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Here's some speculation you might want to check out.

Yes, you are right.

Ok, so modern cars this doesn't work for. Instead, you have to tweak the computer. A conversion to E85 Flex Fuel or even E100 is available for most cars for about $100. But given the price of whiskey, I'd much rather run my little battery generator off of it than my car....

The link worked when I submitted it over 36 hours ago. Ah well, slow editors, here is an alternate link to the same AFP syndicated story: physorg and also Yahoo.

TFA on a link that does work:

http://www.physorg.com/news77352568.html (google toyota robot leg)

  The one-meter (3.3-foot) leg has a joint on its toe letting it jump as high as four centimeters (1.6 inches) by bending and stretching its toe and another knee-like joint, Japan's top automaker said Wednesday.

"This is a basic technology that can be applied to a two-legged robot in future," said a Toyota Motor Corp. spokeswoman.

"It was a difficult step for robots," she said. "But it was made possible after making a number of prototypes."

Besides the joy of jumping about, robots will also be able to run faster and to handle unpaved roads more smoothly, the company said.

Toyota, the world's number two automaker which is expected soon to surpass General Motors, has increasingly taken on robot development.

Toyota humanoids welcomed visitors to the company's pavillion at the 2005 World Expo in Japan, jamming in a brass ensemble and performing hip-hop routines.

> If the cork is 1.38 Jupiter Volumes, how big was the bottle?!?

about 460 billion km: http://www.physorg.com/news63346824.html

The announcement of the pending announcement regarding Dark Matter

"This is the most energetic cosmic event, besides the Big Bang, which we know about," said team member Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

I guess he's never heard of Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"A universe that's dominated by dark stuff seems preposterous, so we wanted to test whether there were any basic flaws in our thinking," said Doug Clowe of the University of Arizona at Tucson, and leader of the study. "These results are direct proof that dark matter exists."

Also a bit of info on physorg

How does the Coalsack Nebula fit into this? It's dark and it's matter, right?

In Soviet Russia, the Moon Lands On You

What? The moon a planet?? Won't someone think of the children???

Only North Koreans call the moon a planet.

ok folks I know there's more I just can't remember right now.

Check this out. TFA's stuff is slow, and pisses away power like it was water. This stuff... they can make a functional transistor by bouncing a single electron off force-field walls. One electron. To test it at full speed, they first need to figure out what to use as a THz scope.

I recommend Seed as well.

A few more are World Science and EROEI.com and Physorg.

What, no love for PhysOrg? OK, someone did mention it, but it bears repeating. A nice all-in-one stop for actual science news, from across the spectrum.

http://www.physorg.com/ I love this site, even though it has way more news than I can handle.

Actually they are trying to develop fuel cells for laptops: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3031870.stm, http://www.pcworld.com/article/112533-1/article.ht ml, http://www.physorg.com/news3656.html. I have been looking forward to them. I suppose this plot will make it hard to get them approved for use on aircraft, though.

This article has a better description of MECOs and also properly attributes the concept of MECOs to Indian astrophysicist Abhas Mitra.

"HTC however purchased QTEK and another company I cannot remember, or partnered, either way, to begine selling directly to the public"

The name of the company you couldn't remember is Dopod, HTC just bought a $150m stake.

http://www.physorg.com/news68740895.html

Genealogists discover royal roots on every family tree

In which they discuss the royal roots of Brooke Shields.

What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing -- at least genealogically.

Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.

then there is this old link to the notion of the Most Recent Common Ancestor of Mankind.

The huge number of proven descents of people from common European royal ancestry in historical times, when considered with the vastly greater number of descents that must exist but are not among the rare few that can be proven, suggest strongly that everyone, in the West at least, is descended from an MRCA in historical times. They suggest, for example, that everyone in the West is descended from Charlemagne, c. 800 AD.

It would seem possible that, even with a lot of geographical separation, the MRCA of the entire world is still within historical times, 3000 BC - 1000 AD. In fact, it is quite likely the entire world is descended from the Ancient Egyptian royal house, c. 1600 BC.

