Two options: 1) Politely ask people not to record a movie. If you catch someone doing it, remove and seize the film (or erase the flash card/HDD/whatever) and may be ban that person from your theatre. 2) 10 million dollar fine and 5 years in jail for bringing a recorder into the movie theatre. Death penalty for repeat offenders.
One course of action is adequate, another one is not.
Fucking dots, more bullshit, for what, for nothing. No one records movies at the movies anymore, least of all in the US. And even if they did, no one would want their ass copy because it's so easy to get a better one. Check out vcdquality - cam versions are released, but the fact is that you need to record a movie in one theater out of about 3000 for a average release. And please note that some theatres are owned by piracy-friendly people. Good luck catching pirates there.
And anyway, all this is just a temporary measure that will not have much effect for a few years, because it's difficult to implement it, but after a few years the technology will allow to record a movie much easier without being caught.
Let them experiment on the ecosystem somewhere else and then, in ten or twenty years, allow them in if there hasven't been any problems. That's just stupid. In twenty years people will be GMed. New organs will be grown and transplanted. People will be connected to computers via direct interfaces. Nanotechnology will be maturing. And you will be excited by the glowing fish? Duh! What Christmas gifts do you explain this year? A cool and trendy lava lamp?
I don't live in California (in fact, I live in Russia), I don't have an aquarium (my mother does), I think having fish is stupid, etc., etc., but as soon as I can, I will buy some of these for my mother just for the sake of it.
Democracy doesn't work, because idiots vote for thieves, liars and other idiots. As a result we have this ban for GM fish. Look, are the potential extremely unlikely minor environmental problems more serious than some very real ones that Californians have? Like not having electricity and a fucked up budget? Not to mention living in a fucking desert and having a cyborg for governor (I would expect a bit more tolerance towards modern tech from Californians).:)
This is complete idiocy, plain and simple, call it "head in the ass strategy". These clowns don't know jack shit about science, about biology, about ecology, etc., they are scared about things they don't understand (pretty much everything) and so choose to listen to the anti-progress eco-freaks.
Sorry for the rant, but I just hate that sort of stupidity.
Anyhow, tax cuts are just as good for an economy as gov't spending. That tax cut money goes somewhere, maybe it goes into a bank account and the bank can lend the money out for someone to buy a house. Maybe it buys a yacht. Maybe it buys something else. That's better than being in the gov't coffers and ending up paying for a study on some senator's pet project with little or no redeemingvalue.
Nothing personal, but people in capitalist countries have a fundamental problem grasping these ideas. The economic growth basically depends on how much of GDP is spent on new means of production as opposed to consumption goods. Of course, there are efficiency issues, but these are related to the quality of management in the government, not to some inherent inefficiency of the government. And quality of management can be improved if you build accountability and transparency into the government.
If the government would spend 15% of GDP per year on fundamental science, R&D and new industrial/infrastructure projects, the economy will grow faster than if these money were spent on houses, cars, yachts and tourism. There are fundamental flaws with democracy and liberal market economy and lack of investment (a result of rampant consumerism) is one of them. A good planned economy run as a well-managed corporation can potentially be much more efficient. Basically, technocracy would be a perfect answer, if only it was feasible to establish through political reform...
I think it is understandable why no one is building assmblers now, but we can expect some assmblers in the near future. Not nanoassemblers, of course... The problem is that we currently don't have computing and programming (AI) capability to build even a simple universal robot, much less an assmbler, much less on a nanoscale. We can definitely see today how fast will robotics develop. There are many good projects on various important aspects of robotics, there are first consumer robots, there are first relatively autonomous robots, we are making a good deal of progress in actuators, energy storage, etc. Without doing a good deal of analysis, I can give a very rough estimate that 2010s will end in a robotic boom - a visible stage of exponential growth we are already experiencing (like Internet in late 1990s). At that stage it will be possible to design and somewhere around 2015 build a macroassembler - a robot (robotic plant) capable of turning relatively simple parts into anything that can be built out of them (including more such robots) given right instructions. Ordinary people will see it as, for example, robots doing more construction work and maintenance. At that stage nanotechnology might progress by approximately 1-2 orders of magnitude. This would allow to gradually shrink our universal assemblers and by 2020-2030 they might become nano-scale.
