It's because RISC-V is currently fragmented. Not the base ISA, but the base ISA isn't enough to build a device, and there are a lot of divergent extensions.

That wasn't a problem when RISC-V was only theoretical, but now that companies are working towards actual devices, having the "common" RISC-V support in the Android Common Kernel was a hindrance, not a help. The expectation is that over the course of a few years the RISC-V Android ecosystem will coalesce and settle on a common set of extensions to the ISA and it will then be possible to standardize the RISC-V support in ACK. Until then, it's better if ACK doesn't have any RISC-V support so chip vendors and OEMs can straightforwardly patch in what they need.

That doesn't make sense.

Android devices in China are not Google Play devices (can't be, really, thanks to the Great Firewall), so the device makers are not obligated to use the Android Common Kernel -- or anything else. They're free to take the open source and build whatever they like. Removing RISC-V support from ACK does exactly nothing to hinder their ability to build and deploy RISC-V devices. If they want to stick with Google's kernel for whatever reason, they can simply reapply the patches that were removed. If they want something else, they can do that.

Yeah, it probably will go that way, but it'll take longer than it should because PV is operating at a significant disadvantage due to coal plants free-riding on the environment. In the language of economists, pollution -- including CO2 -- is an externaity, a cost that is borne by a third party not part of the economic transaction. In this case, the parties in the transaction are the power plant operator and whoever buys their power, and the external third party is everyone else who has to cover the healthcare and climate impact costs of that transaction.

The EPA can't do it, but we really should implement a carbon tax to "internalize" (again, the economic term) the CO2 emission externality, so that whoever is emitting the CO2 has to include that cost in their operations, and of course pass it on to whoever buys it. With a carbon tax, the estimated future cost of climate change would be priced into every carbon-emitting process, creating a level playing field against carbon-reduced or carbon-free processes.

Without that, coal has an enormous built-in advantage. I expect that renewables will eventually win anyway, but it's going to take longer and create greater climate-change impact than necessary.

Ideally, we should also internalize other externalities, such as particulate pollution which increases healthcare costs. Make sure everyone is paying the full and accurate cost of their actions, then let the market optimize the outcome. But, one thing at a time.

More seriously, I wonder what sort of protocol they're using. I guess they could just use standard protocols, but with a freaking huge ACK window, but it seems more likely they'd use extensive FEC to reduce effective bit errors to extremely low rates, since NAKing and retransmitting corrupted packets would be incredibly slow. Or maybe that's okay. As long as they're only transmitting stored data which can be retransmitted a half hour later if needed, it might be fine to use simple error detection with retries. Dunno. This would be a fascinating problem to solve.

This ain't gonna work for FPS games... ping times of 25 minutes!

The increase I'm talking about is just in deployed capacity... it's a manufacturing and installation problem, not a technology problem, and it's manufacturing and installation (as well as demand) that is doubling deployed capacity every year, not technological changes. If you want to claim that the current rate of growth is going to stop it's incumbent on you to explain why it will change.

That said, I think you're wrong that the technology is "done". There is lots of very interesting research going on, in both new chemistries and in new manufacturing techniques.

Sure. So? 10 years is almost certainly not enough to get us to that capacity, but 20 years is. Like most such things, installed battery capacity is likely following a sigmoid curve, and we're in the exponential phase, with an exponent of around 2. Assuming we didn't level off, 20 years would see global installed capacity increase about 1,000,000X.

What was the Powerwall price in 2015?

Define "affordable". There certainly are plenty of Powerwall alternatives that are less expensive than Tesla's.

But that's not really the point of the article. The point is that battery prices have been dropping rapidly for a couple of decades now, and they're showing no sign of slowing. The point is that the cheaper batteries that will be available in the next 1-2 decades will make renewables cost effective as a full replacement for fossil fuels.

If your battery dies after five years, it will be replaced for free under warranty because it's faulty. AFAICT all the manufacturer warranties are around 8 years.

However, it's really unlikely to happen. My 2011 Nissan Leaf's battery is still fine, though it only has about 80% of its original capacity, and the Leaf is about the worst case scenario since Nissan failed to implement thermal management. My four year-old Tesla still has 95% of its capacity.

You wasted money on the Fire stick (granted, not much), since the TV can do everything it can, and more. Okay, it looks like it can maybe do a little bit too *much* more (Gmail access), but it sounds like that was an oversight that is being fixed.

Inflation isn't a deterrent to savings, it just means you have to put your savings somewhere that it also does work, i.e. invested in something. Having a non-zero inflation rate encourages investment, which encourages economic growth. This is good. But it's not the main reason we need constant inflation.

The reason we need constant inflation is because deflation is extremely harmful; it causes debts to grow which can make people and businesses insolvent. The Fed has a 2% inflation target because low inflation rates are manageable and because 2% is high enough that a decrease still won't go negative.