Actually assessment by later engineers was that the Titanic was underdesigned, and that earlier ships such as Brunel's would have survived. I can't remember the name of it, but there was a book back in the 70s which explained why oil tankers kept getting ripped apart, ranging from poor design, too few engines, to shipowners insisting that the fastest route had to be taken even if it was the most dangerous. The thought of supertankers crossing the arctic ocean is worrying to say the least (Exxon Valdez anyone?)
Europeans don't produce as much carbon dioxide as Americans mainly because the climates are less extreme (lower heating and air conditioning bills), transport distances are in general shorter, and higher energy prices have encouraged greater efficiencies. Higher energy costs will not change the climate and geography of the USA.
However, the ice cap melting may have dramatic effects on part of the Eastern seaboard. Woods Hole have pointed out that the release of cold water into the arctic could result in the stoppage of the thermohaline circulation - removing the flow of warm water up past the New England States and resulting in significantly colder winters. Not as dramatic as flooding Florida (or as much fun for the rest of us) but it could trigger a gradual exodus from the East Coast.
Is perpetuating all the cliches about Australians being extremely bad at coping with outside criticism. But remember: now that South Africa has majority rule, Australia is the last former British colony to treat its aboriginal population as an inferior species. Its treatment of refugees is also interesting for a First World country. The Internet is making it all too easy for oppressed minorities to (a) link up with other people who have been oppressed and have done something about it (not necessarily by signing petitions) and (b) get themselves heard. Of course the present collection of right-wingers want to censor the Internet.
Most people think "an order of magnitude" is a factor of 10. This is actually wrong, and I think it is the origin of your mistake. An order of magnitude is the old naked eye astronomer estimate of the just reliably distinguishable difference in brightness of two stars. A real astronomical order of magnitude is actually the FIFTH ROOT OF 100, which is a factor of almost exactly 2.5.
If objects differ in brightness by a factor of 2, you can easily tell which is the brightest if you can see them both together.
The factors influencing the brightness of Mars are:
Its distance from the sun (inverse square law)
Our distance from Mars (inverse square law)
The portion of the illuminated surface which we see - the variation is much less than with the moon or Venus because the orbit of Mars is outside our orbit.
I rather think this adds up to a TOTAL POSSIBLE variation in the brightness of Mars of 85:1. It will not be 85 x brighter under optimum conditions, just 85 x brighter than when it is as its dimmest. So don't expect a supernova effect.
Yes, this is a valid point. In my time I have built a number of systems for environmental monitoring and waste control, and the cost/benefit can be enormous (savings of tonnes of chemicals every year using a small box with little more than a PIC processor and a few analog devices.)
Someone said elsewhere I was missing the point, and that silicon manufacturing processes need to improve. OF COURSE. But what drives the improvement is that it is invariably CHEAPER in the end to make things using best environmental practice, unless the State gives the manufacturer a dispensation from paying the costs of the environmental damage - a statist subsidy. And it is usually cheaper anyway because of the savings on materials and consumables. As an example, one project I looked at (to prevent the discharge of cesium by monitoring the composition of a bath and reprocessing it) had a payback of about a week based on the cesium savings alone: the management simply didn't know what was going on in their own plant and had accepted the costs blindly. In another project, a closed loop treatment plant turned out to be cheaper than open-loop because the cost of the electronics was more than offset by the smaller outlet holding tank that was required. I could go on and on...but then, I got into the computing business because you can, actually, do much more interesting things with silicon than make Word or Quake run faster.
Every time I send a 5Mb file by internet, that is packaging and carriage that has been avoided.
Every time I use conferencing over the internet, I am saving (typically) about 30lb of Diesel (and it would have been nearer 45lb of gas in my last car)
I'm not arguing that we should ignore the environmental costs of technology - places like the former Communist block and Texas are unpleasantly polluted as a result of doing just that - but that we should look closely at the costs and benefits. Given the potential of global warming and the eventual runout of oil, the more we use silicon to reduce the number of boring journeys we have to do, whether by mobile phone, networked computer, or whatever, the better it is going to be for us.
And for those who don't already know - substances like sulfuric acid and HF are widely used in the petrochemical industry. And what happens to all the sulfur they have to remove to get low-sulfur fuel? It surely doesn't get fired into space by a rail gun.
This article could have been summarised in about 400 words, in fact I would do it myself if I hadn't got a deadline to meet. This is old, old stuff. So here comes a boring oldtimer bit of information.