So I surely agree that building a nanoassembler is out of our reach now (although some theoretical work is still in order), but assemblers are much closer. The theory of building assemblers is related to cellular biology and correlates nicely with our gradual progress in that area and in scanning/imaging technology.
The ideas above, are of course, just speculation, and is not based on hard data, but this is an example of what kind of planning is, in my opinion, necessary.
As for your age, I happily admit my error, but now I am surprised by your "deathist" attitude. Why shouldn't you to live to see the assemblers even if that will take 70-100 years? Surely some life extension technologies will arrive much earlier.
I know I will be scorned by you for this, but I will say it anyway.:) I am not a nanoscientist. Even more (or less), I am not a physicist. So although I am still excited by some of the real physical problems that we face, this excitement is limited by my inability to fully comprehend them. So personally (sorry about that) I prefer speculations (hopefully with some basis in reality) about transhuman and posthuman possibilities of advanced nanotech, AI and hypercomputers to analysis of real (by that I mean things more advanced than the level of this particular dicussion covered in the article) technical or scientific issues (not to say I don't like to read a scientific paper on these topics occasionally).
Another thing is that being relatively young and more optimistic about the speed of progress than you are, I already (to a large extent) feel like an immortal being (however strange that might sound to most people). For this reason I do not worry too much about immediate developments (although I still care about it), knowing that in 10-20-30 years things will somehow work out (yeah, I do realise people like you are responsible for this somehow).
Speaking about predictions, while they might look silly to a physicist, they are extremely useful to politicians, businessmen and the public at large. While we might not know the exact schedule of nanotech development, we know enough about it to be able to give some estimates. There can be many techniques, although few with proved reliability, to be used for such forecasting. You can read some of my ideas about planning and the need for it in my small essay Planning for the Future. BTW, overoptimistic predictions are nothing good, I agree here. The question is how to make realistic ones...
I have a lucrative investment proposal for you. Some countries have better copyright laws than the others. The copyright expires there after a reasonable time, after which the works are transferred into public domain. In some of these countries (unlike the US, where constant lobbying kept most modern works from losing copyright protection) this fact is acknowledged by everyone, including in some places the Ministry of Culture. That means that works made before movies like Godfather or Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarves, Bambi, etc. are in public domain. Which means that it is entirely legal to take the DVDs, rip the movies and place them on a website for everyone to download. Given the current traffic costs, this can definitely be done for less than 1$/movie. Probably much less.
The proposal is to establish such a service to provide people all over the world free access to works of art that should already belong to the public. This has a nice side effect of pissing off Disney, MPAA and their ilk (hopefully, in such countries lack of transparency, developed organised crime and well established commercial pirates may help to defend from worse criminals, such as IP laywers). The upfront costs will constitute several thousands euros/dollars.
Want to fight RIAA/MPAA - contribute! Serious inquiries only, please!
You must understand that this statistic doesn't mean 1 million people were scared and stopped using P2P. It probably only means that the average number of connected users dropped by 1 mln (on average or different users per week, etc.). This can be the reason of people spending less time connected to the network, for example not leaving their P2P clients connected to the network over night, etc. While this is a negative thing for FastTrack, it is not a tragedy. And this number is unlikely to drop much lower. There are many technological solutions to the RIAA problem and with enough pressure they will be implemented. There is simply no way for RIAA to win the war against the people without DRMing everything 100% and this is not going to happen (I hope).
Most people do not really understand the potential impact of mature nanotechnologies. And it's easy to see why - even Drexler's book Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution gives some really ridiculous examples (may be to make it simplier to understand). Here are my responses to two of particularly misleading comments in this thread.
