Imagine the the trouble you have to go through as a company to make a monthly or even yearly small payment to a couple of 100 thousand subscribers. Who cares anyway about the 2 dollars a month you might make? The possiblility of winning a big prize every month or week will attract far more people. And of course the more cycles you put in, the better your chances.
This being said, personally I wouldn't mind giving the cycles away to some medical/charity/... -project. Something like the human genome-mapping seemed very appropriate, wonder why they never started something like SETI@home for that.
Preventing this merger might save everybody from 3 million hate-threads about monopolies, movies you buy that come packed with their own web-portal,...
You'll just have to split the monster up afterwards.
If you're interested, here's some more mergers the EC blocked.
Another problem I see with this early version of memory is that the individual cells can be switched "hundreds of times". Better than once, yes, but a realistic memory cell needs to switch billions, if not trillions of times during its expected life. We have a way to go here.
True: that's also the reason we don't use flash-memory as RAM, it becomes unreliable after that many switches but would give the advantage of not needing to be refreshed. (would take away the need to boot your computer)
But maybe that's old thinking: what if the individual cells become so abundant you just discard them and use others after a hundred switches? These are molecules, their production is not comparable to present-day RAM-transistors. A new "memory-paradigm" might be necessary: other ways of organizing and working with memory. I don't think the RAM/HD config would still be relevant with this technology.
Anyway, another good article on molecular electronics (not only about memory though) from Wired:
Easier would be making some hard-to-imitate marks or stains on it. And stick some rare sticker on the bottom. Now they'll need to take pictures of the keyboard first so they can copy it in the lab.
To make this system perfect, disable a certain key you never use. Test it once in a while and when it suddenly works, something is up.
And, granted, they say they wouldn't use primates even though they'd be a better match because they can only reproduce one-at-a-time...
I think it's mainly because pigs have been domesticated so long and we're sure they don't carry too many unknown diseases and viruses like primates do.
Imagine the the trouble you have to go through as a company to make a monthly or even yearly small payment to a couple of 100 thousand subscribers. Who cares anyway about the 2 dollars a month you might make? The possiblility of winning a big prize every month or week will attract far more people. And of course the more cycles you put in, the better your chances.
This being said, personally I wouldn't mind giving the cycles away to some medical/charity/... -project. Something like the human genome-mapping seemed very appropriate, wonder why they never started something like SETI@home for that.
Preventing this merger might save everybody from 3 million hate-threads about monopolies, movies you buy that come packed with their own web-portal,...
You'll just have to split the monster up afterwards.
If you're interested, here's some more mergers the EC blocked.
Another problem I see with this early version of memory is that the individual cells can be switched "hundreds of times". Better than once, yes, but a realistic memory cell needs to switch billions, if not trillions of times during its expected life. We have a way to go here.
True: that's also the reason we don't use flash-memory as RAM, it becomes unreliable after that many switches but would give the advantage of not needing to be refreshed. (would take away the need to boot your computer)
But maybe that's old thinking: what if the individual cells become so abundant you just discard them and use others after a hundred switches? These are molecules, their production is not comparable to present-day RAM-transistors. A new "memory-paradigm" might be necessary: other ways of organizing and working with memory. I don't think the RAM/HD config would still be relevant with this technology.
Anyway, another good article on molecular electronics (not only about memory though) from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/moletronic s_pr.html
99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
Words of Steven Wright...
Yes, good idea: personalize you keyboard.
Easier would be making some hard-to-imitate marks or stains on it. And stick some rare sticker on the bottom. Now they'll need to take pictures of the keyboard first so they can copy it in the lab.
To make this system perfect, disable a certain key you never use. Test it once in a while and when it suddenly works, something is up.
And, granted, they say they wouldn't use primates even though they'd be a better match because they can only reproduce one-at-a-time...
I think it's mainly because pigs have been domesticated so long and we're sure they don't carry too many unknown diseases and viruses like primates do.
Post coïtus, todum animalum triste est. not sure about all the grammar though :)