Agreed that it is way beyond stupid to employ any substance containing sodium in commercial or common industrial apparatus, but NaK is hardly the only metal which has a usefully low melting point. Disregarding mercury for obvious reasons...
Gallium melts at 30 C, which means it will melt in your closed fist. The metal is not considered toxic, though I wouldn't go crazy screwing with it a whole lot, or drinking it or rubbing it all over my skin if it escaped. The ions of soluble gallium salts can be toxic to the liver. It is certainly far less dangerous than NaK, and arguably less dangerous than fluorescent bulbs, which contain mercury vapor encapsulated only by a thin glass housing.
30 C is probably low enough to allow a carefully designed cooling apparatus using Ga to be useful in cooling servers, considering you have ample wiggle room up to at least 50 C, if not 70-100 C, before the CPU overheats. I would imagine tubes of highly thermally conductive copper (plated of course) would allow thorough melting and convection to establish itself throughout the loop, though the cold side heat exchanger design would be a challenge (at least to me). You might have to manege startup carefully.
But there is a much better choice than pure gallium...
The eutectic alloy trademarked as galinstan, which is 68.5% Ga, 21.5% In, and 10% Sn, melts at -19 C, which means it is completely liquid at any temperature from well below room temperature, and the boiling point is > 1300C (!) This one is a no brainer. The cooling apparatus would be easy to design. If frozen outdoors in very cold winter, it would thaw rapidly and naturally indoors. It has low toxicity and low reactivity. The MSDS says:
No adverse health effect has been observed or reported. Exposure quantities are significantly below acute toxicity limits even when complete absorption is assumed. The extremely low vapor pressure of Galinstan makes absorption through inhalation negligible. Galinstan passes through the digestive system without effect. Skin oils may be reduced through continuous contact. Direct contact with the surface of the eye may cause irritation.
Sounds pretty benign. You can get oral thermometers using galinstan, though oral mercury thermometers have pretty much disappeared from the supply chain.
You can readily obtain gallium and fairly readily obtain Galinstan. The latter especially ain't cheap, at least to small-timers.
Civil disobedience does not imply in surrendering yourself, it means fighting the system.
Actually, what separates civil disobedience from general resistance against unjust laws is pretty much acceptance of the consequences. Do you think Rosa Parks tried to run away before the arrival of the police who were summoned? The bus driver stood in front of Ms. Parks and told her if she didn't stand up and move, he would "have to" call the police and have her arrested. She replied that she recognized that was his prerogative, and stood her ground.
In Sophocles' play, Antigone decides that there is an imperative higher than human law and defies a cruel regime's prohibition against burying her slain brother. She is unafraid of the consequences, does not run away, and is herself slain.
David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. all were prominently involved in developing the doctrine of civil disobediance or civil resistance where the governmental structure is too resistant to morally imperative reform. They believed that running away was not the most productive strategy for societal good. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, decided on a strategy of violent intervention and self preservation to further his aims, which he believed were similar.
This is like two clinically brain damaged boxers, one with delusions of grandeur, the other with terminal paranoia, both apoplectic with grotesque rage, each reeling and barely able to stand, stammering and slurring the simplest verbalizations, unable to sign their own names or feed themselves, hands shaking so badly they can't wee on their own without soaking the whole bathroom, bumping gloves and (attempting to unsteadily) stand together, thinking "NOW we'll show the bastards!".
I doubt this is going to strike fear into the champ. Might make him determined to really stomp both of them the next time all three enter the ring, though.
Bravo vranash as AC. I started reading wishing I had a stick to beat you with, and ended up applauding. I love it when somebody uses logic relentlessly. I'm still not agreeing with every single point, but excellent post.
Nobody cares if GNOME3 *EVER* can run on BSD. Last I heard they weren't "discussing" making systemd mandatory - they were dictating it.
Systemd and its dependencies add 2 million lines of code to the early boot process, which on the face of it is a pretty gratuitous burden and negatively affects reliability. It's about 200 times as many lines to support as simple init scripts.
Pretty much any other DE/WM can run on BSD, and many of them are far superior to GNOME3.
What in that article makes the concept of patents valid, moral, ethical, and socially beneficial? Hmmm? I would say Jane Q. Public is spot on and you have adduced nothing to counter argue the point.
