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3-D Flexible Computer Chips

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the new-lego-on-the-block dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have isolated a single-crystal film of semiconductor from the substrate on which it is built. Then they transferred this very thin film — 200 nanometers thick — on plastic. Both sides of the film can host active components and several layers can be stacked, opening the way to very powerful 3-D flexible computer chips. Besides computer chips, this technique could be used for solar cells, smart cards, RFID tags or active-matrix flat panel displays."

85 comments

  1. The Future is now by RMB2 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ... bringing us that much closer to the roll-up computer screens of Tek War.

    Great show, man. Shatner was amazing

    --
    [/sarcasm]
    1. Re:The Future is now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lu, Lu, Lu, Lukas Podolski

    2. Re:The Future is now by dbolger · · Score: 1

      Yeah, well I'm still waiting on the wearable computer/clothes that I saw on Tomorrow's World about fifteen years ago!

    3. Re:The Future is now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Jetsons told me Id have a flying car by now. Wheres my flying car?

  2. Excellent application for cpu construction. by plasmacutter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Heat dissipation is a major issue in cpus.. imagine if you could integrate your cpu within the heatsink's mesh at a monocrystaline level.

    It would be a revolution in cooling efficiency.

    --
    VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
    1. Re:Excellent application for cpu construction. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's posts like this that make me wish there was a +1/-1 Technobabble moderation option.

    2. Re:Excellent application for cpu construction. by Maelwryth · · Score: 1

      Heat dissapation relies on a large surface area, cpu's need to be small. If you spread a cpu over the area of a heatsink you wouldn't have a heat problem, you would have a slow processor.

      --
      I reserve the write to mangle english.
    3. Re:Excellent application for cpu construction. by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 1

      I wonder why CPUs don't already come perforated for liquid cooling. Instead they rely on thermal conduction to metal and fan/convection. Folding CPUs inside whatever heat transfer medium is used seems a lot of work for the same effect as perforation.

      --

      --
      make install -not war

  3. Anyone else? by NalosLayor · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Anyone else read this and think it was some sort of flexible platform for 3-D acceleration?

    1. Re:Anyone else? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No.

  4. I was thinking... like many layers... by MeatFlap3 · · Score: 2, Funny

    So one could possibly make the registers have a "Z" axis and have "real" 3-D address space. Just a thought...

    1. Re:I was thinking... like many layers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Row, column, and level!!!

    2. Re:I was thinking... like many layers... by titzandkunt · · Score: 1


      "So one could possibly make the registers have a "Z" axis and have "real" 3-D address space. Just a thought..."

      You must have really enjoyed working in a segemented memory environment...

      --
      Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...
    3. Re:I was thinking... like many layers... by La+Gris · · Score: 1

      Segmented memory is not needed for 3D or even 4D adress space:

      32bit address bus can be divided in 4D 8bit axises a.b.c.d. IPv4 is a 4D address space :)

      Any address bus size can be arbitrary sliced in whatever bit fields, addressing several dimensions/space. Computation penalities applies on non byte/word bondaries though. It depend on chip architecture but spatial chip layout has little to do with that.

      --
      Léa Gris

      --
      Léa Gris
    4. Re:I was thinking... like many layers... by titzandkunt · · Score: 1

      Of course it doesn't, but from my reading of the op it seemed that he/she was proposing that registers have both a physical and conceptual multidimensional component which would imply the use of some kind of offset(s) to address a specific component of said register, no? MOV AX[0][1],... sorta thing

      --
      Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...
  5. Asus merging with Armani? by Jtoxification · · Score: 2, Funny

    So does that mean we geeks will finally start wearing $1000.00 clothing just like supermodels? (albeit clothing that runs at dual clock speeds of 6.5Ghz ...)

    --
    --I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
    AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
    1. Re:Asus merging with Armani? by kfg · · Score: 5, Funny

      $1000.00 clothing just like supermodels

      You're going to look awfully silly walking around wearing nothing but one shoe.

      KFG

    2. Re:Asus merging with Armani? by Korin43 · · Score: 1

      You mean clothing that runs at 110 degrees?

    3. Re:Asus merging with Armani? by another_fanboy · · Score: 1

      You mean clothing that runs at 110 degrees?

      That's what the heatsink-backpack is for.

      Btw, if I don't register my shoes, will they stop walking after 30 days?

    4. Re:Asus merging with Armani? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean clothing that runs at 110 degrees?
      No. Did you not read the earlier comments on how this could potentially revolutionize cooling?
      (But I think it'll just burn the plastic. HA!)

