Daily News Channel
If you want to make sure you get enough sleep on Tuesday night, you might have to get to bed earlier. You don’t have to adjust your schedule by much: about 1.26 millionths of a second ought to do it
It is Saturday night. A young Army officer and his wife welcome a small group of people to their comfortable split-level home, which stands amid the tidy landscaping of a housing development in Louisville.
The newest technologies–computers, genetic engineering and the emerging field of nanotech–differ from the technologies that preceded them in a fundamental way. The telephone, the automobile, television and jet air travel accelerated for a while, transforming society along the way, but then settled into a manageable rate of change
As big as a football field and nearly as empty, Barack Obama’s re-election headquarters looks like a start-up gone wrong. Wires sprout like weeds from the carpeting, legions of bookshelves stand empty, and the swing-state maps hastily pinned to the wall are freebies from the AAA auto club down the street.
Although supercomputers are dazzling in their power and engineering virtuosity, hardware alone will only partly achieve the eventual goal of computer scientists: the creation of systems that can mimic the decision- making powers of human beings.
Technologist Eric Drexler envisioned a future in which machines far smaller than dust motes would construct everything from chairs to rocket engines, atom by atom; in which microscopic robots would heal human ills, cell by cell. Sixteen years after the publication of Drexler’s book Engines of Creation, the molecular-scale technologies most immediately available to consumers are somewhat less fantastic: stain-resistant khakis and more durable tennis balls.
The intensity with which the spiffily attired investment brokers of the African Banking Corp. stare at their computer screens is misleading.
In a secure vault in the U.S. Army’s super-secret Intelligence and Security Command in northern Virginia, Colonel Mike Tanksley sketches the barest outlines of the new Armageddons
“You can tell a lie but you will give yourself away.
Do you always wear underwear?