Firstly, I've read several comments regarding whether or not the Judge was confused on the issue of Norwegian law. The Judge didn't claim to be confused over Norwegian law, he said he was in no position to interpret Norwegian law. How is this even vaguely surprising? What legal authority does a Judge in California, USA have to interpret whether or not something is legal in Norway? The answer, of course, is none.
Secondly, everyone needs to keep in mind that this is, at this point, not a criminal case. There have been no arrests and no arraignments, which are required for criminal law to come into play. It's under criminal law that strict rules of evidence and constitutionality are rigidly adhered to. Litigation is much more free-form than that...technically speaking, the courts don't get involved in a litigious hearing at all, except to interpret the law as it pertains to the case at hand. The court is supposed to be nothing more than a forum for civil complaint...in practice, of course, this is not actually the case, but I saw at least one post complaining about 'convicting on circumstantial evidence.' For starters, all evidence is circumstantial, if you look at the legal definition of the term. Secondly, conviction is not an issue at all--this is a suit about monetary damages and compensation, not criminal activity (at least at this point, though American copyright law has become somewhat Draconian over the last 2 decades in allowing patent/intellectual poperty infringement to be criminal offenses in some cases).
Also keep in mind that there is no question of 'ought' in the Judge's authority, only a question of the issue as interpreted in light of current American law.
While I agree with you in principle, I am forced (unfortunately) to agree with the Judge's statement. It is not within the power of the American court system to make judgments based upon the Judge's personal belief of right and wrong, only by interpretation of law. In this case, the Judge has correctly pointed out that the case made that the information ought not be a trade secret has no bearing on its legal standing. The only issue which is relevant is if the information falls into a copyright protectable category or not.
For a change in what ought be protected, laws have to be passed and/or repealed. And, to be honest, I'm quite happy about living in a system where this is the case--one of the worst problems in American society today (IMHO) is the unilateral power of the courts to effectively create law through interpretation. The role of the court system is designed to be application of the law as written, not as the Judge would like it to be written.
Note, of course, that this does not apply to the ongoing effort to question the very constitutionality of the DCMA--that is, indeed, an issue wherein 'ought' needs to be consdidered, since it is the law itself which is in question. Even so, however, it's only 'ought' insofar as whether or not the DCMA is consistent with the Constitution as written.
Nonetheless, this case is not an issue of judicial review of law, this is a question of infringement under the law, and as such, the question of whether or not the information ought to be available is not at issue, legally.
Of course, I wish it was--what needs to happen is to fight the vast lobbying force that the MPAA and the RIAA exert in Washington, and get laws that reflect some sort of commen sense emplaced, rather than laws which are simply tools for large corporations to screw everyone but their lawyers.
I wonder if, upon advertising it appropriately, Intel could have Celeron capture that market?
They probably could, but I doubt they want to. All the geeks I know who drool over celerons do so because, overclocked, they run about as reliably as gravity...so they get some incredible benchmarks on them. The celeron 300 can be easily and safely OC'd to somethng like 550Mhz. But I really don't see Intel advertising chips along these lines, since it would probably detract from higher-end chip sales.
Besides, all the people who are even vaguely qualified to OC their system are pretty much guaranteed to know about celerons...
Why is it that as soon as a company gets big, everyone takes up some sort of holy crusade (redundant, I know:P~~) against it? What has Bezos done to you? So he's engaged in a ludicrous patent lawsuit--big deal. Frankly, that's the court system's fault, and the lawmaker's fault, for providing a forum where that's a reasonable thing to do.
The business of business is business...if Amazon sees a way to protect something that makes them money, they're going to do it. If you think that's wrong, help change the law that provides the protection.
Fix the problem, not the symptom. Complaining about a company trying to profit from the way the system is set up is not only ineffective, it's juvenile and simply silly. The whole concept of corporation is to make a profit off the way the system is set up. You don't like it, change the system. Putting Amazon out of business is just going to lose a lot of people jobs, and make finding cheap books online harder. Someone else will just take up the same patent battle over some other "invention," and then everyone will want to put them out of business.
