I heard a myth a few decades ago, that top-secret work in most fields is at least 50 years ahead of the current published state of the art. I can't begin to imagine what that would look like here.

What would that look like here? What sorts of things do you think are solidly plausible within the next 50 years of work in the field of nano-technology, and how would we detect them "in the field" today, if we were to look for them? How and where might we start to look for them, if we wanted to be likely to find something?

I know there were published discussions about silicon based listening and transmitting devices, bugs, that were smaller than grains of salt. I also know that there was great published fervor over single-pixel cameras, and, impo, I have seen a surprising gap in entangled non-return imaging. I expect "they" have working, single-photon, non-return-imaging cameras on grains of silicon too small for the eye to work with, so perhaps nano drone swarms used for data gathering/surveillance, where each drone is less than 0.1mm across?

When I look at robo-cat, and the alleged robo-squirrels or robo-insects, I think they have such swarms that can be ingested/injected/otherwise-implanted inside animals that don't realize they have become "listening posts". What would you do with a fully-functional jet-engine that was only a few microns across? I remember sub-cellular size bar-codes made by shooting proton based cylindrical holes in silicon, then lithographing layers of gold or other stuff to make the code, then removing the silicon substrate. Could we put markers into people to inform future medical reconstruction such as "non-invasive" 3d printing of organs in-vivo? How would we detect sub-cell-size tagging, or fabrication? I like the idea of nanotech-driven bio-energy harvesting. Why can't we turn trees into solar panels by hacking into their organic photosynthesis?

-EngrStudent

I would love to see a standalone application that runs through enough encryption that the ISP can't selectively speed-up or slow down, that uniformly randomly tracks speed to at least one main (not advertiser/spam) site from my computer through my ISP and makes the results public. I would love to see a non-profit make this happen.

Every single customer of every single ISP would want this software. It would allow hundreds of millions of people to keep someone who has a monopoly over them honest. It would "the next killer windows program".

I think there are hundreds of millions of customers in the US who would like to see this. I think it would put teeth and a few hundred million customers behind "net neutrality" support, and make it happen. It might lead to internet access as a public utility, instead of toll roads and monopolies on driveway - which is what we have now.

Netflix is Amazon, which is insanely huge architecture and throughput. I can't imagine Netflix being the slow one. I can't not imagine your ISP being the slow one. They do this crap all the time. It is crap like this that drives cord-cutting. If AT&T/Verizon/Sprint weren't so miserly in their approach to cell phones, they could stunningly vastly improve their income by making an equivalent service to compete in the land of monopolies. If half of all ISP's are effectively a monopoly, and if the telecom just went "same price for same alleged service" then majority of all ISP customers would move, because ISP's don't make their on-paper commits in real life and lots of people are angry about it. Telecoms can't find the will to do that. Truth, however, would be transformative. If the ISP was measured/shown to be the ass every time they cheat, and they can't not cheat, then you would see what happens.

So the large majority of content on my phone is illegal to search without a warrant
And it gets there from the internet, and goes to secure places on the internet through radio waves

At what point does the use of a stingray without a warrant violate civil rights here?

MIT has "I track body motion by how it disturbs cell signals" technology. Look it up.
They are talking about literally the ability to track everyone all the time without implanting a chip.

"It is all fun and games until" this system tracks mouth motion of two dirty chicago politicians - and that data can be used against them.

There is an infinite supply of cash in the form of student loans that schools have access to. They have increasing demand no matter how high they raise the price.

Quality is no longer a differentiating factor in the nature of the product - why not water it down to maximize revenue?

Oh - you want ethically competent students graduating college? Are you willing to pay for that??

(end cynical comment)

A good fab will cost ~7 billion dollars. A few million dollars is not enough to staff basic operations for a year.
Making chips from Intel spin-off ARM derived engineering isn't the same as making your own.

It is not remotely in-house development. It does not remotely remove the "built-in backdoor" problem. It does not remotely make Russia self-sustainable in terms of design, fabrication, production, distribution, or utilization.

At best this is very weak propaganda for people who know nothing about silicon.

There is not one creationism. To treat it as a monolith is false.

Old-earth creationists are given short shrift in this approach - an approach that is not about being anti-religious. Atheism is not the same thing as pro-Scientific.

Questions of the super-natural are, by definition, outside of the scope of proper science. Science is about the natural.

LabVIEW has C# backbone, very fast develop and deploy and seems acceptable (or even ideal) for web-based applications. You might consider it.

This is going to come out. Not if, just when.
When it does - lots of local heads will roll. Politically, not literally.

The scope is very large. The level of participation is very large. The value of a leak is huge, so the first leaker wins the lottery - made for life. Do police get paid enough for that to make economic sense? nope.

The blowback for those who administer this outside of "required to cooperate" is huge. The only response of the leaders that gets them off the hook is to pass that buck upward. "The law made me do it" or "the feds made me do it" will save their careers, some.

Eventually it has to break. How is it handled at that point?
Look at the NSA/Cisco/IBM related consequences of Snowden and imagine that at a local level.

That or those who rule by consent of the governed would want to educate and train the people (not serfs) under them so that there is sustainable rule of law AND good quality of freedom enjoyed in the land of the free, home of the brave, place where justice wears a blindfold. Too bad those way up in power are less interested in that quality - they are the ones with the greatest ability to support it.

Use of a name like that has risk. Doesn't comcast risk a class-action suit by those whose names were falsely named?

I don't need Amazon. When I want to buy it - I go as far upstream as I can.
No need to have more hands touching the product, adding actual if not communicated costs.
Why isn't this a losing strategy for Amazon in this bullying?

Cisco can make lots of money selling hardware that moves different streams at different speeds.

I don't like it. I don't have to buy their products. I don't have to shop at places that use them for infrastructure. I don't have to support politicians that want to break net neutrality.

Cisco may see that sort of (blood) money in their future, but it isn't going to be coming out of my pocket. Maybe some other folks agree.

I think they are working to answer a good question, but not necessarily a high value question. Why does distance matter? Scientific inquiry is good, but the goal is return of value to humanity. If you worked on making computer parts that could transmit information faster and more reliably over a very short distance, somewhere between a meter and a millimeter, then you could plausibly improve the lives of most of the folks on the planet, or at least enable them to check slashdot or facebook more cheaply.

Our leadership has no vision for anything more than lining their pockets. Long term success of the nation - nah.

Let the people learn to speak chinese ... or russian.

Excellent and well articulated point. Thank you.