No, light travels 5cm in one 6 GHz clock cycle, in a vacuum. Speed of light limitations have been a consideration for years. The Cray1 was designed in the early 70s and its physical design allowed for the propagation speed of electricity in copper. It only ran at 80MHz. It's not just about cycle time - what's the duration of your edges? What other latencies are there in the electronics? In 2004, IBM's POWER5 MCM was 9.5cm wide and the CPUs ran at ~2GHz. Not sure what speed the interconnect ran at.

I keep hearing this, but it's not true; RISC OS had protected memory. Try writing to another app's memory from user mode, or writing to VIDC registers from user mode. But some important areas weren't protected, e.g. the ARM vector table.

I'm in the UK and pay 13.1p/kWh flat rate, including tax. Either StoneyMahoney's figures are a "London-only" thing or he should switch supplier.

> Before you ask, I am a professional (it's my job) programmer. I'd love to be an engineer.
> I'd love to work somewhere where those kind of standards were applied. I'd get a CS degree
> (mine is in Physics), but those programmers I've worked with who have CS degrees don't seem
> much more engineer-like in their application than those without.

In principle Computer Science courses are meant to turn out scientists, not engineers. Maybe you'd be better getting a Software Engineering degree. Have you worked with programmers with Software Engineering degrees? Are they more engineer-like?