Maybe the OP doesn't want to work in porn.

And that would be legal. The issue is the companies are making the "interns" do non-internship related tasks.

For example, say a comic book company takes you on as a "production intern" at no pay. Awesome, right? Then they make you spend all the time cleaning out toilets and they fire the janitor. Is that cool with you?

This Lego creation is really amazing in person. The guy did a stellar job. It's permanently located in the lobby of building 50 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (right next to the cigar box where Glenn Seaborg put the first ever sample of Plutonium). If you go on a tour there or visit an Open House, you can see it for yourself. Here's a site with a lot more details about its construction: http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~sdube/lego.html

I suppose we have competing conspiracies, then. The total cost is hidden for any kind of vehicle. Gas companies are incredibly subsidized. Road maintenance is subsidized. Car manufacturers (gasoline, hybrid, and electric) are subsidized the world over.

I'm not sure I see Tesla's success as a conspiracy, unless everything ever has been a conspiracy.

This really is a big negative of Software as a Service. When you own something, you can run it forever, even if the developer decides to stop using it.

I have some simulation software for electrical design that was last updated in 1998. Still works fine and gets the job done. If it were on the cloud I'd be out of luck and forced to continually move my data between paid services. Too bad.

But the fast majority of analog-to-digital converters used for audio use delta-sigma modulation. They are already sampling far above 96 kHz (delta-sigma modulation is a combination of oversampling and quantization noise shaping).

Your argument is specious. If audio converters used Nyquist-rate ADCs I would agree with you, but they don't. The absolute vast majority of audio ADCs are of delta-sigma type so they are already doing your "trivial digital filter with a perfect frequency cutoff to downsample". It's an inherent part of the modulation.

I marched in Orange County, CA just before the Iraq War started. There were at least 100,000 people on Jamboree Blvd. I was there. I saw them. Now, Orange County is one of the most conservative regions of California. It produced Richard Nixon, and usually has Republican representatives. So the fact so many citizens would leave work to march against a coming war was incredible to me.

That night I watched the news. Nothing. Not a single thing. Probably the biggest civil political protest in Orange County history and it wasn't on the news (at least that I saw). It should have been ALL OVER the news.

That's when I knew this "liberal media" was not true. It's really "corporatist media" and because the media in general decided for whatever reason to support the war they ignored the fact that an unprecedented number of regular citizens were against it. I learned a lot about how the world works that day. I really don't think Twitter would have made a difference.

Actually, the quality of the vaccine is a critical issue and was one of the main axes the vaccination/anti-vaccination struggle revolved around. In fact, it was addressing exactly this kind of concern that the United States started regulating pharmaceutical companies. The book I linked to "Pox: An American History" goes into a lot of detail about this issue. This is one area where anti-vaccination agitation improved the way we provided vaccine.

It's very interesting... at one point around 1900-1905 the United States had compulsory vaccination, but didn't take responsibility for the quality of the vaccine. We've come a long way since then, but we can still do a lot better.

Anti-vaccination rhetoric is nothing new... in fact at the turn of the 20th century there were huge struggles regarding the smallpox vaccine. It's a fascinating instance of the struggle between liberty and social responsibility and the rights and the responsibilties of the individual with respect to the state.

There's an amazing book about the early-20th-century smallpox vaccination campaigns and the associated anti-vaccination campaign called Pox: An American History.

I can't recommend it enough. Says so much about the United States and how people's opinions have change (and how for some, they haven't!).

Anyway, here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Pox-American-History-Penguin-Life/dp/1594202869

I agree with you 100%. The original comment indicated gold is not used in semiconductor processing, and I was pointing out that was not true. Our stuff is lower volume so we're still using gold bondwires (can't justify the expensive equipment upgrade).

They aren't really proposing much of anything. They are a bit like the guys working on GaAs and InP in the 1980s... once they got two transistors working on a single substrate they exclaimed "This will revolutionize microprocessors!". It didn't.

Standalone components are SOOOO cheap for the most part now, I wonder how they can possibly be displaced.

Not so sure about that. Lithography is one of the most highly developed technologies in the history of the world, and has gone far, far deeper than most people expected as early as the 1980s. Proposal after proposal has been made to replace lithography (e.g. e-beam, MBE, etc) but all have to relegated to niche status.

Semiconductor lithography itself is highly, highly leveraged from printing processes going back hundreds of years. With this much brain power and inertia behind it I would be really, really surprised if something beats it in "nearly all aspects". Some aspects, maybe, and lithography may finally hit a show-stopper, but there won't be an "oh my, what a breakthrough" type thing to replace it. I agree it has to be replaced to maintain Moore's law, but it is already beyond comprehension advanced.

Actually gold is the highest quality metal for bondwires or top-level bondpad metalization. You're right that gold is a severe contaminant, but it is also a very good conductor, and is easy to work with. It most certainly used extensively in fabs, although care is taken not to contaminate. I used gold interconnect in a chip just a few months ago, in a very up-to-date process.

The vast majority of chemicals used in a fab will severely degrade circuits if they are introduced into the process at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Gold is not a special exception here.

I think you misunderstand Brooks' position. He isn't saying there needs to be a "quality" czar who is some kind of gatekeeper. What he is saying is there needs to be one architect of a system who is responsible for its conceptual integrity.

You actually agree with his premise, obviously since you talk about the FreeBSD issue. The problem isn't that people aren't fixing problems, the problem is there is no designer, and design-by-committee leads to cruft.

True, but if you read the article you'd see that the Autonomy writedown is only a portion of the loss.