Just eyeballing the numbers and making reasonable assumptions, let's say it puts out 2 million watts peak, 1 million average, that is at 10 cents a kilowatt-hour, $100 an hour. If it is running 8,000 hours a year, it makes $800,000 a year. If you borrowed the money at 5%, it had better not cost more than $10 million or so to build and not more than $300,000 a year to run and maintain. And if it lasts 15 years that is another $666,000 a year you lose just in making rust. Unlikely to be a financial win, especially compared to things like wind power that don't rust as quickly.

Yeah but the early CPU's were all microcoded, so most instructions took multiple cycles, so effectively about 1 MIPS.

However anything going Mach 17 is going to quickly get white-hot and quickly run out of fuel, so applications are going to be quite limited.

I could see this story appearing on April 1. Just about everything in it is wrong;

1) Cooling a surface below ambient-- see "Thermodynamics". Can't happen.

2) Costs less-- see "Economics". Things with benefits cost more.

3) Costs less-- see "Economics". If it's 90% pigment, it's not going to be cheap.

4) New discovery-- see "History". Barium sulphate has been used as a reflectance agent for 135 years.

5) Feasibility-- see "Geography". The percentage of rooftop area on the planet's surface is minuscule, under 1%.

Scratching my head.

The power dissipation in a large IC has not much to do with the resistance of the conductors. Most of the power gets used in charging and discharging the capacitances. Most of the rest in leakage currents. Nothing to do with the conductors. So someone please explain how it's "80 times" better with superconducting wires.

The numbers don't make any sense.

If you have 150,XXX drives with 2XX,XXX drive-days, it seems you installed the drives the day before yesterday.

What am I missing??

At my first job we all cleaned 16mm movie projector parts using gallons of TCE. Now I can blame my mediocre college grades, relationship difficulties, and job-hopping on that! Sweet!

KInda wrong.

Negative resistance does not produce power.
It does not have a "wide variety" of applications:
The negative resistance in the old gas-filled fluorescent tubes is not a feature, it is a bug, requiring a lot of positive reactance in an expensive and heavy iron ballast to swamp out the negative resistance.
Gunn diodes are rather rare microwave devices.
TFA doesn't even mention the classic most popular negative resistance device, the tunnel diode.

The autocatalytic responses are examples of positive feedback, not "negative differential response"..

So this thing takes up 3D space to collect 2D air. Doesn't sound like anything that is going to scale up, it's going to top out at a pretty small size. Propeller efficiency is a very well studied field and this certainly isn't a top performer.

Way back Intel took some architectural advice from the old Burroughs mainframes, and put into the 286 chip 4096 special segments, where each segment had its own base and length limits. Smart compilers could be written to allocate a separate segment for each struct or array, as could malloc(), automatically preventing buffer overflows with only minor hardware overhead. Unfortunately the protect mode on the 286 was hard to get into and out of, and 4096 segments was just too few for comfort, and yo'd have to rewrite DOS and Windows a fair amount to work in that mode, and it didn't integrate well with existing real-mode code, so it never really caught on. So we abandoned safety 30+ years ago and never looked back.

.... or you send more than one bit per wire, with like four voltage levels, as already done by some pin-limited chips.

Far too many postulates! And ridiculous/meaningless ones at that.

Someone forgot to mention in the lede, any electrolytic process is going to use scads of electricity, just like aluminum refining, and places with iron ore are like down by the seashore, where there is little or no cheap hydro power available. So you're going to have to build HUGE solar or middling nuke plants to refine steel this way. And price is still going to be an issue, as steel at aluminum prices isn't going to fly, not by a factor of 5 or worse,

The complaints are not unlike the air traffic controller's complaints about IBM's computer system, on which billions had been spent. Nobody thought to consult the end-users. When they were shown the prototype, they just said "Nope, those planes are coming at me at 500MPH, I don't have the time to fill out all those fields".

Minor correction: A modem chip takes in digital data and converts it to a serial analog baseband data stream. Then a RF mixer up-converts the baseband analog spectrum up to RF frequencies, in this case REALLY high analog RF frequencies, like six times higher than a typical CPU clock rate. It's a bit of a stretch to call something that puts out 39GHz a "modem" chip.