Quick notes: Chip dreams | Pandemic wind down...

• India’s Chip Dreams Aren’t Crazy, They’re Just Misguided: While Taiwan is eager to build closer ties with New Delhi, facilitating India's chip fantasy is not high on its priority list given India's lack of expertise in the field. Today, India has a large talent pool of chip designers, but the roster of process engineers is much shorter and certainly not long enough to run a Taiwanese front-end chip factory.
  
  Keen to get their name in a press release alongside blue-ribbon names, generations of Indian leaders seem to have forgotten a far more suitable match: chip packaging and testing.



• Curtains for the pandemic? An oral medication with this type of effectiveness could bring the pandemic to a functional close, turning COVID-19 from a life-threatening experience to a passing respiratory illness that can can be treated at home more often than not.
  
  Indian companies looking to price the drug at ₹880-1,000 for a full course.
  
  Like the vast majority of medicines on the market, molnupiravir was developed using govt funds.



• Instagram harms teens: Celebrity Instagram posts detrimental to the self-image of young girls.. 13% of British teenage users and 6% of American teenage users studied traced suicidal thoughts to Instagram.
  
  Indians had a glimpse of life without WhatsApp.
  
  Fraud on advertisers: Facebook misled investors about shrinking user base, ex-employee alleges.



• End of the road for Panjshiris? “What the Taliban have now is unstinting support from the Chinese, fairly unstinting support from the Russians – and of course they have unstinting support from the Pakistanis. They also have in their possession all the war matériel that the Americans could not destroy, and that was substantial. So the Taliban are in possession of one of the world’s largest fleets of Black Hawk helicopters. The Taliban are not terribly technologically sophisticated but their handlers in [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency] the ISI are. They also have Chinese drones and they’re getting assistance in operating them from the ISI.”
  
  “This Taliban is a lot better armed, they are much more capable, they are much more lethal, they have better international ties than the Taliban before 9/11, and in contrast the Panjshiris have less support. Essentially the resistance in Panjshir has failed and they’ve retreated to Tajikistan. And I don’t see a way in which they’ll be able to retake that territory.”



• New technologies can make underwater vessels “visible”: China has already developed submarine-spotting lasers. CSIRO is working with a Chinese marine science institute that has separately developed satellite technology that can find submarines at depths of up to 500 metres.



• The Gift: The legend of Shohei Ohtani.




• Child abuse in Church: French Catholic Church inquiry finds 216,000 paedophilia cases since 1950



• How to divide Hindus: The Samuel Reddy playbook.

Caste based reservations in Tirumala Darshan.Yet another mindless,vote bank centric decision by YCP Subba Reddy

TTD to provide Free Travel,Food and Free accommodation to daily 1,000 members.Eligibility: Backward " Castes"

Ideally,All Free should be on financial basis,not caste

— Telugu360 (@Telugu360) October 4, 2021





• The heyday of Indian cultural renaissance: AshtaDiggajas of Emperor Sri Krishna Devaraya's court at Vijayanagara



• Intel cozying up to RISC-V: Intel Infuses Nios Soft Processors with RISC-V Instruction Set