The only thing America has now is an entertainment industry and bullshit I.P. laws.

You forgot the almighty Defense Industry. That won't go out of fashion even if the U.S. sinks a few trillion more dollars in debts.

Also, the agriculture "industry" (haha). Yes, I think American agriculture is an industry, the land that invented the term "factory farming".

Unlike the other poor Asian nations such as Thailand or the Philipines, China does not have a incompetent leadership mired in corruption.

Chinese corruption is all about maintaining the ruling class's collective privileges not about cold hard cash or the proverbial Swiss bank account.

Only at first. You then use the replicator to produce the small-scale renewable energy plant needed to power the replicator and holodeck.

And why not? I'm not a rocket scientist, but there's nothing in the literature I've read thus far that says hybrids can't be scaled up.

True. But this has always been a puzzle to me. Why is heat shielding less important going up than going down? Why has nobody invented a spacecraft that can aerobrake without turning into a fireball? "Descent" velocity shouldn't be higher than escape velocity, right?

We'll never, I repeat never, see Star Trek-style transporters because information will always be cheaper to transmit than it is to transport matter. The end point of Star Trek-style transporters requires the reversal of Einstein's famous equation, converting energy back into matter. On the other hand, it is far, far more efficient simply to beam the information that could reproduce (clone) a person out of matter at the receiving station. This is akin to emailing the blueprint for, say, making an iPhone, rather than shipping it to the recipient. At a great enough distance, it would cheaper to clone a person from his or her genetic information using a molecular assembler (a souped-up 3D printer). The clone can then be programmed using the consciousness of the original (mind uploading). Far-fetched, yes. But vastly more energy efficient than effecting a reverse nuclear explosion.

I fear seeing the urban equivalent of the unmanned aerial vehicle. If anything these ULVs (unmanned land vehicles) should be confined to supervised bomb disposal work. No general purpose robocops, please. Would-be drivers should still be tested for their road skills, just as pilots have to be licensed even when it's already possible to fly a plane by autopilot.

I'd mod you funny.

But taking your post seriously: I don't expect machines to be smarter than us. Or at least all of us. What I fear seeing in the future are a select class, enhanced via cybernetics or genetics (or both), lording it over the rest of the human race. There would be a kind of cybernetic divide, analogous to today's digital divide, between this enhanced "uberclass" and the non-enhanced, technologically disadvantaged underclass. Of course, this is the dystopian scenario. The singularity could, after all, turn out to be a geek utopia.

While I appreciate (the existence of) the service, methinks this is a trademark suit just begging to happen. I mean take a look at their logo [png graphic]. It really looks like an official Google site. In this age of massive information sharing, I have my doubts about patents and copyrights in general.

However with patents, I'd give the trademark owner the benefit of the doubt (you're not necessarily evil if you sue for trademark infringement), unless your trademark happens to be a pure (uncombined) dictionary word (in English or whatever language) or a common or well-etablished proper name (e.g. Smith or Madonna). Thus, I'd throw out any lawsuits involving Apple(tm) or Oracle(tm) but not Facebook(tm), Microsoft(tm), Apple Computers(tm) or Apple Records(tm). Obvious parodies are another matter, so there might be room for site names like Googlevil.

[*] I'm using trademark in the general sense to refer to symbols or names that make up the business identity of a company.

How about a netbook called FaceBook? Or a co-branded release of Firefox or Chrome called FaceBrowser?

I think this is the point of a lot of non-portable high-technology. You manufacture them to gain experience because maybe, just maybe, there'll soon be a market for robot servers. I mean, look at electric cars. There are a lot of companies trying to make one, and yet it's less profitable (if at all) than the standard gas/diesel models.

Japan has a rapidly aging population, so having a significant, if not exactly huge market, for service industry robots is by no means a long shot. Perhaps the future will be one robot to do them all, cut and wash your hair, give you a massage and perhaps, uhm, other things. But who knows, maybe specialist robots will be the rule. One robot to wash you hair, another to cut it, still another to give you a mani/pedicure.