I think that comparing "being able to solve NP-hard or NP-Complete problems" to "travel to the moon, mars or deeper into space with rockets" is a much worse offender, since the latter clearly doesn't violate the laws of physics whereas the former probably might.

There's a lot of interesting Forth videos on YouTube, too. People running interesting stuff on whatever you can buy these days.

There's the /r/outside subreddit for that.

If I'm not mistaken, a single monolithic VLSI circuit ought to be more reliable than a PCB full of SSI/MSI circuits. The sheer number of soldered points alone should be a factor in this.

That's what she said! (The alien programmer from Sirius about Earth...)

Virtually anything in modern industry does. That's hardly an argument against solar cells. Is there a law of nature saying you're required to have those toxic compounds leak, otherwise the panel won't work? No? I thought so. Compare this with, for example, gasoline car exhaust...

At 0.7c, you might be able to somehow capture the hydrogen atoms that keep hitting you and harvest their kinetic energy, which should amount to something like 12 kW/m^2 of your ship's cross-section at these speeds in the average interstellar medium of about 1 hydrogen atom per cm^3.

I think the point is that even accounting for waste heat (which is the kind of photons that has to escape eventually) doesn't account for all the observed thrust. So either there's a measurement error, or something else must generate extra thrust.

Well, that's true. But even 1M transistors for a core might be a bit too much. Aside from the problems with validation, you wonder what other interesting choices for HW design we could have had with much simpler cores. Evolutionary optimization of everything below late-stage compiler intermediate code, perhaps? That would presumably be a massive undertaking, but perhaps very valuable in the long run. I don't think we have any idea how the existing systems fare in the larger universe of potential architectures. We just hope that they are good. But doing this with complicated systems is much more difficult than with simple ones.

There may be a somewhat strong correlation between being so stupid that you decide to run Windows XP on a sensitive embedded system and being so stupid that you write a sensitive application in a way that makes the whole system have obvious mistakes in it.

Apparently, the Jevons paradox works for software, too!

Intel is bound by the requirement to run legacy software. Even an ARM system effectively has to be able to run it. A designer of a new open system would have no such constraints. Thus, no need to invest $10.6B and 5.5 billion transistors to reach a reasonable result for a wide range of applications. Attempting to review or redesign an Intel system would of course be a folly, but also completely pointless to begin with.

Eh, "can't possibly hurt..."

Or maybe not?

Also, I suspect that you're ultimately wrong. What exactly prevents us from turning something like Project Oberon into hardware? There's nothing "antiquated" about a clean design. Or are you implying that anything non-baroque is antiquated by definition? Rather than coming up with ever-more-complicated cores, give me a hypercube of power-efficient cores and a stacked memory on top of them to play with. After all, in an era of most software containing some form of encapsulation and message passing between its constituent parts as a means of cleaning up internal interfaces, some form of storage non-locality can possibly hurt. And you can get all the performance you want for a small device without most of the complexity of contemporary COTS hardware.