Actually, I find the whole latency argument specious at best. The whole point of serializing RAM allows the increased bandwidth _and_ clock speeds. Thus for this type of argument you may contend that the latency of Rambus is 30% (I'm not sure what the actual number is) longer than it's current DDR SDRAM competitor, but just remember that Rambus will easily scale upwards 30% faster than SDRAM. This _negates_ any latency advantage that SDRAM had, but also gives a huge pipeline burst advantage to the Rambus component, especially as the speeds increase. It's similar to the PowerPC versus Alpha comparison. The PowerPCs generally had short pipelines versus the Alpha long pipelines (usually more than double the length). This allows the lower clocked PowerPC to keep up with fast clocked Alpha for the most part, but the Alpha is easier to manufacture at higher clocks than PowerPCs. Just look at the '2nd gen' motorola G4 chip, moving from a 5 stage pipe to a 7 stage in order to make clock up easier. Rambus may be roughly equal to SDRAM today, but once the speeds crank up Rambus will leave SDRAM in the legacy parts bin.
I think that once you start down that slippery slope, you'll find it hard to reverse it. What is the definition of severely handicapped? In two more centuries we may view handicapped individuals as less than perfect, genetic aberrations who need to be fixed or culled. Society itself may start opening up this practice in order to achieve two goals, neither wholly altruistic. 1) Organ recycling/Lab research. 2) Lowering apparent social cost. While both may not apparently affect the parents of afflicted children directly. Who's to say that some rich person or group would not offer money for healthy organs and tissues to those parents?
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Actually, I find the whole latency argument specious at best. The whole point of serializing RAM allows the increased bandwidth _and_ clock speeds. Thus for this type of argument you may contend that the latency of Rambus is 30% (I'm not sure what the actual number is) longer than it's current DDR SDRAM competitor, but just remember that Rambus will easily scale upwards 30% faster than SDRAM. This _negates_ any latency advantage that SDRAM had, but also gives a huge pipeline burst advantage to the Rambus component, especially as the speeds increase. It's similar to the PowerPC versus Alpha comparison. The PowerPCs generally had short pipelines versus the Alpha long pipelines (usually more than double the length). This allows the lower clocked PowerPC to keep up with fast clocked Alpha for the most part, but the Alpha is easier to manufacture at higher clocks than PowerPCs. Just look at the '2nd gen' motorola G4 chip, moving from a 5 stage pipe to a 7 stage in order to make clock up easier. Rambus may be roughly equal to SDRAM today, but once the speeds crank up Rambus will leave SDRAM in the legacy parts bin.
I think that once you start down that slippery slope, you'll find it hard to reverse it. What is the definition of severely handicapped? In two more centuries we may view handicapped individuals as less than perfect, genetic aberrations who need to be fixed or culled. Society itself may start opening up this practice in order to achieve two goals, neither wholly altruistic. 1) Organ recycling/Lab research. 2) Lowering apparent social cost. While both may not apparently affect the parents of afflicted children directly. Who's to say that some rich person or group would not offer money for healthy organs and tissues to those parents?