Taco, put your money where your mouth is. Get rid of the Amazon box. (does the damn thing REALLY generate that much revenue?) And tell Jeff why. This madness has got to stop, here, now, and by our hands. If not now, when? If not us, who? Does this strike anyone else as ludicrously melodramatic?
Not only does it feel that way, it is that way. But it's not so much that we're peculiarly uninterested now, it's that we were peculiarly interested before. When you come right down to it, what did we get--directly--out of landing men on the moon? (Note that I said 'directly,' I am well aware of all the technological byproducts of the push to develop the ability). And how much money did we spend on it? Looking at it that way, it's amazing we ever did it. And the only reason we did was because we wanted to beat the old USSR to it. The space age was a side effect of the cold war, really, and of the 'red scare'...without the competition, there's no national fervor for doing anything, and cost becomes the only thing people think about.
*shrug*
Maybe if we set up some other world superpower to compete with again, we could PT Barnum the populace into being excited about space. I'm sure the CIA could do something with China...
Bear in mind that I think you're right--there are some companies in the tech sector that are grossly overvalued, but the area as a whole is pretty much on track. But there's also another way to look at Mr. Greenspan's comments.
He is, IMO, the single most powerful man on the planet, and he has every reason to be aware of that himself. Remember when Mexico was set up for a run on their banks a few years back (I don't remember exactly when)? A situation which could potentially have brought the Mexican economy to its knees (and done its share of damage to the US's, too)...and it was averted entirely simply by Mr. Greenspan saying that the Fed was extending its insurance guarantee to Mexican banks, which guarantee, of course, never got called out. (Granted, the Mexican economy later suffered huge currency problems and was only saved by an IMF/US many-billion-dollar bailout, but the anecdote still illustrates my point).
The point, of course, is that confidence and the economy are damn near the same thing. So the last thing Mr. Greenspan is ever going to do is come out and say that one of the largest areas of the stock market is just so much vapor--because that would send everyone racing to sell their stock and ditch all tech investments, which would kill that sector of the economy.
Stage 1: Financially sound bank. Stage 2: Respected Banker(tm) says: "That bank is shaky" Stage 3: Customers proceed to withdraw all their money from the "shaky" bank. Stage 4: The bank is shaky
This is still off-topic, but I feel compelled to try and clear this up some...Hitler got MOTY because they thought he was a great leader, not just because he was influential. This sounds ridiculous, but consider the situation.
First off, one of the problems throughout the war was that virtually no one actually read his book, Mein Kampf--and you'd know why if you ever tried (I did back in HS German...entirely aside from the content, it's a terribly written book: dry, boring, and rambling). Second, he did have an (apparently) good effect on Germany. The trains ran on time, crime dropped to negligible amounts, the ludicrous amounts of inflation were throttled way back, etc.
Add to this the fact that people didn't want to believe anything different (remember appeasement?) because the world was very tired of war, and it's easy to see how a magazine could give the award to Hitler. Really, even after the Final Solution was in place, and the knowledge of the horrors of concentration camps was "public," people still didn't really believe it. It wasn't until very late in the war that photographs were leaked, and they literally stunned the world. AFAIK, most American GI's liberating the camps didn't believe what he was doing until they saw it.
Is it necessary to make yourself accessible to every possible IM user on the planet?
There's more to it than that...my immediate friends and I grabbed ICQ in the wayback. But AOL's got better marketers, so while I've been away at college, my sister started using the family computer for AIM with her friends. She showed it to my (semi-technophobe) mom, who really liked it...and who wants to know why she can't talk to me like she can talk to my sister (who went away to college last year)...have you ever tried to explain to someone who doesn't know computers why you don't want to use anything that says AOL on it?
The same problem occurs when people I've known finally get around to getting a computer and/or net access. They always end up with AIM--again, better marketers. Granted, these friends are very seldom technophiles, but I can't afford to restrict myself to only techies to converse with--all the good geek girls are taken...;)
Er...I'm no ethical expert, but what moral conundrum arises due to introducing microscopic life onto a lifeless moon? Granted, I've got nothing against animal testing (within reason), and I suppose there might be some issue there, but we're talking about microbes here...I don't know anyone who's pro-animal enough to not swat mosquitoes, and I would think that microbes are worth even less worry...
