While I don't want to sound like a spoil sport, but this product, as I see it, is something I will never buy.
1. It will proably be far to expensive. I think 800$+ is a good estimate.
2. It won't be durable enough. It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating. Hard Drives don't stand up to punishment well. A couple of drops or a hard bump while the disk is spinning and what you have is a 800$ paperweight.
3. Harddrive + Magnet = MP3 Mush. Nuf said.
4. It will break on its own in time. I can't count the number of harddrives I have lost to corrupted sectors. On my PC I can at least isolate and try and eliminate them, but I doubt you'll have that capbility on this thing.
For those reasons I think I'll stick with my RIO, at least for a little while longer.
I think that it is important to note that any study that attempts to predict the far future based upon the present is doomed to be inacurate by at least 10-25% per decade.
There are just to many factors to try and predict. For example, what if India and Pakistan(sp) go and duke it out with nukes? What will happen to the world population then? Or if the US & China go at it. These are just situations possible today. Who knows what technological or sociological ocurences could through of the results in the future?
Furthermore we are attempting to predict something unprecidented in the history of the Earth. Never before on has one speices dommintated all areas of life in global civilisation filling all areas of the planet. It has never happend before. In fact, the biomass of humans on the planet right now is proably greater than that of any other speices from kingdom Animila ever.
I'm just trying to say that any study of this sort that tries to predict such a highly variable things such as human population, based only upon the present, in a time period so far away, should be taken with a grain of salt. This study truly means nothing, not the dawning of a new era, or the end of the world.
Ahh Nanotechnology. The key to the future, or not?
The way I see it nanotechnology is the future, and it is only a question of when it will be implemented not if. To me it seems it will be a long time to we see nanotechnology implemented on a large scale.
First their are a number of practical problems in the way. The biggest one I see is computational and storage power. If each one of these little nanites is going to be self replicating, then it is going to need to contain, within itself, instructions to build a complete replica of itself with the materials it can find. This in itself is no small task, as the nanities will be neccessarly very complex machines. Also necessar are instructions to do all the various tasks that the machine will be designed to caryout. Human cells are increadibly complex living machines. The idea that a nanoscale machine will be able to contain directions for repairing all of the millions of types of cells in the human body to me seems to be a vary long way off, if not impossible altogether.
Going along with the necessity of storage space is the necessity of processing power. Nanities will not be opperating in the ideal enviroment. They will have to make on the fly desions about what to do in various situations. Now while the level of sophistication here is not as great as elsware. It will still need to have a decent amount of realtime processing power.
Also associated with the previous two issues are the ramifications of bugs in the system. If my computer crashes, it is a bad thing, but not necessarly life threatening. But if I have 1000s of nanites crawling around in my body, and things go wrong with their code, I could be in vary real danger.
These are just some of the problemes that must be overcome for nanotechnology to succed on a large scale. There are many, many, more. From power generation, to nano to macro level interface. It is a truly monumental task to be acheived.
On the other hand, once nanotechnology is perfected, the world will be transformed into a very, very diffrent place. The rammifications boggel my mind. We would see a world completely transformed. No longer would "things" have value. Why should they when a couple of nanities could build it out of some dirt in your lawn. The only things of value would be ideas and certain raw materials. The effect this would have upon our society would be truly incrediable. For a possible future I suggest you read the book Slant.
Slashdot Mirror
1. It will proably be far to expensive. I think 800$+ is a good estimate.
2. It won't be durable enough. It's been said before, but I think it bears repeating. Hard Drives don't stand up to punishment well. A couple of drops or a hard bump while the disk is spinning and what you have is a 800$ paperweight.
3. Harddrive + Magnet = MP3 Mush. Nuf said.
4. It will break on its own in time. I can't count the number of harddrives I have lost to corrupted sectors. On my PC I can at least isolate and try and eliminate them, but I doubt you'll have that capbility on this thing.
For those reasons I think I'll stick with my RIO, at least for a little while longer.
There are just to many factors to try and predict. For example, what if India and Pakistan(sp) go and duke it out with nukes? What will happen to the world population then? Or if the US & China go at it. These are just situations possible today. Who knows what technological or sociological ocurences could through of the results in the future?
Furthermore we are attempting to predict something unprecidented in the history of the Earth. Never before on has one speices dommintated all areas of life in global civilisation filling all areas of the planet. It has never happend before. In fact, the biomass of humans on the planet right now is proably greater than that of any other speices from kingdom Animila ever.
I'm just trying to say that any study of this sort that tries to predict such a highly variable things such as human population, based only upon the present, in a time period so far away, should be taken with a grain of salt. This study truly means nothing, not the dawning of a new era, or the end of the world.
The way I see it nanotechnology is the future, and it is only a question of when it will be implemented not if. To me it seems it will be a long time to we see nanotechnology implemented on a large scale.
First their are a number of practical problems in the way. The biggest one I see is computational and storage power. If each one of these little nanites is going to be self replicating, then it is going to need to contain, within itself, instructions to build a complete replica of itself with the materials it can find. This in itself is no small task, as the nanities will be neccessarly very complex machines. Also necessar are instructions to do all the various tasks that the machine will be designed to caryout. Human cells are increadibly complex living machines. The idea that a nanoscale machine will be able to contain directions for repairing all of the millions of types of cells in the human body to me seems to be a vary long way off, if not impossible altogether.
Going along with the necessity of storage space is the necessity of processing power. Nanities will not be opperating in the ideal enviroment. They will have to make on the fly desions about what to do in various situations. Now while the level of sophistication here is not as great as elsware. It will still need to have a decent amount of realtime processing power.
Also associated with the previous two issues are the ramifications of bugs in the system. If my computer crashes, it is a bad thing, but not necessarly life threatening. But if I have 1000s of nanites crawling around in my body, and things go wrong with their code, I could be in vary real danger.
These are just some of the problemes that must be overcome for nanotechnology to succed on a large scale. There are many, many, more. From power generation, to nano to macro level interface. It is a truly monumental task to be acheived.
On the other hand, once nanotechnology is perfected, the world will be transformed into a very, very diffrent place. The rammifications boggel my mind. We would see a world completely transformed. No longer would "things" have value. Why should they when a couple of nanities could build it out of some dirt in your lawn. The only things of value would be ideas and certain raw materials. The effect this would have upon our society would be truly incrediable. For a possible future I suggest you read the book Slant.