de insulating layer used most commonly until now. This Measurements of the Digital World approach lowers the line's capacitance by changing the material that insulates it from the surrounding silicon chip, as well as from its neighboring wire. The bad news is that the low-k films are extremely difficult to integrate into the manufac- turing. They are soft and weak, they adhere poorly to both the silicon and the metal wire, and they crack and delaminate easily. The next generation of chips will require even lower-k films that are even more challenging to process. The more significant development comes from Intel's recent reports of the suc- cessful demonstration of the first continuous all-silicon laser. Silicon photonics have the potential to greatly extend the lifetime of Moore's Law. Optical connections can carry thousands of times more data per second than copper wires can. Unfortu- nately, existing optical components are far too expensive for use in individual com- puters or even local networks. If we could make optical devices out of silicon, which is cheap and easy to manufacture, that would change everything. Eventually, silicon photonics might also replace copper wires between processors within a sin- gle chip and be used in the internal clocks that microprocessors use to execute instructions, dramatically increasing clock speeds and thus computing speeds. On the positive side, however, thanks to Moore's Law, network endpoints today are small, powerful, inexpensive devices. With such power in the endpoints, the need to embed the functions of a network in the network's core shrinks. In addition, smart end devices can set up and manage calls far better than a central- ized network can. In fact, implementing voice in end devices makes it possible to mix it into other kinds of interactions as well, such as online game play, collabora- tion, and shared Web surfing. The latest processors also support fast visualization of large data sets and intensive math for real-time simulations, such as digital entertainmen