Reviews for IEEE/CPMT/SEMI 29th International Electronics Manufacturing Technology Symposium July 14-16,...

The average rating for IEEE/CPMT/SEMI 29th International Electronics Manufacturing Technology Symposium July 14-16,... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-07-28 00:00:00 Gary May A fun, light look at what science fiction promised & how some of those promises are coming true. It's only a decade old, but already dated. In some ways that was good since it highlights just how fast we're moving. For instance, the changes to the space program are amazing. NASA is no longer planning to put a small colony on the moon, but leaving that to private businesses & concentrating on Mars, I believe. No mention of the Falcon rockets or how their lower stages are landing, of course. There was an abundance of humor, a bit much, but all in fun, I guess. Might have been better if I didn't listen to it all at once. He also didn't delve into any subject very well. I was surprised & disappointed that he missed an entire area of fun & money in the robotic section. He concentrated on robots (not human looking) that help the elderly saying that's where the money is. I think he's wrong. Porn drove the Internet pioneering the use of credit cards, scamming search engines, & streaming video, so it's no surprise that the most life-like androids are for sex, aka sexbots. I remember the Twilight Zone episode The Lonely about a man left alone on a planet with an android. In true Rod Serling fashion, the man comes to love his only companion & eventually forgets it is only a machine. Sex is never mentioned or even hinted at. I was very young when I first watched this & it impressed me deeply. People anthropomorphize all sorts of things & nothing is easier than an android, even if it is just for companionship. Look at how much everyone loved Data on STNG or the Bicentennial Man. Drop into the current day Twilight Zone where a guy buys a sexbot customized to his specs. Maybe he's never gotten laid before, has bad skin, never goes out, & smells like a nest of dead rats, but a machine doesn't judge. He can get all the sex he wants, any way he wants & they're even putting artificial intelligence into them so they can hold conversations about literature & music. Check out Harmony (Note, that link is NSFW. Quite graphic.) a $15K sexbot that can hold conversations on multiple topics as well as provide sex in just about any manner you can think of. Since they're manufactured & customized, they are capable of some things that human women aren't, like having 3 boobs or looking like a lost love. They're not capable of much movement yet, but that's just a matter of time. This has led to interesting controversy because the biggest detractors aren't just or even usually the Religious Right (They're mostly oblivious, I think.) but are often feminists. That's rather hilarious since women have been using an artificial part of a man for at least 28,000 years & Amazon has a full selection of sex machines for them. This gal has a great answer to those women. Anyway, it's another complex social issue created by technology. Well, that was quite a digression. Back to the book. It was Sunday Supplement level, but interesting. If nothing else, it's fun to see what's out there & it was very well narrated by Stephen Rudnicki, one of my favorite narrators.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-01-20 00:00:00 Riccardo Patane Well informed, yet overly chirpy insight into the current state of yesterday’s future today. If you see what I mean, by the author of Robopocalypse, Daniel H Wilson. A timely book this, for I have, more than once, wondered where my jetpack was. This book reminds me that life is a big swizz. Why? When I was a kid, in the 1970s, the future was all going to be space hotels and robots and food pills. After patiently waiting, I found it just simply isn’t. For this, I feel aggrieved. Wilson’s book is precisely for people who, like me, wonder what happened to the shiny tomorrow we were promised. Don’t worry, it’s coming, it just got delayed by that old pain in the arse reality. Wilson looks at a number of SF standards drawn from the more genuinely speculative arm of the genre, among them smart houses, moon bases, hoverboards, suspended animation, robots and death rays. He tells us where the tech is now, who’s working on what, and when – if – we’ll ever see any of it. If you spend time on Live Science, Space.com or other such websites, you’ll see that this is pretty exhaustive, and condenses hours worth of surfing into one handy book. It’s got plenty of random facts – like the human brain having the consistency of room-temperature butter – quotes and other informational nuggets. Great then if you can get past the hideous, eye-wounding typeface and the annoying “humorous” patter affected by the author. Each chapter is set up with a weak joke, and peppered with similar, like “Let’s just hope that NASA doesn’t use the dreadful HAL 9000 computer – that guy has a terrible safety record.” Wokka wokka wokka! Some of it’s funny, the majority of the time you feel like you’re listening to a carnival huckster with a degree. Or Fozzy Bear with book smarts. This slender volume does come with two pieces of good news. The first is that, besides picking the scab off the uncomfortable knowledge that you never did get a jetpack, it also reminds you that a second future promised in the 1970s, nuclear annihilation, also did not come to pass. The other good news is that some of the technology of the George Jetson lifestyle could be just round the corner, that’s if we don’t pollute ourselves out of existence first.