One Man's Notes

clipped from www.storytellersunplugged.com

300 is racist.

Anyone who is not Spartan, pure-blooded and pure-shaped Spartan, is lesser or evil. Xerxes’ emissaries are black, his soldiers are Asian and African and Persian and God knows what else. He employs the monsters of Africa against the plucky band of Spartans, and all are inferior, barbarous, cowardly. They hide behind numbers, they hide behind masks, they hide behind sorcery and arrows and treachery and anything else they can think of, while the true Spartan men are unashamed of their faces, their bodies, their pure god-derived blood. And yet…

300 is not racist.

The Spartans treat all who come before them the same, regardless of color. The worst contempt is reserved for the Ephors, men of Spartan blood and ancestry, bloodless and pale. At the end of the film, there is a message of unity, of joining the greater whole regardless of one’s origin or blood. And yet…

clipped from www.electronicsweekly.com

What are the ten best decisions ever made in the semiconductor industry's history? This is the stuff of which long evenings are made, but here, for what it's worth, is one list compiled after a long evening.

1. Bell Labs' decision to sell licenses for transistor manufacturing technology
2. Akio Morita's decision to buy a transistor manufacturing license from Bell Labs.
3. William Shockley's decision to hire Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore
4. Fairchild's decision to make ICs.
5. The decision to invest $3m in founding Intel
6. Intel's decision to make silicon gate MOS memory.
7. Taiwan's purchase of CMOS technology from RCA in 1976.
8. Chips and Technology's decision to clone IBM PC chip-sets.
9. The decisions by Altera and Xilinx to found the fabless semiconductor industry business model.
10. Philips' decision to co-found TSMC with the Taiwan government and kick-start the foundry industry.