Actual worst coworkers ever. (Back to the Future Wiki)

Today, in lawsuits: A disgruntled employee is suing Intel, after his (jerk) coworkers at Intel's New Mexico manufacturing facility allegedly stuck a "Kick Me" sign on his back and, yes, kicked him several times, then "laughed hysterically." Cool company culture, dudes.

The AP reports: 

"The Intel employee, Harvey Palacio, said in the complaint recently filed in Albuquerque that once he suspected something was taped on his back during the August prank, he went to senior staffer Randy Lehman to ask if something was there.

'Lehman said turn around and as Palacio did he saw and heard (another employee) yell out `Don't read it, just do it',' the lawsuit said."

Mr. Lehman then allegedly kicked Mr. Palacio in the butt. He's been fired and convicted of petty misdemeanor battery, along with another perpetrator. Now Mr. Palacio, claiming the incident wasn't isolated and arguing the harassment was racially motivated, wants damages from Intel.

Something tells us Intel won't be taking the top spot in the "America's Best Workplaces" competition this year.

IDK.

Recording artist Will.i.am, as you may know, is something of a self-styled technologist. Besides holding down a sweet gig as Intel's director of "creative innovation," he pops up in pro-coding propaganda and once featured a Makerbot in one of his videos, because why not. Now he's further demonstrating his devotion to technology in the title of his latest track: "#thatpower," released today. 

Justin Bieber guests on the song, contributing such lyrical gems as "I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive" and "I can fly, I can fly, I can fly."

In case you're curious about the creative process that generates this sort of magic, MTV got the goods:

He recalled, "So actually we went shopping first and we were like 'hey, let's just have a chilled day' and we went shopping for shoes, then after that we went to the studio, watched the BRITs [last month], recorded that and then trucked off to see Justin Timberlake perform. So that was a pretty full day."

It's the latest single from Mr. .am's upcoming solo album, #willpower. Perhaps he's taking some inspiration from Ben Parr's #DominateFund?

(h/t Lindsey Weber)

Think of the (adults being treated like) children!

Google's Mountain View campus is home to a beach volleyball court, a bowling alley, a climbing wall, seven fitness centers, "more than 100 micro-kitchens" and, it seems, toxic vapors.

CBS says readings of TCE, or trichloroethylene vapors, as high as eight micrograms per cubic meter were found in Google buildings. Not to get too Erin Brokovich on you, but the normal range is five per cubic meter.

CBS says the culprit are the ghosts of Silicon Valley's past. Buildings QD6, and QD7 are located on land once used by computer chip manufacturers like Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Raytheon and more, who "dumped thousands of gallons of the toxic solvent into the ground, contaminating the water."

But we think we know what dark forces tinkering in the basement might really be at fault. RAYMOND KURZWEIL, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! REPORT TO THE SLIDE IMMEDIATELY.

Mr. Rabois. (Photo: Yaniv Golan)

Aleksey Vayner, the Yale grad who gained Internet infamy in 2006 for his video resume, "Impossible is Nothing," is dead at 29. [Motherboard]

Square COO Keith Rabois is leaving the San Francisco-based payments company; Kara Swisher says disagreements with CEO and founder Jack Dorsey are at least partially behind the departure. [AllThingsD]

The latest petty sleight in the high-school style feud between two social media giants: Facebook has cut off access to Twitter's new video-sharing service, Vine, preventing the app from using Facebook to find new friends. [AllThingsD]

What asshole decided to name a smartphone made for the African market YOLO? [Mashable]

A French court wants to force Twitter to reveal the identities of users who author racist tweets in violation of the country's hate-speech laws. Twitter is deciding whether to fight the ruling. [NYT]

Artist's rendering of the Indeed.com office right now. (Photo: CashCats.biz)

Somebody's ready to make it rain in Stamford: Indeed.com has been acquired by the Japanese company Recruit Co. Ltd., for a price reportedly in the $750 million to $1 billion range. [Business Insider]

The California bill allowing driverless cars on the road has now been signed. [New York Times]

Total Google Play downloads thus far: 25 billion. In celebration, all kinds of goodies are available for download at 25 cents a pop. [The Verge]

Apparently the CEO of Intel doesn't think Windows 8 is fully baked. [Bloomberg]

Even literal rocket scientists can't keep their passwords safe. [Ars Technica]

This girl is your future demo. (flickr.com/littledebbie11)

Just because wisdom is conventional doesn't mean it's right, and just because dudes 18 to 25 are considered the prized tech demographic doesn't mean it's true. The Atlantic dug up a recent talk by Intel researcher Genevieve Bell, and it turns out that women are pretty much the customers you want to have on lock. And people wonder why Pinterest has a great big Scrooge McDuck-style cache of venture capital cash.