And let's say life does exist there--I think it's safe to assume that such life does not have a "highly technical" society (at least, not as we define it), or we would have seen some evidence of it by now... So the question becomes, if life does exist there, how on earth (literally) are we going to find out about it?
I mean, this could well require actually landing something on Europa, and that has got to be phenomenally more expensive than a satellite pass...maybe even more expensive than a manned Mars mission (tho I'm just making that up...I have no justification for that). Still and all, it certainly does excite the imagination, doesn't it?
A lot of the article sounds pretty neat, but I admit I don't know if I like the bit about putting DRAM on the CPU...from a sheer speed perspective, it's obviously superior, but who wants to have to upgrade the CPU to put more RAM in the machine? Granted, I'm sure you'd still have DIMM slots, but those would be (of course) slower than the on-CPU memory.
What it reminds me of most is the old days of trying to configure 640K of main memory to squeeze every last byte out of it to run things...personally, I've rather enjoyed that sort of fading into a quaint historical oddity. Putting memory on the CPU just means software (by which I mean games, at the moment) is going to require a certain amount of "CPU RAM," and a certain amount of system RAM, and a certain amount of video card RAM.
*shrug*
Just $0.02 from someone who remembers reading the install guide for Falcon 3.0...
"Let's see...if I don't run an OS, I can get 604K main memory free..."
But this argument only applies if time is external to the universe (i.e., the universe moves along the timeline). If time, instead, is simply a dimension of travel, this problem doesn't arise. There's no problem of "memory" when you go from your front door to your mailbox and back...that is, there's no reason to think the universe has trouble "remembering" the door is there, or the mailbox is there.
If one considers time as just another dimension which defines the "volume" (yes, i know 'volume' implies exactly 3 dimensions, but i don't know a better word. tesseract, maybe...) of spacetime, memory isn't an issue.
The corollary to which, of course, is that the so-called "arrow" of time is a perceptual limitation of the people observing the universe. Which feeds right into Hawking's "finite without boundary" universe...but I digress.
Two things: first, if it can be reverse-engineered, it can and will be hacked, regardless of its status as open or closed source. Second, the easiest way to avoid hacked clients is to provide the clients in the first place, so there's no reason to hack them. Assuming that the developer(s?) don't have the time for that, help with it from the respective OS communities probably ought to be solicited, not rejected--the friendlier they are about others coding, the more control they can retain over the code that's being written.
Oops, I lied, there's a third: didn't it occur to anyone at napster that client-side security isn't really the tightest one can have (licq's "spoof UID," anyone?)? if that's napster's only security, client hacks are the least of their worries, IMHO.
On the other hand, I've never tried to write a secure client-server protocol, so maybe I'm full of it.
That's the eyepiece. Frankly, the idea of a wearable computer doesn't thrill me all that much--as it stands, I try to avoid using my mouse as much as I can, and a computer without a keyboard strikes me as just useless. Give a wearable computer a keyboard, and you'uve suddenly got a laptop with a strap.
Have we finally got a truly viable eyepiece as output device? If so, that's the part I like. The savings in battery usage on a laptop would be significant, dual eyepieces provide 3d (of course)...if they're good enough, I might even consider using one on my desktop.
I'd certainly consider them if they could be made of transparent plastic and switchable (so I could look through them as needed.)
you're neglecting time. compare the time it takes the corn to grow to the time it takes to burn the grain alcohol to get that energy content back. if we could run cities in bursts after storing solar energy in some sort of power cells, it would be plenty...but it can't provide the continuous power industrialized civilization requires. while i haven't researched it, i don't think we can grow enough grain to supply chemical energy enough to power all power plants, fuel all vehicles, and still feed people.
consider, for example, how quickly we go through fossil fuels (which energy started with the sun, of course) as compared to how long it took to form them.
