Google's threat to pull out of China: What does it have to lose?

So Google threatens to pull out of China.

What does it stand to lose? The most obvious answer is it loses out on 1.3 billion people to click on Google ads. Like any business Google has to weigh the cost of complying with local regulation versus the profit or potential profit.

Who could have been first on the moon?

A few years ago when I was teaching in Seoul, I visited the Seoul science museum. It was mostly geared to kids. Lots of buttons you push that have unexpected results like a bolt of electricity arcs between two wires or you find out what Karen Carpenter's weight would be on the surface of a neutron star. Kids love that sort of thing. There was also a space exhibit. Part of the exhibit was a little diorama model of the moon with your classic LEM and two astronauts exploring the moon. I've included the picture below the fold. Tell me if you see something rather odd in the photo.

Dot Com Week - The Paul Allen Effect effect on post surgical recovery

There is, or was, a thing called the "Paul Allen Effect". Paul Allen is the co-founder of Microsoft and was usually cited as the third or fourth richest man in the world. Allen is barely heard of outside of the Pacific Northwest but in Seattle and Portland he was on par with Rameses II. The guy built great monuments: stadiums, museums, office complexes. Allen, as some might know, got cancer in the early days of Microsoft. He left to fight his cancer. After remission, he never really went back. He was probably only a millionaire a hundred times over back then but even back then he figured he had enough money to last a lifetime, and understood that lifetime could be foreshortened, so why punch a clock? A fan of Jimi Hendrix, he learned to play guitar. He opened a museum in Seattle devoted to rock 'n' roll (originally it was supposed to be a museum devoted to Hendrix but there was a falling out early on between Allen and the Hendrix family). He built a football stadium in downtown Seattle, despite a city plebiscite rejecting it!

Just one word. Are you listening? Silicon.

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Silicon.”  That’s what Benjamin would have heard thirty years later. Forget about the “new economy.” Don’t worry about who’s going to win the processor wars or who will dominate the Internet and the World Wide Web. It doesn’t matter who wins as long as it drives infrastructure. The Silicon machine tool industry seemed like a pretty good place to be in 1995.  And for the most part it was, until the dot.com bubble burst and Sarbanes-Oxley came along.

Moore’s Law: the End Game

A lot of premature predictions have been made about the end of Moore’s Law. Most of them have been proven wrong as the result of clever engineering. But clever engineering can’t defeat the laws of physics and we’re almost there. The economic constraints on Moore’s Law are just as looming although the current technology roadmap takes us past 2022. My purpose here is not to predict when Moore’s Law will end. Instead, I’d like to discuss the technical and economic constraints and their consequences as the end game approaches.