However, if molecular assemblers ever become mainstream I'd rather design my own car and let it assemble that. If everyone is driving a Ferrari I'd rather have something different. When molecular assemblers become mainstream, having a car would be rather pointless. First, there are unlikely to be any streets where you can impress chicks, since everyone would be able to live wherever on Earth they like. Second, there probably won?t be any roads, since you don?t need to transport goods (they can be manufactured from CO2 on the spot) and it?s easier to fly people from A to B. Third, designed cars would be as old-fashioned as horse carriages now ? smart completely transformable people-movers would be all the rage. And forth, you will be able to drive any kind of car in your personal virtual reality simulation, so you don?t need to actually design the car (just program how it should behave) and the issue of IP would be moot.
2jchoyt: Money will still have value. Someone has to create and/or design food, clothing, medicine, entertainment, etc. Strong AIs will be able to create and or/design everything, including these things you describe. Furthermore, people will not need food, because it will be easier to just get energy from the environment without any conscious actions like eating from your side. Clothing is likely to be designed for the sake of it. Most couturiers are not in this business for money, they do it because they like it, and when all fabrics and basic production operations will become free, as well as everything they need personally, they are unlikely to charge you anything for their latest fashionable clothes. Medicine will not be used, because our bodies will be redesigned to include a smart AI-based immune system, capable of fixing most problems, except, may be, for being in the epicenter of the thermonuclear explosion. So most things you mention will not be needed and those that still will be needed, will be done by professional volunteers for free.
First, there was research done in 1970s-1980s (Sorry, can't give you the reference or details), which showed that most scientists/engineers are very bad at predicting the progress in their field of competence for more than 5-7 years.
Second, there is an observation (not sure if it is supported by hard data) that we tend to overestimate the short-term progress and underestimate the long-term progress. Of course, this is not a fundamental law, but overall this hints that nanoassemblers might become reality much sooner than most people expect, possibly, as soon as in 2020-2030, especially if you take into account the possibilities of technological singularity and mutual acceleration of technologies such as computing, AI and nanotech.
While Princeton is a good school it is *not* MIT. Read Part 2 of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - "The Princeton Years". I doubt you had. Then you will realise how Feynman himself compared Princeton and MIT.:)
How many building blocks are needed to create millions of lifeforms (millions of trillions [?] of organisms) that can populate an Earth-class planet? You'd be surprised to know that the answer is "less than 100". How many building blocks are needed to create basically everything that we might need and imagine? While optimisation might sometimes require synthesis of advanced and rare molecules, it sounds plausible that "less than 1000" might be correct...
How do you create an arbitrary molecule? Well, you take a scanning tunneling microscope, you take enough atoms to build a copy of this molecule, you design it and check that it is stable. Then you start building it atom by atom - you take an atom with a STM, you move it to the correct location and you place it there. This is long and tedious, but it can be done. Of course, there are much easier ways to do it, like design a chemical reaction that builds this particular molecule out of simple ones, which can be made in bulk.
Reversible computing basically means doing calculations using operations that can be easily and exactly reversed, including at the lowest level, the level of transistors or other physical mechanisms. By using reversible operations we can avoid dissipating the energy associated with the bits and thus decrease the total disspation of energy in our computer. Since the only functions that cannot in principle be made reversible are input and output, and the bandwidth of these is rather small (compared with internal system bandwidth used in 2020 computers), most of the processing in the future could be done using energy efficient reversible computing. Ballistic computation is reversible computation with energy dissipation so low as to be zero for all practical purposes (i.e. something else is a bottleneck).
Oh really? Not five orders of magnitude as I suggested, but just one? And above that a fixed limit - impossible to overcome without a new law of nature? Somehow I doubt that. LOL. On a more practical note, reversible computing might do the trick - the output bandwidth is limited by the human input bandwidth, which can be saturated rather quickly, so the wasted heat can be kept relatively low even with conventional transistors-on-silicon chips.
As for the amount of material, just check out some fanfic sites - almost always LOTR easily sits in the top 3 most popular themes, together with HP and SW. People are eager to create new art based on the Tolkien's world and can easily find topics and new approaches (of course, professional artists are put off by being required to buy the rights from the estate first).
doors that can be broken by demons among other things I doubt it. If you refer to the moment in the trailer where two monsters break through the door, then most likely it was yet another scripted scene. Sorry to say it, but you sound like a Doom fanboy and not very objective. I am sure Doom 3 will be a quality game, but I am not sure if it will be able to surpass (or even met) our expectations.
