There has been billions of dollars of research into drill bits over the twenty years since the Kola project stopped, drilling deep holes in rock under awkward conditions being more than somewhat useful for the oil industry - the mud-motors that Kola is described as pioneering are now reasonably routine. But whilst 400F is something that people deal with now, 600F is still quite a problem.

The drilling fluids probably will be fairly horrible, and simply getting electronics to work at those temperatures is hard (NASA have done some work in silicon-carbide-substrate semiconductors, since it would be fantastic to be able to run a robot on the surface of Venus, but I don't think they've met with much success).

6km is a deep hole, but not an enormously deep hole by the standards of the off-shore drilling industry; there are deeper holes drilled for oil production in the Gulf of Mexico and for gas production in Sakhalin and the Persian Gulf. The post-salt oil prospects in Brazil require 5km depth to get past the salt layer.

(annoyingly, oil-drillers appear to use 'depth' to describe the length of holes even when they are not pointing vertically downwards, and some of the things described as 'deepest' appear to be drilled mostly horizontally. Some articles also measure depths of oil deposits from the top rather than the bottom of the water)

However, 4km of water is rather deeper than it seems anyone's done oil-drilling to date; there are wells in 2800m water in the Gulf of Mexico (the one that exploded last year was in 1500m) but there doesn't seem to be anything much deeper.

Computer components are designed to be installed by untrained labourers who left their parents' farm in Hunan province last week to seek their fortune in the factories of Shenzhen. Connectors are keyed, connectors with different purposes are keyed differently, and almost everything has locking tabs so you don't knock things out unintentionally.

No; it's rape (since the consent was dependent on the payment); I believe someone in the UK has been convicted of rape for paying a prostitute with counterfeit money.

I've deliberately bought several Intel integrated-graphics motherboards; they display an 80x25 text mode fine as you install Debian, and my compute servers only have a monitor attached when they're failing to boot.

I wish Intel didn't oblige you to buy a super-SLI-gamer motherboard just to run a Core i7 CPU; I bought the chip for the main-memory bandwidth.

The UK government has acted against SHAC in the way that governments are good at: the people who committed the harassment will be in jail for some time.

I find it very difficult ever to justify confiscating servers, because of the huge other-nonoffending-use argument; I'd be entirely at ease with a court order requiring the cooperation of the sysadmin with the police in investigating the origin of the illegal posting while keeping the machine up, but taking the machine away seems a disproportionate impact on everything else hosted there.

You don't tend to demolish the building in which a murder was planned.