Gordon Moore on 40 Years of Moore’s Law

Michael Kanellos:

When you look back, what products have inspired you to say, “Wow, that’s a beautiful piece of work?”
Moore: Well, the ones I think of as landmarks were not necessarily beautiful pieces of work, but they turned out to be economically viable. The first dynamic RAM we made at Intel is with that category–the old 1103. It was a 1K DRAM and that was our first really big-revenue product. I guess I have to put the first microprocessor in that category too. It was very slow, but it did the job that it was designed to do. There’ve been a lot of things since that have been very important economically. I tend to think of them as more evolutionary products.

Homeland Insecurity: Rosenzweig Chairman of DHS Privacy Board

Declan McCullagh:

The Department of Homeland Security’s privacy board chose as its chairman Paul Rosenzweig, a conservative lawyer best known in technology circles for his defense of the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness project. Bowing to privacy concerns, Congress pulled the plug on the program two years ago.
Nuala O’Connor Kelly, the department’s chief privacy officer, nominated Rosenzweig for the job during the group’s first meeting in a downtown hotel here. Rosenzweig is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Justice Department trial attorney.

Why is Tommy Thompson Sad?

Michael F. Cannon:

Finally, Thompson voiced his regret just one day after Medicare’s trustees announced that the drug benefit by itself has an unfunded liability 60 percent larger than that of the entire Social Security program. (The unfunded liability for all of Medicare is nearly six times that of Social Security.) Medicare’s financial outlook has grown so dire that its two public trustees broke with the trustees who are members of Bush’s Cabinet to say that it is in far worse shape that Social Security.

Vint Cerf on the Internet’s next step

Alex Goldman:

“My initial job was getting IP on everything,” Cerf said. That’s been done by now. IP is on every device from the smallest handheld to the largest supercomputer.
“Now we need IP under everything,” he added. By this he meant that now that the computers are all connected, we need to make sure that every device can use and access any service or product available to any one device.

Feingold Funding Political Travels with a Leadership PAC

Frederic J. Frommer:

U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, whose name has become synonymous with campaign finance reform, is raising both his profile and thousands of dollars with his new leadership political action committee.
Feingold, D-Wis., is using the PAC to fund political travel, like his high-profile trip to Alabama last week, and to make contributions to fellow Democrats as he tries to help the party regain the Senate next year.