Engineers Report Breakthrough in Laser Beam Tech

petralynn writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that Stanford engineers have discovered a method to modulate a beam of laser light up to 100 billion times a second. The new technology apparently uses materials that are already in wide use throughout the semiconductor industry. From the article: "The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine large numbers - hundreds or even thousands - of optical connections off of chips," said David A.B. Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at Stanford University. "Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."

Does that mean...

[Signal_Noise]

That I can disco dance a billion times faster?

WTF is Standford University?

[winkydink]

Is that the one across the bay from Berkly?

Modulating Laser...

[mcsestretch]

But will it pop a huge jiffy-pop container in my professor's house by shooting it from a plane?

All I wanted...

[parasonic]

...was chips with frickin' laser beams!

Re:WTF is Standford University?

[Reality Master 101]

And, more importantly, does Standford's football team suck as much as Stanford's?

Who??

[Maradine]

petralynn writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that Standford engineers. . .

That's awesome. I can't wait for Hraverd and Yalle to catch up.

I can't wait until Intel makes a chip with it

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll probably put out as much heat an light as the sun.

Obligatory Reference

[Stibidor]

So can they attach them to sharks' heads yet?

Re:More informative article:

[fishybell]

Well, that link is a little better. I recommend this [slashdot.org] one instead, since it has a coherent summary and has numerous comments from industry analysts.

yep...

[Anonymous Coward]

.....Ahhh we are now closer to the lightsaber....yes... the darkside will dimish......

An Open Letter to Anonymous Coward

[montreal!hahahahah]

Anonymous Coward has recently made a number of people very, very angry, including me. However, as anger serves no function in a successful rebuttal, I will simply state objectively that Anonymous Coward's brethren have an almost identical mentality, as if they all had been cloned from a single insufferable prototype. I would like to start by discussing Anonymous Coward's press releases, mainly because they scare me. The thing I'm the most frightened about is that the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "Will the world ever be free of negligent, disgraceful doofuses like Anonymous Coward?" After days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the conclusion that Anonymous Coward has planted its worshippers everywhere. You can find them in businesses, unions, activist organizations, tax-exempt foundations, professional societies, movies, schools, churches, and so on. Not only does this subversive approach enhance Anonymous Coward's ability to destroy that which is the envy of -- and model for -- the entire civilized world but it also provides irrefutable evidence that I frequently wish to tell it that its witticisms serve no purpose other than to declare a national emergency, round up everyone who disagrees with it, and put them in concentration camps. But being a generally genteel person, however, I always bite my tongue.

Anonymous Coward's morals leave me with several unanswered questions: Why do we put up with it? And what in perdition does it think it's doing? These are difficult questions to answer, because it is always prating about how all major world powers are controlled by a covert group of "insiders". (It used to say that human beings should be appraised by the number of things and the amount of money they possess instead of by their internal value and achievements, but the evidence is too contrary, so it's given up on that score.) In particular, Anonymous Coward says that it has mystical powers of divination and prophecy. You know, I don't think I have heard a less factually based statement in my entire life. Anonymous Coward can't help it; it just loves to keep us perennially behind the eight ball. Anonymous Coward extricates itself from difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice.

Even by Anonymous Coward's own account, if you think you can escape from its harebrained indiscretions, then good-bye and good luck. To the rest of you I suggest that we must reveal the truth about Anonymous Coward's pranks. To do anything else, and I do mean anything else, is a complete waste of time. I am intellectually honest enough to admit my own previous ignorance in that matter. I only wish that Anonymous Coward had the same intellectual honesty. If one dares to criticize even a single tenet of Anonymous Coward's revenge fantasies, one is promptly condemned as egocentric, repugnant, biggety, or whatever epithet Anonymous Coward deems most appropriate, usually without much explanation. Something that I have heard repeated several times from various sources -- a sort of "tag line" for Anonymous Coward -- is, "We should go out and make empty promises. And when we're done with that, we'll all tear down everything that can possibly be regarded as a support of cultural elevation." This is not a direct quote, nor have I heard it from Anonymous Coward's lips directly, but several sources have paraphrased the content to me in near-enough ways that I feel fairly confident it actually was said. And to be honest, I have no trouble believing it.

As a matter of policy, sniffish insincere-types should not bar people from partaking in activities that cannot be monitored and controlled, but this has never stopped Anonymous Coward. The impact of Anonymous Coward's balmy, overbearing put-downs is exactly that predicted by the Book of Revelation. Evil will preside over the land. Injustice will triumph over justice, chaos over order, futility over purpose, superstition ove

Re:I can't wait until Intel makes a chip with it

[hcob$]

It'll probably put out as much heat an light as the sun.

At least then you'll never need to get up to get rid of that monitor tan and you can fix a grilled cheese sammich at the same time!

BRRRRRRRRiiiiilliant!!

Re:WTF is Standford University?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the West Coast's answer to Harfurd.

Re:All I wanted...

[Admiral Ackbar 8]

[holds pinky up to mouth] 100 billion modulations!

Genetic engineers wanted...

[jpellino]

...to come up with a frickin' shark that can keep up wih these new lasers.

Re:More informative article:

[JJman]

What? You hadn't already read the article in IEEE Spectrum?
What kind of a geek are you?

Re:I'm still betting on qubits

[Heembo]

Mommy, can I have $25,000 to buy the new 10k Ghz Dell Diamond Dimension pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?