As a lifelong reader of IT mags, I have an experience of reviewers downplaying the role of new technologies. I may bring up uncountable examples: the CD-ROM, the Internet, flash memories, digital cameras and so on. Every time they test a starting technology here's the comment: "it's not a revolution". Sure. No technology is a revolution from the start, because no technology grows from nothing. There's always a previous technology and a following evolution. That's how mobile internet slowly evolved from GSM 9.600baud unstable and almost unusable connections to the current state of the art of 3G, HSPA+, which is a 3.5G technology to say the least. Also, the reviewer manage to look dumb when he says the only obvious improvements of 4G is latency at an ADSL line level. Geez.. that's what we were ACTUALLY AND BADLY IN NEED since the whole mobile internet began to take off! Latencies today make you want to die: what use can you make of a 7.2Mbps HSDPA line when it takes forever just for your mobile browser to begin transfers? And no way for a whole set of applications to ever appear on mobiles before this lag issue is worked out, on line multiplayer for example, which doesn't allow a mobile connection to be elegible as a replacement of ADSL lines. So, 4G really and by far improves what actually needed to be improved, it isn't just a fancy double digit transfer rate to stick on a mobile device. And we should wait 3 to 5 years, dying on our 3G laggy connections before adopting it?? Geeeez... And besides all this, the reviewer here takes for granted what 4G carriers will be advertising is WiMax. This is perhaps true in the United States, but here in Europe there's almost no plan for WiMax and all carriers are about to start upgrading from 3G directly to LTE. LTE is a more recent technology and is better than WiMax. If you really want to compare some 4G labeled technology to the most advanced blend of 3G you have to take LTE for a test.

ROTFL! So we have to print more?? Lovely!! Sure I'd never bet we would have ended up saying so when the whole information technology revolution starting from the 80s emphasized the "no paper at all" eco-compatible point of it. And, you know? Before the digital transition was complete, we already printed way too much, in the eighties and the nineties. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of our portable digital devices and the ease of accessing every document through the Internet, printed medias are finally becoming a thing of the past. Even State bureaucracy here in Italy has gone digital now, that's true progress and we don't absolutely need to go back. Printers' manufacturers should better resign themselves.

I don't see the point in saying the number of new articles has decreased in that last 2 years. It's like saying I'm not satisfied of my 34.347.293 volumes enciclopedia because it grows only 2 volumes per months and not 4. Wikipedia is already the biggest enciclopedia on earth, nothing compare to it, there are articles about things traditional enciclopedias would never dream to cover such as consumer products, software programms, videogames characters, movies, etc..etc.. I think the number of articles has decreased simply because there aren't so many new topics to talk about and general knowledge has already been completely covered. Wikipedia keeps being one of the most valuable assets of the whole Internet.

Another dark age again? You mean the strong live and the "weak" dies? I don't feel any nostalgia for "state of nature". Screw it. Look at how animals live, it doesn't worth living that way.

Yeah, quantum computing is NOT a necessary requisite for strong A.I. . We will get to it nevertheless. That's what IBM engineers are saying.

You're talking about very distant eras. The technology that used to be known then has nothing to do with what we know today, just as those eras don't resemble ours in any way. Since it was the beginning of civilization it's normal technological advancemenent were erratic and causal, you're talking about people who didn't even know the concept of "progress"! But now we're progressing at gradually increasing rhythm. Moore's law has always been proved true, according to IBM it will be so at least until 2020. By then we'll have moved to new technologies such as quantum computing, so Moore's law will be still valid. I don't know what do you mean as for progress being a "law of nature". But if humans are a law of nature, then technological progress is. Besides, this is a non-issue: technology is rapidly advancing for sure (just take a look at regular advancements in nanotechnology, genetics and information technology...) the problem is if we are going autodestroy ourself before getting mature enough to exclude this possibility, in the next few centuries.

500.000 years to go? Come on... As a race our fate is going to be sorted in the next 500 years, and I'm giving us a long time... In the next few centuries we will have found a way to make the Alcubierre's Warp Drive theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_Warp_Drive) feasible otherwise it will simply means that we are extinct.

Wait before saying Kurzweil is a delusional fanatic. Have you actually read his books? They make sense, it's not just a bunch of futuristic blabbing. I'm critic and quite picky about futuristic visions, I always ask "why", and Kurzweil books aren't the place where these questions end up unanswered. You can say he's too optimistic, or that's he's right, but I will never say he's a charlatan. Otherwise every other expert trying to make a guess on the future using statistical tools should be labeled the same. Sure, some claims seem unrealistic now, but how much of the technology you're using now would have considered unrealistic, for example in the eighties? So think twice, wait and live to see, it's a possible outcome, not ridiculous science-fiction.