OR

3) MS originally bribed officials to attempt to force ordinary people to Linux desktops knowing they would eventually complain enough to make the whole experiment fail and spin a cautionary for any that follow...

Or maybe not... ;^)

If a quality project can't raise money elsewhere from more traditional fund-raising sources, might this indicate a subtle case of pre-selection quality bias instead of an indication of any anything to do with kickstarter campaign odds?

It could simply confirm that woman entrepreneurs often have less access to traditional funding sources because their industry contact lists are shorter in certain industries (which may or may not have anything to do with positive specific gender bias on kickstarter).

This is also consistent with the fact that in industries that tend to have more even female representation, they apparently lost the bias they were measuring...

I guess you can spin the results anyway you want...

Next thing you know they'll start practicing buddhism...

Single isotope silicon? Silicon wafers surfaces (where the transistors are) are generally doped with ions using diffusion and etched, and the most serious defects are usually parametric due to patterning issues. We've go a long ways to go before actually isotope purity is going to be a limiting factor...

Conductivity of gold vs copper? Copper is a better conductor than gold (although silver is a better conductor than both of them). The reason that gold is used for *connections* is that it is more malleable than copper allowing it to make a more robust physical connection. For conduction, copper or silver is much better. The reason that silver isn't used today is that the processes needed to etch it are their infancy. Also, there's a reluctance to go there, because it's known that silver is much more prone to electro-migration issues than copper and the gain in conductivity is relatively small (compared from the step between aluminum and copper).

Also, silicon on insulator isn't w/o problems. The main problems today are the floating-body problem** which will likely render SOI impractical for devices that need high frequency switching (e.g, a CPU) in future process nodes. This is why after a brief commercial taste of this technology, many companies are moving away from it except for specialty products (like Z-ram).

Also, if your assertion is true that insulators don't conduct heat (very well), now you can't get heat away from one hemisphere of your circuit (instead of heat conducting up and down). Wouldn't that tend to make more problems than it solves?

**As I understand it, in bulk silicon, there is a leakage path that bleeds the capacitance away, but on an insulator, the body of a transistor is effectively a large parasitic capacitor. Failure to fully discharge the transistor body after switching creates somewhat of a memory effect limiting performance and potentially causing a parasitic transistors to drain floating nodes (e.g., in latches and xor-gates) in a operational sequence indeterminate way influenced by neighboring transistors. This makes it hard to margin for and may ultimately make it unworkable to obtain the tolerances needed for high speed design.

200mV likely comes from a generic analysis of CMOS on Silicon wafer oxide assuming you don't want a leakage factor more than 50% the current (most of which comes from the subthreshold conduction current) and you don't do any weird body-biasing techniques (which would consume lots of circuit area). It isn't a hard number but a general ballpark. Since everyone is scaling down the supply voltage, we must also scale down the threshold voltage and then the amount a signal is below the threshold voltage when you are 'off' is now conducting at a level that is a significant fraction of when it is 'on' meaning the device no longer has much noise margin to work reliability at all.

Of course with different insulators and conduction semiconductors and transistor types and tolerance for leakage and reliability this will be different.

Bad example, the initial yield on 28nm was so bad that the initial pricing was hugely impacted by wafer shortages. Many fabless customers reverted to the 40nm node to wait it out. TSMC eventually got things sorted out so now 28nm has reasonable yields.

Right now, the next node is looking even worse. TSMC isn't counting on the yield-times-cost of their next gen process to *ever* get to the point when it crosses over 28nm pricing per transistor (for typical designs). Given that reality, it will likely only make sense to go to the newer processes if you need its lower-power features, but you will pay a premium for that. The days of free transistors with a new node appear to be numbered until they make some radical manufacturing breakthroughs to improve the economics (which they might eventually do, but it currently isn't on anyone's roadmap down to 10nm). Silicon architects need to now get smarter, as they likely won't have many more transistors to work with at a given product price point.

Given the above situation, and that fast SRAMs tend to be quite a bit larger than fast DRAMs (6T vs 1T+C) and the basic fact that the limitation is currently the interface to the memory device, not the memory technology, a shift back to SRAM seems mighty unlikely.

The next "big-thing" in the memory front is probably WIDEIO2 (the original wideio1 didn't get many adopters). Instead of connecting an SoC (all processors are basically SoC's these days) to a DRAM chip, you put the DRAM and SoC in the same package (either stacked with through silicon vias or side-by-side in a multi-chip package). Since the interface doesn't need to go on the board, you can have many more wire to connect the two, and each wire will have lower capacitance which will increase the available bandwidth to the memory device.

So just why would alpha particles (which are basically a helium nucleus consisting of 4 really heavy particles) gonna be somehow faster than electrons (which are much lighter and take less energy to manipulate)?

Another problem is that we aren't currently using free-space electrons either, but electrons in a wave guide (where we lay down conductors to steer the electrons around the circuits we design). Not as easy to do with alpha particles...

It may be affordable and walkable, but would you actually want to walk there?

I've always been weary when I took the RTD to the light rail station there at night and the crime statistics tend to bear this caution. Not to say it might not be some sort of up-and-coming neighborhood (don't live in Denver now so my information is a few years old), but historically, that's been fits-and-starts for that area with little progress since the '90s even though downtown was getting all the ball-park redevelopment...

On the other hand Capitol Hill in Seattle doesn't seem nearly as bad. It isn't the greatest neighborhood and although I don't generally wander around that area at night when I travel to Seattle (although I did occasionally drive by there because I know someone who used to have a restaurant there). I wonder how much crime got factored into this so-called walkability "math"... I'm a bit suspect of this WalkScore anyhow as it yields very unexpected ratings for the last few places that I lived...

