I think it makes more sense to start with the "transistor is a switch" level of abstraction. Make some logic gates out of transistors and then go from there. Most people have heard that "computers are made out of transistors" and have probably always wondered where exactly they fit in.

One could try to start even lower, and introduce some basic semiconductor physics--but I'm not sure of a clean of way of introducing those concepts without lying a lot.

Technology moves on in fits and starts--you don't get everything all at once and not everything is monotonically improved. In many ways horses were (and still are) superior to automobiles; there was a significant phase in history in which the two overlapped for this reason. And back then, some jackass like you was preaching about how we shouldn't use automobiles at all until they were uniformly better than horses at everything.

That's all?!? Why didn't anyone else think of that? That would only cost about 100 trillion dollars and would dump a huge amount of carbon into the air (to tear down and then rebuild all human residences). Although one downside is that it is politically infeasible, mostly because it is so stupid.

You know what might be a good backup plan? Switch to electric cars (which are quite efficient at starting and stopping), encourage more telecommuting, and slowly make our electric power generation infrastructure more reliant on renewable or low-polluting energy sources.

President is a Muslim born in Kenya?

Why do idiots believe such obviously stupid email forwards? Oh, right, because they're idiots.

I don't see anything in the pictures which implies "hand custom layout". I see a lot of carefully placed and floorplanned blocks, some of which are synthesized and some of which may have varying degrees of directed placement & routing. There are a lot of RAMs and register files, which look very regular but there's no way to tell whether they were generated by a bog standard RAM/RF compiler or whether there was some custom work (perhaps a combination of the two). There are a lot of unique blocks for a chip this size, I suspect there are several fixed function units to do various things (mpeg decoding or whatnot).

Hand custom layout conjures images of dozens of layout engineers drawing polygons for every transistor; I doubt they did much of that but I'm certain you can't tell from these kinds of photos.

It certainly looks "designed" and knowing how sharp the pasemi folks are then that isn't at all surprising.

then they'll need to be able to refuel by eating grass and drinking from a stream, they'll need to be equally at home on smooth or rough terrain, they'll need to cost no more than a couple hundred dollars for an entry-level model, and they'll need to be able to procreate.

My point? You don't always get uniform monotonic improvement with new technology.

union labor.

Since when? ;-)

almost all the money they make is from sales of hardware. It is their entire business model.

Western countries starting buying products made there?

Maybe the Western countries aren't the problem. Maybe China is the problem.

nt

The previous Google maps app relied on a licensing agreement with Google that recently expired. Obviously the app itself could continue to run fine just like the 700,000 other iOS apps (dating back to the dawn of time) which continue to run fine on every subsequent iOS version. The 'trickery' probably involves bypassing whatever system is in place to prevent that app from being installed on iOS6 or using Google's mapping data from an iOS6 device. Really, you'd have to be pretty stupid to assume that the app stopped working because of some fundamental technology problem.

They also have a pretty long history of favoring open standards (Postscript, HTML5, etc.).

I wish I could frame it better--but in a nutshell you are just a fucking moron.

Aesthetics have value to humans and always have, in every field for all of history--if that makes all humans stupid then you just fundamentally have a problem with humanity.

Your way of calculating the iPhone premium for its nonexpandable flash memory is transparently dumb. Let me recalculate for you:

"Lets see, the iPhone has a higher screen resolution than your wife's phone. The cost to retrofit your wife's phone with an iPhone-quality display is about a $100K, therefore your wife's phone is overpriced by about $100K."

Why can't you just accept that some people like a different phone than you? is that too much complexity for your tiny little brain to handle?

Apple is on their way to being the first every trillion dollar company. This isn't a loss, Apple is a huge winner.