We were excited about game graphics for a long time now. Even Quake 2 was visually great with coloured lightning and stuff. Unreal was visually stunning, with large open spaces, cool level design, great-looking lakes and waterfalls, and stuff. Max Payne was amazing with photorealistic textures, models, etc. Basically every major game was visually stunning in some way. The level of hype about Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 is only moderately higher than usually and can be explained by both games being announced and shown quite a time before they are ready. The unique features of these two engines are basically facial animations and per-pixel lightning. Everything else is already used in games you can buy today. If we are to believe the scientists, there is a big drop in our perception of computer-generated humans as realistic right before complete realism. Supposedly, we don't like characters that look "almost right", like characters in Final Fintasy (the movie). If this is so, then there will always be demand for more realism, until we can simulate reality 100% and more. So don't expect games to ignore the eye-candy and return to "good old times" of fun and good gameplay.
BTW, the most visually stunning game currently in development is neither Doom 3, nor Half-Life 2. It is Stalker. It also has by far the most realistic levels in an FPS, dynamic weather system (really cool), and (supposedly) very large levels, great story, great AI, great gameplay. It also has the usual (now) things like rag-doll physics, advanced dynamic lightning and shadows, cool shader effects, etc. It is also the first game about Chernobyl.;)
It doesn't work that way. People will do what is rational (or irrational, but pleasant/fun) for them to do. If used games offer more value, people will buy them, if not - they won't. And you personally should understand that your actions have a negligible effect on total sales/profits of game developers, so just do what you want to maximize your own utility. If you want to spend 30$ on a game, simply buy one for 50$ and get another one for free (from pirates). The end result for game developers is the same.
What we need is a breakthrough as fundamental as the discovery of a new law of nature to get any further. How about this one: there are three dimensions in the world.
Assuming 50 billion transistors per CPU by the year 2018, by moving from a single layer 9 cm^2 CPU to single volume 27 cm^3 CPU we can increase the transistor count 225000 times, which will help us get through to about 2050, while still using transistors on silicon technology (ignoring the technical issues such as heat dissipation).
I mean, we've seen this kind of crap so often, it is no longer funny, but anyway, I will bite.:)
1) End draws nearer for Moore?s Law - we do not know that and this might even be false. Remember, Moore himself thought that his observation will only be valid for a decade or so. But instead the end of Moore's Law has been constantly postponed for almost half a century now. It might be that, with increased R&D, in 10 years we will expect the end of Moore's Law in 2025. Then the opposite to the article title is true - the end of Moore's Law is always pushed further into the future. 2) Ignoring the stupid and factually incorrect headline, let's turn to the idea itself that this Law will stop working some day. Well, duh. Obviously, if we are talking about transistors on silicon, we can't increase the density infinitely, because every transistor must have at least one atom and we can only pack the atoms so tightly before they start to fuse.:) Of course, any constant (moreso exponential) growth will have to stop. How is that news? 3) Why do we ignore all computing technologies and concentrate on transistors and silicon alone? Like Kurzweil writes, they are just a small part of the big picture. It might very well be possible to make a computer based on the electron tunneling effect, which complicates traditional transistors.
The truth is - it is possible to fit a shitload of computational capacity in a very small volume. As a minimum, we can fit a computer able to run a human-level AI in a cube 10x10x10 cm. And most likely, we will be able to do 5-20 orders of magnitude better. Most likely, not without Intel's help. Computers will not stop becoming much faster, simply because it is fashionable (or rather it was 10 years ago) to bash Moore's Law.
In short, journalists are complete idiots, we are tired from sensationalist bullshit.
In particular, what if I copyright all facts concerning myself and refuse to grant any company a license? Surely no entity could have a better claim to their "authorship". Say hello to free unlisted telephone numbers. Except for the telephone provider.:)
Slashdot Mirror
By your logic I should be allowed to fire my automatic gun everywhere I want and if you happen to be in the path of my bullets, it's your problem.
Two options:
1) Politely ask people not to record a movie. If you catch someone doing it, remove and seize the film (or erase the flash card/HDD/whatever) and may be ban that person from your theatre.
