The VienerX Newsletter

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As America approaches its 250th anniversary, it is worth stepping back and reflecting on one of the defining forces behind our nation’s growth and resilience: technology.

From the very beginning, American innovation has been less about invention for its own sake and more about practical progress. Technology here has always been about saving time, expanding opportunity, and giving people more control over their daily lives. In that sense, technology has been a quiet partner in freedom.

This newsletter series will explore how technology helped shape America into a more connected, productive, and innovation-driven country. Not through abstract theory, but through everyday change. Through tools and systems that altered how people lived, worked, communicated, and built businesses.

Some of those breakthroughs were simple. Toothpaste in a tube made daily hygiene cleaner and easier. Sliced bread saved time in kitchens across the country. Automatic transmissions changed how and where Americans could travel. Each one gave people back minutes, effort, and mental energy. Over time, those small gains added up to something larger.

Other innovations were born in garages, basements, and workshops. Think of Hewlett and Packard starting with test equipment in a Palo Alto garage, or Thomas Edison experimenting relentlessly to turn ideas into usable systems. These were not just inventors. They were builders of ecosystems that allowed ideas to spread, scale, and endure.

What connects all of these moments is not novelty, but impact. Technology gave Americans more time. More reach. More freedom to focus on ideas instead of mechanics, outcomes instead of effort. While life in our country is not perfect, the innovation and leaders of our past have given people more time and tools to innovate and help shape a better future than ever before.

As the series unfolds, we will trace this evolution from simple, life-improving innovations to the technology-driven world we now inhabit. Along the way, we will revisit the moments when technology inspired genuine wonder, examine when it became expected rather than celebrated, and explore what leadership and stewardship mean in a world where technology is no longer optional.

Understanding how technology earned trust in the past helps us better understand our responsibility to use it wisely today.

How Your Laptop Knows It Is Closed

When you close your laptop, the system detects the lid position using built-in hardware sensors. Years ago, laptops often used a small mechanical switch near the hinge. When the lid pressed the switch, the system triggered sleep. Because these were physical parts, they sometimes failed or got stuck.

Modern laptops usually use a magnetic method instead. A magnet sits in the screen bezel and a tiny sensor sits in the base. When the lid comes down, the magnet and sensor align and the system registers that the lid is closed. That slight snap feeling at the end of closing is often the magnets pulling together.

The sensor sends a “lid closed” signal to the operating system. The hardware detects the action. The software decides what to do next.

Quick tip: If a laptop does not sleep when closed, the sensor is rarely the problem. It is usually a power setting.

What Sleep Mode and Hibernate Actually Mean

Sleep mode is a low power standby state. Your work stays open, but most of the system powers down.

In sleep mode, the screen turns off, the processor slows way down, and memory stays powered so your apps remain exactly where you left them. Network activity and downloads usually pause. Power use drops a lot, but not to zero.

When you wake the system, it resumes almost instantly because your session never left memory.

Hibernate goes one step further. Instead of keeping your work in memory, the system writes your full session to storage and then powers off almost completely.

In hibernate, open apps and documents are saved to disk, battery use drops close to zero, and startup takes a bit longer than sleep but faster than a full cold boot.

IT note: Sleep preserves problems along with your work. A full reboot clears memory and restarts services, which is why support teams often ask you to reboot instead of just closing the lid.

Why a Closed Laptop Can Still Work with a Monitor and Keyboard

If your laptop is closed but connected to an external monitor, keyboard, or dock, it can stay fully running. This is controlled by a power policy setting, not by the lid sensor itself.

Operating systems include a rule for lid behavior, usually shown as “When I close the lid.” The choices are sleep, hibernate, shut down, or do nothing. In desk setups, this is often set to do nothing.

In that configuration, the laptop detects that the lid is closed but ignores the sleep action. It turns off the built-in screen and keeps everything else running.

The system also detects connected devices such as monitors, docks, USB keyboards, and Bluetooth mice. When an external display is present, the graphics system shifts output to that screen automatically.

This setup is commonly called clamshell mode. It allows a laptop to function like a desktop while docked, then go portable when unplugged.

Quick tip: Closed does not always mean asleep. In many office and managed IT environments, closed and running is intentional.

On October 3rd of last year in Turin, Italy, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a bold prediction, stating that by 2045 we will have massive data centers orbiting the Earth. The principal driver of this idea is energy consumption. It has been well documented that AI data centers require massive amounts of energy, to the point that governmental agencies are exploring ways to limit power usage or reduce electricity prices. This significantly increases the appeal of data centers in space, which would be able to draw on the largest independent energy source available to humans today: the sun.

Solar Energy in Space

Solar energy in space is significantly more efficient than terrestrial-based solar power. Estimates from the Royal Greenwich Observatory suggest that the same solar panels in space versus at sea level can produce roughly 30% more watts on average, a huge gain in terms of energy efficiency. This is due to a variety of factors, including direct sunlight that is not refracted by the atmosphere, the absence of weather, and increased predictability of solar exposure.

This difference is further amplified when newer technologies, such as solar collectors, large mirrors that reflect sunlight onto panels, are factored in. This technology has become so promising that nations around the globe are researching power stations that would beam collected solar energy back to Earth. When combined with declining rocket launch costs and proof of concept that large-scale infrastructure, such as Starlink, can operate in space and transmit data back to Earth quickly, the idea of space-based data centers becomes increasingly compelling.

How It Would Actually Work

How this concept would be implemented is relatively easy to conceptualize, though it would require significant technological advancement to reach the previously mentioned 2045 goal. There are several challenges, which will be addressed in the next section, but in principle the data centers would likely exist in pressurized pods, not unlike those used for human space stations.

It is unlikely, given our current understanding of data transfer, that these facilities would power consumer-facing applications such as ChatGPT. Latency requirements would make this impractical. However, for power-intensive tasks such as scientific data modeling, large language model training, and other workloads that require hours or days to run, these centers could be ideal. To be cost-effective, they would need to operate with minimal human intervention, meaning our technology would need to advance to the point where remote systems and AI-driven robots could handle most, if not all, maintenance and servicing.

The Issues

Last, but certainly not least, are the challenges this proposal presents. One major issue is sovereignty, or, more plainly, who owns low Earth orbit? This is already a concern, and with the growing number of commercial satellites, a large congestion problem is emerging. This also extends to data rights. Even today, questions around who owns AI-generated or AI-trained data, particularly when copyrighted material is involved, are becoming louder and more contentious.

However, these are relatively minor compared to the most significant practical issue: heat transfer. The physics are complex, but in simple terms, space is not an environment that easily dissipates heat. Space is cold for humans, but cold does not mean cooling. Think of a car. No matter how cold it is outside, you need coolant to keep the engine cool. On Earth, when you bring a hot cup of coffee outside on a cold day, it cools because heat energy is transferred into the surrounding air via air molecules. In space, there is no air, and therefore no easy medium for transferring heat away from servers running intensive AI workloads.

This problem is so severe that the International Space Station, which uses roughly 75 kW of power, requires entire systems dedicated solely to heat dissipation. Modern terrestrial data centers, let alone those envisioned for the coming decades, consume orders of magnitude more power, which in turn generates exponentially more heat.

Conclusion

Data centers in space are an interesting idea with a lot of benefits. If the issues around them, which are numerous and quite challenging, can be sorted out, than they may be the future. However, the physics challenges, which do not stop at heat distribution, may be a problem without an easy solution. Time will tell if this proves to be realistic, or a server in the sky.