as to 640 watts per meter^2, i'll accept that number since i don't have the means to hand to refute or confirm it--but consider how much power a person uses in an average day per unit area. as it sit here at my computer, i've got a forty watt bulb lighting my desk, a 300 watt power supply in my computer (although i have no idea, really, what it's current draw is), and a monitor drawing up to 240 watts. i'm already using ~500 watts just sitting here. toss in my stereo being on, and my roommates' computers being on (along with the small but cumulative draw of digital clocks, my printer being on, my force-feedback joystick drawing power, the three small refrigerators in the room, etc.), and how much power do you think i'm drawing right now? the room is ~12m^2, which is 7680 watts (assuming it was daylight at the equator, not 10:00 at night in wisconsin). the room right now probably doesn't hit that (though it likely could if i just started turning stuff on), but now add in the three rooms directly below mine with similar draw, and no extra surface area. each column of rooms in this building draws well more than their shared surface area gets from the sun. i could expand the surface area draw to outside the building, certainly, but then i have to start considering the draw of streetlights, lit signs, and most importantly, cars...i'm fairly certain you'd find that the amount of energy draw of this rural town exceeds conveniently available area. i'm absolutely certain that in population-dense areas, it FAR exceeds it.
if someone wants to claim that we could suddenly cease worldwide fossil fuel consumption and switch immediately to grain alcohol & the like without missing a beat (even assuming the infrastructure to do so existed), i'm going to need to see -quite- a justification of that statement before i believe it...
oh, and one more thing...i apologize for calling cyanide an element. i was thinking of arsenic, see...and i now feel quite stupid.
i'm all for new technology, and i don't want to say something isn't possible, but there are a couple things in this article that just aren't true without rearranging physical law as we know it. which, i suppose isn't entirely impossible, itself...
the bit i picked out primarily was the article talking about how some patch of sunny pavement could power the US...i don't know if anyone else did this way back in AP physics (high school...*shudder*), but we spent a period once calculating the total amount of energy striking the earth from the sun...and it wasn't enough to power one american city. which means if you covered the planet with a PERFECTLY EFFICIENT solar cell array, it still wouldn't be enough to be a major contributor of power.
the other intriguing note is the idea of nanites that can make any substance for effectively nothing. again, sounds great and all, but unless we're talking nanotech that arranges subatomic particles (can you build particle accelerators that are three microns around?), the raw material still has to come from somewhere. if you want to make an apple, you mainly need carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (go figure). but there's bob alone knows how many other elements necessary to make a realistic apple (cyanide, for example). and all that stuff has to come from somewhere, too. not insurmountable, of course, but it's still not free food, just food without a land base to support it.
not to mention the power consumption of the critters, and where it comes from--i don't think you can exactly hook one up to a AA battery.
is this revolutionary? sure, it could be, but let's not get carried away with ourselves, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, everyone needs to keep in mind that this is, at this point, not a criminal case. There have been no arrests and no arraignments, which are required for criminal law to come into play. It's under criminal law that strict rules of evidence and constitutionality are rigidly adhered to. Litigation is much more free-form than that...technically speaking, the courts don't get involved in a litigious hearing at all, except to interpret the law as it pertains to the case at hand. The court is supposed to be nothing more than a forum for civil complaint...in practice, of course, this is not actually the case, but I saw at least one post complaining about 'convicting on circumstantial evidence.' For starters, all evidence is circumstantial, if you look at the legal definition of the term. Secondly, conviction is not an issue at all--this is a suit about monetary damages and compensation, not criminal activity (at least at this point, though American copyright law has become somewhat Draconian over the last 2 decades in allowing patent/intellectual poperty infringement to be criminal offenses in some cases).
Also keep in mind that there is no question of 'ought' in the Judge's authority, only a question of the issue as interpreted in light of current American law.
It's the law that needs to be changed.
For a change in what ought be protected, laws have to be passed and/or repealed. And, to be honest, I'm quite happy about living in a system where this is the case--one of the worst problems in American society today (IMHO) is the unilateral power of the courts to effectively create law through interpretation. The role of the court system is designed to be application of the law as written, not as the Judge would like it to be written.
Note, of course, that this does not apply to the ongoing effort to question the very constitutionality of the DCMA--that is, indeed, an issue wherein 'ought' needs to be consdidered, since it is the law itself which is in question. Even so, however, it's only 'ought' insofar as whether or not the DCMA is consistent with the Constitution as written.