We pick them as an example because they left proven descents for centuries, so it seems likely their descents did not die out, and they are ancestors of some people alive today. Hence probably ancestors of all people alive today.

Quite likely almost everyone in the world descends from Confucius, c. 500 BC. We pick him as an example because he is the proven ancestor of some people alive today. Hence probably the ancestor of all people alive today.

Atlantic Magazine, among others, had a story on this a few years back.

The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne

.....And another Global Warming Denial Myth goes poof......

There is another theory. It applies not only to earth, but to the other planets as well, Mars in particular. Measurements indicate that Mars is definitely getting warmer also. Since Martians don't drive SUVs or burn coal in the power stations, their global warming must be due to some other cause. The one commonality is that we both use the same sun for energy. So that is the source of global warming.

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17977
also
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/?page=article&Article_ ID=2736
and
http://www.physorg.com/news6892.html

It is interesting that there are two references to an overheated sun in the ancient writings of the Bible. One is in Isaiah 30:26 and the other in Revelation 16:8, both of which talk about man's corruption and the judgments of God, at the end time on rebellious mankind. Words of punishment and judgment are highly unpleasant, but there IS justice in the Universe and we are given a glimpse of some of what this will entail.

We humans like to think ourselves to be in control of our destiny, but that is the biggest fantasy we collectively entertain. There is one true God, His name is Jesus, who came to earth and who ultimately runs the entire Universe. (Ephesians 2:5-11)

.....I know Bob Carter exists. He's taken enough money from Exxon.....

So you can't find Dr. Dick Morgan, Bob Carter takes bribes, so what about:

Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson,
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology,
Dr. Wibjörn Karlén, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University,
Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama.

These people are more learned that you or I and do not agree with other learned guys, who tells use we are all going to burn and/or flood BECAUSE of human activity, who have just as many degrees. So now you choose to BELIEVE the burn boys and I actually believe in global warming in a way you and those like you will scoff at derisively.

The ancient book of Isaiah, part of the Jewish and Christian holy writings contains many sections that concern themselves with the Last Days, a time of judgment, when God Himself will once again assume sovereign, complete control of His creation, including mankind. If you would take the time to read what is written there to get the context, you'd come across the following verse:

(Isaiah 30:26 The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the LORD binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted.)

I do believe what is written, that there will indeed be some dramatic global warming, but humans will have nothing whatsoever to do with it. There is already evidence that the sun is putting out more energy:

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17977
also
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/?page=article&Article_ ID=2736
and
http://www.physorg.com/news6892.html

There are many similar articles you can google for. We humans were created by and ultimately are subject to God's sovereign purposes.

Thats actually quite simple.

If they are modelling everything without calibration from known experimental results then anything this machine can produce is as trustworthy as internet gossip.

For instance, if you were creating a weather prediction machine (easier to explain), you would feed it with all your historical data and allow the calculations to run from a set date in the past. If the results matched up with actual observed results for the following day/week/periods then you begin to build confidence in your algorythm.
You continue this and allow it to calculate longer and longer runs, most likely tweaking your code as you go along.

To put it into real perspective, heres the real version of the simulated experiment.

But if Pluto isn't (better: won't be) a planet http://physorg.com/news70120085.html, how can it have moons?

While the nanowire transistors Lieber and his colleagues demonstrated are comparable to but slightly worse in performance to the best ones made with carbon nanotubes, theirs can be made with reproducible electronic characteristics "unlike carbon nanotube FETs, and this is absolutely essential for moving beyond single nanowire or nanotube devices," he said.

I just wanted to point that out, I think some posters are thinking about it incorrectly: "The 500 GHz mark was the goal when Feng and UI colleagues received a $2.1 million, five-year grant for the project from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in October. In contrast, the transistors inside the central chip of a powerful personal computer run at around 50 or 100 GHz, Feng said. The fastest that such a chip runs as a package is currently around 3 GHz." http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2003/01/24/ fastest_transistor_made_at_ui/ In addition, University of Illinois broke 600 Ghz last year. http://www.physorg.com/news3662.html "The speeds quoted in this article are maximum rated *switching* speeds of a single transistor. Synchronous logic designs of the type found in microprocessors involve synchronous cells (known as flip-flops) and asynchronous gates providing boolean functions on the signals passing between flip-flops. The maximum rated frequency of any design is limited by the slowest path between flip-flops and this is what the clock signal will be set at. As the paths between the clocked flip-flops are typically anywhere between 2 and 10 logic cells deep and with each one comprising 10's of transistors (usually in complementary configuration to aid switching speed), the overall figure for an ASIC design such as a uProcessor would be at least 2-4 times slower than the maximum transistor switching speed (it's not quite cumulative, because as one transistor starts switching, the voltage at the at the `gate' of the next one has already started changing causing it to start conducting, and so on). I also have a suspicion that there would be other real-world constraints such as cross-talk (noise between transistors) and thermal problems. I'd hazard a guess that a production-quality chip would be somewhere in the region of a tenth the speeds quoted here! However, these new materials and structures still make for an impressive speed gain over traditional Silicon CMOS designs." (The speeds quoted in this article are maximum rated *switching* speeds of a single transistor. Synchronous logic designs of the type found in microprocessors involve synchronous cells (known as flip-flops) and asynchronous gates providing boolean functions on the signals passing between flip-flops. The maximum rated frequency of any design is limited by the slowest path between flip-flops and this is what the clock signal will be set at. As the paths between the clocked flip-flops are typically anywhere between 2 and 10 logic cells deep and with each one comprising 10's of transistors (usually in complementary configuration to aid switching speed), the overall figure for an ASIC design such as a uProcessor would be at least 2-4 times slower than the maximum transistor switching speed (it's not quite cumulative, because as one transistor starts switching, the voltage at the at the `gate' of the next one has already started changing causing it to start conducting, and so on). I also have a suspicion that there would be other real-world constraints such as cross-talk (noise between transistors) and thermal problems. I'd hazard a guess that a production-quality chip would be somewhere in the region of a tenth the speeds quoted here! However, these new materials and structures still make for an impressive speed gain over traditional Silicon CMOS designs." (http://www.physorg.com/news3662.html)

Or will the robot team have to replace the batteries on each robot every 10 minutes, that is what I would like to know. How will these robots be powered?

Why not fuel cells? Hydogen and elsewise? Perhaps carbon nanotube capacitors?

Of course this is kind of like asking someone in 1906, how one would go about finding a method to fuel a Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter so that it will have flight times of more than 20 minutes (which won't exist until 1944).

Then how do you explain that a considerable number of pregnancies end in "spontaneous abortions"? A great deal of perfectly viable embryos just don't survive.

here: http://www.physorg.com/news67783446.html
or, a site you trust: http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/jun/06060508.html

According to the second site there, only 10-15% of preganncies "spontanteous abort", "Ninety percent of all such abortions are due to rejection of a maldeveloped embryo or fetus".

That means 1%-2% of healthy babies are naturally aborted for no reason.

If God considered every embryo that important, and I'm assuming you think this to be more or less under his control, he would make sure that the viable embryoes lived.

I don't believe in God, but I respect people that do. The problem I have with this situation is that people like you are attempting to stop my friends and family members from getting the treatment that could be possible.

The direct effect of changes in solar brightness are probably small. (These guys http://pda.physorg.com/lofi-news-solar-since-sun_6 15.html are a respectable source.) A more controversial idea is that the modulation of the cosmic ray flux by the heliospheric magnetic field affects the rate of cloud formation on Earth ( http://www.dsri.dk/sun-climate/NewPublications.htm ). The idea isn't silly, but it's definitely "fringe", plus nobody really knows what effect it would have on climate if it was true.

