Tonight on Stossel: The Tech Revolution (Fox News 10 pm ET)

[jct74]

This Week's Show -- June 19, 2014

A new world is coming. Here's our show:

THE TECH REVOLUTION: A child's PlayStation has more computing power than a military supercomputer from the 1990s. Moore's Law says technology will continue to double every 18-24 months.

ROBOTS: Watson is a robot from IBM who taught himself how to play Jeopardy. He beat the world champion and won $1 million. If robots now can teach themselves, will they become a threat to us in real life? Will they take our jobs?

Leftists tell us, if robots are never late to work and they never ask for a raise, they will take our jobs, requiring welfare programs for us unemployable humans. But this is childish thinking. Until the 1900s, nearly all Americans worked on farms. Now 1% does. Farm workers found other jobs, often better jobs. So did horseshoers, phone operators, and secretaries. (Today's high unemployment is caused by suffocating regulation, not computerization.)

IMMORTALITY: "Transhumanists" use radical science and technology to try to live forever. Baseball star Ted Williams used "cryonics" to freeze his dead body soon after he died in the hopes that when science became more advanced, he would be brought back to life. So far, no luck. A thousand people have been frozen; no one has been revived.


Just as radical, Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil predicts that in 30 years, we will be able to upload our consciousness into a computer.

DESIGNER BABIES: Wouldn't you like your baby to be healthy? Smart? A good athlete? A talented musician? Designer babies would let you choose all that. It's not allowed in America yet, but it's coming. Some people object to designing babies; they say doctors are "playing God." But the first steps in that direction are already happening. Five years ago, clinics started helping parents choose gender, hair color and eye color.

ROAD WARRIORS: People are eager to find better ways to speed traffic. And soon, traffic signs will be less necessary because we won't drive our own cars. Computers will. The technology for driverless cars is already here.

STOSSEL'S TAKE: The tech revolution is very cool. We are much better off because of it. This is why it's important that America not let Bill O'Reilly or the pompous old geezers in Congress and at regulatory agencies decide which innovation is permissible. Most established authorities are clueless about advantages of innovation until the gains are so obvious, they slap us in the face. Let's embrace the future. If government doesn't strangle change, life will get better!

http://www.foxbusiness.com/on-air/stossel/index.html

 

[Anti Federalist]

Yeah, Stossel is fine with the government surveillance state, so naturally he jumps for joy at all these neat new gadgets that will make humanity more superflous.

Me, well, call me an old geezer who has now lived long enough to see how bad all this can go.

I am not impressed with this technological terror that is being created, where the world is a prison planet, under total surveillance.

 

[Anti Federalist]

DESIGNER BABIES: Wouldn't you like your baby to be healthy? Smart? A good athlete? A talented musician? Designer babies would let you choose all that. It's not allowed in America yet, but it's coming. Some people object to designing babies; they say doctors are "playing God." But the first steps in that direction are already happening. Five years ago, clinics started helping parents choose gender, hair color and eye color.

Why was this a horrible thing when the man with the funnny mustache and the red and black spider flag did it?

 

[kcchiefs6465]

American scientists controversially recreate deadly Spanish Flu virus​

The extinct influenza virus that caused the worst flu pandemic in history has been recreated from fragments of avian flu found in wild ducks in a controversial experiment to show how easy it would be for the deadly flu strain to reemerge today.

Scientists said the study involved infecting laboratory ferrets with close copies of the 1918 virus – which was responsible for the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people – to see how easy it can be transmitted in the best animal model of the human disease.

[.......]

The 1918 virus was recreated from eight genes found in avian flu viruses isolated from populations of wild ducks. Using a technique known as “reverse genetics” the scientists rebuilt the entire virus so that it was 97 per cent identical to the 1918 strain, known from viruses recovered from frozen corpses, according to the study published in the journal Cell Host and Microbe.

hxxp://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/american-scientists-controversially-recreate-deadly-spanish-flu-virus-9529707.html

Neat!

 

[Matt Collins]

Please link to this when it is posted online.