In the distant past, embedded systems used eproms that were rather slow, so memory access needed several wait states - the author doesn't seem to know this ancient term - while the eprom went "duh, that's address #F0F0, better go back in the stores and find the data". So as soon as fast RAM was cheap enough we would load the eprom contents into RAM at power up (or at least the frequently accessed bits) and then run from RAM where no wait states were needed. This was usually a 50% performance boost without changing the processor
And there you have it. Substitute L1 cache for fast RAM and dram for eprom, and despite the fanciness of the modern technology, and the enormously bigger memory space, nothing has really changed.
Actually, Airbus is not heavily subsidised. That's Boeing.
EU rules apply to Airbus. Although it had govt. start up funding this was a loan which it since has paid back. Boeing, on the other hand, is subsidised by pork barrel military aircraft production with huge margins. They really need a war with Iraq
Even so, Boeing is now less competitive simply because it makes too many designs of planes, too many cockpit types, in a part of the world where engineering and manufacturing costs are way too high. Boeing is a victim of globalisation. And, er, doesn't this sound a bit like Microsoft, except that Microsoft increasingly design and sells offshore?
A lot of small publishing operations are only now in the process of moving to a PDF-based workflow. I can just see the big print people and the rip engine designers being absolutely delighted at the prospect of another "standard" (we need a word to describe these non-cooperative standards, one that will get through Net Nanny) to spread FUD.
In effect, Microsoft depends on its users - largely technology ignorant - to push its technologies into areas of resistance regardless of the problems it causes. It is so like the old IBM that one can only assume the managers read IBM internal memos before bedtime. Except that IBM had better R&D, a wider range of products, and a captive market for mainframes...and it still ended up in trouble.
The European Commission isn't actually very large and does not actually have a very large budget. Finding 250000 euros isn't necessarily that easy. There is a mildly amusing story about this. Apparently at some event Prince Charles (von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg etc) was sounding off about the huge European bureaucracy and its deadening effect, until someone broke protocol (you're not allowed to tell the heir to the throne he is talking bovine excrement) and remarked that actually the EU bureaucracy is smaller than Kent County Council, which handles local services for a few percent of the UK. At which the Prince suddenly went quiet.
The Commission tends to attract the brightest civil servants, and actually if you ever have to deal with it, it shows. Think West Wing in several languages. And no, I don't work for it and am never likely to.
This is almost as funny as the nuclear powered pogo stick. (gas strut with a lump of plutonium at each end, as they come together on bounce the heat produced increases the gas pressure so you bounce higher each time).
Then there was the.303 Diesel engine for gun nuts (a bandlolier system feeds blank cartridges into the cylinder head and detonates them at TDC).
But why do we get so hung up in this way (i.e. censorship=stop looking at nude people doing rude things)? My personal disgust is with the levels of violence in the media, and it wouldn't worry me if the glorification of violence was banned. (It would, obviously, worry some other people but fortunately they don't live near me.) However, there is a big difference between stopping kids from watching violent films and stopping your citizens finding out that they live in a repressive police state/anarchy run by gangsters, and finding out what they could do about it. That is what Red China and North Korea practise, and it is a great evil not in any way to be compared with mom not letting her teens look at anal penetration on the internet. Anything that prevents dictators keeping people in ignorance must surely be good for all of us, in the long run.
I/O is still the bottleneck, be it to RAM, hard disk or whatever. I haven't got a single computer which at some time or another isn't sitting around waiting for the harddisk to stop reading or writing, or for data to flow through that sl-o-o-w 100baseT switch.
The fact is that for work a 700MHz PIII is usually fast enough given the rest of the system, as well as being reasonably cool and quiet.
So what is the point of this advert? Is it the result of a kind of desperation on the part of Intel? Marketing departments insisting on announcing ever smaller "feature creeps" in an effort to create a buying climate run the risk of the very buyer turnoff they want to avoid. It's like the old Indian auto industry, where the big new feature for each year was something like a differently shaped tail-light molding.
I suggest everybody who regards these guys as being careless with their data and trying to cover up writes to
thomas.ahlerup@intentia.se
to let him know. At the least, you might provide a security consultant with some work explaining the utter uncoolness of posting data to a public site until it becomes, er, public. I hope Reuters considers counter-sueing over the possibly libellous statements published on the Intentia site. This sort of thing annoys me as much as the people who get drunk, trip over the edge of the sidewalk, and then sue the authorities because one slab was raised a few millimetres.
IANALBIBOU (I am not a lawyer but I brought one up)
Speed cameras everywhere
Where there are accidents.