I don't know about "easier", whatever that means, but actually hovering in a helicopter OGE (out of ground effect) takes considerably more power than cruising in forward flight.
Since this was an extreme case of IN ground effect, color me academically impressed but realistically the feat is completely void of any application.
The best maple syrup is from Green Mountain Sugar House in Ludlow, VT and Eaton's Sugar House in South Royalton, VT. The latter is an excellent place to sit down to a breakfast of pancakes, waffles, or french toast with locally produced maple syrup in their wonderful old restaurant. No visit to Vermont is complete without a visit.
Everybody knows that the consummately divine hard maple sugar is infinitely preferable to maple syrup. How is the supply of maple sugar holding up?
I admit to having had a lot of fun years ago twirling maple syrup into tufts of my hair. And it's OK to eat on pancakes and french toast. But maple sugar - num num num! You can snack on it!
Please understand. Nobody cares WHICH patents were used to squash competition like a bug. On the one side, Apple and their partisans only care that competition was squashed. They don't care how.
And on the other hand, actual thinking people only care that not just the patent system as it is presently tortured, but the very IDEA of patents is an evil, stinking, obscene insult to humanity. It is corporate welfare. It is a denial of nature and evolution. It strangles competition. It does not further the advance of useful arts in ANY WAY. It stifles the advance. While accelerating transfer of wealth to the wealthy, It hurts the economy. It props up the cancer of bloodsucking lawyers - not the lawyers who participate usefully in addressing criminal acts and REAL civil transgressions. It gives the finger to small business already reeling under the assault of the System. It even uselessly damages very large corporations like Samsung who employ many people. And Samsung will quickly move to pass the cost along to the consumer if this decision stands.
Only idiots believe that patents encourage innovation. Patents strangle innovation. In the absence of patents, innovation would flourish because it confers advantage. The real advantage comes not in planting your boot on the other guy's neck to get a competitive edge at the expense of everybody else. The real advantage comes from making a superior product at a superior price, for its OWN sake.
N.B. - most people, if they interviewed me skilfully, would conclude that I am to the right of Ghengis Khan. In actuality I deny the whole right/left fraud. If I have one message, it is: don't filter every single issue through the prism of some presumed regimented Rule Of Everything imposed from outside your own conscience.
Oh for god's sake. It's not misconduct. It's a stupid, stupid, stupid verdict but it's not misconduct. No one took a bribe, or sat drunk in the jury box while the evidence and arguments were presented.
Suppose I as a taxpayer don't want to pay for making half the population into patent examiners and jurors? Because your idea of a lousy trebling is ridiculously feeble and wouldn't come close to fixing anything. I doubt if you increased the force tenfold it would make the slightest degree of difference. Because the problem isn't that examining patent applications is demanding; it's COMPLETELY IMPRACTICAL TO EVEN ATTEMPT. Both the volume of applications per day, and the sum total of prior art to search, are growing EXPONENTIALLY. The certain result is a corrupt system like we have now.
Here's my counterpoint. Patents are (1) morally and ethically EVIL, and (2) not of any benefit to society or the advancement of "useful arts"; in actual fact, they are very much the opposite. If Eli Whitney didn't put his vision of the cotton gin into operation because he was scared like a little girl that everybody else would copy his idea and he would fail to get filthy rich at the expense of everyone else - then SOMEBODY ELSE less imbalanced WOULD HAVE. And those who put out the best product most efficiently will win the competition, as they should. Anybody who is so scared that someone else will steal "his" ideas knows that, if "his" ideas are any good at all, he can use trade secrets to protect them anyway. File off the markings on the IC's. Enable copy protection on the FPGA's. Lock away the source code. Keep your workers happy so they won't be tempted to reveal your secrets. If that's the way you really want to go. Just be aware that a thousand competitors will be turning all their efforts toward innovation instead of hoarding ideas, and they will probably leave you in the dust.
As it happened, Whitney did get his patent, and he still failed to get filthy rich from his monopoly. He couldn't make the machines fast enough, he refused to license his patent, others saw how to improve the machines when he didn't, and simple economics ensured that people "violated" the patent to fill the demand. He spent his profits on - you guessed it - patent infringement lawsuits.
