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MIT Emerging Technologies Conference
StoneLion writes "At Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week, speakers in various disciplines provided fascinating glimpses of future technology, including exotica like hydrogen energy and smart dust. NewsForge has a conference report." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
Dell against proprietary hardware? Since when. I have a dead Presicion 220 in my office because it needs a proprietary power supply. The new desktops have a power supply that runs across the bottom of the case. Dell has used a lot of proprietary hardware.
Maybe a technology that works.
Breeder reactors have a terrible track record. Graphite reactors and sodium-cooled reactors are both major fire hazards, and there have been major fires at both types of plant. Windscale and Chernoybl were both large graphite reactors, and both had major fires. Most large sodium-cooled reactors have been shut down, either after a major fire (Joyu A, Beloyarsk, Monju) or because of concerns about one (Kalkar, Superphenix).
Even when not having fires, breeder reactors seem to have major downtime. Superphenix only had 174 days of full-power operation over a decade. Pressurized-water reactors routinely operate with over 90% uptime. The only big one still running is B-600 at Beloyarsk, built in 1980. It has a history of sodium fires and radiation leaks, despite massive attempts to prevent them.
This is not a new trend. Dell has copied most of Apple's innovations since at least '99. They just copy the guys with the highest margins. Since the ones with the highest margins have them so that they can afford to develop interesing new technologies, Dell is just outsourcing its R&D and market research for free.
A brief history.
t'nera semordnilap
Obviously no one shares this vision in their printer-sales department. Dell's printers use propietary ink cartridges full of proprietary nonsense.
You can measure "all technology" with a single variable (or each technology depending on how you parse your sentence)? Gimme a break. So, it's just a matter of time before we have more artificial memory capacity than there are atoms in the known universe? Kurzweil may be smart, but that doesn't mean everything he writes is correct or even reasonable. In some areas, he's a certifiable nut.
What do you mean "if it can be made to work?" Nature already does it, and "The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom." artificially.
But there are other principles than Physics involved. Organization and coordination being a big one (the big one in my opinion). How will nano-bots coordinate their activities? Radio waves? Too small. Chemicals? Too expensive and potentially complex. Tiny interconnects? Too fragile. How much memory/state can a theoretical nano-bot have? What messages will they need to coordinate? The organization and coordination of cells in nature (ie your body) is an insanely complex dance of chemical and biological triggers developed over billions of years of evolution. Duplicating something even remotely similar is a decidedly non-trivial task and one that has been neglected amongst all of the hype about the "comming age of nano-technology". Bah Humbug.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye