Data storage could increase by a factor of 100 [aka "Oh wow..."]

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/techno...torage.htm

[Great Rumbler]

You continue to amaze me with you're descriptive thread titles, ABF.

[A Black Falcon]

That was my intention. :)

... well, isn't it a really amazing technology, if it works out?

[Dark Jaguar]

Um, wasn't this thread title perfectly descriptive though?

[Dark Jaguar]

Incidentally, this is why people saying "we should only invest in useful applications of science" are shooting themselves in the foot. If you asked the Queen of England ages ago before television to tell a bunch of scientists to create a network whereby images of her and audio of her proclimations would appear before everyone in the kingdom, and money was NO object, they couldn't do it. No, it took funding the research of peculiar and seemingly impractical stuff to set the groundwork that could later lead to such devices.

You can't just tell someone "invent this" or "cure cancer now". No, the most you can say is "using currently existing technology, build this", not "make new technology". It takes funding research into some weird buzzing, or prisms making hot spots next to their rainbows, or noting an arc second difference in the location of Mercury that (and literally in those examples) leads to practical solutions. Screw economics 101.

[A Black Falcon]

Um, wasn't this thread title perfectly descriptive though?

GR renamed it. I had just called it "Oh wow"... which I think is indeed perfectly descriptive of what I thought after reading that article. :)

(Unless that's what you meant?)

[Dark Jaguar]

Oh, never mind then.

So anyway, one thing I have to add is this. While "going off the beaten path" is all well and good, you still need to prove your stuff actually works.

The one thing I wonder about is if these things are susceptible to holding a fridge magnet next to it.

[A Black Falcon]

Aren't all harddrives susceptible to that?

[Dark Jaguar]

While true, maybe not to this extreme. Also, memory cards aren't really susceptible.

[A Black Falcon]

On a vaguely (not really, except for the 'hard drives' topic) related note, the Nobel Prize for Physics this year was awarded to some people who made advances in hard drive technology...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/world/10nobel.html