Oh yeah - I didn't support point (1), you say? I suppose I assume anyone can see its truth. But here goes:
Mary: "Mommy! MOMMY! Billy is COPYING me! I thought of it first!". That's the full extent of the moral and ethical justification for patents. It's laughable. The wise mommy tells Mary to mind her own life and not be concerned with whether others do or say things she thought of "first". And the wise mommy tells both Mary and Billy that it's not the copying that is bad, it's the mocking that is behind it, and she will not put up with mocking in her family, but her kids had better be prepared to face mocking in the real world.
OK, let's see. If you set your figure of $100,000,000 to be the annual renewal fee for, say, the eighth year, work it backwards.
Year 8: $100,000,000 Year 7: $50,000,000 Year 6: $25,000,000 Year 5: $12,500,000 Year 4: $6,250,000 Year 3: $3,125,000 Year 2: $1,612,500 Year 1: $806,250
Do you really want to hit the small inventor with almost a million dollars for his initial filing fee? And if he doesn't get into production pretty fast his costs will spiral out of control. That pretty much shuts down all small inventors. On the other hand, Apple could easily file for a thousand patents. And, for the "good" patents, they could afford to go well beyond the eighth year.
If I understand your idea correctly, I don't think I like it at all.
I believe the judicial system counts on the members of the jury being able to think for themselves. You know the foreman is picked by the jury itself, right? And that he doesn't have any particular powers?
OK, genius, so it's spread over 20 to 45 million smart phones and tablets per quarter... times how many quarters? Hmmm? That's 80 to 180 million units in one year. It's a one time payment offset by a continuous stream of product sold. Let's not go crazy making fun of the poster before we've thought this through for even ten seconds.
It would be a pretty weak primary English speaker's vocabulary which didn't include at least familiarity with, if not active use of, "exculpate". It's a high school level word at the most.
When I lost my last salaried job in 2003, my health insurance went with it. It was completely impractical to get insurance as a contractor for the next nine years. As it happened, my luck held. I didn't need care during this time, and became eligible for Medicare at 65 last month.
When I was contracting in the early 1980s, I had absolutely no problem whatsoever affording health insurance.
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It's not a matter of opinion. It's common usage.
Agreed that it is way beyond stupid to employ any substance containing sodium in commercial or common industrial apparatus, but NaK is hardly the only metal which has a usefully low melting point. Disregarding mercury for obvious reasons ...
Gallium melts at 30 C, which means it will melt in your closed fist. The metal is not considered toxic, though I wouldn't go crazy screwing with it a whole lot, or drinking it or rubbing it all over my skin if it escaped. The ions of soluble gallium salts can be toxic to the liver. It is certainly far less dangerous than NaK, and arguably less dangerous than fluorescent bulbs, which contain mercury vapor encapsulated only by a thin glass housing.
30 C is probably low enough to allow a carefully designed cooling apparatus using Ga to be useful in cooling servers, considering you have ample wiggle room up to at least 50 C, if not 70-100 C, before the CPU overheats. I would imagine tubes of highly thermally conductive copper (plated of course) would allow thorough melting and convection to establish itself throughout the loop, though the cold side heat exchanger design would be a challenge (at least to me). You might have to manege startup carefully.
But there is a much better choice than pure gallium...
The eutectic alloy trademarked as galinstan, which is 68.5% Ga, 21.5% In, and 10% Sn, melts at -19 C, which means it is completely liquid at any temperature from well below room temperature, and the boiling point is > 1300C (!) This one is a no brainer. The cooling apparatus would be easy to design. If frozen outdoors in very cold winter, it would thaw rapidly and naturally indoors. It has low toxicity and low reactivity. The MSDS says:
Sounds pretty benign. You can get oral thermometers using galinstan, though oral mercury thermometers have pretty much disappeared from the supply chain.
You can readily obtain gallium and fairly readily obtain Galinstan. The latter especially ain't cheap, at least to small-timers.
Or unless it is atomized, for example in a crash.
Civil disobedience does not imply in surrendering yourself, it means fighting the system.
Actually, what separates civil disobedience from general resistance against unjust laws is pretty much acceptance of the consequences. Do you think Rosa Parks tried to run away before the arrival of the police who were summoned? The bus driver stood in front of Ms. Parks and told her if she didn't stand up and move, he would "have to" call the police and have her arrested. She replied that she recognized that was his prerogative, and stood her ground.
