What this demonstrates is a manufacturing method for producing nanoscale machinery. The concept is, with a series of simple experiments conducted in many labs, enough data is obtained to create an accurate nanoscale design simulation. (many of this experiments have been done already). You would then design a set of nanoscale machine parts - sensors, motors, gears, and so on in the software then create prototypes very laboriously and at very high cost using a tool like this microscope at IBM.

Once you have tested the prototypes and debugged them, correcting mistakes in the software model of them as you go, you'd then design a nanoscale machine that could place atoms down according to a template. You'd build that machine at even higher cost, using hundreds of microscopes like the one at IBM, and test it.

Anyways, a series of iterations later (and about a trillion dollars, realistically) you'd have a machine that could PRINT ITSELF and you no longer need the microscopes. By print itself, I mean it can slowly manufacture itself if kept in a clean vacuum chamber, supplied with clean DC power, atomic intermediates as substrate, and a high bitrate stream of the design files for itself from a control computer system. Nevertheless, exponential growth would be possible and you'd be very close to changing the world forever.

Google glass has to have a powerful ARM processor and a high resolution display to implement it's specs. 2013 technology can only reduce the power consumption for that to a certain extent. And glass is supposed to be a wearable pair of glasses, so the battery mass can only be so high before it causes pain for the wearer.

A wire trailing down from the user's neck to a battery pack elsewhere is a potential solution...but wires like that get tangled up.

Maybe a bleeding edge higher density experimental battery? There are a few like that with more power density (about double) than the best standard lithium ion packs. Of course, such batteries are more likely to fail by catching fire, and this would be in the worst possible place.

Offload more computation to the android smartphone that goes with the glass? Still have to run the radios at a high bitrate to get things like the camera feed. Also this would make the smartphone mandatory.

Ideas? The concept here is awesome, but it de fact REQUIRES a powerful machine that can do image recognition in realtime, monitor gps and heading, read street signs, etc etc etc. This in turn means many millions of active transistors.

The only thing I can think of that just might work is a custom ASIC that provides hardware implementation of the most common mathematical functions performed by the most common glass application. You can get 10 :1 better power efficiency using a custom ASIC to implement the logic instead of a general purpose chip. The catch is, the cost to create such a chip is exorbitant.

Are you saying that when a Boeing aircraft is actually sold, the buyers and the sales team get onboard, they take off, fly out over the nearest ocean, and sign the bill of sale while IN FLIGHT? That's crazy amusing.

Are "seed factories" even possible with current levels of tech? I thought we needed molecular manufacturing to build credible devices.

The way I see it, currently we lack the "pre-requisite" technology to do practical space exploitation like this. If we had molecular manufacturing, we could mass produce rocket components autonomously in giant automated factories on earth that can self replicate the parts used in themselves. We could build true von neuman probes and spacecraft that could go out and build real seed factories, etc to really do it.

Large space stations with thousands of inhabitants, etc would all be possible.

But step 0 is R&D in developing molecular manufacturing, which requires an enormous research effort. Right now, there's a few scientists poking around with simulations of a method to covalently bond carbon to other carbon on a surface. This should be where all the research dollars go.

Try to think about this solution with a blank slate view for a moment. Don't assign qualitative values as to whether an approach is "good" or not.

Mining for resources ultimately comes down to (resources gained)/(labor + energy + fixed costs + materials).

There are very huge amounts of resources available deeper in the earth's crusts, in the oceans, in the wilds of undeveloped countries, etc. All of them require somewhat more of one of the variables in that equation than mines that are open today.

Consider the case of space mining. Labor requirements : enormous, because each piece of space-rated hardware must be assembled by hand because space stuff tends to use one-off designs and of the best possible quality. Energy : enormous. You have to provide incredible amounts of energy to get asteroids to a recovery location near the Earth. Fixed costs : enormous : you have to develop a bunch of new technology for this to even be possible. And materials : enormously expensive because the rocket equation demands that you throw away most of your spacecraft to even reach low earth orbit.

Versus opening a new mine somewhere on earth, or mining a little bit deeper.

Now, there is one advantage to space mining : no one has legal claims that can be enforced on any of those celestial bodies. In the future, when we have radically more advanced technology, it might be cheaper to send self-replicating robots out somewhere than to try to unleash those same robots onto land on earth that someone is willing to fight over. We don't have that kind of technology, yet, and are many decades from developing it.

One other nasty fact : high performance rocket engines need several nuclear weapons worth of highly enriched uranium as fuel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket

If you actually wanted to push a mountain of metals to near the earth in a reasonable amount of time, you'll want a very high performance engine. However, such an engine not only has weapons proliferation risks, once you get the asteroid under power you've got a weapon in itself.

I have an alternate proposal. The total cost of investigation + prosecution must be available for the defense. That is, if the cops and the crime lab and the prosecutors office spend $500,000 on the case, then you get that amount for the defense.

