> I don't see how microbes degrading plastics is any better than putting plastic bottles in a recycling bin so they can be melted down to make new ones."
You don't have to waste money and energy sorting bottles out of the trash if you can just dump a bunch of this bacteria in your landfill.
Latency is a real problem. Distances to satellites in orbit are very long. Also, there is a scalability problem. How many ground targets can a satellite simultaneously provide service to? My guess is, not a lot.
This could be an incremental bandwidth (but not latency) upgrade over existing satellite internet service to remote areas (by transmitting to a single ground receiver that serves a local area), but that's about it.
This is going very tangential, but no, not all bridges are directly paid for only by people driving on them.
To make public bridges into an ISP analogy, imagine: municipal and state taxes as well as tax revenue from other states (via Federal highway dollars) pay for a municipal broadband network. You may or may not actually use the service, and you pay for it either way. You likely don't have any other choice of ISP. And it's not-for-profit, and the general public and lawmakers constantly clamor and legislate for better service at lower prices.
Sure, but these are mostly just arbitrary caps. xfs performance at 50TB is supposed to be better than ext4 at 50TB. I don't know what xfs actually does over ext4, but I do know a little bit about ext4; on-disk it looks very similar to the ancient Unix FFS. xfs may use more scalable on-disk structures.
Looks like XFS supports concurrency better (both on the request side, and on the kernel<->backing store side).
MDMA is a lot easier than LSD, and dumb people get away with just selling Meth (even easier) as MDMA. But ok, maybe some people get away with making synthetic chemicals for some period of time. I don't know that it's necessarily the same people, as opposed to an unending supply of people willing to join the illegal trade. shrug
I expect long-term expected returns of the drug trade are negative, but people aren't good at evaluating risk.
You don't have to waste money and energy sorting bottles out of the trash if you can just dump a bunch of this bacteria in your landfill.