[ExI] world's smallest movie

[Mike Dougherty]

On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> This is carbon monoxide on copper, and if you count in everything then
> unfortunately your bit density/volume is really lousy.
> Compare that to http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
>
> I doubt you can squeeze more than 1 bit/nm^3 in a 3d
> lattice of addressable sites. That gives you around 10^21 bits/cm^3.
> That's the kind of density you need for Avogardo scale computing
> (somewhere between 1 mole bits/liter or at least 1 m^3,
> or about one 19" rack, if one still thinks in ancient units).

I wonder if/when this kind of transfer becomes ancient too.

Have you seen the commercials of the phone-to-phone momentary transfer
of what seems to be an entire movie?  While it's a great marketing
tactic, I assume the way that works is that your content has already
been uploaded over whatever comparatively slow link you have - and the
nearly instantaneous transfer is actually just an authorization token.
 There continues to be a single version "in the cloud" but now two
devices have been authenticated to consume it.

If/when we start measuring our individual wealth by how much
restricted/non-public bits of content we can access, the instant
delivery of authentication tokens will easily outpace the actual
transfer of data over wires - even virtual wires.

"Click" I just purchased the entirety of the Encyclopedia Galactica.
I don't need to download the whole thing to prove that I own it
because I have random access on-demand; what do you want to know?

Maybe we're not thinking of access this way yet... but it's a possibility.