So why are there so many comments here from people in the US complaining about the lack of small and/or affordable car options?

Kind of like the US kept their currency artificially low to prop up their exports with the Bretton-Woods agreement until everyone else said "fuck that"?

The MIPS instruction set is used in a lot of places because it's fairly simple and has decent compiler support. A lot of things like home routers, electronic toys, etc. use MIPS-like CPUs, particularly in China. These aren't actual MIPS CPUs, just embedded CPUs with MIPS-like instruction sets. These applications are slowly moving towards RISC-V. There are other MIPS-like CPUs, e.g. the SunwayMPP supercomputer CPU which is like MIPS with a bunch of vector processors tacked on (SunwayMPP is to MIPS as Cell is to PowerPC). It remains to be seen what direction they take.

RISC-V does have some significant differences from MIPS. One is the lack of branch delay slots. Another is that it provides branches based on comparison results between integer registers other than equal/not equal (with MIPS you have to set a register according to the comparison result, then branch on euqal/not equal to zero). MIPS also uses 16-bit immediates for all instructions with immediate operands, while RISC-V uses 20-bit or 12-bit depending on the instruction.

ARM isn't open as such. You can license cores from ARM themselves, or you can pay for an architecture license that allows you to design your own cores implementing the ARM instruction set. The architecture licenses are very expensive now, and comparatively rare. In either case, you need to pay royalties for every CPU.

OpenPOWER and OpenSPARC are free and open in that there are no costs to make your own implementation of the instruction set, and you can use the name on conformant implementations. Some instruction set extensions are proprietary (e.g. SPARC VIS SIMD extensions), but the base instruction sets are free and open. MIPS is no longer protected by patents, but the "MIPS" name is still trademarked, so you can't call your implementation "MIPS" without a license.

Doesn't Toyota sell their three "bread and butter" models, the Camry, Corolla and Yaris, on the US market? Does Mazda sell their equivalents, the 6, 3, and 2, there?

We've seen this play out numerous times. India had a highly protectionist market for motorcycles. It just led to companies selling 1930s designs because they faced no competition. The US "chicken tax" has led to a form of island gigantism in the US ute market, and also leads to inefficiencies to avoid the tariff, like Ford importing the Transit van in passenger configuration, then shredding the seats, or the Subaru BRAT being sold with carpet and seats in the tray.

At this point, it looks like Ford doesn't even want to sell cars, based on their Australian line-up. They've just got a couple of utes (the Ranger and F-150), a couple of vans (Transit and Tourneo), the Mustang, Everest, and whatever the Mustang Mach-E is supposed to be. The vans are getting squeezed out between the European brands (Mercedes, Renault, etc.) on the larger end, Toyota and Hyundai at the smaller end, and LDV (SAIC) for people on a budget. The Everest isn't competitive with the Japanese and Chinese options. The Ranger still does pretty well, but it can't make up for the lack of a convincing product line-up. Ford used to have the Australian Falcon family, all the Mazda-derived cars (Laser, Telstar, Probe, etc.), and the cars from their European division (Cortina, Escort, Focus, Mondeo, etc.). It's like they're winding down operations.

Toyota's bread and butter are the Camry, Corolla and Yaris. Mazda has the roughly equivalent 6, 3 and 2. BYD is making inroads in that space with the Seal and Dolphin. Where's the competition from the US companies?

Ford and GM are just going to further isolate themselves in the US market, then cry for a bail-out, and still have to massively downsize. Complaining about competition won't save them.

It doesn't need a 16-bit variant. We're at the point where the very low end is mostly 32-bit anyway. It's competing with various MIPS derivatives (e.g. PIC32) and 32-bit ARM in that space. Just being royalty-free and open isn't really all that exciting. SPARC and PowerPC are both free and open. All the patents on MIPS and Super-H (up to SH-5 at least) have expired, although the current owner of the MIPS trademark will threaten to sue you if you call it MIPS. RISC-V is probably going to displace MIPS derivatives at the low end, and erode ARM's market share.