 

[libertyjam]

As to the first point, we are about at the limit of Moore's Law. The ability to reduce feature size in production has not been limited by fundamental physical constraints, only by how fine we could make the etchings, which now is done by interferometry in the photo-resist masks. But now when the feature size is getting down to the size of just a few atoms in the individual molecules , there is not any further to go. You might think that then there is new technology in quantum well and quantum state devices that will take over, but we are still years away from any kind of maturity in to at present to be able to extend Moore's Paradigm (it really isn't a Law) into the near future. I have seen feature size reductions from 1-2microns down to .18 then .12 and .09 (180 and 90 nm) and 60nm, and in 2004 they started talking about we only had a few more iterations to go before reaching the limitations of Moore's Rule.

Here is a decent discussion:
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/97469-is-14nm-the-end-of-the-road-for-silicon-lithography

Back in the ’80s and ’90s, it used to be a seriously noteworthy advance when Intel or IBM or TMSC announced that they’d successfully crossed yet another nanometer threshold and moved their CMOS chip fab process down the micron ladder. In 1985, 1 micron — 1,000nm — was the state of the art, and was used by the Intel 80386 processor. By 2004, the micron scale had been abandoned and 90nm processors like the Winchester AMD 64 and Prescott Pentium 4 were the norm.

Things have slowed down considerably since the heady days of 0.8, 0.6, and 0.35 micron, though. Most current digital devices use processors, sensors, and memory chips based on 45 and 60nm processes because very few silicon foundries — except for Intel — have managed to make the jump to 32nm, let alone 22nm. The fact is, the standard process of arranging components on a silicon wafer using a top-down, layer-by-layer approach, has hit a wall. Even atomic layer deposition, the process that will take us to 22nm, 16-and-14nm, and introduce FinFET “3D” transistors, can go no further.

The thing is, atoms are very, very small, but they still have a finite size. A hydrogen atom, for example, is about 0.1 nanometers, and a caesium atom is around 0.3nm. The atoms used in silicon chip fabrication are around 0.2nm. Now, you would be right in thinking that you can get hundreds of atoms into 22 or 16nm — but that’s not the size of individual transistors; that’s actually a measure of the distance between discrete components on a chip. In the case of the 22nm chips — a process that only Intel has mastered and will come to market with Ivy Bridge — the high-κ dielectric layer is just 0.5nm thick; just two or three atoms!

This is a problem because no manufacturing technique is perfect — and when you’re talking about a single out-of-place atom ruining an entire chip, it is no longer possible to create circuits that are both reliable and cost effective.

 

[Anti Federalist]

hxxp://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/american-scientists-controversially-recreate-deadly-spanish-flu-virus-9529707.html

Neat!

Progress!

 

[pcosmar]

Progress!

Ain't it though.
I have no idea why that link was broken,, but here are some directly related articles.

Baxter bird flu botch
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/02/28/baxter-bird-flu-botch/

http://socioecohistory.wordpress.co...axter-vaccine-materials-sent-to-18-countries/

http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html#

 

[Anti Federalist]

Ain't it though.
I have no idea why that link was broken,, but here are some directly related articles.

Baxter bird flu botch
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/02/28/baxter-bird-flu-botch/

http://socioecohistory.wordpress.co...axter-vaccine-materials-sent-to-18-countries/

http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html#

Always "we can."

Very seldom "should we?"

 

[kcchiefs6465]

Ain't it though.
I have no idea why that link was broken,, but here are some directly related articles.

Baxter bird flu botch
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2009/02/28/baxter-bird-flu-botch/

http://socioecohistory.wordpress.co...axter-vaccine-materials-sent-to-18-countries/

http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html#

I break all links to the mainstream media sites.

Usually after posting the entirety of their articles.

Why? Because fuck em, that's why. They are by and large propagandist pipers, I will deny them clicks all day long.

 

[Natural Citizen]

I shared this in the Biology thread a while back.


American scientists controversially recreate deadly Spanish Flu virus...

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?442216-Biology&p=5563655&viewfull=1#post5563655


This probably goes here too...