And my free advice is to pay no attention to an idiot who doesn't know what a TESS search is.

I honestly don't understand this post. Welcome to the modern world, intellectual property rights are not all that abstract. There part of your development process. Spend 10 minutes doing a TESS search to make sure your name isn't infringing on copyright. Saying you "don't have time because you're too busy developing" is like saying you don't have time for security or cross-platform testing. Trademarks are a real issue that needs addressing.

I'm very sorry, but Larry Niven lied to us in Ringworld.

Electrical superconductors are not heat superconductors; in fact, as far as I know, nobody has demonstrated true heat superconductivity (all points of the material remain at the same temperature, supporting infinite heat-transfer rates). I found a speculative paper about it from 2012, but it's only speculation.

Ptable.com isn't telling you everything you need to know. The melting point it lists is for the white (yellow) allotrope, the one that spontaneously combusts in air. The red and black allotropes are a lot more refractory, and a lot less chemically reactive.

Since a phase change is also a structural change, I'd say "everything".

However, as you say, the black allotrope has a very high melting point. It's only the white/yellow allotrope that's low-melting.

Oh, and yes, "trespassing" is bad -- that's why I'm sure none of us ever did it as children. Never mind that this kid was probably doing a favor for whomever eventually tries to rehabilitate or demolish the building, by removing hazardous materials from it. Something tells me that they don't always go around pulling all these mercury-bearing switches for "proper disposal" before they start demolition.

But, yeah, if you go in where you're not allowed, you can get in trouble. Especially if you take stuff without permission.

I'm sure they did find substances that could be used to create explosives -- heck, let's call a spade a spade, and acknowledge that they're precursors. Things like:

Water -- simply pass an electric current through it to generate a tremendously explosive mix of hydrogen and oxygen gas.

Air -- a critical component, and by far the major component by volume, of the infamous "fuel-air explosive".

Aluminum foil -- ball-mill it long enough, and it becomes dark aluminum, a controlled substance used to make flash powder.

Lunch meat -- a plentiful source of animal fat, which can be saponified to produce glycerine, which can be nitrated to form nitroglycerin.

Books and other printed material -- almost always printed on paper, consisting mostly of cellulose, which can be nitrated to form nitrocellulose ("smokeless powder").

I could go on in this vein at great length, but why bother? I've already outlined the case against anyone on the surface of the planet, or off it for that matter.

Sure, germanium is rarer and more expensive than silicon. And given the mass of germanium required to add the necessary layer to a single chip, that might raise the per-unit material cost by multiple cents -- but probably not.

SiGe devices are more expensive because they're harder to make and (so far) don't enjoy the same economies of scale as silicon. As I understand it, material cost, especially raw material cost, is a vanishingly small contributor.

I'll freely admit that I was too much of a newbie to really appreciate Multics during the precious year or two I had access to it, but the single abstraction for memory and files seemed like a great approach...

This has been going so well for such a long time. It will be absolutely heartbreaking if the probe is incapacitated just during the flyby window.

Most articles I've read about this point out that the risk to any given swimmer is still extremely low. We all know that humans are bad at weighting risks from very low-probability but high-horror events.

By the same token, though, the risk to any given golfer out on a course during a thunderstorm is pretty low -- but nearly everybody agrees that going out on a large, open expanse and holding a metal stick over your head during a thunderstorm is kind of stupid.

I can't say that I blame people for deciding to stay out of the water.

I started out with a TRS-80 Model I in high school. I spent a lot of time on that machine, and applied a lot of the "canned hacks" developed by others -- add-on hardware better than that Radio Shack sold, a memory remapper to let it run CP/M, soldering in another 1024x1 RAM chip to support lowercase video, jumpering the clock divider chain to effectively overclock the CPU, and so on.

Eventually, I noticed that I was starting to have wrist problems, especially when I used WordStar -- that WP used the non-existent Control key quite a lot, and the CP/M port mapped it to one of the arrow keys, which was an ergonomic nightmare. But I happened to find a pair of foot switches on clearance at Radio Shack, pre-wired to mini audio plugs. I drilled two holes in my system unit, mounted two mini jacks, and wired them to the keyboard in the same position as the shift key and that arrow key. Stomp-K-D for the win! My wrists were better in no time.

Later, I got a state-of-the-art 1200bps modem, but my poor terminal program couldn't keep up. Any time the screen had to scroll, I dropped characters. The solution: I rewired the 40Hz real-time interrupt to fire at 160Hz, and wrote a little interrupt-driven driver to catch and buffer characters coming in over the RS232 interface. It was completely bulletproof. Unfortunately, it also sped up the keyboard timing (repeat delay and rate) by 4x in CP/M.

I guess the biggest hack, though, was building a full character-based video display subsystem that hung off the expansion port. Forty or fifty SS/MS LSTTL packages spread across eight or ten solderless breadboards, with a couple of static RAM chips thrown in for character generation and storage. It ended up being something like 30 lines of 100 characters, comfortably larger than the original 16x64 display or even the 24x80 displays in the computer labs, and each cell was 8x16 pixels, so they were nicely readable characters. Luxury. I used that "in production" for a year or two, until I managed to land a Lisa.

...reading your op-ed (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, an actual report containing actual facts).

One of the unique characteristics of the Internet is that it provides a way to monetize tiny minority tastes. That way, bozos can produce books or videos on "Down is Up", "Beanie Babies: The New Future-Proof Investment", or "The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age", and find enough paying customers to make it worth their while.

Golly! How do you suppose that having one person at a time writing code, with the rest of the team effectively doing simultaneous code review, magically produces "fewer features" but "better code quality" than having everybody writing code, then throwing it together and maybe doing a cursory bit of code review at the end?

Next, you'll be telling me that having one or two testers per developer produces better-quality software than spending all your money on developers so you can "get more features".

Turning the shield (conductive layer around the craft) into an antenna? I like this idea. And with the full paper freely available through the link in the source article, I could in principle learn more -- if only my math and EM physics were up to it. Sigh.