2) 10 million dollar fine and 5 years in jail for bringing a recorder into the movie theatre. Death penalty for repeat offenders.
One course of action is adequate, another one is not.
Fucking dots, more bullshit, for what, for nothing. No one records movies at the movies anymore, least of all in the US. And even if they did, no one would want their ass copy because it's so easy to get a better one.
Check out vcdquality - cam versions are released, but the fact is that you need to record a movie in one theater out of about 3000 for a average release. And please note that some theatres are owned by piracy-friendly people. Good luck catching pirates there.
And anyway, all this is just a temporary measure that will not have much effect for a few years, because it's difficult to implement it, but after a few years the technology will allow to record a movie much easier without being caught.
Let them experiment on the ecosystem somewhere else and then, in ten or twenty years, allow them in if there hasven't been any problems.
That's just stupid. In twenty years people will be GMed. New organs will be grown and transplanted. People will be connected to computers via direct interfaces. Nanotechnology will be maturing. And you will be excited by the glowing fish? Duh! What Christmas gifts do you explain this year? A cool and trendy lava lamp?
I don't live in California (in fact, I live in Russia), I don't have an aquarium (my mother does), I think having fish is stupid, etc., etc., but as soon as I can, I will buy some of these for my mother just for the sake of it.
:)
Democracy doesn't work, because idiots vote for thieves, liars and other idiots. As a result we have this ban for GM fish. Look, are the potential extremely unlikely minor environmental problems more serious than some very real ones that Californians have? Like not having electricity and a fucked up budget? Not to mention living in a fucking desert and having a cyborg for governor (I would expect a bit more tolerance towards modern tech from Californians).
This is complete idiocy, plain and simple, call it "head in the ass strategy". These clowns don't know jack shit about science, about biology, about ecology, etc., they are scared about things they don't understand (pretty much everything) and so choose to listen to the anti-progress eco-freaks.
Sorry for the rant, but I just hate that sort of stupidity.
Anyhow, tax cuts are just as good for an economy as gov't spending. That tax cut money goes somewhere, maybe it goes into a bank account and the bank can lend the money out for someone to buy a house. Maybe it buys a yacht. Maybe it buys something else. That's better than being in the gov't coffers and ending up paying for a study on some senator's pet project with little or no redeemingvalue.
Nothing personal, but people in capitalist countries have a fundamental problem grasping these ideas. The economic growth basically depends on how much of GDP is spent on new means of production as opposed to consumption goods. Of course, there are efficiency issues, but these are related to the quality of management in the government, not to some inherent inefficiency of the government. And quality of management can be improved if you build accountability and transparency into the government.
If the government would spend 15% of GDP per year on fundamental science, R&D and new industrial/infrastructure projects, the economy will grow faster than if these money were spent on houses, cars, yachts and tourism. There are fundamental flaws with democracy and liberal market economy and lack of investment (a result of rampant consumerism) is one of them. A good planned economy run as a well-managed corporation can potentially be much more efficient. Basically, technocracy would be a perfect answer, if only it was feasible to establish through political reform...
I think it is understandable why no one is building assmblers now, but we can expect some assmblers in the near future. Not nanoassemblers, of course... The problem is that we currently don't have computing and programming (AI) capability to build even a simple universal robot, much less an assmbler, much less on a nanoscale. We can definitely see today how fast will robotics develop. There are many good projects on various important aspects of robotics, there are first consumer robots, there are first relatively autonomous robots, we are making a good deal of progress in actuators, energy storage, etc. Without doing a good deal of analysis, I can give a very rough estimate that 2010s will end in a robotic boom - a visible stage of exponential growth we are already experiencing (like Internet in late 1990s). At that stage it will be possible to design and somewhere around 2015 build a macroassembler - a robot (robotic plant) capable of turning relatively simple parts into anything that can be built out of them (including more such robots) given right instructions. Ordinary people will see it as, for example, robots doing more construction work and maintenance. At that stage nanotechnology might progress by approximately 1-2 orders of magnitude. This would allow to gradually shrink our universal assemblers and by 2020-2030 they might become nano-scale.