It's a question of dying before producing offspring. The article shows that the majority will reach the average age of parenthood in society. That's all it takes.

Heh. My daughter and I were having a conversation about that just last night. She is a mostly a big believer that there is no "great filter" per se. The answer for her to the question of why intelligent aliens have not reached us yet is that intelligent aliens have not reached us yet. Still she had to concede that, if intelligent aliens were simply holding out on reaching out to us, one probable reason, could pretty well be summed up in a specific example. That example was a specific politician whose identity will be left as an exercise to the reader (note that, if you come up with an example that is not the one she was thinking of, it is still probably a correct example, since really it's about how much the politics of our planet suck and what a poor reflection that is on humans as a species).

One interesting thing about it as well is that, even if the question of whether or not there is other life out there is actually truly no, there's a funny thing that happens if the question of "will we ever work out interstellar travel" turns out to be yes. Basically, if we manage to inhabit worlds beyond our solar system and it's a repeatable event, then eventually we get life all over the place and the universe still has billions of years left at least for that life to evolve into all sorts of things. So, basically panspermia.

I mean, one of the houses I grew up in we heated our living room with a fireplace, so... I think the actual concentration may matter some.

Yeah, but that's UV radiation. Most transparent materials are opaque to UVC, the most dangerous UV light. There are even plenty of transparent materials (such as typical window glass) that are opaque to UVB. So that's the most dangerous UV light blocked possibly without even any special filter materials. UVA can be blocked by some materials that are fully transparent to ordinary visible light. Otherwise, there are plenty of coatings that are still largely transparent that can block it. So, you can block basically all the harmful UV light with a roof that is otherwise fully transparent. Not that you necessarily even need your habitat to have a transparent roof in the human habitable areas, but that might be nice for various public areas or even atria in people's private quarters.

In any case, at the approximate 50 km altitude proposed, the total amount of solar irradiance is estimated to be similar to Earth. If it's higher to any significant degree, then habitat areas with transparent roofs just need more light filtering (possibly with transparent solar panels). As it is, they will probably need some sort of shuttering system such as an LCD system or similar to simulate night and maybe seasons for the comfort of the residents since the proposal is to keep the habitat always in sunlight. Too much sunlight can make people overstimulated and manic. For agricultural areas, obviously the light cycle and allowed UV levels would depend on the needs of the particular plants growing in any bay. For solar panels, you would expect coatings that protect against particular UV ranges that might damage them. Possibly the coatings could be fluorescent to convert UV to light usable by the panels, or the panels might be intrinsically fully UV hardy. The materials of the outside of the aerostat habitats would need to be UV hardy or coated with a UV protection layer and they would similarly need acid protection.

Ultimately, EM radiation either UV or visible seems like it would be a non-issue with some basic design precautions. So it is a consideration, but an easily solved one. The same applies for other forms of radiation from the sun. This would be at an altitude where the protection of the atmosphere above provides almost exactly the same protection as that of Earth. On Earth, at sea level, radiation from the sun and cosmic radiation pose basically zero threat (the threat from UV is many, many times greater) barring a massive burst from a supernova. On Venus, at that altitude, the radiation threat would be no greater than being at a high altitude city on Earth.

It's really only better if you want to make a really low-end CPU with minimal gates/silicon. If you're trying to do a multi-issue out-of-order CPU, ARMv8 is better.

I just had to remind someone else of this: sarcasm tags are now mandatory on all sarcasm.

Not really. Despite the heat of re-entry, meteorites are generally cold when they hit the ground since they tend to keep cool through ablation and/or sheer thermal mass and the square/cube ratio. Sure, a lot of meteors are going to be sterilized as fiery bolides, but if you have a lump of rock left over after re-entry and it had life in it, it is highly likely to survive.

Right, but the thing about what you're saying is that it means that the $20+ million isn't a real operating cost for the craft. Canceling it therefore does not mean that you really save that money.