Agreed. I never used a case with my iPhone, and a protruding lens would've been annoying and probably gotten caught on things on my pockets.

... but I do admit that I'm the only person I know of my friends who doesn't have a case on his phone.

If Kip Thorne can win a year's worth of Playboys for his bet that Cygnus X1 was a Black Hole, when current theory from Professor Hawking says Black Holes don't really exist, then can Professor Thorne please give me a year's subscription to the porno of my choice due to the non-existent bet that this wasn't such a star?

Although I agree and would rather have the additional battery, most people put their phones in a case, which adds some thickness... The lens will protrude into the case cross-sectional region, allowing the overall phone+protruding-lens+case to be thinner than a thicker-phone+flat-lens+case.

Memory transistors are about a thousand times larger than CPU transistors. Do try to keep up.

If you read the article, in the instances where the automation didn't know what to do, it pulled over and stopped:

The driver doesn't need to react in time - the car does that. The driver merely needs to make the next decision to start moving again and guide the car to where it needs to go.

I've a very good idea that RAM prices are artificially inflated, that the fab plants are poorly managed, that the overheads are unnecessarily high because of laziness and the mentality in the regions producing RAM.

I'm absolutely certain that 15nm-scale RAM on sticks the same size as sticks used today would cost not one penny more but would have a capacity greater than I've outlined.

It could be done tomorrow. The tools all exist since the scale is already used. The silicon wafers are good enough, if they can manage chips 4x and 9x the size of a current memory chip with next to zero discards, then creating the far smaller dies (so you can discard more chips and still get the same absolute yield) is not an issue. It would reduce idle time for fabs, as fabs are currently run semi-idled to avoid the feast/famine cycle of prior years but 15nm would let them produce other chips in high demand, soaking up all the extra capacity.

What you end up with is less waste, therefore lower overheads, therefore higher profit. The chip companies like profit. They're not going to pass on discounts, you getting a thousand times the RAM for the same price is discount enough!

Not really. RAM is only expensive because of the transistor size used. Fab plants are expensive. Packaging is expensive. Shipping is expensive. Silicon is expensive. If you add all that up, you end up with expensive products.

Because fab plants are running very large transistor sizes, you get low yields and high overheads.

Let's see what happens when you cut the transistor size by three orders of magnitude...

For the same size of packaging, you get three orders of magnitude more RAM. So, per megabyte, packaging drops in cost also by three orders of magnitude.

Now, that means your average block of RAM is now around 8 Tb, which is not a perfect fit but it's good enough. The same amount of silicon is used, so there's no extra cost there. The shipping cost doesn't change. As mentioned, the packaging doesn't change. So all your major costs don't change at all.

Yield? The yield for microprocessors is just fine and they're on about the scale discussed here. In fact, you get better. A processor has to work completely. A memory chip also has to work completely, but it's much smaller. If the three round it fail testing, it doesn't affect that one. So you end up with around a quarter of the rejection rate per unit area of silicon to a full microprocessor.

So you've got great yield, same overheads, but... yes... you can use the fab plant to produce ASICs and microprocessors when demand for memory is low, so you've not got idle plant. Ever.

The cost of this memory is therefore exactly the same as the cost of a stick of conventional RAM of 1/1000th the capacity.

Size - Exactly the same as the stick of RAM.

Power budget - of no consequence. When the machine is running, you're drawing from mains power. When the machine is not running, you are refreshing the dirty bits of memory only, nothing else. And 99.9% of the time, there won't be any because sensible OS' like Linux sync before a shutdown. The 0.1% of the time, the time when your server has been hit by a power cut, the hard drive is spun down to save UPS and the main box is in the lowest possible energy mode, that's when this sort of system matters. Even on low energy mode, buffers will need flushing, housekeeping will need to be done, transactions will need to be completed. This system would give you all that.

And the time when the machine is fully powered, fully up? Your hard drive spends most of its time still spun down. Not for power, although it'll chew through a fair bit - mechanical devices always do and the high-speed drives being proposed will chew through far, far more. They'll be spun down because a running hard drive suffers rapid deterioration. Can you believe hard drives only last 5 years??! Keep the damn thing switched off until last minute, then do continuous write. Minimizes read head movement (there's practically none), minimizes bearing wear-and-tear, eliminates read head misalignment (a lot of times, you can write the entire disk in one go, so what the hell do you care if the tracks are not perfectly in line with the ones they're replacing?) and (by minimizing read head time over the drive) minimizes the risk of a head crash.

