What really changed in the Valley is that the best are gone. There is always a very small number of real contributors, I'd say one in several hundreds, that shape the whole environment and dictate the overall mood.
This was best seen in Xerox PARC, where sleazy Gilman Louie was selling fatherland defense on May 16, with mannerism and vocabulary of a polished used car salesman. He was preaching to an auditorium packed with white middle managers and young aspiring nobodies, extracting applause and laughs at all the right places. No one threw up, and at the end he even didn't have to say "MEIN GOTT I CAN WALK !!" It was implied. He said, after describing his enlightment that working for CIA is good after all, in the best tradition of government commercials from 50-ties, that VCs were always patriotic. He also said that they received 500 business plans in few weeks after demolition of WTC, and that government needs better tools to track arab student pilots. This is the new silicon valley, future grounds of the Homeland Security Industries, where thousands of engineers will proudly churn out surveillance products, dissent-detecting chips and network tapping devices.