Draconion[sic] speed limits (less than 35 km/h in some places)
Yes. Outside schools. Where the UK have one of the worst accident rates in Europe
Insane fuel tax, (costs around 75p/litre)
See below
High Taxes
You have a second world economy, you want first world services, you get high taxes. The UK is no longer a world power but tries to act like one. Get over it.
Speed bumps, chicanes, etc
With you there. Sensible countries like Germany use rumble strips.
Plans for congestion charges/road tolls in cities.
Have you ever been outside the UK, friend? To France, Italy, Switzerland or the places in the US where they have toll roads? It's hardly a UK disease.
If you don't like it, go somewhere else. Pay French income tax, be unemployed in Germany, pay US health insurance rates, suffer Italian bureaucracy or Swiss anal retentiveness. But don't be so silly. The UK economy is still heavily auto-based, and governments ignore this at their peril.
First, India has a big educated middle class. Over 100 million people. They don't have the sort of incomes we do in the West, but a $200 handheld is within their possible budgets.
Second, India has huge potential in IT as their materials-poor economy has encouraged education in mathematics and other subjects which do not require expensive learning facilities - you do not actually need a computer to learn computer science, but it sure helps.
Third, India cannot afford lots of imports from the US, Korea or Japan. They need to be self-sufficient (even if it wasn't one of Gandhi's principles).
Fourth, the demand for such things is enormous. Believe me, I once thought I was going to find myself in prison in Mumbai because I had an HP calculator and a mini circuit tester in my luggage ("Admit, you have brought these to sell on black market")
Fifth, even poor Indian villages have the odd educated person who will provide services for the locals - and such people would benefit enormously from a handheld. The idea that every peasant should ultimately have a compactflash/smartmedia card with all their own information on it, is actually a hugely enabling one in a subliterate culture because it allows them access to a personal store of information. If it has to be retrieved by symbols on a soft keyboard and text-to-speech, does it matter?
Unfortunately, looking at some earlier posts, India and China are far from having a monopoly on illiterate peasants who don't know what goes on in the rest of the world (flamebait)
Water computers-useless information
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 2
An Australian once built a water analog computer to describe the Keynesian economic model (Republicans-don't ask) at, I believe, University College London. I think I heard recently it has been restored. Anyone know about this?
Back in the early 80s, a colleague with aerodynamics experience built a device without mechanical handling parts for sorting pills based on fluidics. The inputs were amplified to the point at which they controlled air streams which moved the pills physically, the Bernouilli effect causing them to fly over the track like hard disk heads and so avoid contact damage, until a contrary air stream braked them as they landed in the output bins. The management got a demonstration, it worked perfectly, but guess who was first out the door when there were layoffs?
Why do Brits say maths instead of math? Because it's short for mathematics. Whether mathematics actually is plural or not is irrelevant, it's a syntactic usage rather than grammatical.
Just as utterly off-topic, what irritates me is marketoids referring to vehicles without the definite article, i.e instead of saying "The klutzsuv gets five milles to the gallon and can climb a kerb without the wheels falling off", they say "Klutzsuv....". They're trying to suggest the thing has a personality and so has a proper name, when it's just a metal thing and lots of them have the same name on the back end. Oh well, I can either post pointlessly to this discussion or moderate from a position of total ignorance. I've made my choice.
I thought digital paper was that stuff that basically holds two dimensional bar codes.
This is reverse specification creep. Anyway, I do all my sketching in Clairefontaine exercise books with 240 sheets and 5mm squares: great for SSADM diagrams etc. I'm not about to go back to using poxy little bits of expensive paper, paying through the nose because it's called "digital", especially knowing how cheap it is to print that stuff. This concept needs more work before lots of suckers will allow their credit cards to be vacuumed.
No. This is how it is. Rightwingers are just people who wait till a left wing idea is long obsolete, then adopt it. In a hundred years time, libertarians will decide that capitalism is in conflict with their liberties and a bad thing.
Years ago Scientific American (dead tree edition ) published a series of articles on how to build a backyard atom smasher of the Cockcroft and Walton variety using a Van der Graaf accelerator. As I remember, it reached about 3 MeV, three times better than this cyclotron, and was a practical home build for someone without the Rutgers back lot to call on. There was a whole lot of stuff in the article about lead lined aprons, though given the usual cliches about backyard inventors and the opposite sex, I'm surprised this was considered necessary.