I reckon this strategy should double the expected lifetime of drives, so take the cost of one 10 Tb drive and calculate how much power you'd need to consume extra for the memory in order for the memory's power budget to exceed the value of what you're doing.

Oh, and another thing. Because I'm talking memory sticks, you only need to buy one, subsequent drives of the same or lower capacity would not need to have memory there. You could simply migrate it. RAM seems to hold up ok on old computers, so you can probably say that the stick is good for the original drive and the replacement. That halves the cost of the memory per drive.

So, no, I don't see anything unduly optimistic. I think your view of what the companies could be doing is unduly pessimistic and more in line with what the chip companies tell you that you should think than what the chip companies can actually do.

Agreed, which is why it should be there.

Nonetheless, there needs to be a backup plan in case it does turn out that the NSA or GCHQ have a backdoor to it. If it's been deliberately compromised (and I'm not keen on changes made AFTER it had been approved as SHA3 for that very reason), then the more paranoid amongst us need to have a backup plan. I certainly wouldn't suggest HTTPS over TOR use algorithms that are considered three-letter-agency-unsafe for any part of the security protocol, for example, since they're the ones doing most of the attacking.

There's no easy answer to this, but I think that having SHA3 and NESSIE as the two standard choices and limited support for some third algorithm for when approval simply isn't good enough is the only real solution. The first two can be standard on all browsers and by all certificate authorities, the third only needs support on special-purpose browsers and OpenCA/OpenSSL/LibreSSL (since most uber-secure sites will roll their own certs).

High capacity I can understand, but high speed is senseless. At current transistor sizes, you could easily have 10Tb of battery-backed RAM on a hard drive. You can then peel the data off the hard drive into RAM and write changes when there are enough or when a sync command is sent. RAM doesn't eat battery significantly, it only needs to maintain state and then only on dirty portions. That'll easily buy enough time to survive power outages and Windows crashes.

If everything is in RAM, access times are insignificant for always-on machines (the ones likely to need 10Tb of disk space). Since writes can be postponed until critical, the disk can spend most of the time totally powered down.

Now, if you're REALLY clever, you have twice that RAM. One lot for working space (which doesn't need battery backing) and one lot for writing to disk. This second set can be permanently defragmented, with writes designed to be compact on space and the hard drive spun to specifically provide for that.

Microsoft will probably implement SHA0. There's no value in SHA2 (and variants) now that SHA3 has been ratified, since SHA2 is just SHA1 with some lengthening. If SHA1 is brutally compromised, SHA2 will fall shortly after. Best to switch to NESSIE (Whirlpool) and SHA3 (something that sounds vulgar).

Having said that, SHA3 involved dubious mid-contest rule changes and spurrious rejection criteria that might well have been NSA-inspired. I'd take a very close look at the Hashing Lounge for any second or third round reject that shows greater resilience across the board (pre-image vulnerabilities, etc) as a backup in case NESSIE and SHA3 are seriously compromised.

That's why you should never hire people, just small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

I deny all knowledge about the epson fx spontaneously catching fire.

The short circuit that blew up two power transformers and an embedded computer had nothing to do with me. And you didn't see me. And I was in disguise anyway.

Nobody saw me insert the radio direction finder valves into the R1155, switch it on and jam all televisions in the neighbourhood.

So, no, I've no knowledge of using technology to get into trouble. None whatsoever.

Those who are dead via saline solution can be told once they're... ummm... undead.

In hindsight, everything looks trivial. That's why you need to find actual prior art that invalidates the claims. And in particular, mimicking something in the real world may still be patentable, if the patent goes to the method of how it's mimicked. For example, we're trained from birth to recognize faces, but would you say that a facial recognition technology for a computer would never be patentable, because it just mimics that real-world ability? No - it depends on what's actually in the claims, and whether they go to how that simulation is implemented, rather than just the general idea of "recognizing faces" or "unlocking something".

What galls me the most is the panty-wetting over a government-granted monopoly trying to maintain its government granted monopoly when that very same government tries to compete using taxpayer dollars as a subsidy.

The outrage should be against government involvement period. If governments didn't grant local monopolies, there would be real competition among the real companies, and no perceived need for the government competition which is only competitive because it has the taxpayer subsidy.