Free Republic

On November 15, 1971, 40 years ago this Tuesday, an advertisment appeared in Electronic News for a new kind of chip – one that could perform different operations by obeying instructions given to it. That first microprocessor was the Intel 4004, a 4-bit chip developed in 1970 by Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor in cooperation with the Japanese company Busicom [1] (née the Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation) for that company's adding machines. Busicom held the rights to the 4004 in 1970, but released them to Intel in 1971. Intel then offered the world's first processor for sale,...

FORWARD OPERATING BASE HAMMER, Iraq — Soldiers see their missions differently. An infantryman has close contact with an enemy. But ensuring the infantryman is as safe as can be falls to other soldiers, whose MOSes — military occupational specialties — provide additional help. Having knowledge of what may face an infantryman outside the wire is something Pfc. Craig Obeso does. An intelligence analyst, the 20-year-old Obeso has yet to go outside the wire that separates Forward Operating Base Hammer from potential insurgents, but he knows his job is important. Analyzing intelligence is designed to help “patrols find what they are...

It's not words on paper which will better protect this nation from a terrorist attack. We're not at all convinced that a culture of collaboration can be legislated. Or that a new counterterrorism center solves the bottom line lesson of the missing WMD in Iraq - threat assessments are only as reliable as the intelligence being analyzed. Indeed, we will be no safer if the first appointee to the new post of National Intelligence director simply has access to the same junk intel which led former CIA Director George Tenet to declare the case for war in Iraq a ``slam...