Business, Spoken

In 2016, the chip industry’s clock ran out. For 50 years, the number of transistors that could be squeezed onto a piece of silicon had increased on a predictable schedule known as Moore’s law. The doctrine drove the digital evolution from minicomputers to PCs to smartphones and the cloud by cramming more transistors onto each generation of microchip, making them more powerful.

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One upshot for Democrats after their devastating loss on election night 2016 was the birth of The Resistance. The last two years have seen millions of newly born activists with pun-covered signs take to the streets for the Women's March. Thousands of demonstrators have descended on town hall meetings to make their voices heard. Hundreds of women have been inspired to run for office. But the election didn't just activate progressive protesters and candidates.

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If you are one of the 20 million potential voters that MoveOn, a progressive advocacy group, believes could help swing the midterm elections in Democrats' favor, then chances are, over the next few days, you will see a MoveOn–sponsored ad in your Facebook news feed. It'll be a video of a real voter---not an actor or a politician---explaining why he or she is voting for a given candidate.

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Big companies attract big attention, and none quite as much as Apple. Its quarterly reports have become something of a collective soothsaying moment for stock markets and the tech industry, and so Thursday’s report garnered its usual share of outsized attention. WIRED Opinion About Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research.

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On Friday, Cesar Sayoc was arrested in connection with the 14 pipe bombs sent to top Democrats, other critics of President Trump, and CNN earlier this week. The 56-year-old Sayoc appears to have been active on social media. A Twitter account prosecutors linked to him praised Trump, threatened top Democrats with death, and shared convoluted ultra-right-wing conspiracies about many of the people to whom he is suspected of sending homemade bombs.

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When AT&T announced plans to acquire HBO's parent company Time Warner, competitors, consumer groups, and the Department of Justice argued that the combined company would harm competition. Now those critics say their concerns are being validated. HBO and Cinemax went dark on pay television provider Dish's satellite and video streaming customers after Dish and HBO failed to reach a deal to replace a contract that expired at midnight on Wednesday night.

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You know when you try to go online at a Starbucks or on an airplane, first you get a little popup that asks you to accept some terms before you can get to the internet? That popup window exists in a sort of netherworld between actual internet connection and being offline--you pick it up via Wi-Fi, but until you click a box, you’re not actually online. A team of five developers realized in that gray area was potentially a huge opportunity to save lives.

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Plenty of people are following the final days of the midterm election campaigns. Yale law researcher Rebecca Crootof has a special interest—a small wager. If she wins, victory will be bitter sweet, like the Manhattan cocktail that will be her prize.

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For most of the past year, Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to convince the world that Facebook was fast becoming a very different company—one that accepted its enormous role shaping public opinion worldwide and would spend what it took to exercise its power responsibly. Many still have trouble believing him, and it's easy to understand why.

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Proposition C, a bill to fight homelessness with a new business tax, slid into San Francisco’s DMs in the middle of the night, politically speaking. What happened was, in December of last year, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died unexpectedly. Over the next seven months, the city lived through two mayors and a nail-biting election that dragged on for a week after voting.

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