There seem to be two schools of backyard engineering thought: High voltage (lots of polished metal spheres and weird looking insulation, with blue sparks) and high current (big evil looking coils with water cooling circuits.) Perhaps the two camps could collaborate to build a really big mass spectrograph, which (given enough cheap electricity) you can use to extract your own enriched uranium. I'm sure Charlton Heston could be persuaded to argue that the right to bear arms extends to home tactical nukes.
Someone mentioned this. Forget the solder joints for a moment (though the pure tin used on some boards now will actually crumble after a time at liquid nitrogen temperatures) the contraction of the case of the CPU will put stress on the pins, and the temperature differential between top and bottom of the case will put stress on the die joints. Also, if I remember rightly, the actual drain currents of the transistors goes UP because the resistance is going down (which is why you can overclock, of course.)Although the lowered temperature means the tracks will not be damaged, there may be other effects of the increased current density in longer term degradation of the die. If there is track necking anywhere, this might be a potential failure point. You might also expect damage to the epoxy cladding of the graphics chips, as the contraction pulls the epoxy away from the filler. This could result in the epoxy eventually becoming porous and the system failing due to moisture penetrating the cladding, just like 6502s etc. used to fail before anyone realised that glass fibre filler could wick water in to the die.
The answer is to follow Seymour Cray and sink the entire system in cold fluorinert, using the total loss nitrogen system, or much cheaper dry ice, to keep the temperature at a sensible -45C or so. But that wouldn't be nearly so spectacular, would it?
This is all a bit like our local hot rodders who can't safely make it to the next town and back for fear the engine will blow up on them. Even so, it would be nice if Intel would release some of the data they doubtless keep on this sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually assessment by later engineers was that the Titanic was underdesigned, and that earlier ships such as Brunel's would have survived. I can't remember the name of it, but there was a book back in the 70s which explained why oil tankers kept getting ripped apart, ranging from poor design, too few engines, to shipowners insisting that the fastest route had to be taken even if it was the most dangerous. The thought of supertankers crossing the arctic ocean is worrying to say the least (Exxon Valdez anyone?)
However, the ice cap melting may have dramatic effects on part of the Eastern seaboard. Woods Hole have pointed out that the release of cold water into the arctic could result in the stoppage of the thermohaline circulation - removing the flow of warm water up past the New England States and resulting in significantly colder winters. Not as dramatic as flooding Florida (or as much fun for the rest of us) but it could trigger a gradual exodus from the East Coast.
Is perpetuating all the cliches about Australians being extremely bad at coping with outside criticism. But remember: now that South Africa has majority rule, Australia is the last former British colony to treat its aboriginal population as an inferior species. Its treatment of refugees is also interesting for a First World country. The Internet is making it all too easy for oppressed minorities to (a) link up with other people who have been oppressed and have done something about it (not necessarily by signing petitions) and (b) get themselves heard. Of course the present collection of right-wingers want to censor the Internet.
800 000 years ago? I think not. You're thinking of the mesolithic. You know, when the human race nearly became extinct in the Ice Ages.
Most people think "an order of magnitude" is a factor of 10. This is actually wrong, and I think it is the origin of your mistake. An order of magnitude is the old naked eye astronomer estimate of the just reliably distinguishable difference in brightness of two stars. A real astronomical order of magnitude is actually the FIFTH ROOT OF 100, which is a factor of almost exactly 2.5.
If objects differ in brightness by a factor of 2, you can easily tell which is the brightest if you can see them both together.
The factors influencing the brightness of Mars are:
- Its distance from the sun (inverse square law)
- Our distance from Mars (inverse square law)
- The portion of the illuminated surface which we see - the variation is much less than with the moon or Venus because the orbit of Mars is outside our orbit.
I rather think this adds up to a TOTAL POSSIBLE variation in the brightness of Mars of 85:1. It will not be 85 x brighter under optimum conditions, just 85 x brighter than when it is as its dimmest. So don't expect a supernova effect.Someone said elsewhere I was missing the point, and that silicon manufacturing processes need to improve. OF COURSE. But what drives the improvement is that it is invariably CHEAPER in the end to make things using best environmental practice, unless the State gives the manufacturer a dispensation from paying the costs of the environmental damage - a statist subsidy. And it is usually cheaper anyway because of the savings on materials and consumables. As an example, one project I looked at (to prevent the discharge of cesium by monitoring the composition of a bath and reprocessing it) had a payback of about a week based on the cesium savings alone: the management simply didn't know what was going on in their own plant and had accepted the costs blindly. In another project, a closed loop treatment plant turned out to be cheaper than open-loop because the cost of the electronics was more than offset by the smaller outlet holding tank that was required. I could go on and on...but then, I got into the computing business because you can, actually, do much more interesting things with silicon than make Word or Quake run faster.