So I surely agree that building a nanoassembler is out of our reach now (although some theoretical work is still in order), but assemblers are much closer. The theory of building assemblers is related to cellular biology and correlates nicely with our gradual progress in that area and in scanning/imaging technology.
The ideas above, are of course, just speculation, and is not based on hard data, but this is an example of what kind of planning is, in my opinion, necessary.
As for your age, I happily admit my error, but now I am surprised by your "deathist" attitude. Why shouldn't you to live to see the assemblers even if that will take 70-100 years? Surely some life extension technologies will arrive much earlier.
I know I will be scorned by you for this, but I will say it anyway. :) I am not a nanoscientist. Even more (or less), I am not a physicist. So although I am still excited by some of the real physical problems that we face, this excitement is limited by my inability to fully comprehend them. So personally (sorry about that) I prefer speculations (hopefully with some basis in reality) about transhuman and posthuman possibilities of advanced nanotech, AI and hypercomputers to analysis of real (by that I mean things more advanced than the level of this particular dicussion covered in the article) technical or scientific issues (not to say I don't like to read a scientific paper on these topics occasionally).
Another thing is that being relatively young and more optimistic about the speed of progress than you are, I already (to a large extent) feel like an immortal being (however strange that might sound to most people). For this reason I do not worry too much about immediate developments (although I still care about it), knowing that in 10-20-30 years things will somehow work out (yeah, I do realise people like you are responsible for this somehow).
Speaking about predictions, while they might look silly to a physicist, they are extremely useful to politicians, businessmen and the public at large. While we might not know the exact schedule of nanotech development, we know enough about it to be able to give some estimates. There can be many techniques, although few with proved reliability, to be used for such forecasting. You can read some of my ideas about planning and the need for it in my small essay Planning for the Future. BTW, overoptimistic predictions are nothing good, I agree here. The question is how to make realistic ones...
Dear Friend!
I have a lucrative investment proposal for you. Some countries have better copyright laws than the others. The copyright expires there after a reasonable time, after which the works are transferred into public domain. In some of these countries (unlike the US, where constant lobbying kept most modern works from losing copyright protection) this fact is acknowledged by everyone, including in some places the Ministry of Culture. That means that works made before movies like Godfather or Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarves, Bambi, etc. are in public domain. Which means that it is entirely legal to take the DVDs, rip the movies and place them on a website for everyone to download. Given the current traffic costs, this can definitely be done for less than 1$/movie. Probably much less.
The proposal is to establish such a service to provide people all over the world free access to works of art that should already belong to the public. This has a nice side effect of pissing off Disney, MPAA and their ilk (hopefully, in such countries lack of transparency, developed organised crime and well established commercial pirates may help to defend from worse criminals, such as IP laywers). The upfront costs will constitute several thousands euros/dollars.
Want to fight RIAA/MPAA - contribute!
Serious inquiries only, please!
You must understand that this statistic doesn't mean 1 million people were scared and stopped using P2P. It probably only means that the average number of connected users dropped by 1 mln (on average or different users per week, etc.). This can be the reason of people spending less time connected to the network, for example not leaving their P2P clients connected to the network over night, etc. While this is a negative thing for FastTrack, it is not a tragedy. And this number is unlikely to drop much lower. There are many technological solutions to the RIAA problem and with enough pressure they will be implemented. There is simply no way for RIAA to win the war against the people without DRMing everything 100% and this is not going to happen (I hope).
Most people do not really understand the potential impact of mature nanotechnologies. And it's easy to see why - even Drexler's book Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution gives some really ridiculous examples (may be to make it simplier to understand). Here are my responses to two of particularly misleading comments in this thread.
:
:
2BorgDrone
However, if molecular assemblers ever become mainstream I'd rather design my own car and let it assemble that. If everyone is driving a Ferrari I'd rather have something different.
