It's politically popular to sneer at "elites." Even people in the top percentiles for education and income like to think of themselves as average. But when political pandering becomes policy, you have a problem. Like it or not, educated creative people are the engine that drives the technology and entertainment industries. If you make those people feel unwelcome, they'll leave, and take the fuel of economic growth with them.

Nikon reports that they will start EUV product development this year, and expect to have a tool available in 2006. "No major hurdles" remain. Great news! Except that buried way down at the end of the article we find that this tool's target throughput is just ten wafers per hour. (Silicon Strategies link, free registration required.)

For economical production, you need more like 100 wafers per hour. For a first generation tool I'd let Nikon slide on this, except that the biggest difference between a 10 wph tool and a 100 wph tool is source power. EUV sources and optical paths are horribly inefficient. Less than 1% of the energy supplied to the source emerges as photons, and then each optical element loses about 17% of those photons. Achieving a 10x power increase in such a system is hardly trivial.

Yes, I remain highly skeptical of EUV's economic feasibility.

This is long, but worth reading. The Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College discusses strategies for fighting terrorism. In particular, it questions whether pre-emptive war against rogue states is an appropriate answer to terrorist acts committed by non-state organizations.

Where are Saddam's weapons? Kenneth M. Pollack, a Clinton administration analyst who helped make the case for invading Iraq, considers the mismatch between reality and what we thought we knew.

And it's off to the races. After three years in the doldrums, the chip industry is trying to ramp up quickly. Unfortunately, those three years devastated the equipment supplier infrastructure. Hence, panic buying of equipment. Where have we heard this before?

(Silicon Strategies link. Free registration required.)