Modern Intel chips have documentation that is not available outside Intel. Consider things like registers for testing in the factory, circuits for disabling defective cores or defective cache memories, etc..

Also in the WordStar executable was the ASCII text: "Nosy, aren't you?", a message to those disassembling the program.

While we're at it, all undergraduates should only be allowed to submit programs on punch cards, and have to wait 3 days to see if their program compiled and ran. And walk to class barefoot in the snow.

With an optical microscope you could actually look at a Z80 die, see the transistors (all 8500 of them) and conductors, and write up a schematic of the chip. Considered a trade secret or not, the Z80 is known and completely defined. Nonetheless, it's possible that you're right and contracts may prevent him from talking about stuff that's no longer secret.

Z80:
8 bit register adds, 4 clocks (equivalent to 2 6502 clocks)
16 bit register adds, 11 clocks, with carry, 15 clocks.
The slowest instructions (23 clocks) are obscure instructions like swap register with memory, or indirect indexed addressing. These were limited by the number of memory accesses needed.

I've built hardware and done a lot of assembly level programming on both the Z80 and 6502. There is simply no substantial speed difference between them for the level of technology available in any particular year.

Most Z80 code was written to be compatible with the 8080. As a result, the second register set wasn't used. Floating point math using the second register set for temporary variables made possible a substantial speedup.

If the 6502 and Z80 waveforms for various instructions are examined, it quickly becomes apparent that the Z80 effectively divided its clock by 2 before using it. This is why, for the technology available in any particular year, they had comparable performance but the Z80 used twice as many clock cycles.

The 6502 was a tremendously clever design for making effective use of a small number of transistors. The Z80, striving to be a superset of the 8080, was also a clever and powerful design for its time.

An increase of germination speed by 50% is a decrease in germination time by 33%. In your effort to denigrate their efforts and results, you display not only a sour attitude but poor math skills.

Although the names would be nice, even if they were put first they would soon be forgotten. I mean no denigration of the girls involved, but for an article like this the primary interest is the technology, followed by the nation and gender of the inventors. Those are the things that will be remembered, the names are just noise for the general reader.

What's more important: the cotton gin or the name Eli Whitney?

What do you see as the insurmountable barrier to global prosperity?

"Too many people" based on what standard? Causing what problem -- food shortages?

"Not enough fresh water". Water for direct human consumption is dwarfed by water used for agriculture, also by water used by industry.

These things are interrelated. Trying to configure them as separate problems is foolish and futile.

The explosive population growth in today's world is in Asia (China and India), and in the future it will be Africa, according to the WIRED article you cite. Think, and you'll see that this supports ceoyoyo's assertion. China and India are both working hard to educate their populations (limited by the deep corruption of their political systems.) I see no such hope for most of Africa.

The anomaly here is South America; why is the population not growing there also?

"transferring genes between species that could never procreate together isn't even remotely like evolution." -- never heard of viral DNA insertion in nature, have you?

There are a great number of plants that produce no value for humans or that make significant problems when intermixed with food plants. Consider milk thistle or poison ivy or hundreds of other thorny or poisonous plants growing alongside strawberries, which grow close to the ground and must be hand picked.

Your science fiction imagination is sadly inadequate. Also on the horizon are the creation of new humans without the use of the bodies of either men or women, the creation non-human intelligent beings, and the creation of intelligent beings not based on life-as-we-know-it.

Why do you write "Fuck you", then write "can't wait till we figure out how to get pregnant without men" which indicates that you don't want him to fuck?

By the way, the word missing from your vocabulary is misogynist.

From the article you cited,

The proximate cause of famine was a potato disease commonly known as potato blight

So, bad power politics combined with a disease striking a monoculture crop.