-hot outside), so all you have to care about is the charger's current limit, as you won't be losing battery range.

Now all you have left to connect/disconnect are the power rails and communication lines. Of course, that needs to be weatherproof, but that problem was solved long before EVs became commonplace.

Since the battery module needs to be protected from road debris anyway, that would mean designing it and its shield so that air can be circulated between them. I would assume this is already a thing now as well.

Um, wouldn't a treatment that completely reverses a disease entirely just be a "cure", regardless of its underlying actions? What's with the new terminology?

[...]
since Bitcoin purchases are all public it should be pretty clear about what price all the Bitcoin they hold was bought for [...]

Except that rates in dollars or Euros or whatever aren't a part of the Bitcoin blockchain, or that of another common cryptocurrency for that matter, as far as I know. About all that's recorded there is address FOO sent X Bitcoins to address BAR at such-and-such date and time.

Even then, that's only if the transaction actually involves the blockchain.

I mean, if you buy some crypto on an exchange via their normal means, that most likely won't hit the relevant blockchain, but if you give someone a wad of cash, and he whips out a phone and sends the proper quantity of crypto to a wallet that you control, THAT will show up on the blockchain (even if one or both wallets are themselves on an exchange, so long as they're different exchanges).

A typical purchase would just use a connection to your bank account, using plain old ACH (or similar) transactions, perhaps through an intermediary, very similar to a trip to the local grocery, and just like those, you'd never interact with the upstream supplier. Your "bread" comes from an on-site, periodically-replenished cache instead. Wonder doesn't know you spent eight bucks on two loaves of some fancy-shmancy whole-grain artisan thing last Friday afternoon, they just know Kroger ordered a thousand loaves of various kinds last week (okay, there's probably more info than just that, but you get the point).

To get the kind of data you're thinking of, at the level of accuracy you'd want, you'd have to associate transactions according to the exchange their addresses are connected to, then reference the price on the exchange at the exact date and time of the transaction (since prices can vary wildly from exchange to exchange), and you'd need to use an aggregator tool also, to get approximate prices for transactions that don't trace to an exchange.

All in all, seems like it'd be a pain in the ass to do. Then again, I'm sure someone, somewhere is already doing all of this.

That's "The Slaver Weapon", to be specific. It ought to be accurate, as DC Fontana brought Larry Niven in to adapt his story into the Star Trek episode.

It's called Debian. ;-)

Wait, so my 30 year old vehicle DOESN'T have an extended warranty after all? Well, shit...

You jest, but there's a super simple solution to that issue also: implied consent for all cops and all other government personnel of any sort, at any level (local, state, fed), when performing their usual duties or acting under color of law. Oh, and that applies to private security as well.

Ignoring all the marketing BS, I followed the links to the actual announcement ( https://ai.facebook.com/blog/a... ) and listened to the samples they provided.

I have to say for 6 kbps, the last segment of the sample (made with their "Encodec") is pretty good quality.