FWIW, historically, Opium dens and crack houses did not consume much more than a small percentage of actual people, but it was significant enough to cause wide-spread effect on the population as a whole. Just because we aren't headed toward a future of "mechanized work/play", doesn't mean that the slope isn't slippery, it's just that you aren't likely to slip too far, but even then some might not like the consequences of slipping a small amount (depending on your definition of "small")...

Although you might disparage so called anti-ADHD people as being as a group ignorant, likewise some ADHD proponents exhibit a lack of knowledge of analogous medical anomalies like antibiotic abuse, or even somatic and conversion disorders (including, Münchausen syndrome or Münchausen syndrome by proxy)...

FWIW, it appears (to me anyhow) the current diagnostic of ADHD is problematic in that it is really an attempt to categorize a vague set of symptoms (effectively a syndrome) and associate this with a generic treatment plan. This is not unlike having a fever, stomach aches, etc and looking for some sort of pre-emptive and/or palliative cure in antihistamines and antibiotics (instead of perhaps waiting for a bacterial culture to verify the diagnosis before taking antibiotics). Sure some of those with symptoms might have TB or Salmonella poisoning, or have cold that results in secondary bacterial infection like pneumonia, so you can't rule that out, that possibility doesn't make it an inevitable (although personally, that's happened many times to me).

Studies like this ADHD study can really help to improve the situation greatly and hopefully result in a diagnostic tool that has much higher predictive powers for designing treatments rather than broad-spectrum palliative medications that can be over-prescribed and potentially have a net-negative outcome.

With more discrimination, sometimes newer treatment will emerge (like Neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu did for actual viral influenza) that actually start to clinically improve outcomes (rather than just vaguely mask symptoms). In the meantime, palliatives are generally tradeoffs and if Ritalin actually helps a patient's situation relative to the side-effects, it is certainly useful, but as we can see with the anti-biotic over-use fiasco, the patents (or even the doctors) aren't necessarily always capable of making good tradeoffs in many cases, which leads me to be skeptical generally of ADHD being as wide spread as it is diagnosed (and similarly treated)...

My wife is a doctor and I know from her there is still strong bias and pressure to preemptively prescribe anti-biotics in the medical community (both from patents and over-worked doctors) even with all we know now... The main reason given... Just in case, side-effects are usually minimal, cannot treat the underlying virus anyhow and want to do something...

I suspect many feel the same is true with ADHD. It isn't that a brain/body disorder analogous to ADHD doesn't exist, it's just that we must be careful what we are trying to treat and why since we do not yet have the best diagnostic tools available to distinguish this disorder from other disorders for which we do not know the cause only symptoms, nor do we have a great understanding of the treatment outcomes relative to a specific underlying cause.

It perhaps raises the question if she was the right person to lead the program...
But it might beg the question that the huge cost of sending her into space was a waste of taxpayer's money (assuming that was the goal of spending the money)...

Of course, which is why I also said this...

That would simply be the fact that some pigs are more equal, right?

I think if Google and crew ponied up for their own private bus stops, the argument about stopping at existing stops is moot, right?

I don't think that SV cities not building enough houses is causing people to want to commute from SF. Certain people want to live in SF and having a job in SV is enabling more of them to compete for SF housing... Before these busses, I know many folks that live in SF and used public transportation (e.g., Caltrain) to get to work in SV. Also, there are plenty of housing in Tracy and Morgan Hill about the same distance from SV cities if it were simply about housing costs and availability...

Google and crew are simply catering to a the segment of their highly skilled 20-something workforce desires to live in SF and enabling them with attractive commute options (which is in line with other perks you offer the employees you want to recruit/retain). Sadly this seems to impact disproportionality a segment of the population of SF that doesn't benefit from this. OTOH, I'm sure the property owners near these transportation corridors are really-really happy about Gbus and the like driving up their rents and property values...

Oh yeah, that $2 doesn't pay for squat. SF-Muni has a 22% fare-box recovery ratio, and given the number of fare crashers in a typical SF-Muni bus, it's likely irrelevant to the people these shuttle busses are affecting. In contrast, BART has about a 60% fare-box recovery ratio which is more typical of public transit...

Try again...

If you notice closely, they attempted to pose a slightly different question...

If you ask the question like this, it's true. However, leading causes of warming is the sun and the other main gas driving global climate change is methane, neither of which is technically human produced.

If you want to get technical, if factor in our desires for growing plants, industrialization, keeping warm and eating beef, then both CO2 and methane are somewhat similar in that regard. There's about 200x the CO2 than methane in the atmosphere, but methane is about 86x better at trapping atmospheric heat.

It's easy to forget humans are likely responsible for only 25Gtons of the CO2 released, where the natural carbon cycle is about 750Gtons (+- a extra volcano eruptions which are about 40Gtons)... Human contribution is non-negligible, for sure, but natural variations are of the same scale. Certainly there is case to be made that doing something is better than nothing, but even if somehow we could collectively reduce our carbon footprint to zero (likely impossible), it's likely that some warming is already inevitably started and the only long term solution would be to adapt our planet to sink the additional carbon output we will be producing...

Truth be told, all the CO2 we humans are likely to responsible for is dwarfed by the Methane Clathrate Ice timebomb at the bottom of our oceans. All that stuff was there long before humans and has been theorized to be the source of historical global run-away climate events. It's probably already too late for this, so it's likely that adaptation for a higher climate variation is something we just have to adapt for...