Btw, I'm very impressed with the standard of some of the discussion here. It's good to see people rationally debating the merits of prevention v. adaptation, for example.

Isn't it tectonics and an active planet that hides the evidence after the fact?

actually, by combining this technology with this technology you could have a pretty cool visual representation of the earth and it's current space traffic.

At least compared with the new silicon nanowire transistors developed last month. But well, we have to start with something :)

http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/nanoc apacitors.htm http://www.physorg.com/news10525.html

You are quite right in saying so, and it was entirely my intention to make that point. As I said, the industry has quite some time before growing beyond its infancy. However, the main point to be made is that people are attempting to be forward thinking and, indeed, pragmatic enough to realize that the requisite infrastructure for the elevator must be established. Only then may genuine progress be made towards making what today remains science fiction into reality.

As for current realities: many promising, potentially useful applications are developed every year.

You are quite right in saying so, and it was entirely my intention to make that point. As I said, the industry has quite some time before growing beyond its infancy. However, the main point to be made is that people are attempting to be forward thinking and, indeed, pragmatic enough to realize that the requisite infrastructure for the elevator must be established. Only then may genuine progress be made towards making what today remains science fiction into reality.

As for current realities: many promising, potentially useful applications are developed every year.

Thats because you never heard of Holographic Memory/Storage and more interesting Atomic Holographic Nanotechnology http://www.physorg.com/news785.html.
You can get from 10TB to 100TB per disk ( with a theoretical maximun of 10PT per disc ), and if they say is correct, the medium will be very cheap just like the player ( it will cost less than the currect Blu-Ray player ). They made the announcement in 2004 and said it would take from 3 to 5 years for the technology to be usable, if they're statement is correct, the time the telescope is finished, and based on all 'future' techologies beeing developed, yes, i bet there will be more viable options than to buy 300GB hard drive rom newegg ...

Won't somebody think of the children?
Won't somebody think of the children???

Fitzpatrick and fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on Wednesday endorsed new legislation that would cordon off access to commercial Web sites that let users create public "Web pages or profiles" and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.

• PhysOrg Forum
  
• SparkNotes Math & Science Message Boards
  
• StudentDoc Medical Message Board
  
• AOL Domestic Abuse Support Message Board
  
• Scarleteen Sexual Abuse Support Message Board
  
• Etc...etc...etc...
  

We've all heard stories of children on some of these social websites meeting up with dangerous predators.

http://www.physorg.com/news65375101.html

In combination with gyroscopic sensors from Gyration Inc.

You can recharge a battery in 1 minute to 80% of its capacity.
http://www.physorg.com/news3539.html

But there is alternative solution to that problem. Other solution is having enough range, stop for 1 hour for every 5 hours of driving. There are plenty of battery technologies capable of recharging in 1hour.

toshiba 1 minute 80% charge batteries

on the new toshibe batteries(actually its been over a year now, wonder where we can buy them, i've got a few projects they'd be useful in :

- my 2KW mini mini scooter (looks like a little kid push scooter, weighs less than 7 kg, goes like hell (not yet finished)
- my busking portable power source, currently use SLA batteries cos I already had them, but damn are they heavy to lug round (15kg plus my other gear (guitar, amp, mikestand etc) ouch)

They really should be pushing these by now for all sorts of purposes, but cars especially, being able to charge your car fully in under 2 minutes is VERY impressive, and will convince lots of those doubtful about electric cars that they are ready to be used widely (if they ever start selling them cheap enough to afford enough to get decent range).

Now I'm the first to admit that his public words and actions suggest someone much closer to (or even slightly below) the mean.

Public speaking is not his forte, apparently. I loved that SNL skit with him and Gore, where Bush's one-word summary of his campaign was "strategery". Did he actually ever say that word, or was that a bit of creativity on the part of the SNL writers?

