By any chance do you know the names of these companies and where they are based? I'm exploring job opportunities and I'm interested being involved with a company I can be proud of - and can potentially make some big $$ in the no-so-distant future.

> There's that second law of thermodynamics to get in the way.

Yup. You can't get more power out of the thing than is contained in the sunlight itself that's hitting the panel.

This is, by the way, roughly 300BTU per hour per square foot.

> Not so with processing power.

Well, not entirely true either, but the theoretical limits are so far beyond where we're at that we have plenty of generations to work through.

Moore's law is misnamed; it's by no means a law. Its predictive value only exists in the sense that it seems to be holding up fairly consistantly, if you're willing to give plenty of leeway in your measurements. Think of it as "Moore's Observation", and don't presume that that there's any guarantee of it holding up.

And beyond the Second Law there's the First Law of Economics: scarcity inflates prices. The total output of the factory producing these new cheap solar cells has been bought by some mega-conglomerate or other, so the stuff won't be available to the public for the forseeable future. If another big purchase and then another occur they may never see the 'light of day' for us mere mortals. This chokepoint needs to be overcome before Moores Law can take over.

moores law is implicitly limited because if you extrapolate the equasion eventually you will make a computer so small yet so powerfull that it implodes.