      You're going to look awfully silly walking around wearing nothing but one shoe.
      Was that a classist remark on his monetary supply? For shame, you filthy karma-whore!

      Now he's going to call up all his friends on his $400 blackberry phone wristband and blog about how mean you two bastards are online through his bluetooth keyboard on his pants and the bluetooth monitor installed on his contacts, despite the fact that he's going to die in two years due to all those radio waves ransacking his brain's DNA... or whatever.

    5. Re:Asus merging with Armani? by Jtoxification · · Score: 2, Funny

      No no no, you're all wrong! It means we're going to see an uprising of nerds who have committed suicide after someone decided to wash their $3K gaming rigs, thinking they were just Levi's jeans!

      --
      --I gots 99 problems but a new machine ain't one!
      AMD! Asus! Whoot! 6 years!
    6. Re:Asus merging with Armani? by teslar · · Score: 1
      You mean clothing that runs at 110 degrees?
      That'd be nice in winter though... and potentially lifesaving, simply melt your way out of avalanches and all that...
    7. Re:Asus merging with Armani? by rahrens · · Score: 1

      Ahhh! the uprising of the undead nerds!

      Sounds like a cheap B grade movie... Where's Schwartzenager when we need him?

      --
      "Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
  6. Could be used... by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Insightful

    but won't. Call me when the technology is even remotely ready for commericalization.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:Could be used... by Taimoor · · Score: 1

      Sounds good... I'll chalk this up after those mega-capacitors we've all been hearing about.

      --nick

    2. Re:Could be used... by rolfwind · · Score: 2, Insightful

      People probably once had the same attitude toward the transistor when it first came out....

    3. Re:Could be used... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Considering the first transistor was made in 1947 I'm not sure what your point is.

    4. Re:Could be used... by QuantumG · · Score: 1

      No, see, cause the inventors of the transistor were all people who were actually working to make a profit. They weren't research graduates at a university dicking around and writing press releases about how great they are. Now, if IBM or Intel had written this press release I'd be waiting with baited breath for their next great leap forward..

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    5. Re:Could be used... by rolfwind · · Score: 1

      Nor am I of yours....

    6. Re:Could be used... by stonecypher · · Score: 1

      Er, no, they didn't. The importance of switching was well established by the time Bardeen/Shockley/Brattain did their work. Computers were already tremendously valuable, and the value of switching from vacuum tubes, which died on the order of a week and were at that time around the side of a lighter, to transistors, which even then could be clustered to a hundred in the size of a penny, was immediately obvious. Their boss at Bell Labs publically stated a week after the discovery that he thought it would be remembered as the most important discovery of the century.

      Guessing doesn't make you smart. Please talk about what you know about only, thanks.

      --
      StoneCypher is Full of BS
    7. Re:Could be used... by rolfwind · · Score: 1

      Actually, some people did have that attitude - have you ever heard of the vaccuum tube vs. transistor debates in the sound field when transistor radios came out and still go on to this day?

      I didn't say everyone had that attitude, but I should have specified some, and certainly in some niches.

      Guessing doesn't make you smart. Please talk about what you know about only. Please try again soon and come again. Thanks!

    8. Re:Could be used... by stonecypher · · Score: 1

      Actually, some people did have that attitude - have you ever heard of the vaccuum tube vs. transistor debates in the sound field when transistor radios came out and still go on to this day?

      That's a fidelity issue. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether transistors are useful. This is simply an observation that vacuum tubes have a characteristic impact on the domain of sound. Because that impact is reflexive - it's exactly opposite in production than recording - then when music is recorded with tubes, it will only sound correct reproduced with tubes. Have you ever noticed that the only people saying these things are the people listening to music recorded with tubes?

      Either way, transistors weren't applied to sound generation for seven years (contact-point transistor was December 1947; Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio, was November 1956) after they were invented. That's a complete non-sequitor, and nobody in Bell Labs said "wow, we have a solid state switch that works at the frequency of electricity, but it's not going to be useful because two presidents from now someone's going to notice it has different sound reproduction characteristics."

      I didn't say everyone had that attitude, but I should have specified some, and certainly in some niches.

      Ahem. Until you can show even one person from the era of the transistor's invention having that attitude, you're still guessing. It's just false. Find me just one person saying that. When you realize nobody ever said "wow this thing that costs one tenth of a cent replacing twelve dollar vacuum tubes which works several orders of magnitude faster, doesn't die and takes several orders of magnitude less space, allowing machines which cost tens of millions of dollars to be produced for several hundred thousand is fairly pointless," you'll begin to understand why people get annoyed when you wave your hands speculating.

