Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.

Don't forget those in the construction industry. Like administrators, they contribute where it counts: in the voting booth where they help elect those that will continue to increase spending on that abstraction "education" rather than on actual educators.

And these are the people we want to trust making decisions about our healthcare?

Mod. Parent. Up.

There are other advantages to shrinking components. Higher clock rates become possible.

You'd think so, but the problem is global interconnect. Not gates. It was all the way back at the 250nm node when interconnect and gate delay were about the same.

At the 28nm node, wire delay is responsible for something like 80% of the time it takes for signals to work their way through a circuit.

And it some cases inverters are actually used to help signals propagate more quickly down long wires. In other words, long wires are so slow compared to gates that adding gates can speed things up!

In any type of reasonable court the "social contract" concept would be thrown out due to Unconscionability. One side has grossly unequal bargaining power. Social Contract is a nicer way of saying "Ultima Ratio".

The flip side of that is that NO western job is worth the prevailing wage, except in ultra competitive fields with international mobility like movie or basketball stars. For all other jobs, cooks, engineers, doctors, street vendors, architects and bankers etc., you will always find some equally qualified individual in some developing country ready to work for (significantly) less.

If skilled workers were paid what their production was actually worth, employers wouldn't profit from the transaction and hiring them would be counterproductive for employers. Employment is an arbitrage game, where employers offer employees some stability in return for being paid less than the actual goods they produce are worth.

The fact that globalization, technology and the liberalization of gender roles has expanded the workforce and thus pushed wages down is predictable. It's somewhat interesting that the fields that still have a large gender gap (Nurses, Computer Programmers) have some of the highest wages...likely because of a lack of supply of workers. Nice to see Google is trying to "fix" that....

We're already at the point where 22nm components are more expensive per transistor than those at 28nm.

Previous shrinks lowered the cost of each transistor. It doesn't look like it's going to happen after 28nm.

They should just contact the NSA. I'm sure they've got copies.

I believe many ISPs are actively sabotaging customer's connections to some of the internet's content

They don't have to. The protocols we use are more than capable of screwing with things.

Consider TCP: the protocol is BY DESIGN meant to exponentially increase the amount of data dumped on a link until it overloads and begins dropping packets. TCP then throttles for a little while and then soon goes back to bashing the network with packets until it breaks again.

No, the problem is that the judicial branch told the FCC that *until* they classify ISPs as common carriers, they don't have the authority to mandate anything with regards to paid prioritization or de-prioritization.

With Mr. Wheeler in charge, there doesn't seem to be much impetus to reclassify the ISPs in that way.

I am an independent who often votes republican, and I believe that the republican bill as currently laid out is a bad plan. Internet service is a utility in the 21st century, and should be treated that way.