Except Solyndra didn't actually outsource their manufacturing to China. They had millions of square feet of factory space in CA.

Caltech is not run by money from from the federal government. JPL is run by Caltech using federal money. The chemistry (and other unreleated) labs on campus are not (at least not any more so than at any other university; pretty much every university in the country receives some source of funding from the federal government, through grants from thttp://science.slashdot.org/story/12/02/13/0331221/nasa-considers-privatizing-galex-astrophysics-satellite#he NSF, DOE, etc.)

AMD is a fabless company now. They contract out their manufacturing to their former fabs (including the one in Dresden), which is a separate company that they own ~10% of. That company is building a new fab in Saratoga County in NY. Their former Austin fab was spun off with their flash memory division as Spansion. It's no where close to being a leading edge fab. It still uses 200 mm wafers.

And being ahead of TSMC is arguable in any case.

AMD lost its fabs a while ago. (Their fabs are part of GlobalFoundries now, and they're a bit ahead of TSMC, but not anywhere close to Intel in terms of process capabilities.)

Really?! Then what is a government supposed to tax. Any economist will tell you that negative externalities are *exactly* what a government is supposed to tax and then use the money to subsidize positive externalities. The government is certainly not the most efficient body in the world, but I'd argue that compensating for externalities should be the government's first priority.

Trust me, Intel is so far ahead of everyone else in process technology, it's not even close. Yeah, someone else will eventually make FinFETs in production but by then I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel with transistors that have III-V and Ge channels. And lithography limitations are already resulting in very restricted design rules for design engineers. As they are pretty much the only vertically integrated company semiconductor company left, they'll have a rather large advantage in knowing exactly how to tune their designs to fit the limitations of their mask sets, etc.

One of the problems with open source hardware is that the highest performance chips are designed under restrictive design rules which are a result of fabrication process limitations at the smallest technology nodes. That's one of the biggest reasons the semiconductor industry hasn't moved entirely to a fabless model. The folks making high performance computing hardware need to know exactly what limitations are imposed upon them by the fabrication process. And the fabircation process will never become "open source" (at least not until Moore's law no longer works), there' just way too much money invested in process technology for it to be freely released.

This is nonsense (or at best an utterly pessimistic view on the value of Google). Let us assume that you currently possess $50 worth of tangible assets. Suppose I signed a contract with you saying that I had to give you $100 for your work on zoology 1 year from today. How much should someone be willing to pay you right now for all to all of your money for time immemorial? Assuming I am perfectly credit worthy, someone should give you ~$150 (actually slightly less accounting for inflation reducing the value of $100 in the future, rates of return on other risk free opportunities, etc.). Now suppose that this fictional investor has noticed that you seem to have been able to get me to sign this contract for $100 every year for the last 5 years. If you knew I was absolutely guaranteed to get $100 every year for the rest of time, and the rate of return+inflation on the best alternative risk-free investment was 7%, someone would be willing to pay 50+sum[100/(1+r)^n,{n,1,Infinity}]=$1478.57 for access to all of your money. Replace all these values on these contracts with the expected value of the profits of Google and the appropriate interest rate and then divide by the number of outstanding shares and you would get how much someone should be willing to pay for a share of Google's stock. The market comes into play by determining the expected value of Google's profits. If the price of Google is going up, it's because they think that the future profits of Google are higher than what the market currently thinks they are going to be. If it's going down then the opposite is true. Your valuation scheme is based on the idea that Google will make no profits in the future, which is so utterly pessimistic as to be silly.

Chances are you would be one of those people. There's an extremely good chance that some of your retirement savings are invested in some fund that owns shares in BP. Congratulations on your criminal record.