In fact, Bush's seeming disdain for "book smarts" typifies the result we both expect from a poor educational system (though I'm under no illusion that he ever attended public school).

I think the disdain for "book smarts" comes more from political orientation than anything else. It's more a mistrust of the climate of arrogant intellectualism that pervades the pseudo-meritocratic structure of academia. As an academic myself (a physics grad student, to be specific), I can certainly see the off-putting aspects of the academic world. It's very easy to assume that, because you're the world's foremost expert on X, you understand Y and Z as well (I know I've done this). When that turns into preaching politics from the pulpit of science, it really pisses people off.

An example: recently, a bunch of physicists signed a letter about the dangers of using nuclear weapons against Iran. That kind of thing just makes me cringe. I know some of the physicists who signed the letter, and they've given me no reason to believe they're any more informed or knowledgeable about the Iran situation that your average college graduate. The spin on the letter was something along the lines of the claim, "we invented the nuclear weapon, and we're here to tell you just how bad it would be to use it", but it's not as if any of the signing physicists actually provided any new information. Military analysts, Middle Eastern policy studies professors, Iranian exiles--all of them might have had something valuable to say--but physicists? Hardly. All that kind of stunt does is make the Republicans even more pissed off at academia.

A major backlash from the right is coming--primarily aimed perceived left-wing bias in the social sciences, etc.--but there will be collateral damage to the natural sciences as well. The more reasons we give Republicans to lump the natural sciences in with the "left-wing" crowd, the worse things will be. Read Phi Beta Cons, a higher education blog run by the conservative magazine National Review, to see what I'm talking about.

Secondly, Intel is far from out...their soon-to-be-released latest generation of processors are going to blow AMD's current offerings out of the water in practically all aspects, including cost per watt. And they've even bumped FORWARD the release date of the Woodcrest processors to June. On top of that, they've engaged in a major restructuring effort and a price war. Intel was caught with its pants down resting on its laurels. However, the sleeping giant has been awakened, and Intel has the tech and the fab capability to make magic happen. AMD has an "in", which is great...competition is good in any market. But they're hardly replacing Intel, nor are they even going to be superior at this point. With P4 and Netburst going the way of the dodo, Intel is looking vicious. Now all they have to do is trim the fat to get lean and mean.

As a direct reply to some posters here:

The Conroe will launch when promised.
That it is a real launch with the product in stores, not just a paper launch.

Release dates have been pushed forward and Intel wouldn't dare goof this release...their stockholders are pissed enough as is.

That the performance will be as great as promised.

Plenty of benchmarks and specs and reviews have been released already. I haven't seen one that didn't decimate the existing chips. On a side note, Core Duo is an equally impressive release that is tearing up the benchmarks.

I'm just shocked at how cool Intel managed to make the new chips...Conroe's MAX will be 65 watts...that's already 30 watts below the P4's max. And the ultra low variants of the Conroe are slated to be like 40 watt max.

Intel has always had a process technology advantage over AMD. That never stopped AMD from shipping competitive products.

Process technology is not the end-all of making a respectable chip. Intel hampered themselves heavily by investing WAY too much in trying to stretch out a 6 year old architecture. Most of Intel's new architecture releases have been monsters...Pentium M, Core Duo, and the upcoming Conroe. Intel is in a fundamental generational gap. AMD has been beating the old platform. Lets see them keep up with the newer architecture. At the moment, K8L aside, I see nothing on the horizon. And frankly, as far as anyone knows at the moment, K8L is vaporware...nothing is known or even predicted about it.

Also, note that AMD's fab situation has gotten a lot better in the last year - with Fab 36 (and soon Chartered), AMD has the capacity to take on Intel in the market

While noted that AMD's fab capabilties are increasing, you go too far in claiming they can take on Intel's capacity. AMD's new fab gives them the ability to ship about 100 million units by 2008, which btw is roughly equivalent to Intel's capabilities way back in pre-2003.

