Re: poly: Emerging Technology

On Jan 3, 9:46am, GBurch1 wrote:

> chafe at the "last mile" problem for my own personal connection here at home
> (my cable company keeps promising a fiber optic connect "in about 18 months"
> -- and they've made this promise for 2 years.) Is wireless the best bet?
  
Or more cable competition? The company in Pasadena has been muttering
and slow, although I think some people are getting connections. I don't
know if the problem is technology, cost (labor) or simple monopoly
crudescence.

> tenacity of the CRT. I have been expecting a solid-state flat-screen
> breakthrough "any day now" for 5 years. Last Christmas, I finally asked a

Well, they are getting better. What I want far more than a normal LCD
is the digital paper people have been working on. A very thin and
flexible flat panel, or something. I don't like monitors for reading a
lot, I've been finding. It'd be neat to have some medium sized
hardcover book, with lots of display pages, and chips and a port in the
spine. Download your book and read it. Multi-volume? No problem.
People have been predicting (happily or mournfully) the death of the
book for a while, seeing microfiche readers, tape-book viewers, and
whatnot as replacements. Much better for the electronics to infiltrate
the book, not replace it.

Has holography gone anywhere? It made people excited a couple of
decades ago but I haven't heard of any impressive applications. O'Neill
talked about a realtime projector; I imagine you'd be scanned by red,
green and blue lasers in your room, and the hologram would be
transmitted digitally to the other person, where a flat-panel capable of
controlling the phase of its pixels would display your 3D image. Less
fantastically, where are the holograms of statues and paintings?
Photographs are considered much lower quality than the originals; I'd
expect holography to pick up some of the slack, unless it's hard to make
large holograms or the images looks weird otherwise.

Biotech: specific organ cloning. Transplants are the obvious market;
another might be growing meat in culture. I'd think that a bunch of
replicating muscle cells in a tank could be more efficient than a whole
cow, and avoids lots of ethical problems for the vegetarians.

-xx- ROU Bibliovore X-)

Do not look upon this glass,
Lest your soul from this world pass
This legend burned upon its case
You dare not see the mirror's face.
Received on Sat Jan 3 20:11:49 1998