The reason is simple - if someone is clearly guilty, the investigation is comparatively cheap. And if the cops spend a million bucks on prosecution, this usually means their case is weak and they are trying to amplify this weak signal as much as possible.

The game was rigged against those white males from the start, like you think, but it's a matter of genetics, not society. Males must take risks in order to have a chance to reproduce, there's evidence that only about 40% of males managed to successfully reproduce in past societies. (this information comes from digging up old bones and tracing lineages)

"Risk taking" is implemented by genes coding for neural networks that can have a wider variety of behaviors, some good, some bad.

If my hypothesis is correct, and it is supported by reams of overwhelming evidence, so it most likely is, then this means that at any given time there is a nonzero chance of a young male wanting to do something bad like this. As long as we have a free society where the means to commit mass murder are conveniently accessible, events like this will happen.

The only way to prevent them is to remove the freedom.

This is not true. Certain chemical reactions are 1 way, and the loss of lead from the plates is also 1 way.

If you wanted to keep a lead acid running for 100 years, you'd have to keep building a new one using the old one as materials to recycle.

I'm trying to figure out if any user, worldwide, would be affected by this.

As pointed out in another comment, there aren't very many applications that will work. If anyone, worldwide, is using it as a desktop OS, they probably are on an older kernel anyway.

As for embedded systems : since new 386 CPUs have not been produced in 5 years, there's not anyone who would be designing a new embedded system that will use a recent kernel. There's old systems deployed in the field - but why would anyone try to upgrade an old embedded system to a new OS and kernel? A good embedded system is supposed to be reliable and simple enough it needs only minor bug fixes throughout it's deployed lifespan.

From TFA : Temperature tolerant chocolate has been around since the 1930s, but it sucks because it becomes too hard and tastes bad.

I can't wait to try a bar of this stuff and compare it to the normal kind. Obviously, since it doesn't melt in your mouth, it won't be the same, but if it is soft and easy to chew, and disolves in saliva, maybe the eating experience will be similar.

Personally, I find the most enjoyable chocolate to be Hershey's Symphony bars that have been frozen.

Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go? That for anything but an item that they picked up recently, a human worker would need to be told where exactly to go to pick up the nearest item X. And even if one of the human workers did remember the last place they saw X, that spot probably is not the closest instance of X. This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.

No competent engineer would even consider adding code to allow the automated car to consider swerving off the bridge. In fact, the internal database the automated car would need of terrain features (hard to "see" a huge dropoff like a bridge with sensors aboard the car) would have the sides of the bridge explicitly marked as a deadly obstacle.

The car's internal mapping system of drivable parts of the surrounding environment would thus not allow it to even consider swerving in that direction. Instead, the car would crash if there were no other alternatives. Low level systems would prepare the vehicle as best as possible for the crash to maximize the chances the occupants survive.

Or put another way : you design and engineer the systems in the car to make decisions that lead to a good outcome on average. You can't possibly prepare it for edge cases like dodging a bus with 40 people. Possibly the car might be able to estimate the likely size of another vehicle (by measuring the surface area of the front) and weight decisions that way (better to crash into another small car than an 18 wheeler) but not everything can be avoided.

Automated cars won't be perfect. Sometimes, the perfect combination of bad decisions, bad weather, or just bad luck will cause fatal crashes. They will be a worthwhile investment if the chance of a fatal accident were SIGNIFICANTLY lower, such that virtually any human driver, no matter how skilled, would be better served riding in an automated vehicle. Maybe a 10x lower fatal accident rate would be an acceptable benchmark?

    If I were on the design team, I'd make 4 point restraints mandatory for the occupants, and design the vehicle for survivability in high speed crashes including from the side.

The in-efficiency of trying to do that...is mind boggling. Most of the malware authors probably aren't even within the U.S. Extradition is very slow and expensive and does not always succeed. It is possible for malware authors to cover their tracks so effectively that even finding out who they are is de facto impossible.

Basically, I see trying to eliminate malware as being about as practical as trying to eliminate bacteria from the planet. Much better to secure your system so it can't get through.

All software changes that address cybersecurity threats should be validated before installation to ensure they do not affect the safety and effectiveness of the medical devices.

Validated. That costs a bunch of money. And this basically is saying that if the manufacturer DOESN'T validate the changes to the FDA's satisfaction (meaning do a heck of a lot more testing than just applying the patch real quick and booting it up and making sure it's still working) then they are totally vulnerable to lawsuits.

Also, just as importantly : the manufacturer does not receive money from medical devices already sold. Their new ones (with new hardware which is why they can't back-port the software) are where the revenue is. In fact, it's sort of beneficial if the hospital's old equipment starts running slowly and badly because they can push their new gear (now with enhanced cybersecurity!)