The most important change in the next two decades of computing might be the lack of change in computer processing speeds, Bob Colwell, a deputy director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, predicted Tuesday.

For about the past 40 years, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a computer chip has doubled roughly every two years, a phenomenon known as Moore's Law after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first noted the trend in 1965.

That trend is likely to reach its limit in the next six to 12 years, as the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology that underlies modern silicon computer chips reaches its physical limits, said Colwell, deputy director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office and a former longtime Intel chip architect.

"When I make that statement, a lot of people say 'yeah, yeah, a lot of people have always predicted Moore's Law will always end and it never has yet so let's move on to something else,'" Colwell said. "And that's true. People have said that forever and they have not been right yet. Unfortunately, physics being what it is, someone will eventually have to be right."

"The point is," Colwell added," the single best exponential technology curve mankind has ever seen is what we just lived through the last 40 or 50 years and it's going to end real soon. So, how can you possibly think that won't make a difference to the Department of Defense or computing or electronics or any other related industry?"

Colwell was speaking at an Emerging Technologies Symposium sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, a government and industry group.

That doesn't mean computing speeds will hit a permanent brick wall. "There's a lot of government money chasing new switches," to replace CMOS-engineered silicon, Colwell said. But none of the alternatives looks promising so far and there's likely to be a "fallow period" while computing power simply rests at is outside limit.

For some companies that may spell doom if they can't periodically offer consumers a new upgrade. But, "in a perverse sort of way, it may mean there's a new flowering of computer architectures," Colwell said, as electronics companies come out with specialized architectures for different fields and tasks.

In the past, companies rarely put out "special purpose" computers, Colwell said, because the pace of new computing power outran anything but a one-size-fits-all approach. With a decade or so of downtime on more computing speed, though, the industry might begin launching specialty computers for graphics designers, engineers, architects and all sorts of different industries.

Who knew the federal budget was so popular?

A mobile website of President Obama's fiscal 2013 budget request received about 53,000 visitors during its first 24 hours online, a spokesman for the Government Printing Office told Nextgov Tuesday.

To put that in context, GPO's first mobile site -- a detailed list of all members of the 112th Congress organized by state, party or chamber -- has only had about 50,000 visitors since it was launched in November, GPO Spokesman Gary Somerset said.

Among the places the Obama Administration publicized its recent step back on a controversial rule requiring Catholic charities and other groups to supply birth control to female employees was the White House's online petition site We the People.

A few hours after President Obama announced he would soften the policy Friday, Cecilia Muñoz, director of Obama's Domestic Policy Council, responded to a We the People petition on the issue. Her post included statements praising the move from two Catholic organizations and from Planned Parenthood.

The contraception petition was one of only a handful of We the People petitions to reach the site's 25,000-signature threshold for an official response since that threshold was raised in October. The petition rocketed to more than 29,000 signatures between its creation Jan. 28 and Muñoz' response Feb. 10.

Obama's shift essentially amounts to putting the cost of birth control on insurers rather than on religious organizations that object to paying for it.

The administration's new media team launched We the People in September, modeled partly after a British government petition site and aimed at giving citizens another digital venue to challenge the administration.

The administration used its first petition response to announce a minor policy change on student loan payments. Some petitioners have criticized the site since then for mostly issuing pro forma responses that restate White House positions.

Among the only other petitions to see such a rapid stream of signatures was a December petition posted in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect Intellectual Property Act in the Senate.

Former federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra cited that petition as evidence citizens could be as engaged online in civic issues as in person during a farewell speech earlier this month at the Center for American Progress.

U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford is trying to remain an important voice in that chaotic and violence-wracked country despite the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Damascus last week.

In posts on the embassy's Facebook page Thursday and Friday, Ford decried Syrian President Basher Assad's use of heavy artillery against his citizens and pledged to work in Washington on behalf of the Syrian people.

It's not clear whether Ford's posts mean the State Department is attempting to retain an embassy-like influence in Syria -- similar to the department's virtual embassy in Tehran -- or if Ford is simply expressing himself through the easiest means available.

Ford made a point in Thursday's post of saying President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had both decided he should remain ambassador to Syria despite his embassy's closure.

"I left Damascus with immense sadness and regret," Ford wrote. "I wish our departure had not been necessary, but our embassy, along with several other diplomatic missions in the area, was not sufficiently protected, given the new security concerns in the capital."

The embassy Twitter account tweeted links to Ford's Facebook posts Thursday and Friday but the embassy website has been silent since a post explaining the closure.

Other posts to the embassy Facebook and Twitter accounts since the evacuation have been links to news articles and political cartoons.

The U.S. Marine Corps is getting another lesson in the power of ubiquitous digital technology.

Less than one month after a video surfaced showing Marines urinating on Taliban fighters' corpses, a photo has been making the rounds of an elite sniper unit posing by a flag with the double lightning bolts symbol of the Nazi SS.

The photo, which an earlier Marine investigation concluded was a mistake by young Marines unaware of the symbol's history, might have slowly yellowed in a back drawer in an earlier age. On Thursday and Friday, though, it shot around the Internet, prompting outrage from the Simon Weisenthal Center and other groups.

The photo, taken in 2010 in Afghanistan, first surfaced on the blog for Knight's Armament, a military weapons manufacturer in Florida and Marine officials first learned of it in November, according to a CBS News report.

The picture shows 10 Marines posing with their weapons around an SS flag which hangs directly beneath an American flag.

The Marine Corps conducted an internal investigation that determined members of the sniper unit mistakenly thought the flag's SS referred to "sniper scouts," and weren't aware it was a symbol of the Nazi paramilitary unit. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered a broader investigation into the photo Friday after it went viral online.

Also on Friday, Marine Corps Commandant James Amos launched an investigation into the possible use of the SS symbol by other sniper units and vowed to ensure the sniper school curriculum included a prohibition on the symbol's use, according to a statement.

"I want to be clear that the Marine Corps unequivocally does not condone the use of any such symbols to represent our units or Marines," Amos said.