      The only people who even knew about the transistor back then were the people involved in the kind of industry which made it blatantly obvious how important they were. You want to say there was a substantial minority of people yawning loudly? I'm calling bullshit. Find me one or quit lying through your teeth.

      Guessing doesn't make you smart. Please talk about what you know about only.

      Oh wow, he can repeat what I said while he's still guessing. I bet you think you're making a point. Rather than being coy, try spelling it out: exactly what guess do you believe that I've made? Or, do you just think saying "no you" makes you a master debater?

      It's admittedly relatively amusing that you could mis-duplicate that sentence and break the grammar, though.

      --
      StoneCypher is Full of BS
  7. Heat dissipation..... not a major issue by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 2, Informative

    Heat dissipation is only a significant issue in a very small number of CPUs like x86s and PowerPCs. Most CPUs you'll encounter in your average day (phone, car, mouse, PDA, refridgerator, washing machine, air conditioner, ...) use very little power and you don't heat up that you can notice.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  8. And thus... by Null+Nihils · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Moore's law will be able to keep marching on.

    Hopefully these tricks, and others, will be commercially available by the time it becomes impractical to cram any more cores on a single chip.

    1. Re:And thus... by eonlabs · · Score: 1

      The Terminator is yet another step closer to reality.

      In seriousness, this is very exciting news. I wonder how difficult it will be to automate the extraction process.

      We need to combine this with oleds and power paper to make a complete device that is the size, shape, and thickness of a
      piece of paper. Add flash memory and you could literally have a notebook full of computers. If the tech is fast enough,
      it could even be run low voltage and have no need for any external heat management under normal operating conditions.

      I'm liking where this is going very much.

      --
      I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
    2. Re:And thus... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Terminator already exists. You don't actually believe that the US has spent $400 billion in that last 4 years in Afghanistan and Iraq do you?

  9. Alright! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'll get tons more performance using this instead of my 1D chip in half-life!!!

  10. This is new .. how? by Bender_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is not new - this is known as "susbtrate transfer process" and has been practiced for year. One company doing very advanced work in this is Philips:

    First two paper hits I found in google:

    http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/ectm013.pdf
    http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/111568631.pdf

    Many companies are also working on substrate transfer processes to build silicon wafers with selective crystal orientation. Among them IBM and Soitec.

    1. Re:This is new .. how? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Did you read the articles or the pdf's you sent? These are completely different processes. Not only are the products of the transfer very flexible in the new process but they can also be stacked which is certainly not achievable in the second and maybe not in the first, although it doesn't specifically say. Are you just trolling?

    2. Re:This is new .. how? by 2.246.1010.78 · · Score: 1

      this is a link to their JAP abstract

      it seems that the novelty is that they were able to transfer strained silicon thin films to a polymer substrate.

  11. RFID Tags, huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why isn't this in YRO? After all, The Man could be using it to watch us shopping....

  12. Uses by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 1

    Does anyone have any ideas, besides clothing, as to how this could be useful? As I see it most devices have a hard screen, which makes them inherently inflexible.

    --

    Philosophy.
    1. Re:Uses by dohzer · · Score: 1

      Some sort of intelligent condom?

    2. Re:Uses by DigiShaman · · Score: 1
      According to this article, Samsung has already developed a flexible LCD screen.

      "Conventional LCD displays are made from glass panels. The flexible prototype is made from a plastic backing that is thin enough so it can be bent."

      "The first products using the screens will be notebook PCs and other portable consumer electronics product, Lee says. The sizes of the panels have yet to be decided, but they could be bigger or smaller than 5 inches, she says. More exotic wearable display products such as helmets, glasses,and fashion accessories could come later."


      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:Uses by roddy+rags · · Score: 1

      if there is one place I need some intelligence that is it!

    4. Re:Uses by lexarius · · Score: 1

      Yes, but what will the Church think of the theory of Intelligent Contraception?

    5. Re:Uses by Ana10g · · Score: 1

      How about animated tattoos? I know it's a coupla rednecks who put this together (and filed a patent), but I didn't quite think they put together a flexible LCD by themselves...

