Too bad I wasn’t born in a time when people made useful and life-changing inventions...
The mulitvariate applications of carbon nanotubes are but one of those examples...quantum computers are another.
For perspective, my second computer kit, an HP Pavilion 700 series, with matching tube-monitor and inkjet printer, cost $1600 in 2003. And this was during a sale!
It had a 2500 Mc/s Pentium4 (Prescott) CPU, 80GB of storage, and exactly one-half GB of RAM.
At the time, it was quite bleeding-edge, when most desktop CPUs were on the order of 600-1000 Mc/s, had 20-40GB of primary storage, and 64-256MB RAM. And that modest power still set you back at least $1000.
Laptops were still rather thick, with less then half the average power of desktops, moderate battery life (and comparatively inordinate amounts of dissipated heat as part of a positive-feedback death-loop), and still cost ~$1500-2500 then.
An equivalent computer kit today (now with an LCD screen), would cost at most ~$750, with AMD64/EM64T included! That is, computing power has become so cheap, it costs very little (in addition to the cost of a 32-bit instruction set) to use 64-bit instruction words!
Incidentally, I recently acquired an old AST Premium 386SX/16, which I use to test programs targeting the equivalent embedded system. I flipped through an old PC Mag (thanks Google)...the list price in 1989: $4590. The CPU board was itself $1595! (They created the product line with upgradeability in mind; you had the CPU/FastBoard, which plugged into an ISA backplane, with IDE, CMOS, ROM, and floppy disk controller)
IOW, our generation may yet see another wave of paradigm-shfting, life-changing, useful inventions—America's best days are NOT behind us, yet, despite the left's insistence that it is so.
If we can't organise the power of the conservatives among us, Obama's "fundamental transformation" runs to completion, taking the US down with it. God help us all.
__rvx