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Both the Intelligence and conventional rackets deflect backward somewhat upon ball impact. With a conventional racket, the ball leaves the stringbed before the racket returns to its normal position. The Intelligence, with its active electronic microchip system, creates a counterforce that deflects the racket slightly forward as the ball leaves the stringbed. The net effect is a 50 percent reduction in vibration.

Pictures and a more detailed description can be found here

They laughed at Newton. They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Real scientists always publish and share their work. When someone says they have something brand new that no one has ever thought of before, and claims it will change the world, but won't tell you what it is, they are a fraud 99.9% of the time. That's what the bullshit detector picked up on.

And why does the link on his site about flying saucer propulsion point to a Popular Mechanics article about a 40 year old US Military project?

Already developed

You hit the nail on the head.
The BSA/RIAA/MPAA don't know from pirates.
Real pirates waylay you on the high seas and take your property on threat of death. And they might rape you to. That's a little bit different than little Johnny violating copyright by copying the "Lion King".

There has even been serious military planning for concrete submarines. Since concrete is very strong under pressure, such subs can sink to enormous depths and lurk on the sea bottom, looking like a rock to enemy sonar. Steel subs can only go down about half a mile.

There was a whole article about this in the New Scientist a couple of months ago, it's not on their site but I seem to recall it mentioned concrete planes too...

Popular Mechanics ran something to this effect sometime ago. It can be found online here.

I can just imagine it now, getting spam that reads: "Do you weigh over 200lbs? Well we have the solution for you! Loose over 4lbs INSTANTLY! Thats right, INSTANTLY! NO gimmicks, NO drugs, just pure science! Only $600,000! Act Now!"

"this is a life and death issue"


These weenies don't know from real pirates. real pirates shoot and kill people and take their physical property.

A long sight different than some kid who makes a copy of a song.

I think it's a shame that the word " pirate " has been so trivialized. Sort of like happened when the media started using the term "hacker".

Researchers have identified a new axon guidance receptor found in the tips of growing neurons that can exist in more than 38,000 slightly different forms. The unprecedented diversity of proteins derived from this single gene may offer an important hint that a fundamental code directs the precise wiring of trillions of neurons in the brain...

There's a reason why tall, narrow SUVs roll over all the time, and why Corvettes never do. Can you guess what that reason is?

Ah, I see. So the Corvette is by far the most likely of all of these vehicles to roll over, right?

• Hummer: 86.5 inches
• Excursion: 79.9 inches
• Suburban: 78.8 inches
• Expedition: 78.6 inches
• CART/IRL cars: 78.5 inches
• Park Avenue: 74.7 inches
• 5th-gen Corvette: 73.6 inches

Hint: it's not the width, it's the ratio of CG height to width. Wider is not *always* better...

There was an article in Popular Mechanics a while back that held up the Jetsons as an example of sci-fi predicting future technology trends.
I had to laugh -- I remember an episode where George flies across town in his personal jet car to mail a letter. How much more wrong could you get predictions of email?
Of course, the same article also praised Star trek, which also often missed the technology prediction boat. The article is here As for literature, I'd go with Asimov as having the best predictions!

Yeah, you could do that, but I think that a possibility that rarely gets talked about is that of an EMP bomb. A few of these in strategic locations (I'm thinking Silicon Valley, DC, etc.) would not only thrash the Net by ruining colocation facilities, routers, etc., but the economic implications would be unbelievable. Anyone touting a "Digital Pearl Harbor" ought to be aware of just how fragile our technology really is.

I guess that anyone that's heard of Moore's law doesn't be surprised by this. In 1971 Moore published his Law that describes the performance increase for semiconductors and was estimated as an 18 month doubling. You can see a fine graph about this here.

And a fast calculation (based on a 2GHz intel P4 :):
6 years = 72 months
72/18=4
and 2^4=16GHz
And 2.1 GHz will give 19.4GHz, which I think they will release before new year or so...