      --
      just an analog boy living in a digital age.
    6. Re:Uses by zippthorne · · Score: 1
      Not only didn't they do it without help, they didn't even do it at all. Did you read the little box at the bottom?
      The patent for the PSVI is real, but that's as far as it goes. Now that April 1st has come and gone, we'll admit that this article is absolutely untrue...for now.
      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    7. Re:Uses by stonecypher · · Score: 1

      The reason they have hard screens is that the edge feeding circuits are inflexible. This is a reasonable, real-world flexible circuit. LCD and OLED screens aren't by their nature rigid; they're just plastic bubbles full of goo. This is (other than scratch resistance and the power supply, both of which are solvable but ugly) the last major barrier to rollable screens.

      --
      StoneCypher is Full of BS
    8. Re:Uses by Ana10g · · Score: 1

      dang... I guess that makes me gullible, eh?

      --
      just an analog boy living in a digital age.
  13. Fire by luketheduke · · Score: 4, Funny

    In other news Geeks overclocking clothes causes fire and personal injury.

  14. Imagine by cryptoluddite · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They say this can be used for solar cells too. Imagine what 300 billion dollars investment could have done to make this a reality. We're like the 3rd generation of rich kid, the one that pisses away the fortune on gambling and yahts instead of doing something productive with it.

    1. Re:Imagine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yachts

    2. Re:Imagine by DigiShaman · · Score: 1

      Human action defines what being productive is and means. So in this context, gambling and sailing yachts is productive as seen fit by our human endeavors.

      As a side note, you cannot force people to an application unless they desire the need for it. Because energy is still rather cheap, why in the hell should I invest in solar cell technology? I'm sorry, but I won't accept this application unless I'm personally affected. Selfish, I know. But that's how the real world works for everyone.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:Imagine by asuffield · · Score: 1
      We're like the 3rd generation of rich kid, the one that pisses away the fortune on gambling and yahts instead of doing something productive with it.


      Gambling is zero-sum; nothing is created or destroyed. It's merely a mechanism for transferring money from people who are bad at math to the mafia. It therefore cannot constitute 'waste' at this point (what the recipients do with it is unclear).
    4. Re:Imagine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Geez how self-centered can a person be? Your actions may indicate what is productive for you, but that almost never the same thing as what is actually productive for us collectively.

      You sure as hell can 'force' people to an application without a personal need for it, it's called 'government' and that's its entire purpose. Sure, you shouldn't invest in solar power but we should. Like you apparently, our current leaders just don't understand that what's good for them is not good for the country. That's why we are in this mess.

  15. Oh? by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Well my phone does get warm if I use all its features and my iPod sure warms up when it plays video and my PSP and DS both can get a bit warm if played in their case. (Why yes I am a gadget whore)

    Presumably the CPU in larger devices like my washing machine is properly placed and can use the entire body of the machine to cool it, but in general electric circuits of any kind will produce heat under load.

    Saying it just PC cpu's is idiotic. All cpu's will get warm, just because some you use are small enough and cooled well enough that you don't notice it doesn't mean they won't overheat if you remove the cooling.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

    1. Re:Oh? by Rah'Dick · · Score: 1

      I might be wrong, but the heat from your mobile phone, when using many functions at once, might come from increased energy consumption and therefore higher battery temperature. Same with your iPod, although the conceived warmth of your mobile phone may also result from radiation energy absorption in your skin (only when making a call, tho).

    2. Re:Oh? by cnettel · · Score: 1

      Of course you're right in the battery being an added source of heat. Batteries are not that inefficient, so it's in a comparable range to the power usage, which is just about equivalent to the heat put out by the circuit. The actual transmitting power is also not that efficient from an antenna, you get a lot of localized heat in the antenna itself, so if you actually hold the object, I would think that the direct heat transfer through conduction is lower than the radiative absorption.

    3. Re:Oh? by stonecypher · · Score: 1

      Actually, the Arm9 and Arm7 in the DS run so cool that you could touch them directly and you wouldn't notice the difference between on and off. The heat coming out of your DS is a combination of the battery (~70%) and the screen (~30%).

      --
      StoneCypher is Full of BS
  16. Word Spell Check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    He's Back! Back from vacation, fresh faced and fancy free! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you MR. ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE! Give him a big hand!

    (by the way, I spell-checked this in Word. PIQUEPAILLE was not flagged as a bad word... ???)

    1. Re:Word Spell Check by puntloos · · Score: 1

      Hey lay off, he didn't point to his own blog, at least.

    2. Re:Word Spell Check by FoamingToad · · Score: 1

      Try Tools -> Options -> Spelling and grammar and uncheck "Ignore words in UPPERCASE" and the red wavy line will display.