Nonetheless, this case is not an issue of judicial review of law, this is a question of infringement under the law, and as such, the question of whether or not the information ought to be available is not at issue, legally.
Of course, I wish it was--what needs to happen is to fight the vast lobbying force that the MPAA and the RIAA exert in Washington, and get laws that reflect some sort of commen sense emplaced, rather than laws which are simply tools for large corporations to screw everyone but their lawyers.
I wonder if, upon advertising it appropriately, Intel could have Celeron capture that market?
They probably could, but I doubt they want to. All the geeks I know who drool over celerons do so because, overclocked, they run about as reliably as gravity...so they get some incredible benchmarks on them. The celeron 300 can be easily and safely OC'd to somethng like 550Mhz. But I really don't see Intel advertising chips along these lines, since it would probably detract from higher-end chip sales.
Besides, all the people who are even vaguely qualified to OC their system are pretty much guaranteed to know about celerons...
Why is it that as soon as a company gets big, everyone takes up some sort of holy crusade (redundant, I know :P~~) against it? What has Bezos done to you? So he's engaged in a ludicrous patent lawsuit--big deal. Frankly, that's the court system's fault, and the lawmaker's fault, for providing a forum where that's a reasonable thing to do.
The business of business is business...if Amazon sees a way to protect something that makes them money, they're going to do it. If you think that's wrong, help change the law that provides the protection.
Fix the problem, not the symptom. Complaining about a company trying to profit from the way the system is set up is not only ineffective, it's juvenile and simply silly. The whole concept of corporation is to make a profit off the way the system is set up. You don't like it, change the system. Putting Amazon out of business is just going to lose a lot of people jobs, and make finding cheap books online harder. Someone else will just take up the same patent battle over some other "invention," and then everyone will want to put them out of business.
Taco, put your money where your mouth is. Get rid of the Amazon box. (does the damn thing REALLY generate that much revenue?) And tell Jeff why. This madness has got to stop, here, now, and by our hands. If not now, when? If not us, who?
Does this strike anyone else as ludicrously melodramatic?
Not only does it feel that way, it is that way. But it's not so much that we're peculiarly uninterested now, it's that we were peculiarly interested before. When you come right down to it, what did we get--directly--out of landing men on the moon? (Note that I said 'directly,' I am well aware of all the technological byproducts of the push to develop the ability). And how much money did we spend on it? Looking at it that way, it's amazing we ever did it. And the only reason we did was because we wanted to beat the old USSR to it. The space age was a side effect of the cold war, really, and of the 'red scare'...without the competition, there's no national fervor for doing anything, and cost becomes the only thing people think about.
*shrug*
Maybe if we set up some other world superpower to compete with again, we could PT Barnum the populace into being excited about space. I'm sure the CIA could do something with China...
Bear in mind that I think you're right--there are some companies in the tech sector that are grossly overvalued, but the area as a whole is pretty much on track. But there's also another way to look at Mr. Greenspan's comments.
He is, IMO, the single most powerful man on the planet, and he has every reason to be aware of that himself. Remember when Mexico was set up for a run on their banks a few years back (I don't remember exactly when)? A situation which could potentially have brought the Mexican economy to its knees (and done its share of damage to the US's, too)...and it was averted entirely simply by Mr. Greenspan saying that the Fed was extending its insurance guarantee to Mexican banks, which guarantee, of course, never got called out. (Granted, the Mexican economy later suffered huge currency problems and was only saved by an IMF/US many-billion-dollar bailout, but the anecdote still illustrates my point).
The point, of course, is that confidence and the economy are damn near the same thing. So the last thing Mr. Greenspan is ever going to do is come out and say that one of the largest areas of the stock market is just so much vapor--because that would send everyone racing to sell their stock and ditch all tech investments, which would kill that sector of the economy.
Stage 1: Financially sound bank.
Stage 2: Respected Banker(tm) says: "That bank is shaky"
Stage 3: Customers proceed to withdraw all their money from the "shaky" bank.