Every time I use conferencing over the internet, I am saving (typically) about 30lb of Diesel (and it would have been nearer 45lb of gas in my last car)
I'm not arguing that we should ignore the environmental costs of technology - places like the former Communist block and Texas are unpleasantly polluted as a result of doing just that - but that we should look closely at the costs and benefits. Given the potential of global warming and the eventual runout of oil, the more we use silicon to reduce the number of boring journeys we have to do, whether by mobile phone, networked computer, or whatever, the better it is going to be for us.
And for those who don't already know - substances like sulfuric acid and HF are widely used in the petrochemical industry. And what happens to all the sulfur they have to remove to get low-sulfur fuel? It surely doesn't get fired into space by a rail gun.
In the distant past, embedded systems used eproms that were rather slow, so memory access needed several wait states - the author doesn't seem to know this ancient term - while the eprom went "duh, that's address #F0F0, better go back in the stores and find the data". So as soon as fast RAM was cheap enough we would load the eprom contents into RAM at power up (or at least the frequently accessed bits) and then run from RAM where no wait states were needed. This was usually a 50% performance boost without changing the processor
And there you have it. Substitute L1 cache for fast RAM and dram for eprom, and despite the fanciness of the modern technology, and the enormously bigger memory space, nothing has really changed.
I doubt the problem is the looking at CRTs, I suspect it's more that most crt-watchers are in lousy jobs (call centres, anyone?)
EU rules apply to Airbus. Although it had govt. start up funding this was a loan which it since has paid back. Boeing, on the other hand, is subsidised by pork barrel military aircraft production with huge margins. They really need a war with Iraq
Even so, Boeing is now less competitive simply because it makes too many designs of planes, too many cockpit types, in a part of the world where engineering and manufacturing costs are way too high. Boeing is a victim of globalisation. And, er, doesn't this sound a bit like Microsoft, except that Microsoft increasingly design and sells offshore?
In effect, Microsoft depends on its users - largely technology ignorant - to push its technologies into areas of resistance regardless of the problems it causes. It is so like the old IBM that one can only assume the managers read IBM internal memos before bedtime. Except that IBM had better R&D, a wider range of products, and a captive market for mainframes...and it still ended up in trouble.
Ah. Another American without a passport. Who are you, President Bush's adviser on the Middle East?
The Commission tends to attract the brightest civil servants, and actually if you ever have to deal with it, it shows. Think West Wing in several languages. And no, I don't work for it and am never likely to.
Then there was the .303 Diesel engine for gun nuts (a bandlolier system feeds blank cartridges into the cylinder head and detonates them at TDC).
But why do we get so hung up in this way (i.e. censorship=stop looking at nude people doing rude things)? My personal disgust is with the levels of violence in the media, and it wouldn't worry me if the glorification of violence was banned. (It would, obviously, worry some other people but fortunately they don't live near me.) However, there is a big difference between stopping kids from watching violent films and stopping your citizens finding out that they live in a repressive police state/anarchy run by gangsters, and finding out what they could do about it. That is what Red China and North Korea practise, and it is a great evil not in any way to be compared with mom not letting her teens look at anal penetration on the internet. Anything that prevents dictators keeping people in ignorance must surely be good for all of us, in the long run.
The fact is that for work a 700MHz PIII is usually fast enough given the rest of the system, as well as being reasonably cool and quiet.
So what is the point of this advert? Is it the result of a kind of desperation on the part of Intel? Marketing departments insisting on announcing ever smaller "feature creeps" in an effort to create a buying climate run the risk of the very buyer turnoff they want to avoid. It's like the old Indian auto industry, where the big new feature for each year was something like a differently shaped tail-light molding.
thomas.ahlerup@intentia.se
to let him know. At the least, you might provide a security consultant with some work explaining the utter uncoolness of posting data to a public site until it becomes, er, public. I hope Reuters considers counter-sueing over the possibly libellous statements published on the Intentia site. This sort of thing annoys me as much as the people who get drunk, trip over the edge of the sidewalk, and then sue the authorities because one slab was raised a few millimetres.
IANALBIBOU (I am not a lawyer but I brought one up)
Where there are accidents.
Draconion[sic] speed limits (less than 35 km/h in some places)
Yes. Outside schools. Where the UK have one of the worst accident rates in Europe
Insane fuel tax, (costs around 75p/litre)
See below
High Taxes
You have a second world economy, you want first world services, you get high taxes. The UK is no longer a world power but tries to act like one. Get over it.