In Sophocles' play, Antigone decides that there is an imperative higher than human law and defies a cruel regime's prohibition against burying her slain brother. She is unafraid of the consequences, does not run away, and is herself slain.
David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. all were prominently involved in developing the doctrine of civil disobediance or civil resistance where the governmental structure is too resistant to morally imperative reform. They believed that running away was not the most productive strategy for societal good. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, decided on a strategy of violent intervention and self preservation to further his aims, which he believed were similar.
You mean, from the same place everybody gets everything: China.
This is like two clinically brain damaged boxers, one with delusions of grandeur, the other with terminal paranoia, both apoplectic with grotesque rage, each reeling and barely able to stand, stammering and slurring the simplest verbalizations, unable to sign their own names or feed themselves, hands shaking so badly they can't wee on their own without soaking the whole bathroom, bumping gloves and (attempting to unsteadily) stand together, thinking "NOW we'll show the bastards!".
I doubt this is going to strike fear into the champ. Might make him determined to really stomp both of them the next time all three enter the ring, though.
Bravo vranash as AC. I started reading wishing I had a stick to beat you with, and ended up applauding. I love it when somebody uses logic relentlessly. I'm still not agreeing with every single point, but excellent post.
Nobody cares if GNOME3 *EVER* can run on BSD. Last I heard they weren't "discussing" making systemd mandatory - they were dictating it.
Systemd and its dependencies add 2 million lines of code to the early boot process, which on the face of it is a pretty gratuitous burden and negatively affects reliability. It's about 200 times as many lines to support as simple init scripts.
Pretty much any other DE/WM can run on BSD, and many of them are far superior to GNOME3.
Any chance you meant "castigate" instead of "vindicate"?
Yeah, the summary is "you're screwed". Bow before your masters.
Dude, you missed you chance. It has already spread very widely through the world. Neither patents nor copyright even originated in the U.S.
What in that article makes the concept of patents valid, moral, ethical, and socially beneficial? Hmmm? I would say Jane Q. Public is spot on and you have adduced nothing to counter argue the point.
First of all, hovering is flying.
I don't know about "easier", whatever that means, but actually hovering in a helicopter OGE (out of ground effect) takes considerably more power than cruising in forward flight.
Since this was an extreme case of IN ground effect, color me academically impressed but realistically the feat is completely void of any application.
The best maple syrup is from Green Mountain Sugar House in Ludlow, VT and Eaton's Sugar House in South Royalton, VT. The latter is an excellent place to sit down to a breakfast of pancakes, waffles, or french toast with locally produced maple syrup in their wonderful old restaurant. No visit to Vermont is complete without a visit.
Everybody knows that the consummately divine hard maple sugar is infinitely preferable to maple syrup. How is the supply of maple sugar holding up?
I admit to having had a lot of fun years ago twirling maple syrup into tufts of my hair. And it's OK to eat on pancakes and french toast. But maple sugar - num num num! You can snack on it!
Please understand. Nobody cares WHICH patents were used to squash competition like a bug. On the one side, Apple and their partisans only care that competition was squashed. They don't care how.
And on the other hand, actual thinking people only care that not just the patent system as it is presently tortured, but the very IDEA of patents is an evil, stinking, obscene insult to humanity. It is corporate welfare. It is a denial of nature and evolution. It strangles competition. It does not further the advance of useful arts in ANY WAY. It stifles the advance. While accelerating transfer of wealth to the wealthy, It hurts the economy. It props up the cancer of bloodsucking lawyers - not the lawyers who participate usefully in addressing criminal acts and REAL civil transgressions. It gives the finger to small business already reeling under the assault of the System. It even uselessly damages very large corporations like Samsung who employ many people. And Samsung will quickly move to pass the cost along to the consumer if this decision stands.
Only idiots believe that patents encourage innovation. Patents strangle innovation. In the absence of patents, innovation would flourish because it confers advantage. The real advantage comes not in planting your boot on the other guy's neck to get a competitive edge at the expense of everybody else. The real advantage comes from making a superior product at a superior price, for its OWN sake.
N.B. - most people, if they interviewed me skilfully, would conclude that I am to the right of Ghengis Khan. In actuality I deny the whole right/left fraud. If I have one message, it is: don't filter every single issue through the prism of some presumed regimented Rule Of Everything imposed from outside your own conscience.
