This is a well written and funny letter: http://hardass-6owwz.posterous.com/listen-up-you-whiny-bitches

If you keep increasing the voltage then it's likely that you can hit higher frequencies, but the power scales with voltage squared and frequency linearly, so power will go up pretty quickly. However, nowadays in advanced processes the interconnect is becoming more of a factor in the limitation on frequency scaling instead of the transistors themselves, in which case increasing the voltage will only help up to a certain point.

The trade-off that the company selling the CPU's makes is between the cost of cooling, reliability and lifetime of the device (higher voltage will wear the transistors out quicker, and high temperatures accelerates this process), and yield.

Samsung is a huge conglomerate and the mobile division is certainly completely separated from their foundry and LCD businesses.

More information in the original article: http://www.materialise.com/cases/the-areion-by-formula-group-t-the-world-s-first-3d-printed-race-car

Well, I'm glad I have some AAPL stock.

Those ubiquitous black IC's are plastic packaging which is not moisture sealed. Not sure if it'd actually affect the silicon to soak it in water for a bit though and use normally. But if you ever order any parts, they come in moisture sealed bags with big warning labels saying that you must reflow solder the IC's within 24-72 hours of opening the package or else too much moisture from the air will seep into the packaging, causing them to act like popcorn when you bake them to 350C for soldering. So if you leave them out too long you're supposed to slowly bake them to get rid of all the moisture before reflow soldering.

Probably has some kind of exponential dependence on temperature as well, so I imagine there has to be a table storing the decay rate across temperature and voltage which also has to be specific for each manufactured chip.

This guy has been circulating around the internet as the profile of the next mass murderer on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?ld=2582718763

If anyone didn't catch it, watch the video and there's a cameo of Gabe Newell forging a crowbar and saying "These things take time"

How is your usage of electronics products from company X any better?

I don't really understand this argument. In Diablo 2, you could play single-player, but that character would never make it onto battle.net. Sure, you could just always play LAN games with your friends, but you'd never be able to take any of your progress online. Or if you go on open battle.net, anyone can just edit their save file and give themselves whatever items or levels they wanted. In Diablo 3, it's the same thing if you want to play your character on closed battle.net.

Same process, not same processor. And besides, Samsung's foundry is completely separate from their mobile business.

Doubt it. The consumer electronics industry, including CPUs and GPUs, is keeping well in pace with the technology developed by semiconductor companies. Each new process node nowadays costs up to ten billion dollars to develop and put into production, and it's highly doubtful anyone is secretly hiding years of advancement over publically known technology. Now, if you want to talk about the companies keeping "hyperfast" architectures in wraps for slow release, then that is plausible, although still, highly doubtful.

Is it worth paying twice as much for all of your GPS devices to be able to get Lightsquared?

Ah, you're right. Reballing can be annoying but the people in China do it all the time, somewhat reliably. No telling what effect the PoP will have though.