Stage 4: The bank is shaky
This is still off-topic, but I feel compelled to try and clear this up some...Hitler got MOTY because they thought he was a great leader, not just because he was influential. This sounds ridiculous, but consider the situation.
First off, one of the problems throughout the war was that virtually no one actually read his book, Mein Kampf--and you'd know why if you ever tried (I did back in HS German...entirely aside from the content, it's a terribly written book: dry, boring, and rambling). Second, he did have an (apparently) good effect on Germany. The trains ran on time, crime dropped to negligible amounts, the ludicrous amounts of inflation were throttled way back, etc.
Add to this the fact that people didn't want to believe anything different (remember appeasement?) because the world was very tired of war, and it's easy to see how a magazine could give the award to Hitler. Really, even after the Final Solution was in place, and the knowledge of the horrors of concentration camps was "public," people still didn't really believe it. It wasn't until very late in the war that photographs were leaked, and they literally stunned the world. AFAIK, most American GI's liberating the camps didn't believe what he was doing until they saw it.
Is it necessary to make yourself accessible to every possible IM user on the planet?
There's more to it than that...my immediate friends and I grabbed ICQ in the wayback. But AOL's got better marketers, so while I've been away at college, my sister started using the family computer for AIM with her friends. She showed it to my (semi-technophobe) mom, who really liked it...and who wants to know why she can't talk to me like she can talk to my sister (who went away to college last year)...have you ever tried to explain to someone who doesn't know computers why you don't want to use anything that says AOL on it?
The same problem occurs when people I've known finally get around to getting a computer and/or net access. They always end up with AIM--again, better marketers. Granted, these friends are very seldom technophiles, but I can't afford to restrict myself to only techies to converse with--all the good geek girls are taken... ;)
I guess I'm just lucky I only deal with two IM's.
Er...I'm no ethical expert, but what moral conundrum arises due to introducing microscopic life onto a lifeless moon? Granted, I've got nothing against animal testing (within reason), and I suppose there might be some issue there, but we're talking about microbes here...I don't know anyone who's pro-animal enough to not swat mosquitoes, and I would think that microbes are worth even less worry...
Or am I missing some fundamental ethical isssue?
And let's say life does exist there--I think it's safe to assume that such life does not have a "highly technical" society (at least, not as we define it), or we would have seen some evidence of it by now... So the question becomes, if life does exist there, how on earth (literally) are we going to find out about it?
I mean, this could well require actually landing something on Europa, and that has got to be phenomenally more expensive than a satellite pass...maybe even more expensive than a manned Mars mission (tho I'm just making that up...I have no justification for that). Still and all, it certainly does excite the imagination, doesn't it?
A lot of the article sounds pretty neat, but I admit I don't know if I like the bit about putting DRAM on the CPU...from a sheer speed perspective, it's obviously superior, but who wants to have to upgrade the CPU to put more RAM in the machine? Granted, I'm sure you'd still have DIMM slots, but those would be (of course) slower than the on-CPU memory.
What it reminds me of most is the old days of trying to configure 640K of main memory to squeeze every last byte out of it to run things...personally, I've rather enjoyed that sort of fading into a quaint historical oddity. Putting memory on the CPU just means software (by which I mean games, at the moment) is going to require a certain amount of "CPU RAM," and a certain amount of system RAM, and a certain amount of video card RAM.
*shrug*
Just $0.02 from someone who remembers reading the install guide for Falcon 3.0...
"Let's see...if I don't run an OS, I can get 604K main memory free..."
But this argument only applies if time is external to the universe (i.e., the universe moves along the timeline). If time, instead, is simply a dimension of travel, this problem doesn't arise. There's no problem of "memory" when you go from your front door to your mailbox and back...that is, there's no reason to think the universe has trouble "remembering" the door is there, or the mailbox is there.
If one considers time as just another dimension which defines the "volume" (yes, i know 'volume' implies exactly 3 dimensions, but i don't know a better word. tesseract, maybe...) of spacetime, memory isn't an issue.
The corollary to which, of course, is that the so-called "arrow" of time is a perceptual limitation of the people observing the universe. Which feeds right into Hawking's "finite without boundary" universe...but I digress.
