No. They would not. Concentrated solar is only useful on clear days. It is not a serious option in most of Europe.

Plain old solar voltaic works fine on cloudy days.

Also, it is "Stirling".

Do you really want to lie in court? When the opposition can subpoena your firewall logs and browser cache?

Ha, you included UK in solidly metric. The UK has basically failed to switch. Only fuel is measured in metric units. Well ok, milk is sold in 568ml containers that do not say "pint" anywhere, but everyone says pint.

Right, so your assumption is that petrol engines are more efficient at partial load than diesel engines. This assumption is wrong, diesel suffers less from partial load.

Gearing for 1500-2000RPM means that each gear is 4/3 as high as the previous, which means that a 6-speed box with a first-gear speed of 10km/h at 750RPM will hit 110km/h at 2000RPM. Add an seventh and you are golden; once you hit 150km/h you will need to go beyond 2000RPM to have enough power anyway.

Typical parallel hybrids have continuously variable transmissions. They always run at the most efficient RPM for the needed power, just like serial hybrids.

You are still trying to talk around the fact that diesel engines in traditional cars are not even 50% more efficient than petrol engines, combined with the fact that diesel engines benefit less from hybrid drive than petrol engines. Therefore diesel hybrids will not be 50% more efficient than petrol hybrids.

Serial hybrids look decidedly pitiful so far, the BMW i3 does something like 7l/100km on petrol.

RHEL 6.5 supports at least one 40Gbps ethernet driver (Mellanox). I have no idea whether it can achieve 40Gbps in practice, but it can certainly connect to a 40Gbps switch.

init IS supposed to know whether services are running and restart them if they fail or exit. It used to do that way back when; you would edit /etc/inittab to specify what runs at which runlevel. Unfortunately /etc/inittab was sufficiently crap that all sorts of things were pushed into shell scripts instead, which lost the the ability to recover from failed services. Then you could install Monit and edit those shell scripts to get that ability back, but every time you upgrade you have to check whether your edits survived. Not nice.

A replacement for init was sorely needed.

Fair enough. Wikipedia provides no citations for that number, and I have had zero luck finding actual published studies, which is actually a bit weird.

However, conventional diesel cars are nowhere near twice as efficient as petrol cars. I do not understand why that changes with the addition of a hybrid drive system -- the hybrid drive system should improve the efficiency of a petrol car comparatively more. E.g. look at spritmonitor.de, top diesel performer (after the special models VW Lupo 3L and Audi A2 3L which do not have equivalent petrol cars) is the Citroen C1: 4.2 l/100km on diesel, 5.2 l/100km on petrol. Less than 25% improvement, and half of that is just because diesel is heavier.

Anyway, I will be convinced when someone builds a small diesel range extender. I won't be holding my breath.

That is great when you are building a ship engine for Emma Mærsk. Now build a 30kW diesel range extender and get 40% efficiency out of that. Good luck.

Verizon does not offer balanced traffic ratios. They should be paying Netflix for the imbalance. Yet somehow it gets twisted so that Netflix has to pay.

Locomotives are diesel electric because you cannot make a mechanical power train which get a freight train rolling. You need something with near-infinite torque like an electric motor or a steam engine. And yes, diesel has more energy, partially because it is heavier and partially because C turns into CO2 whereas you need two H per O. More carbon atoms mean higher CO2 emissions of course.

Small diesel engines are not inherently more efficient than petrol engines. They just perform a lot better in practice because they do not suffer so much from partial load. Making a petrol hybrid makes sense because petrol engines hate to run at anything but full load and you solve the lack of torque at the low end. Making a diesel hybrid does not make nearly as much sense since diesel is reasonably efficient at partial load and provides a more acceptable amount of low-end torque.

Diesel engines are large, heavy, and expensive which means less room, mass, and money for batteries.

That makes no sense. As soon as you ask Netflix for the cache, Netflix will steer traffic coming from your customers to the cache, and the cache will do good.

You still need the bandwidth to download each movie once of course.

Economies of scale only makes it better. Yes, you need more than one box for hundreds of thousands of customers, but it is still the cheapest way to get any kind of bandwidth. The cost is completely trivial when you are Verizon-size.

You have to get to Netflix size. Small players pay for everything.

If the ISP is concerned about this, they can just ask Netflix for a caching box. Total cost to the ISP is a couple of ports in a switch, a few rack units, and power. I.e. approximately zero.