He did read it but he missed the part where it was supposed to be a cautionary tale and not an instruction manual.

Even near perfect mirroring makes damn near zero difference to a cutting laser so I doubt this attack laser would be any different.

$159,279,888 in 1973 or ~$837M is 2015 dollars for the A-10. The GAU-8A develop cost was $49.7M in 1974 or $235M in 2015 dollars for a total system development cost of just over $1B.

Personally I'd go with the CX3000, it does POTS, SIP, and USB connectivity and you can use the expansion microphones which is huge if you have more than a few people on the call.

How did cutting telecommuting across the board and thus forcing many talented engineers to go elsewhere stop the brain drain?

Local loop unbundling isn't a panacea, working through a clec who has to lease lines from the ilec is often painful when something goes wrong.

Most rendering engines aren't single threaded, and most browsers use GPU acceleration. However, on mobile adding a bunch of animations will surely lower battery life, so I just switched from Chrome to Firefox on my Android device as animated and sound filled ads are evil and Chrome mobile lacks extension support.

In Chrome Menu -> More Tools -> Developer Tools -> click on Resources tab and you can get the individual URL for each image, script, or style sheet for each frame.

Reimage monkeys were never valuable, they were a necessary evil that companies tolerated while they had to. If you didn't drive your skills up the value chain then you either lack the ability to or you lack ambition, neither of which generally leads to a lucrative career path. Heck, when VMWare and other vendors try to sell me expensive management tools to save me time I laugh because my team spends probably only 15-20% of our time doing management of the infrastructure, the rest is spent working on projects that bring value to the business.

The talent agencies are desperate for growth, they've already massively consolidated and recently started buying the sports management companies, so I'm sure if they think they can make money off the arrangement they'll try. The problem for programmers is that even really, really good ones only make 2-3x the league minimum for the major sports leagues so agents might not want to deal with the work for their 10% cut.

It can't be seized through civil forfeiture quite as easily.

Silver is 3x more rare and is mined at ~18,000t per year, so again you can reasonably expect ~60kt per year if prices support the effort (though that's a bit misleading since elemental silver veins happen in numerous places but In has not been found in similar streaks)

GaAs chips have a very high thermal tolerance, temperatures of 250C have been shown to have no impact on MTTF, this is ~250% better than Si. The bigger issue is what do you attach them to, most commonly available PCBs can't handle that, though solutions do exist since I've read about very high temperature GaAs chips used in jet engine monitoring and control.

Doubtful, Ga isn't that rare, we mine ~254t per year mostly as a byproduct of Al smelting, this is fairly small compared to ~54,000t for Si use in semiconductors, but is quite high given the fairly small market for it today. To give you an idea Lithium is slightly less common in the crust but annual production is ~30,000t.

It's definitely slowing down, Westmere EX was 2.6B in early 2011, Haswell EP 5.69B in late 2014 so roughly 42 months to double (Haswell die is ~20% bigger accounting for the 220% count instead of 200%) . A large part of that slowdown though might be economics, Westmere was surely started before the financial crisis and Haswell likely during or after so Intel might have slowed development (especially since on these large parts they don't have any meaningful competition except at the very high end from IBM and Oracle)