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.

More to the point, they're *guaranteed* bucks.

People don't understand the significance of risk to profitability. By underwriting 80 billion dollars of risk for banks, it's essentially guaranteeing them profits. When it's politically infeasible to spend money on something, the government guarantees loans. That's politically popular across the board because it's spending *later* money and it puts money in bankers' pockets.

but come next upgrade, the entire monstrosity has been re-written, and yet more things that have worked exactly as they did in Unix since 1978 without any problems will have gone to hell in a new and even more unfathomable way.

Poetering and his code are the work if the devil, and those pushing his "way" should be put in rockets with the politicians, estate agents and lawyers and sent to a galaxy far, far away.

I admit to being old, but currently, I do not have a beard of any colour.

To be clear, I think nuclear can and should play a key role in our response to anthropogenic global warming. I just think we shouldn't (a) talk about it like it is *the* answer in and of itself and (b) misunderstand the full breadths of risks and challenges, the most difficult of which are likely to be economic rather than political objections by environmentalists.

Ss you point out, climate change is in effect an economic externality that fossil fuels get a free ride on. This is a key reason for nuclear power's economic non-competitiveness -- in effect fossil fuel use is subsidized by future generations. If you made fossil fuel users pay the true cost of their energy use, nuclear would *instantly* become competitive. But politically that's not going to happen. The only politically possible way around that is to subsidize other energy sources as well.

If you haven't seen any nuclear advocates claim that we should stop investing in renewables, you haven't been paying attention. Usually they come out in response to some article on climate change or perhaps renewables and they will trot out the bogus argument that environmentalists killed nuclear, which is (they say) the only solution to climate change.

The argument that a particular technology is a panacaea isn't confined to nuclear advocates; I think renewable advocates oversell what's possible in the near future, just as anti-renewable people -- and yes, they exist if you're paying attention -- exaggerate renewables' limitations. Really any all-eggs-in-one-basket approach is unnecessarily risky and likely more costly than having several approachs that can work together and compete economically. Key to making that happen will be improvements in grid infrastructure, which will increase the size and therefore the efficiency of the energy market, allowing multiple sources of power to compete.

As for thorium, that's something we'll have to turn to if fission remains a long-term part of our energy supply, but it's not really a help in the time frame we have to respond to climate change. I think the most promising developments are in the development of fail safe reactor technologies and small modular reactors. There are such things as both economies of scale and *dis*-economies of scale, and SMRs are a different way of scaling production than the traditional and every expensive nuclear power plant.

It was never the case that the public being scared caused nuclear to be outlawed, or even *discouraged*. The problem is that investors are scared by the high capital costs, long construction times, and uncertainties about future electricity prices.

This is why nuclear requires government subsidies, either in straight grants, loan guarantees or price guarantees. It's no coincidence that the only country in the world that did a serious nuclear crash program was France, where the electric system was *nationalized*. They didn't go in big for nuclear to make a profit, for them it was a national security issue in result of the OPEC oil embargos. As soon as France privatized its electric system, nuclear construction stalled, just like it did in every other privatized system.

In any case, even if we *were* to underwrite a crash nuclear program, it's neither necessary nor desirable to put *all* our eggs in the nuclear basket. One place we can put investment in is a modernized grid. This will not only help renewable sources like wind and solar, it will be a huge boon to nuclear plants, eliminating questionable siting choices that were driven by the need to locate the plant within 50 miles of customers.

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.

The norm thirty years ago for a hardware store battery was zinc-carbon, with premium batteries being alkaline. The norm today is alkaline, with fancy batteries having a lithium chemistry. So it's absolutely true that the "regular AA" battery you put in your flashlight back then had something like an 800 mah capacity; there is nothing on the market today that is that weak.

In any case that's primary cells, which have zero relevance to this topic. We're mainly interested in secondary cells, and there the improvements in the common rechargeable battery has been dramatic and continual. Thirty years ago the standard hardware store rechargeable was Ni-Cad; a AA probably had about 700 mah capacity. A modern alkaline AA has a capacity of 2000 mah or so roughly 3x as much. This understates the case because modern rechargeable alkalines can typically be recharged easily twice as much as a 1990s NiCad. And *rechargeable* alkalines are getting significantly better almost year to year.

Of course the hardware store battery only has minimal relevance to what we're talking about. What we really care about is Li-ion, and capacity, lifespan and cost for *those* are improving faster than any other battery technology ever has.

You're not going to Gish Gallop your way out of this one. You're the one who brought up your personal experience with the price of batteries at the *hardware store* as proof that batteries have not gotten cheaper. I'm actually being charitable in assuming you're talking about shopping for primary cells; if we're talking *rechargeable* cells the argument is even stronger because they are recharged over and over again which means the steady increase of capacity and lifespan in secondary cells over the decades dramatically lowers your lifetime costs.

As documented in my links above, the cost per energy stored of secondary storage has gone done dramatically in the past twenty years, over 90% since 2000. As for why the Tesla Powerwall isn't dirt cheap yet, customers report waiting months from order to delivery; Tesla already has more customers for this product than it can handle at the current price, why would they drop it? This is Tesla milking the early adopter market segment for a product that they can't produce in high enough volume to sell to the pragmatist market segment.

In any case we're not talking about home storage, we're talking *utility* scale grid storatge with is three orders of magnitude larger. There have been economically successful grid storage projects for years now. Hornsdale in Australia earned back its construction costs in just two years [source]. That's probably close to an ideal econmic situation for grid storage, but as costs continue to drop more and more projects that wouldn't quite clear the normal profit bar will become economically feasible.

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?