      I'm disappointed though, I thought it was a new euphamism for an unsavoury body part. I may need to use that word as such henceforth.

      F_T

    3. Re:Word Spell Check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have some guts man. If you are such a karma whore, why don't you post with your id. Spilling on others is always fun.

  17. It also means... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny



    victoria's secret is now a hardware store...

    "no, hon, that wasn't your manliness: my bra's cpu is just overheating again"

    ... and myspace just got that much more obnoxious.

  18. One more piece to my Iron Man by Tempest451 · · Score: 1

    One step closer to my Iron Man armor. Call me crazy, but the tech is not so far-fetched.

  19. Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by Flying+pig · · Score: 2, Insightful
    So you had rather that the family cycle didn't exist, and the entire world was by now owned by one man? At least the third generation rich kid provides a living for Indian tribes and interesting employment for other people.

    Being serious, your argument is flawed. This might not in fact be a good way to make better solar cells. You can invest as much as you like in technology, but if you try to push too far in one direction too fast you will fail to get synergies. Putting a man on the moon has actually achieved very little for space flight overall. Heavy expenditure on military programs leads to waste and inefficiency, and ends up with paradoxes like commercial semiconductor designs being more reliable than extensively tested military ones.

    It actually takes a long time to train PhDs who can build on the work of the previous generation, and the number of people with the capability of doing leading edge work is limited. Before you can spend $300 billion on R&D you have to get a big enough educated population, and that means rapid social development under less than ideal conditions. Don't misunderstand me, I believe we need large investments to mitigate global warming - but the answer may not be solar power, or hydrogen, and it would be foolish to bet the planet on any one technology.

    --
    Pining for the fjords
    1. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by Vo0k · · Score: 1

      > So you had rather that the family cycle didn't exist, and the entire world was by now owned by one man?

      That's soooo flawed. What about the whole world sharing the wealth where it's needed and not in the 20-80 80-20 proportions?

      > Before you can spend $300 billion on R&D you have to get a big enough educated population,

      Spend half of that $300 billion on the education. Actually, don't separate education from research, simply make one morph into the other with experience.

      --
      Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
    2. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by x2A · · Score: 1

      "What about the whole world sharing the wealth"

      Not gonna happen... wealth is not how much you have, it's how much /more/ you have. A closer gap between rich and poor will mean that money will have less value overall.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    3. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by rahrens · · Score: 1

      Actually, the value of any commodity is based upon the quantity of that commodity you have. The more of a commodity you have, the less value it has to you. The less of it you have, the more each unit is worth. You've got it backwards.

      Economics 101...

      --
      "Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
    4. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by x2A · · Score: 1

      When you're 100% self sufficient and have everything you could ever want/need, maybe, but be realistic, is that gonna happen often? No, so you need to make exchanges, and the *exchange* value of anything is based not on how much you have, but how much more you have than someone else (with something that you want), hence their desire to exchange with you, actually. For example, if everyone starts getting paid more money, the money starts to lose it's value; this is called "inflation". I don't have it backwards in the slightest.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    5. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by Vo0k · · Score: 1

      Meaning it's good if many people are poor because then money have better value then?
      Something's wrong about the priorities here.

      --
      Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
    6. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by rahrens · · Score: 1

      You didn't mention self-sufficiency, nor did you mention inflation, which, by the way is NOT everybody getting paid more. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation, where wikipedia gives a more proper definition, that's not so self serving as yours. Strictly speaking, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. I guess your mentioning money loosing its value is the closest you came to being right, but that's not because everybody gets paid more. Everybody getting paid more is only a symptom of inflation, and your original post didn't seem to mean inflation was a cause of that, in that context.

      Sorry, as to the original statement you made, you still got it wrong, no matter how you try to explain yourself through obfuscation.

      --
      "Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
    7. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by x2A · · Score: 1

      hey I never said it was good, but it is human nature. When it comes to the crunch, people will prioritise their own families needs above others (and other times just out of greed) and so will try to maximise what they get out of each exchange made.

      For example, when people shop around for "the cheapest" (eg, go to a shop where banana's are cheaper), the result being that people who make the produce get paid less.

      When money's tight, I regret I must admit I do exactly that, as do most, and if you ever have done too, you're as guilty as I am :-/

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    8. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by x2A · · Score: 1

      Don't accuse me of obfuscating just because you can't understand what I'm saying, and you're blind if you don't think that increased wealth doesn't drives up prices. Wages *must* increase inline with inflation, otherwise a recession will occure as people can afford to buy less than they could previously. But just because increased wages is in effect of inflation, does not mean that it's not also a cause. It's called a "cycle"; two things that are both cause and effect of each other.