When molecular assemblers become mainstream, having a car would be rather pointless. First, there are unlikely to be any streets where you can impress chicks, since everyone would be able to live wherever on Earth they like. Second, there probably won?t be any roads, since you don?t need to transport goods (they can be manufactured from CO2 on the spot) and it?s easier to fly people from A to B. Third, designed cars would be as old-fashioned as horse carriages now ? smart completely transformable people-movers would be all the rage. And forth, you will be able to drive any kind of car in your personal virtual reality simulation, so you don?t need to actually design the car (just program how it should behave) and the issue of IP would be moot.
2jchoyt
Money will still have value. Someone has to create and/or design food, clothing, medicine, entertainment, etc.
Strong AIs will be able to create and or/design everything, including these things you describe. Furthermore, people will not need food, because it will be easier to just get energy from the environment without any conscious actions like eating from your side. Clothing is likely to be designed for the sake of it. Most couturiers are not in this business for money, they do it because they like it, and when all fabrics and basic production operations will become free, as well as everything they need personally, they are unlikely to charge you anything for their latest fashionable clothes. Medicine will not be used, because our bodies will be redesigned to include a smart AI-based immune system, capable of fixing most problems, except, may be, for being in the epicenter of the thermonuclear explosion. So most things you mention will not be needed and those that still will be needed, will be done by professional volunteers for free.
First, there was research done in 1970s-1980s (Sorry, can't give you the reference or details), which showed that most scientists/engineers are very bad at predicting the progress in their field of competence for more than 5-7 years.
Second, there is an observation (not sure if it is supported by hard data) that we tend to overestimate the short-term progress and underestimate the long-term progress. Of course, this is not a fundamental law, but overall this hints that nanoassemblers might become reality much sooner than most people expect, possibly, as soon as in 2020-2030, especially if you take into account the possibilities of technological singularity and mutual acceleration of technologies such as computing, AI and nanotech.
While Princeton is a good school it is *not* MIT. :)
Read Part 2 of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - "The Princeton Years". I doubt you had. Then you will realise how Feynman himself compared Princeton and MIT.
How many building blocks are needed to create millions of lifeforms (millions of trillions [?] of organisms) that can populate an Earth-class planet? You'd be surprised to know that the answer is "less than 100". How many building blocks are needed to create basically everything that we might need and imagine? While optimisation might sometimes require synthesis of advanced and rare molecules, it sounds plausible that "less than 1000" might be correct...
How do you create an arbitrary molecule?
Well, you take a scanning tunneling microscope, you take enough atoms to build a copy of this molecule, you design it and check that it is stable. Then you start building it atom by atom - you take an atom with a STM, you move it to the correct location and you place it there. This is long and tedious, but it can be done. Of course, there are much easier ways to do it, like design a chemical reaction that builds this particular molecule out of simple ones, which can be made in bulk.
Reversible computing basically means doing calculations using operations that can be easily and exactly reversed, including at the lowest level, the level of transistors or other physical mechanisms. By using reversible operations we can avoid dissipating the energy associated with the bits and thus decrease the total disspation of energy in our computer. Since the only functions that cannot in principle be made reversible are input and output, and the bandwidth of these is rather small (compared with internal system bandwidth used in 2020 computers), most of the processing in the future could be done using energy efficient reversible computing. Ballistic computation is reversible computation with energy dissipation so low as to be zero for all practical purposes (i.e. something else is a bottleneck).
A nice reference page with a list of rather informative is maintained at the MIT AI Lab website:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/~cvieri/reversible.html
Oh really? Not five orders of magnitude as I suggested, but just one? And above that a fixed limit - impossible to overcome without a new law of nature? Somehow I doubt that. LOL. On a more practical note, reversible computing might do the trick - the output bandwidth is limited by the human input bandwidth, which can be saturated rather quickly, so the wasted heat can be kept relatively low even with conventional transistors-on-silicon chips.
As for the amount of material, just check out some fanfic sites - almost always LOTR easily sits in the top 3 most popular themes, together with HP and SW. People are eager to create new art based on the Tolkien's world and can easily find topics and new approaches (of course, professional artists are put off by being required to buy the rights from the estate first).
doors that can be broken by demons among other things
I doubt it. If you refer to the moment in the trailer where two monsters break through the door, then most likely it was yet another scripted scene. Sorry to say it, but you sound like a Doom fanboy and not very objective. I am sure Doom 3 will be a quality game, but I am not sure if it will be able to surpass (or even met) our expectations.