Ms. Bell has shared several interesting nuggets, including that women in Western countries use the Internet 17 percent more per month; they spend more time talking on their mobile phones (hold your stereotyped jokes, please); and they're the biggest users of every social networking site that's not LinkedIn. Also, "Women are the vast majority owners of all internet enabled devices--readers, healthcare devices, GPS."

This shouldn't be surprising if you consider who rules the roost at home:

Furthermore, most consumers don't own devices just by themselves, those devices exist within social networks. Consumers share devices in families, so that a mobile phone is owned by multiple people, a laptop is used by multiple people, an email account is used by multiple people.

Speaking of your mom, maybe you should just use her as a one-woman focus group. Says Bell (via The Atlantic):

So it turns out if you want to find out what the future looks like, you should be asking women. And just before you think that means you should be asking 18-year-old women, it actually turns out the majority of technology users are women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you wanted to know what the future looks like, those turn out to be the heaviest users of the most successful and most popular technologies on the planet as we speak.

Gee, we can't imagine why companies still pull ridiculous, sexist stunts.

Mr. Kaku. (YouTube.com)

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku is calling it: Moore's Law ain't what it used to be. The principle, which holds computing power doubles roughly every 18 months, is reaching its limits. In fact, in this recent Big Think video, he gives it about a decade. Nor does he hedge: "In about ten years or so, we will see the collapse of Moore’s Law.  In fact, already, already we see a slowing down of Moore’s Law," he says.

What's the issue? Eventually, around the time they reach five nanometers, heat and electron leakage will render Pentium chips useless. Hence Intel's shift to three-dimensional transistor technology for its next-generation Ivy Bridge chips, which will allow the company to maintain the pace for a bit longer. But Mr. Kaku holds that the end of the line is inevitable:

If I were to put money on the table, I would say that in the next ten years we’ll simply tweak Moore’s Law a bit with chip-like computers in three dimensions, but beyond that we may have to go to molecular computers and perhaps late in the 21st century quantum computers.

To us, that sounds more like the end of silicon than the end of Moore's Law. It's also worth mentioning that Intel is a little sunnier on the subject. MIT Technology Review recently spoke to Intel's Mark Bohr, who heads up efforts to translate chip innovations into manufacturable reality, and he sounded relatively upbeat: "It's becoming more challenging, but I don't see the end [to Moore's Law]."

Anyone waiting around for the Singularity might want to take Mr. Kaku's projections into account, however.

But during the short tour, a "journey that explores who I am" by traveling through a virtual museum composed of images, text and video from my profile, I found myself unsettled.

An image of my sister appeared directly next to a dead friend, followed by a co-worker making a goofy pose. Later on a snapshot of my current girlfriend was juxtaposed next to an old flame.

The text that scrolled across the screen in the style of a news ticker included the  repeated phrase, "I am finally sick" before dissolving into a large block that read "Birthday Birthday Birthday." A gaggle of virtual museum-goers looked on with curiosity and a giant thumbs-up statue remained, from what I could tell, without a single click.

The whole experience was set to some emotionally-wrought piano and choral score that closed with a group of robotic arms assembling images into a composite me. The building block photos included faces of friends and family along with the logo for Kentucky Fried Chicken and a yellowed American flag.

It was disturbing to look at the smiling face of a now-deceased college friend next to a dumb office joke. It was unpleasant to watch the deep important connections I recorded on the social network thrown in with weird corporate images I don't ever remember posting. My point is not that this isn't an elegant and interesting use of Facebook data, but that the very personal nature of this information makes the context in which it sits extremely important.

The project is nearing 100,000 "likes" itself, so my caveat emptor may fall on deaf ears. But Facebook and Intel's Museum of Me will certainly leave a  negative association with both brands in my mind.