Two things: first, if it can be reverse-engineered, it can and will be hacked, regardless of its status as open or closed source. Second, the easiest way to avoid hacked clients is to provide the clients in the first place, so there's no reason to hack them. Assuming that the developer(s?) don't have the time for that, help with it from the respective OS communities probably ought to be solicited, not rejected--the friendlier they are about others coding, the more control they can retain over the code that's being written.
Oops, I lied, there's a third: didn't it occur to anyone at napster that client-side security isn't really the tightest one can have (licq's "spoof UID," anyone?)? if that's napster's only security, client hacks are the least of their worries, IMHO.
On the other hand, I've never tried to write a secure client-server protocol, so maybe I'm full of it.
That's the eyepiece. Frankly, the idea of a wearable computer doesn't thrill me all that much--as it stands, I try to avoid using my mouse as much as I can, and a computer without a keyboard strikes me as just useless. Give a wearable computer a keyboard, and you'uve suddenly got a laptop with a strap.
Have we finally got a truly viable eyepiece as output device? If so, that's the part I like. The savings in battery usage on a laptop would be significant, dual eyepieces provide 3d (of course)...if they're good enough, I might even consider using one on my desktop.
I'd certainly consider them if they could be made of transparent plastic and switchable (so I could look through them as needed.)
(what can i say, my dad's a chemist)
consider, for example, how quickly we go through fossil fuels (which energy started with the sun, of course) as compared to how long it took to form them.
as to 640 watts per meter^2, i'll accept that number since i don't have the means to hand to refute or confirm it--but consider how much power a person uses in an average day per unit area. as it sit here at my computer, i've got a forty watt bulb lighting my desk, a 300 watt power supply in my computer (although i have no idea, really, what it's current draw is), and a monitor drawing up to 240 watts. i'm already using ~500 watts just sitting here. toss in my stereo being on, and my roommates' computers being on (along with the small but cumulative draw of digital clocks, my printer being on, my force-feedback joystick drawing power, the three small refrigerators in the room, etc.), and how much power do you think i'm drawing right now? the room is ~12m^2, which is 7680 watts (assuming it was daylight at the equator, not 10:00 at night in wisconsin). the room right now probably doesn't hit that (though it likely could if i just started turning stuff on), but now add in the three rooms directly below mine with similar draw, and no extra surface area. each column of rooms in this building draws well more than their shared surface area gets from the sun. i could expand the surface area draw to outside the building, certainly, but then i have to start considering the draw of streetlights, lit signs, and most importantly, cars...i'm fairly certain you'd find that the amount of energy draw of this rural town exceeds conveniently available area. i'm absolutely certain that in population-dense areas, it FAR exceeds it.
if someone wants to claim that we could suddenly cease worldwide fossil fuel consumption and switch immediately to grain alcohol & the like without missing a beat (even assuming the infrastructure to do so existed), i'm going to need to see -quite- a justification of that statement before i believe it...
oh, and one more thing...i apologize for calling cyanide an element. i was thinking of arsenic, see...and i now feel quite stupid.
the bit i picked out primarily was the article talking about how some patch of sunny pavement could power the US...i don't know if anyone else did this way back in AP physics (high school...*shudder*), but we spent a period once calculating the total amount of energy striking the earth from the sun...and it wasn't enough to power one american city. which means if you covered the planet with a PERFECTLY EFFICIENT solar cell array, it still wouldn't be enough to be a major contributor of power.
the other intriguing note is the idea of nanites that can make any substance for effectively nothing. again, sounds great and all, but unless we're talking nanotech that arranges subatomic particles (can you build particle accelerators that are three microns around?), the raw material still has to come from somewhere. if you want to make an apple, you mainly need carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (go figure). but there's bob alone knows how many other elements necessary to make a realistic apple (cyanide, for example). and all that stuff has to come from somewhere, too. not insurmountable, of course, but it's still not free food, just food without a land base to support it.
not to mention the power consumption of the critters, and where it comes from--i don't think you can exactly hook one up to a AA battery.
is this revolutionary? sure, it could be, but let's not get carried away with ourselves, please.