AMD has always been conservative in launching new processes, and it has benifited them in the past. Intel's 90nm process turned out to be the nail in the Prescott coffin, but AMD's 90nm launch resulted in CPUs that clocked much higher, used less power, and cost less money.

But once again, AMD was competing with an aging platform, one that AMD largely always had a slight edge over. I want to see how they respond to Conroe.

While I'd agree that Conroe is looking quite good, note that Athlon 64 is not sitting still. Even a simple d

Sure, not a problem. I had this very discussion yesterday. I'll repost with I did then:

According to this article the amount of greenhouse gases that man puts out in one year is ~30 billion tons. Unfortunately the article doesn't have a date but judging by the references it is somewhere around 2000.

This article (which uses figures from 2000) indicates that the U.S. alone produced 1,583 million metric tons of carbon from burning fossil fuels.

Now, consider that in 1815 Mount Tambora (Indonesia) produced an estimated 400 million tons of sulfurous gases and ash and that caused the year without a summer (i.e. global cooling), it is quite easy to suggest that mans dumping of multiple times that amount of gases into the atmosphere could cause an increase in world temperatures.

As far as what NOAA has to say, you can read and make your own judgements. They seem to agree with my assertion that the global increase in temperatures seem to be the result of both natural and man-made factors. The page in question was last updated on Feb 3, 2006.

Then of course there is the Wiki entry which indicates the volume of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased from around 280 parts per million in 1800 to around 315 in 1958, 367 in 2000 (a 31% increase over 200 years), and about 380 in 2006. In other words, despite the huge quantity of atmosphere that exists around the planet, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing. Not remaining the same, not decreasing. Increasing. That's just CO2. In trying to find numbers to justify my claims I saw the same increase in other gases during the same timeframe (which is what the Wiki entry says in the next sentence).

After all that I found another source which says that on a yearly basis volcanoes contribute 100 million tons of CO2 whereas other sources of CO2 produce about 10 billion tons a year. It's under the section marked 'Influence on the Greenhouse Effect' halfway down the page.

As far as my quote about the amount of gases and such from Mt. Tambora, I left out a zero in my posting and didn't catch it during preview. The correct number is 400 million tons (as shown in this posting) of sulfuours gases though various sources differ. One says 200 million tons while another indicates 400 million tons.

Despite my mistake and even using the higher figure of 400 million tons, comparing that figure to the sources I listed in the beginning it still shows that what man produces is substantially more, every year, than what Mt. Tambora produced in a 3-month period. In the case of Tambora after the eruption stopped nature had a chance to recover. In the case of us burning fossil fuels, nature never gets a breather. We are always pumping out more and more gases.

I must state that I am not an uber-treehugger. I do, however, try to minimize to an extent my footprint. That said, there is not reason NOT to try and reduce our CO2 and other emissions if for no other reason than our health. Think LA and how wonderful it must be sucking in that brown atmosphere. For a better example think Mexico City. I don't know about you but I prefer to look through a clear atmospher, not a brown one.

• Ele-Neutrino mass: 0.381 × 10^-8 MeV/c^2
• Mu-Neutrino mass: 0.00537 MeV/c^2
• Tau-Neutrino mass: 0.010752 MeV/c^2

Like StarTrek's communicator presaged the flip phone, this , "Global Link", from the TV show "Earth Final Conflict" (terrible show yes) would really be an example of what we are after in a mobile device. The technology needed to make it happen is a high resolution OLED flexible display, so you can roll up the screen tightly. But nearly everything else is very doable with today's technology. Also, with better voice recognition with dictation it would make the interface much more appealing by limiting the need for a keyboard.

