Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, died this morning. He was 71.

Project Censored presents its list of the top 25 under-reported stories of the last year. If more than half of these surprise you, you might need to find more diverse sources of news.

Two years ago this morning, two hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center towers. Esquire asks about the people above the impact, and about us.

A columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail argues that the US is bogged down in Iraq, and should pack up and leave. If only it were that simple. Having crippled the Iraqi infrastructure with a decade of sanctions, then bombing what was left and removing the existing government, we're stuck. Leave before the job is done, and we'll leave a nightmarish mess that could haunt us for decades. Picture Afghanistan-style anarchy, but in the Middle East.

So Bush should get his $87 billion. What he shouldn't get, from either Congress or the American people, is a blank check. Having gotten us into this mess on flimsy, manufactured evidence (seen any weapons of mass destruction yet?), and having badly misjudged the costs and complexity of the reconstruction (which Iraq's oil revenue was supposed to pay for), the administration has shown that it can't be trusted to manage a two-car funeral, much less the largest nation-building project since World War II.

This is pretty cool. An article of mine on fab building was apparently on the reading list for a course on IT Industry Analysis and Management at the KDI School of Public Policy and Management in Korea. Thank you for the recommendation, Dr. Sakai, I hope the article was helpful.

A reader alerted me to some interesting technology at Symmorphix. They make amorphous dielectric films using a wide-area, low-temperature PVD process. Suitable for OLED barrier layers, among other things. Interesting stuff.

An interesting bit of etymology (or entomology?). The concept of debugging a computer has apparently been with us as long as computers have. The US Naval Historical Center documents what may be the first known computer bug.

IC Insights reports that there are now eight members of the billion dollar club (chart) of chip capital spenders. With new 300 mm fabs estimated to cost $3 billion and up, that means only two companies (Samsung and Intel) are capable of building as many as one such fab per year.

It's coming attractions season for the December IEDM conference. IBM announced that they've made strained silicon on insulator transistors by a layer transfer technique that removes the SiGe strain layer before transistor formation. The company claims this approach avoids SiGe integration issues.

Interesting article by Clay Shirky on the economics of content and why micropayments don't work. He also briefly addresses the question of how creators can get paid in world where content is free.

(Link by way of TechDirt, which also has some dissenting views.)