Not the non-member 3rd suing themselves - that's stupid. But rather by scraping from other sources and then claiming it represents a non-member 3rd party, if there are errors that cause damage it's most definitely actionable under common law libel/slander. The non-member 3rd can sue this firm. This firm has to be responsible for accuracy of their collated and created database. It's a derivative work on public information but they are adding to it by systematizing it into usable form for their members.

Does anyone have any critical reading skills anymore?

The article says "written Chinese". Written Chinese for Mandarin and Cantonese and Fukien and etc. etc. is the same (in China). The exception is traditional used in Taiwan and Hong Kong but once you go beyond the subset of characters that is simplified Chinese, guess what, it's all traditional. And in many cases you can recognize the simplified if you already know the traditional as it's usually obviously and predictably simplified from the traditional form.

And what do web sites use: written or spoken language? Oh yeah, written. So only written matters much for the web. This whole discussion about spoken Chinese being different is a bizarro Red Herring.

And what does the article actually say? There will soon be more web pages in Chinese than in English, which given the population and economic power of China isn't even surprising or suspect as a claim.

Does this mean that you will not find any (or even as many as today's) English language web pages? Of course not.

It certainly might mean that you could in the near future miss something relevant or important that was only published in Chinese if you can't read Chinese. This happens today if you don't read English. This is simply true based on numbers.

So it wouldn't be a bad idea for a (wàiguó rén) to (xué) some (Zhngguóhuà) if you want to be economically relevant in the future (/. only UTF-8 apparently?).

Yes. It really does.

The reason is that to get the signals off the chip you have to amplify them and then take the losses of having to line-charge the bond pads, bond wires, package traces, PCB traces, etc. This charging is simply done due to physical parasitic losses induced by shipping the data off-chip. Keeping it all on-chip avoids this and allows nA-uA currents to be used throughout rather than kicking things up to mA currents and then back down again.

This, combined with jitter limits, is part of the reason for going to cores rather than increases GHz clock rates.

The one caveat with 3D is that it probably won't work for microprocessors because too many devices are switching at any one time. This includes CPUs and GPUs. Memory is more "quiescent" in terms of duty cycle of any given transistor on-chip to it's a better candidate for 3D.

As it is, the energy density (J/m^3) in a typical minimal geometry CMOS transistor is higher than the core of the Sun. This is a serious thermal issue, especially since >90% of thermal conduction is only through the silicon substrate. Another reason that SOI/SOS hasn't been nearly as successful as you might expect.

I'm still "shocked" when apparently leading tech companies fastidiously try to preserve their cash-cows without giving a thought to continuing R&D to replace them. How MBA of them, but clearly they don't get tech. I've seen it happen so much in Silicon Valley in the last 15 years that I've come to realize I can pick winners and losers just using this as a diagnostic. This also is a death rattle of a tech firm when they start acting this way.

It is always better to obsolete your own products than to have your competitors do it for you! You'd think the "why?" would be obvious but to spell it out: obsoleting yourself puts inevitable your market revenue decline in your hands rather than your competitors.

In the case of Apple, which their most excellent sell-on-value and margin, this means they have control of that margin (and profits) to a far greater degree than their competitors who tend to be completely reactive in product development investments and choices. Being reactive means you are always a day late and dollar short.

This is still nothing but a bunch of smoke. Recipes are not copyrightable! Never have been.

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl122.html

There's a marketing name and then there was the internal name commonly used. Same die! Really.

Integrated circuits have had "stealth" debug/test modes since forever. Every single one made since the 1970s on with any complexity above that of a RAM has had these modes.

When I worked for Intel I used these extensively to get "inside access" to the raw memory array for production line testing of EPROMs.

The same types of modes are how the 486DX, 486SX and 486FX (FPU) all originated from the same, exact, single-design die. Basically you go into the test mode and blow a fuse that shut down the failing half of a DX to result in an SX or FX part. All the same exact die in all cases.

The article author is way late to the party!

You'd have to be able to access the network the IC is operating on (if it is even connected to anything). So, not really if normal military security measures already common are taken. Backdoors imply communications channels existing because a backdoor is useless without one.

There are other more nefarious things "they" could do. I could tell you but I've have to kill you.

Extremely well said. This is exactly the situation.

The excuse is War on Terror, which just the lie to cover the truth. The reality is a desire to be able to detect and tax for VAT and income tax on every last dime that is transacted anywhere in the world.

False dichotomy. Presumption that the absence of authoritarian control is riotous chaos.

The Delaware incorporation does matter in many cases but the California nexus of employment and the filing in California also does.

Basically HP waded in and grabbed a tar-baby. It's going to be messy for them now. Very skittish, Toombs!

I was an employee of HP for 10 years and customer for 15 years prior. And sadly, seeing how the company has been destroyed from Bill and Dave had created, I'm also glad to be rid of them.

I no longer buy HP products at all. For printers I buy Brother. For computers I buy Apple. Apple manufactures the physical quality of what HP used to be capable of but they also apply the same to the user experience which HP was always only rarely a hit and mostly a miss on.

It more dramatic that this.

If a profession has the pace or size that even allows the creation of a certification, it's absolutely not a leading edge profession. Leading edge professions have everything change so fast that any attempt to create a certification standard ends up being obsolete before the first certificatee takes the first copy of the exam! Thus if there is a certification at all the chances are the profession and technology in question is trailing edge because it means bureaucracies in all their inefficiencies have caught up with the technology.

Computers, generally, are a trailing edge technology. Leading or trailing edge is a direct reference to the technology adoption curve. Leading edge is where 0% to 50% to 100% of the market/population is willing to pay money for the technology. Computers, and specifically microprocessor-based or microcomputers, are trailing edge technology, as are all the supporting activities like IT. This is also why IT is so easily outsourceable! It's a trailing edge commodity service. The trailing edge is where products become commodities!

Yes, Web 2.0 is a trailing edge technology - just a minor refinement of Web 1.0 without anything really all that radical added. Not even like new protocols to replace IP or stuff. Trailing edge. Get used to it.

I guess some people anthropomorphize machines including computers. I never have and have never understood why it would be necessary or desireable. But I'm an engineer so I understand most machines down to their smallest components.