There are many fields in computing and general science that haven't been explored yet or are just beginning:

Sprite-based video compression, speech recognition which doesn't suck, 3D (holographic) video, motorless robotics (artificial muscles), brain-machine interfaces (there's a working prototype of a brain-operated keyboard), solid-state storage (aka the end of moving parts in computers), hundreds of nanotech discoveries, efficient power generation / storage (boosts in solar cells, efficient hydrogen cells), ultra-efficient home lighting (like with LED's), holographic "touchable" aids for computing a-la Johnny Mnemonic / Minority Report, AI-based audio compression, (sampling the instruments in real-time and generating the notes / effects, or phonemes/variations for speech and songs), photo-realistic computer animated characters which don't suck in the audio sync, the Open Source desktop era which i'm still waiting for...

A simple example of the "next big thing": Do-it-yourself cartoons. A program where you specify certain character designs (or patterns), taking some samples from existing cartoon or anime characters, and specify: "I want this nose, these eyes, a mixture between this and this face", male-female, measurement, body height from 3-heads tall (chibi) to 9 heads-tall characters (ultra-atheltic)...

Or to go to a much simpler example, automatic shading / coloring algorithms. You specify certain spots or lines with certain colors in an area (a drawing you need to colorize), and the paint program interpolates them using AI algorithms, creating a perfect shading for you. That'd render the famous dodge/burn photoshop technique OBSOLETE.

Or how about this? You draw a sketch with paper and pencil and the program creates a 3D model for you, without needing to tweak a mesh like today's 3D drawing programs...

Now combine that with VR-interfaces, and you'll realize that we're still in the stone age in CG art, not to mention computing as a whole. Perhaps we might need another VR or graphics engine-based computing language to do stuff like this.

IMHO, software development becomes the greatest lag in technology. In a couple of years we may already have increased bandwidth capacity but software development keeps stalling, as it depends on something which is very expensive: Work time.

The problem with people who think "there's no next big thing" is that they've forgotten the meaning of "revolution". There are many revolutions to come in computing. It's just that no one has pictured them yet.

Then can you tell me why significant useful science (understanding about solidification at the atomic level) was found with this even larger MD simulation: http://pda.physorg.com/lofi-news-simulations-natio nal-nuclear_8651.html

I read this article on PhysOrg.com http://www.physorg.com/news11538.html (yes I'm to lazy to HTML'ize that link)

But you had the energy to type out HTML'ize?

"The results, recorded by spectrometers and confirmed by computer models created by John Apruzese and colleagues at Naval Research Laboratory, have held up over 14 months of additional tests."
(http://www.physorg.com/news11538.html)
How did they create a simulation if they don't know how it works ??

Actually the live science article is missing the most vital info.

I read this article on PhysOrg.com http://www.physorg.com/news11538.html (yes I'm to lazy to HTML'ize that link)

From the PhysOrg article: "The results, recorded by spectrometers and confirmed by computer models created by John Apruzese and colleagues at Naval Research Laboratory, have held up over 14 months of additional tests. "

What I don't understand is how these spectrometers even worked at these tempearatures, I would expect most things to go kaput at these temperatures.

So let me get this straight. Satellites confirm global warming. Then Bush cuts significant funding for these satellite programs. I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you.

The cost of a new fab is in the order of $ 3.5 billion; a bit steep for any but the biggest companies. And since so much money is involved I'm pretty sure a business does not want a competitor to run off with its research into the latest of chip technologies, decreasing chances of ever earning back their investments...

In pure water there would be no effect, but in salt water there is a small one. Since the ice excludes salt, when it melts the ocean becomes less dense and raises the sea level slightly. See: http://www.physorg.com/news5619.html/

http://www.physorg.com/news9607.html

is 300 GB per disc using RED lasers (1 or 2 tb using blue lasers) enough for you?

yeah, the technology is write once, read many, and not rewritable, but if you look at the cd and dvd market rewritable is more 'niche' use than write once. write once is what is cheap, so it's what people like.

inphase is definitely the darkhorse for completely usurping both blu-ray and hd-dvd. With 300 GB to play with, you have over 40 MB/second bitrates to play with for video streams. Lossless video compression, anyone? you can easily fit 720p using a 2:1 losseless compression, and leave plenty of room for a 5.1 audio stream or two.