Oh for god's sake. It's not misconduct. It's a stupid, stupid, stupid verdict but it's not misconduct. No one took a bribe, or sat drunk in the jury box while the evidence and arguments were presented.
Suppose I as a taxpayer don't want to pay for making half the population into patent examiners and jurors? Because your idea of a lousy trebling is ridiculously feeble and wouldn't come close to fixing anything. I doubt if you increased the force tenfold it would make the slightest degree of difference. Because the problem isn't that examining patent applications is demanding; it's COMPLETELY IMPRACTICAL TO EVEN ATTEMPT. Both the volume of applications per day, and the sum total of prior art to search, are growing EXPONENTIALLY. The certain result is a corrupt system like we have now.
Here's my counterpoint. Patents are (1) morally and ethically EVIL, and (2) not of any benefit to society or the advancement of "useful arts"; in actual fact, they are very much the opposite. If Eli Whitney didn't put his vision of the cotton gin into operation because he was scared like a little girl that everybody else would copy his idea and he would fail to get filthy rich at the expense of everyone else - then SOMEBODY ELSE less imbalanced WOULD HAVE. And those who put out the best product most efficiently will win the competition, as they should. Anybody who is so scared that someone else will steal "his" ideas knows that, if "his" ideas are any good at all, he can use trade secrets to protect them anyway. File off the markings on the IC's. Enable copy protection on the FPGA's. Lock away the source code. Keep your workers happy so they won't be tempted to reveal your secrets. If that's the way you really want to go. Just be aware that a thousand competitors will be turning all their efforts toward innovation instead of hoarding ideas, and they will probably leave you in the dust.
As it happened, Whitney did get his patent, and he still failed to get filthy rich from his monopoly. He couldn't make the machines fast enough, he refused to license his patent, others saw how to improve the machines when he didn't, and simple economics ensured that people "violated" the patent to fill the demand. He spent his profits on - you guessed it - patent infringement lawsuits.
Oh yeah - I didn't support point (1), you say? I suppose I assume anyone can see its truth. But here goes:
Mary: "Mommy! MOMMY! Billy is COPYING me! I thought of it first!". That's the full extent of the moral and ethical justification for patents. It's laughable. The wise mommy tells Mary to mind her own life and not be concerned with whether others do or say things she thought of "first". And the wise mommy tells both Mary and Billy that it's not the copying that is bad, it's the mocking that is behind it, and she will not put up with mocking in her family, but her kids had better be prepared to face mocking in the real world.
OK, let's see. If you set your figure of $100,000,000 to be the annual renewal fee for, say, the eighth year, work it backwards.
Year 8: $100,000,000
Year 7: $50,000,000
Year 6: $25,000,000
Year 5: $12,500,000
Year 4: $6,250,000
Year 3: $3,125,000
Year 2: $1,612,500
Year 1: $806,250
Do you really want to hit the small inventor with almost a million dollars for his initial filing fee? And if he doesn't get into production pretty fast his costs will spiral out of control. That pretty much shuts down all small inventors. On the other hand, Apple could easily file for a thousand patents. And, for the "good" patents, they could afford to go well beyond the eighth year.
If I understand your idea correctly, I don't think I like it at all.
I believe the judicial system counts on the members of the jury being able to think for themselves. You know the foreman is picked by the jury itself, right? And that he doesn't have any particular powers?
OK, genius, so it's spread over 20 to 45 million smart phones and tablets per quarter ... times how many quarters ? Hmmm? That's 80 to 180 million units in one year. It's a one time payment offset by a continuous stream of product sold. Let's not go crazy making fun of the poster before we've thought this through for even ten seconds.
Maybe because he completely misses the point.
It would be a pretty weak primary English speaker's vocabulary which didn't include at least familiarity with, if not active use of, "exculpate". It's a high school level word at the most.
When I lost my last salaried job in 2003, my health insurance went with it. It was completely impractical to get insurance as a contractor for the next nine years. As it happened, my luck held. I didn't need care during this time, and became eligible for Medicare at 65 last month.
When I was contracting in the early 1980s, I had absolutely no problem whatsoever affording health insurance.
You had faith in the justice system? Bwahahahaha! Sorry, it's not personal.