actually most franchise restaurants are not profitable and eventually go out of business. subway is famous for being basically a pyramid scheme that only makes money by fleecing aspiring restaurateurs. mcdonald's is an exception because they are primarily a real estate company and commercial landlord.
WOW64 is not emulation, it's just a second set of libraries exactly like the ia32-libs package on linux. OSX used to have this too but i guess apple got tired of maintaining it
the exterior of the ISS is constantly exposed to small mounts of atomic oxygen, which is an incredibly strong oxidizer. probably in addition to ozone there is a huge variety of organic and inorganic oxides that get tracked in through the airlock.
interestingly my ISP, at&t, quietly turned off ipv6. not sure exactly when it happened, i should get around to complaining about it but i hate making phone calls
my parents also lost data that was supposed to be backed up on backblaze because they didn't use that computer for a month and when they turned it back on the hard drive was dead. apparently backblaze silently deletes backups more than 30 days old even if they are the newest backup and then happily keeps billing you for not storing your data.
i was too clever by half and tried to make a NAND gate by combining an AND gate with an inverter. after about 15 minutes i realized that i had it backwards, an AND gate is actually a NAND gate combined with an inverter
that's backwards compatibility. forward compatibility is being able to run new apps on an old operating system. the latest version of the SDK builds apps which only run on big sur or newer.
a few years ago the vending machines in my office building started accepting credit and debit cards for an extra fee of $0.35 per transaction. just recently they stopped accepting bills and coins leaving cards as the only option, but are still charging the extra fee.
one difference is that a phase change stores energy at constant temperature, which may be desirable given that heat pump efficiency is inversely proportional to temperature output temperature
battery life span is defined as when the reach 80% of their original capacity. it's possible that the decline will accelerate after that point but they aren't suddenly useless
it takes surprisingly few trucks to keep stores stocked. most of the trucks you see driving around are either delivering packages or hauling bulk cargo that used to go by rail
of course they are not throwing the energy away. but by using a working fluid that changes phase they are trading away energy efficiency for power density, for the same reason that steam engines are less efficient than stirling engines.
i didn't do any math tbh, i just took the 25% number from the wikipedia page for cryogenic energy storage. i assumed their efficiency would be lower of the smaller temperature differential, but maybe it will be higher because they are storing part of the energy as pressure rather than temperature
The tanks to hold liquid CO2 will likely be a lot cheaper than compressed air tanks because the required pressure is much lower. But they are going to loose a lot of energy to cooling the gas and reheating the liquid. I would be surprised if the round-trip efficiency is higher than 25%.