It is possible that the 18 months would be slightly different, like 20 months, but clearly this trend has continued with little change. But remember that computer performance is strongly influenced by the semiconductor trend but need not be exactly identical.

My previous place had Covad DSL, and that was fairly reliable as well, though the speed of that connection was not nearly as fast.

I think that as cable companies and phone companies upgrade/update their infrastructure, we'll see more people get DSL or Cable. I think it will be something like the Cable service. You'll not really have much of a choice other than to use AT&T At Home or Pacbell DSL (here on the west coast).

Competition can be a bad thing, ie: look at the energy situation here. But if I had 2 choices, that would be better than just one. Kinda like using either Satelitte or Cable. Both cost about the same.........

Dvorak's statements could be akin to this article 10 years from now....
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Try http://popularmechanics.com/popmech/sci/1950STROM. html. That appears to be where the MIT copy is from, anyway (do a "view source" and look for "saved from url").

The MIT copy has URLs for the images that look like this: src="MIRACLES OF THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS_files/1950STROE.jpeg". Ick -- spaces aren't legal in URLs. Escaping them as %20 works if you want to look at them individually, but the browser won't be able to show them inline.

They received a fair bit of press in the middle of last year, following an AP report that they would propel the wearer to speeds of up to 25 mph using a mechanism similar to footwear-mounted pogo sticks with internal combustion engines (!).

Some selected articles on this invention can be found at: http://popularmechanics.com/perl/tw_display.pl?id= 306 http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/rus sia_boots000707.html

This is a popmech story about the device. Also in their latest issue is a larger story about a machine that can cancle the gravity vector completely all the way to space. Now, I am as skeptacle as next guy, but if this is true, it will REVOLUTIONIZE the space program. You could get into space with a cylinder of compressed gas!

For a more thorough essay on starting to commercially explore space, see "Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution" by James P. Hogan. One of the chatty chapters between stories is about why government has stifled space exploration, merely by being the only entity doing so. (It's probably in the "Science Fiction" section of your library/bookstore)

Predictions like those and These make some sense at the time based on current technology. They were often based on fantasy in their day. Personal robots didn't catch on due to many impractalities, starting with keeping them powered. The "Pushbutton Society" they predicted in the 50s and so forth have not been wholly realised, but some of the technologies have. PCs are also a part of the equation left out in the 50s, but they developed anyways!

While the conversion of ALL books seems ludicrious, MOST of them can be translated to machine code. A great deal of the books out there can be OCR-ed and formatted into a usable format and some stories are only available online.

Besides, the prediction of all books being available online are more limited by publishers than technology. Until you have some sort of cross-platform (fie on Microsoft!) book-reading solution where payments for material are made, you won't see everything online. This is more societal than anything else.

Popular Mechanics is doing something similar to this. Here's an article called "Miracles of the next 50 years" This is really cool.. the article seems pretty level headed too, like it doesn't go into detail about "flying cars" or teleportation. Think reality, guys :) Click here

See:

"Inductrack"

Maglev: A New Approach, Scientific American (January 2000) - article not available online.

"Track to the Future," Popular Mechanics (May 1998), pp. 68-70.

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And like magic a search of PM's site brings up the article

The US decides that they don't want so many people to be hiding their money here and they have a little police action against Nauru. I mean literally just send in a couple hundred marines and helicopters and take the place over, given the current ability of us presidents to use military force without congressional or UN (haha) approval I really don't think this is so farfeched. I'm all for undermining the us tax structure but I'm worried that if all of these tax shelters are used by mobsters then the rest of us common sensible self deterministic anarchists are never going to get to use them properly. Here is my suggestion, set up the pr functions on the island, get a big international data cable strung out there, then sink a big concrete submarine down there and keep all the data and money underwater, where a bunch of marines and helicopters can't just waltz in and get it. Then this would be a lot more like Cryptonomicon. and lord knows we need the world to be a lot more like that.

Have a look at this one : http://popularmechanics.com/popmech/elect/9909EFCO BM.html cyborg suit with lcd and assorted stuff