We were excited about game graphics for a long time now. Even Quake 2 was visually great with coloured lightning and stuff. Unreal was visually stunning, with large open spaces, cool level design, great-looking lakes and waterfalls, and stuff. Max Payne was amazing with photorealistic textures, models, etc. Basically every major game was visually stunning in some way. The level of hype about Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 is only moderately higher than usually and can be explained by both games being announced and shown quite a time before they are ready. The unique features of these two engines are basically facial animations and per-pixel lightning. Everything else is already used in games you can buy today. If we are to believe the scientists, there is a big drop in our perception of computer-generated humans as realistic right before complete realism. Supposedly, we don't like characters that look "almost right", like characters in Final Fintasy (the movie). If this is so, then there will always be demand for more realism, until we can simulate reality 100% and more. So don't expect games to ignore the eye-candy and return to "good old times" of fun and good gameplay.
;)
BTW, the most visually stunning game currently in development is neither Doom 3, nor Half-Life 2. It is Stalker. It also has by far the most realistic levels in an FPS, dynamic weather system (really cool), and (supposedly) very large levels, great story, great AI, great gameplay. It also has the usual (now) things like rag-doll physics, advanced dynamic lightning and shadows, cool shader effects, etc. It is also the first game about Chernobyl.
It doesn't work that way. People will do what is rational (or irrational, but pleasant/fun) for them to do. If used games offer more value, people will buy them, if not - they won't. And you personally should understand that your actions have a negligible effect on total sales/profits of game developers, so just do what you want to maximize your own utility. If you want to spend 30$ on a game, simply buy one for 50$ and get another one for free (from pirates). The end result for game developers is the same.
Once your organizing atoms you physically cannot do much more.
But you can organize them better. Such as make CPUs 3D, not flat. Or make them not just larger, but more complex (somewhat like the brain).
What we need is a breakthrough as fundamental as the discovery of a new law of nature to get any further.
How about this one: there are three dimensions in the world.
Assuming 50 billion transistors per CPU by the year 2018, by moving from a single layer 9 cm^2 CPU to single volume 27 cm^3 CPU we can increase the transistor count 225000 times, which will help us get through to about 2050, while still using transistors on silicon technology (ignoring the technical issues such as heat dissipation).
I mean, we've seen this kind of crap so often, it is no longer funny, but anyway, I will bite. :)
:) Of course, any constant (moreso exponential) growth will have to stop. How is that news?
1) End draws nearer for Moore?s Law - we do not know that and this might even be false. Remember, Moore himself thought that his observation will only be valid for a decade or so. But instead the end of Moore's Law has been constantly postponed for almost half a century now. It might be that, with increased R&D, in 10 years we will expect the end of Moore's Law in 2025. Then the opposite to the article title is true - the end of Moore's Law is always pushed further into the future.
2) Ignoring the stupid and factually incorrect headline, let's turn to the idea itself that this Law will stop working some day. Well, duh. Obviously, if we are talking about transistors on silicon, we can't increase the density infinitely, because every transistor must have at least one atom and we can only pack the atoms so tightly before they start to fuse.
3) Why do we ignore all computing technologies and concentrate on transistors and silicon alone? Like Kurzweil writes, they are just a small part of the big picture. It might very well be possible to make a computer based on the electron tunneling effect, which complicates traditional transistors.
The truth is - it is possible to fit a shitload of computational capacity in a very small volume. As a minimum, we can fit a computer able to run a human-level AI in a cube 10x10x10 cm. And most likely, we will be able to do 5-20 orders of magnitude better. Most likely, not without Intel's help. Computers will not stop becoming much faster, simply because it is fashionable (or rather it was 10 years ago) to bash Moore's Law.
In short, journalists are complete idiots, we are tired from sensationalist bullshit.
In particular, what if I copyright all facts concerning myself and refuse to grant any company a license? Surely no entity could have a better claim to their "authorship". Say hello to free unlisted telephone numbers. :)
Except for the telephone provider.