Speed bumps, chicanes, etc
With you there. Sensible countries like Germany use rumble strips.
Plans for congestion charges/road tolls in cities.
Have you ever been outside the UK, friend? To France, Italy, Switzerland or the places in the US where they have toll roads? It's hardly a UK disease.
If you don't like it, go somewhere else. Pay French income tax, be unemployed in Germany, pay US health insurance rates, suffer Italian bureaucracy or Swiss anal retentiveness. But don't be so silly. The UK economy is still heavily auto-based, and governments ignore this at their peril.
Second, India has huge potential in IT as their materials-poor economy has encouraged education in mathematics and other subjects which do not require expensive learning facilities - you do not actually need a computer to learn computer science, but it sure helps.
Third, India cannot afford lots of imports from the US, Korea or Japan. They need to be self-sufficient (even if it wasn't one of Gandhi's principles).
Fourth, the demand for such things is enormous. Believe me, I once thought I was going to find myself in prison in Mumbai because I had an HP calculator and a mini circuit tester in my luggage ("Admit, you have brought these to sell on black market")
Fifth, even poor Indian villages have the odd educated person who will provide services for the locals - and such people would benefit enormously from a handheld. The idea that every peasant should ultimately have a compactflash/smartmedia card with all their own information on it, is actually a hugely enabling one in a subliterate culture because it allows them access to a personal store of information. If it has to be retrieved by symbols on a soft keyboard and text-to-speech, does it matter?
Unfortunately, looking at some earlier posts, India and China are far from having a monopoly on illiterate peasants who don't know what goes on in the rest of the world (flamebait)
Back in the early 80s, a colleague with aerodynamics experience built a device without mechanical handling parts for sorting pills based on fluidics. The inputs were amplified to the point at which they controlled air streams which moved the pills physically, the Bernouilli effect causing them to fly over the track like hard disk heads and so avoid contact damage, until a contrary air stream braked them as they landed in the output bins. The management got a demonstration, it worked perfectly, but guess who was first out the door when there were layoffs?
Just as utterly off-topic, what irritates me is marketoids referring to vehicles without the definite article, i.e instead of saying "The klutzsuv gets five milles to the gallon and can climb a kerb without the wheels falling off", they say "Klutzsuv....". They're trying to suggest the thing has a personality and so has a proper name, when it's just a metal thing and lots of them have the same name on the back end. Oh well, I can either post pointlessly to this discussion or moderate from a position of total ignorance. I've made my choice.
This is reverse specification creep. Anyway, I do all my sketching in Clairefontaine exercise books with 240 sheets and 5mm squares: great for SSADM diagrams etc. I'm not about to go back to using poxy little bits of expensive paper, paying through the nose because it's called "digital", especially knowing how cheap it is to print that stuff. This concept needs more work before lots of suckers will allow their credit cards to be vacuumed.
No. This is how it is. Rightwingers are just people who wait till a left wing idea is long obsolete, then adopt it. In a hundred years time, libertarians will decide that capitalism is in conflict with their liberties and a bad thing.
There seem to be two schools of backyard engineering thought: High voltage (lots of polished metal spheres and weird looking insulation, with blue sparks) and high current (big evil looking coils with water cooling circuits.) Perhaps the two camps could collaborate to build a really big mass spectrograph, which (given enough cheap electricity) you can use to extract your own enriched uranium. I'm sure Charlton Heston could be persuaded to argue that the right to bear arms extends to home tactical nukes.
Also, if I remember rightly, the actual drain currents of the transistors goes UP because the resistance is going down (which is why you can overclock, of course.)Although the lowered temperature means the tracks will not be damaged, there may be other effects of the increased current density in longer term degradation of the die. If there is track necking anywhere, this might be a potential failure point.
You might also expect damage to the epoxy cladding of the graphics chips, as the contraction pulls the epoxy away from the filler. This could result in the epoxy eventually becoming porous and the system failing due to moisture penetrating the cladding, just like 6502s etc. used to fail before anyone realised that glass fibre filler could wick water in to the die.
The answer is to follow Seymour Cray and sink the entire system in cold fluorinert, using the total loss nitrogen system, or much cheaper dry ice, to keep the temperature at a sensible -45C or so. But that wouldn't be nearly so spectacular, would it?
This is all a bit like our local hot rodders who can't safely make it to the next town and back for fear the engine will blow up on them. Even so, it would be nice if Intel would release some of the data they doubtless keep on this sort of thing.