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Flexible PCB's

Most certainly have been used. I remember taking apart a Polaroid camera when I was a kid, and finding a flexible light brown plastic circuit with chips soldered to it.

Apologies for A/C. This is probably a little less than a full 3D model construction. Having seen a real-time demo of a "morphable model" the almost certainly use priors on face shape.

"First, the applications capture a user's face with a camera and detect the position of key features of the face, including the eyes, nose and mouth, using image recognition technology."

this can be done real time quite effectively right now:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/rd/95418640%2C476373%2 C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http%3AqSqqSqwww.merl.comqSqp eopleqSqviolaqSqresearchqSqpublicationsqSqICCV01-V iola-Jones.pdf

"By matching the 2D positions of these key features to a computer graphic image using a 3D face model, the applications estimate what direction the user is facing and the 3D positions of the face's 500 features."

Having seen a real-time morphable model demo from Toshba at ICCV2003 this is probably a similar approach to this:

http://gravis.cs.unibas.ch/Sigg99.html

(my PhD thesis includes this area - not on my site yet, but I have a paper on MM fitting at )
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~jamie/paterson03.html

Cheers.

Scientific American (warning: loaded with ads etc)

Not for the light-hearted, a thorough review in Reviews of Modern Physics (subscription required, if you cannot access the article, drop me an email at karvind@NOSPAM.gmail.com)

On Ferroelectric spintronics from Colossal Storage.

Spintronics and Quantum Dots. Discussion about one possible implementation.

Another good introduction.

Hope it helps.

You might want to check this out... there are practical problems with large diameter networks. Some of the problems lay at the MAC layer (i.e. in the specs), so solving them probably requires radically new thinking.

The problem with the rosy view is that most real study has been done in simulation. There are not a lot of papers detailing real, large scale testbeds (with a literal handful of exceptions).

And the airport is nice, but I wouldn't want to participate as a mobile node with that card without an energy-aware network stack - I gather it is one of the worst in terms of power efficiency.

Besides the intrinsic interest in spin-related phenomena, there are two main areas which hold promises for future applications: Spin-based devices in conventional [1] as well as in quantum computer hardware [7]. In conventional computers, the electron spin can be expected to enhance the performance of quantum electronic devices, examples being spin-transistors (based on spin-currents and spin injection), non-volatile memories, single spin as the ultimate limit of information storage etc. [1]. On the one hand, none of these devices exist yet, and experimental progress as well as theoretical investigations are needed to provide guidance and support in the search for realizable implementations. On the other hand, the emerging field of quantum computing [8,9] and quantum communication [9,10] requires a radically new approach to the design of the necessary hardware. As first pointed out in Ref. Loss97, the spin of the electron is a most natural candidate for the qubit--the fundamental unit of quantum information. We have shown [7] that these spin qubits, when located in quantum-confined structures such as semiconductor quantum dots or atoms or molecules, satisfy all requirements needed for a scalable quantum computer. Moreover, such spin-qubits--being attached to an electron with orbital degrees of freedom--can be transported along conducting wires between different subunits in a quantum network [9]. In particular, spin-entangled electrons can be created in coupled quantum dots and--as mobile Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs [9]--provide then the necessary resources for quantum communication.

For both spin-related areas--conventional computers and quantum computers--similar and sometimes identical physical concepts and tools are needed, the common short-term goal being to find ways to control the coherent dynamics of electron spins in quantum-confined nanostructures. It is this common goal that makes research on the electron spin in nanostructures--spintronics--a highly attractive area. While we advance our basic knowledge about spin physics in many-body systems, we gain insights that promise to be useful for future technologies.

Stolen from: http://theorie5.physik.unibas.ch/qcomp/qcomp.html

This is not a birds-eye view. It's the view of the Milkyway from earth when you look towards the Center with Infrared Telescopes. If you want to see a real bird-eye view of the Milkyway spiral pattern you have to go here.

That's a good point, but in addition to that there's a more basic reason.

It's art for art's sake.

It's the same reason that some people still take pictures with pinhole cameras or the cult favorite Polaroid SX-70 despite the existence of far more sophisticated modern machines, or directors shoot films following the spartan rules of Dogme 95, or contemporary poets still compose sonnets, despite the existence of free verse poetry.

One can create something of great beauty within severe constraints. It's as if the self-imposed limitations force you to focus on the Art more than on the mechanics. Douglas Hofstadter would say it has something to do with "stripping away irrelevancies to get at the gist of things."

Video phones exist and are actually reasonably common, especially in business circumstances. The reason most home users don't see them though is that for the most part the quality is sorely lacking, and they're often way too expensive...

a quick search on google netted me this:
a home videophone...
another home video phone...
and, for what appears to be the prevailing standard: h.232

molecular manufacturing is a bit of a different story, but:
a group devoted to molecular manufacturing
some interesting stuff on it
and, last but not least:
IBM does some cool stuff sometimes

hope this helps dispel your mistrust of tech previews (Although i'll admit that at least a grain or two of salt is warranted in many occasions)

If you just need predictable timing and no IO, no memory allocation in real time, then both RTL and RTAI will work. RTAI has richer API. You will get below 20 us typical, below 30-50 us worst case delay (if you will not get PCI stalls (e.g. XFree 4.0 on some video cards)). You will have to recompile all the modules with RT kernel - any binary kernel module may contain cli().

Split your application cleanly between real time (put there only what absolutely neccesary) and all the rest.

And have a look into one shared mechanism - mbuff

Performing the calculations,
(22,238 miles X 1609.344 meters per mile)/(299,792,458 meters per second) X 4 trips = .47751 seconds.

See this Byte article for further discussion of TCP and latency. Also see this student article for a discussion of alternatives.