The Bear and The Eagle

The U.S has missed the boat to St. Petersburg. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. made it clear to the new Russian Federation that they would never be welcome in the new NATO. This was one of the greatest foreign policy errors in the history of the U.S. This proved that Washington and Moscow would continue to be enemies, or at least rivals, into the 21^st century. Despite The “reset button” of President Obama, this has become a self fulfilling prophecy. The U.S. now finds itself in conflict with Russia over Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, which the Unites States wants to engage, but Russia considers to be a region over which it still has large amounts of control.

The Eastern European question is, in all likelihood, the greatest intra-European conflict in the next twenty years. Many of the former Soviet republics have gained membership in the European Union, but the U.S. needs to do more to make sure that the others do not fall back into the Russian orbit, especially as Russia seems to grow more authoritarian every year. Ukraine is one of the great prizes of east, is still completely up for grabs. In 2005, the “Orange Revolution” threatened to turn them into an entirely proto-western nation, but recent political shifts have changed that. The ruling party of the Ukraine is now not only pro-Russian, but is supported by the Russian ethnic minority in the east and southeast of the country. Russia certainly plans to maintain her dominance in the region, extending its lease on a port on the Black Sea in the Crimea for several years, and even beginning to offer passports to ethnic Russians in the Crimea. For this reason, the United States must do more to expand ties with Ukraine, as it is very important to maintain U.S. ties in the region as their current influence is due to decline. Russian influence could undermine the fragile democracy of the nation. Meanwhile, the United States must continue to work for a more cordial relationship with Russia, as the U.S. simply needs as many allies as she can get. For this reason, it is an absolute necessity that the United States ratify the new START treaty.
-G. Ferrante 

This Week

This week, we will be discussing the Foreign Policy of the United States, both before and in the light of the Wikileaks Scandal. Enjoy!

  -G. Ferrante

Moore's Law

In the Computer world, there is a term called Moore’s Law. It was pioneered by one of the founders of Intel, the leading semi-conductor corporation worldwide. Essentially this means that processor speeds will double every two years due to more transistors on silicon. Nvidia’s GTX 580, a graphics card released last week, has 3 billion transistors. The Pentium Processor, the original one, had 2 million transistors. This was released in 1995. That is 1500% increase in the number of transistors in a 15 year span. The chips have also been getting smaller down to 32 nm today. This is meant to reduce power consumption and increase efficiency. However, due to the limitations on small a chip can be, Moore’s Law may becoming to an end. Sandy Bridge, Intel’s new microarchitecture, will be released on the 32 nanometer technology and its successor will be manufactured on 22 nm technology. However, by 2020, the chips will get to a point where they are too small. 

Intel’s main competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, is attempting to attack the Netbook market that was powered by Intel’s Atom Processors, with an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit). This is the combination of a processor and a graphics processor, the brains and eyes of a computer. This revolutionary product is set to be more efficient, and strike Intel across the bow. AMD has been losing money had it not been for the Anti-Trust violations of Intel that were paid to AMD. Intel has a wide advantage at the moment, and Intel is expected to maintain its performance advantage with Sandy Bridge. It is expected to bring a 25% boosts while using 10% percent less power. But one question on the minds of many in the industry is will there be this exponential growth in performance in the Future? Time will tell. This greatly effects other industry and the American semiconductor industry. 
-S. Martin 

This is the Internet

This is not an article about how the Internet works. Nor is it an article about where it came from, or its history. It isn’t about the millions of servers and connected devices that make it up, or the kinds of scripts and plug-ins that power the web pages you visit daily, or the web browsers that display them. Sure, that’s what the Internet is, technically, after all is said and done. But as I said, this article is about none of those things. It’s about what the Internet is as a whole and what it represents for the human race. As a whole, the Internet is an easy way for billions of people to connect to perhaps the greatest source of knowledge and literature ever assembled. And this content is visible to roughly a third of the world’s population. Never before has there been a medium extending to that many people. But it isn’t so much the reach of the Internet as it is how accessible it is. While it is true that anyone could write a book, that doesn’t mean anyone will actually see it. Not so on the Internet. If you want to share your opinions on politics or food or music or whatever, you can write something and publish it, with the potential for millions of people to see it. And THAT is what the Internet is about. The Internet’s original purpose was to create and easy way for scientists to share information and files. While it now permeates every aspect of our lives, from entertainment to interacting with other people, at the core information is what the Internet is still about. No stronger example of the power of the Internet can be found than Wikipedia, perhaps one of the largest sources of human knowledge in the world. While it is patrolled and moderated heavily, anyone with sources and information is free to contribute. Blogs like this one allow people to share their own information, people who otherwise would have no voice. And as the Internet continues to grow, the power of the ideas and opinions of millions of people all merging together and being shared will show the power of a global community of ideas. This is the Internet, and information is what it’s all about.

-C. Mancini, a special contributor

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers, we hope you all manage to eat more turkey than is necessarily prudent, and have more fun than should ever be allowed.
    -G. Ferrante and the Staff of The Bond Project