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Self-Assembling Nanocomputers
A Semi-Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article a researcher at Harvard University has developed techniques for self assembly of nanoscale wires that operate without resistance due to a property called ballistic conductivity. He hopes the research will provide an 'end run' around convential top-down circuit designs, allowing much smaller, faster and more energy efficient computers."
Apparently this TrollScript seems to work about as well as any other Open Source project: Not at all. I bet if Microsoft had made this it would work flawlessly, much like the amazing new Windows XP. I wiped off the shitty Mandrake 8.1 from my two 486s and put XP on them. Not only do they run faster than they did when Linux clogged them up, they're also much more stable. Its a shame that Linux can't work with only 8 megs of RAM, as XP can. Perhaps some day.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
With a statement like that, I bet half of the Army's decision-makers are already lining up to fund these guys.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
3. Reproduction
Last one to http://wirese.cx is a rotten egg!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Well, aside from the obvious environmental and geo-political implications of self-replicating machines - there is another important aspect to such machines. Copywrite enforcement.
Just as magical as it would be to make a stable batch of these machines which would reliably work (even in laboratory conditions) - the thought of how these things would possibly be kept from being altered or copied ad infinitum is equal in terms of seeming implausibility.
What methods might work?
Making the constuction materials be of some "special" molecules? Not likely to keep people from making unauthorized copies before too long, plus it makes engineering potentially more difficult.
Adding extra logic to each one to ensure legality? Aside from again the engineering aspects, it is hard to even brainstorm minimally plausible ideas.
Harsh legal enforcement? The sheer convenience of these micromachines would ensure demand is high enough to bypass any law short of complete totalitarianism based on the product. This would be more than yesterday's computer, internet, or cell phone demand - once applications development hit mainstream programming, and then mainstream consciousness, the demand would be levels of magnitude higher than anything we've seen.
The only reliable way I could think to make these machines properly profitable would be to use societal paranoia and fear to convince everyone that these machines are dangerous, and only sell them to 'licensed technicians for clean-room-only use'. But this protection of profitability would only last so long before demand creeped back up, or some major catastrophy renewed the fear factor.
Everything about this sounds like it might make a good story though.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Resistance, being futile, is not responsible for the light-speed limit for electron flow. That's Einstein's fault. However, if the circuit is considerably smaller than current designs, then all the electrical pathways get drastically shortened and processing gets faster anyway...
Excuse me, I just had an image of a 55-gallon drum of these things sitting by my computer, quietly self-replicating into a Beowulf cluster of a billion-odd submicroscopic quantum computers. It could solve every computational problem currently on the books in the blink of an aibo, render all cryptography (except OTP) useless, and probably faithfully emulate the intelligence of several myriad Ph.D.'s long enough to invent a higher consciousness for itself, becoming an unimaginably transcendent cerebral being to which humans would seem as advanced as bacteria.
And think of the Quake framerates!
T-1000 here we come!
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Every hardware-scale-advance news article will describe Moores first law.
Ahh, my favourite rhetorical recipe, the tautological soffle.
Wouldn't having indentical reproducing robots be a violation of the DMCA. Wouldn't one copywrighted robot be plenty?
</sarcasm>