I looked into this earlier this year. 100% of those surveyed want the annual time changes to stop, so the time is the same year-round.

However there is almost an exact 50 / 50 split of which way should be the permanent way. So 50% of folks will be unhappy whichever one is chosen.

Yes, and this statement:

Which I assume was meant to be reassuring, is the exact opposite. It tells me that it is very probable that whatever was actually in the test tube is something they don't even have the ability to test for or identify.

My guess is this is a front for bioweapon research.

For comparison, Starlink V3 satellites have a solar array wingspan of 70 meters.

https://www.cctvmanuals.com/20...
See also https://grokipedia.com/page/St...

They are, of course, technology that is about 40 years later than the ISS design

This doesn't make sense on the surface for a number of reasons. The Starship second phase cannot launch most of the things that Falcon 9 launches. I'm assuming they are going to have two large shuttle-like doors on a Starship eventually that can release larger payloads?

The next thing that doesn't make sense is simply payload size. Certainly it is not more economical to use the Starship stack to put something into orbit that is only a small fraction of its cargo capacity? And yes, I know it could carry multiple satellites / spacecraft at once, but it is very rare those things all need to be in the exact same orbit at the same time. So it seems Falcon 9 would be more economical for launching a single smaller thing?

Maybe the economics of the Falcon 9 second stage not being usable totally makes the case for Starship? It's estimated a second stage costs between $7 and $10 million. So perhaps right there economically it makes more sense to fly a 100% reusable Starship even for a small payload. I guess the liquid methane Starship burns is a relatively cheap, being derived from natural gas that the USA already has in abundant supply.

You could already install docker on WSL and Windows still doesn't have native container support. I'm not sure what the use case for this is.

Correct on both, in fact heat decreases efficiency of PV cells (thermal dark current is opposite to photovoltaic current). However, keep in mind that "hot electrons" aren't exactly hot in the sensible-heat sense-- it means that the electrons are in a high-energy state well above the bandgap of the semiconductor. The solar photons come in at an equivalent temperature of 6000K, and all of that energy gets transferred to the minority-carrier electrons, but they quickly shed their excess energy (by transferring energy to the lattice and to other electrons or holes) and relax to the edge of the conduction band (or, ~kT above it). So, using "hot electrons" means somehow finding a way to transfer energy out of the highly-excited initial state immediately after photon absorption, rather than the relaxed quasi-equilibrium state of the conduction band.

So, there's energy there, and in principle it could be used. It's just going to take a new approach to use it. I can't think of a way to do that without adding junctions, and then you end up essentially just re-inventing the multi-junction solar cell.

Yes, but of course now you're harvesting the sensible heat, not the hot electrons. This can be useful, if you need low-grade heat.

The perovskite semiconductors here are a very different technology than the old thin photovoltaics. They have the potential to be much more efficient, and the deposition techniques are cheap and comparatively low-tech

Whether they can succeed in simultaneously be highly-efficient, resistant to degradation in the environment, and still be low cost is the subject of a lot of work. We'll see.

To be more specific, the target back in the '80s and '90s was clearly articulated as being fifty cents per watt (where "per watt" meant, when illuminated at standard conditions of 1 kW/square meter.) Silicon photovoltaics can now be purchased at 12 cents per watt. In today's dollars. They not only hit the target, they blew it away.

The reason the thin films of the '80s and '90s lost was not that they were bad, but that silicon simply outcompeted them.

I have some amount of skepticism too. Nanosecond lifetimes of hot electrons are amazing, but to date there's no way for turning hot electrons into electrical energy*. So they'd essentially have to invent a technology from scratch.

--
  *(thermoelectrics convert hot electrons into usable energy, of course, but there not just the electrons, but the whole lattice is hot. And the efficiency is worse than a solar cell).

You mean like TreeSheets?

Except it wasn't the unwashed masses who labeled large language models "AI". It was the AI corporations (maybe "AI" should be in quotes here), who wanted it to sound sexier.

Link, because it didn't work the first time.

It doesn't. Even on Android phones, it requires Play Integrity. Most of the problems with social media are caused by monopolistic megacorps, and the "solution" is to give said megacorps even more power.

except for the hours in which the F16 crashes. Those hours cost $80 million/hour.

Fascinating; three completely disparate things, none of which have any relation to teleology, the nominal subject of the sentence.

"Wigner's Friend" is a thought experment, pointing out that in a strict interpretation of quantum mechanics, even conscious observers must be in an indeterminate quantum state until observed by an external observer. The least action principle states that the path of an object moving through a potential field is the one in which the action, the time integral of the kinetic energy minus the potential energy, is minimized. The second law of thermodynamics says that in any closed system the change in entropy, defined as the change in heat divided by the temperature, must be greater than or equal to zero; for a not-closed system, in order to decrease the entropy in one place, energy is needed (typically to be radiated as waste heat; i.e., life takes energy from the sun, and rejects waste heat to the envionment (which ultimately radiates it to space).) None of these have any relation to teleology, the philosophical concept that causality is driven by purpose.