      My original statement, which you say is wrong, I could have been a little more precise. When I said "wealth is not how much you have, it's how much /more/ you have", what I should have said is "it's how much /more/ you have than somebody else", I thought that was implied but I guess not. For example, we all have basically as much air as each other, so it has no trade value, but people who have more oil than others get to exchange that oil for... well, anything really, with people who don't have any oil.

      Same is true with money. If you knew that everyone had $1m, and you were the only person with bread, you'd most likely charge more for your bread. The $1m everyone had would be worth less, because they could buy less with it, because everyone would be charging more.

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    9. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by Vo0k · · Score: 1

      "when money is tight".
      The OP was about people for whom money is definitely NOT tight.
      Agreed, people already understood leadership based on inheritance (monarchy) is not the way to go and replaced it with sharing equal power of decision who's to rule, aka democracy. Now if the same happened to economy...

      --
      Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
    10. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by x2A · · Score: 1

      "replaced it with sharing equal power of decision who's to rule, aka democracy. Now if the same happened to economy"

      Corruption would occure just as it does in a "democracy", and where corruption doesn't occure, things will often end up being driven into the ground because decision is given equally to people who are less able to make good judgement. Various levels of this can occure with economy, such as socialism (the rebalance of some wealth) or communism (wealth spread evenly), but human nature stops them from working as well as they could do (or stops them working completely). Or something. Tired, going off point here, think i should go to bed :-p

      --
      The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
    11. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by rahrens · · Score: 1

      Nobody said that. My statement was a bald faced explanation of an economic axiom about the marginal value of money, or for that matter any commodity, NOT any kind of moral judgement as to the goodness or not of that axiom.

      What the axiom means is that, as you accumulate more of anything, each additional unit of that commodity becomes less valuable. If you have ten bucks to your name, five more dollars is an increase of 1/3 of your net worth. If you have $100,000.00 its less than pocket change. The same thing is true if you replace the unit "dollar" for any commodity, say, gallons of gas.

      Economic theory is not designed to teach or explain morality, merely economic facts.

      --
      "Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
    12. Re:Sympathy [ok, off topic, sorry] by rahrens · · Score: 1

      Your post is a better explanation of what you meant. Sorry, but it sounded a bit off at first.

      --
      "Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
  20. Sig by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Separation of church and state - Done.
    as if
  21. Solar Powered Beer Bottles by duffel · · Score: 1

    "Beer bottles that use solar power to keep their precious contents cool in the height of summer could be a welcome fringe benefit of thin-film technology currently under development"

    rest on http://www.vnunet.com/2160151

    I'm pretty sure this wouldn't work in direct sunlight, as I doubt the heat pumps and solar cells are efficient enough. In diffuse light, which an ideal application of the less efficient thin film cells, it might work quite well. Haven't done the maths though.

    1. Re:Solar Powered Beer Bottles by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      If the bottle isn't enough insulation to keep your beer cool, you probably don't like beer as much as you think you do. And if you don't like beer, why are you drinking it at all?

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
  22. Smart Wires by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 1

    Now they've got the semiconductoroff the substrate and flexible, as strained monocrystals, they should be able to align corresponding sites on the multiple layers of circuits to actually go 3D, for more efficient routing. Maybe even rolling up sheets into scrolls. Since they're flexible, maybe rolling scrolls around a power core, making tiny smart wires.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  23. move along... by Goldsmith · · Score: 1

    Carbon nanotube networks do this faster and cheaper, have already been used in solar cells, and are being commercialized right now.

  24. like many layers... by MeatFlap3 · · Score: 1
    Yes, yes... But like writing bits vertically to multi-platter disk drives at the same head location, only with this thought, it could load registers with addresses, or stack, or instructions, whatever. Each vertical location, or part of that bit string, could do something else while the horizontal part is ececuting... I haven't really thought of the possibilities, but both could execute in chain step, even though they would be on different physical processors, or devices of any kind for that matter. There is also the possibility of one of the vertical locations acting like a chip enable pin for address decoding... or a "processor enable", or a graphic layer enable... More likely, a way to switch to concurrently running user space... Kind of like the early Control Data Cyber series machines. As I said, it's just a thought, fleeting as it was. [g]

    -r