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The electromagnetic force that is. Why would you bother with atmospheric drag, just pay out a cable and use electromagnetic drag instead. Oh wait they can do that already... Terminator Tether - EDT Solution To Space Debris

I'm over thinking it. Here's a R/C plane going from VTOL to normal flight and back to VTOL.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1322

The story references a military story, where they talk about developed technologies that deform the wings into limp hanging detritus. That should diffray the issue of wind once attached to a line.

MIT students have actually been developing robot planes like this for years. They can prop-hang and take off vertically. They can hook vertically onto walls. They can fly quickly around indoors. Wind, then, is just one more problem to tackle.

So Twitter is basically the All Thing from Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels?

Are our brains THAT similar to ones found in a snail?

More similar than you'd think. While there are obvious physiological differences between the different species, animal cells can adapt quickly to very human activity, such as flying airplanes!

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=241

Reminds me of the Portable PCs they had in the movie Red Planet: http://www.technovelgy.com/graphics/content07/red-planet-map-display.jpg

My guess is we're approaching Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", at least in terms of technology.
The Primer also reacts to its owners' environment and teaches them what they need to know to survive and grow
some more info on his ideas about "mediatrons" as he calls them: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=214

e-ink, e-paper, ipad, not only technology changes, but the way people are educated too. now that they will have interactive textbooks, studying is not only going to be faster, but even more fun. anything from physics, chemistry, biology is going to be not only described, but shown. encarta of size of your palm. fantastic.

indeed, I think some books will be better off left as they are now. the main reason behind this is imagination and fantasy of reader. if you are shown everything, then there is barely some space for you imagination to fire up. it might be fun to roll and twist your ipad, but it might be even funnier to have all those characters shaped up by your imagination instead of imagination of the artist who worked on it. but this applies to less extent than the former case with textbooks. i guess it's great technology to have in overall.

Anyone else notice that this looks quite a bit like the prototypical "Alien Face" as described here:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=496

This

Niven is usually classified as a Hard SF author, but he does love investigating the social aspects of his future tech. In this case, an interesting piece of triva is that in the Known Space continuity, pranking someone by hitting them with a tasp is colloquially known as "making someone's day".

Also in the milieu is the very real prospect of stimulation addiction, even with the "hardwired version" of the tasp.

This

Niven is usually classified as a Hard SF author, but he does love investigating the social aspects of his future tech. In this case, an interesting piece of triva is that in the Known Space continuity, pranking someone by hitting them with a tasp is colloquially known as "making someone's day".

Also in the milieu is the very real prospect of stimulation addiction, even with the "hardwired version" of the tasp.

Perhaps not those specific things, but...

http://www.technovelgy.com/

"Explore the inventions and ideas of science fiction writers at Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) - over 1,865 are available. Use the Timeline of Science Fiction Invention or the alphabetic Glossary of Science Fiction Technology to see them all, look for the category that interests you, or browse by favorite author / book. Browse more than 2,770 Science Fiction in the News articles. "

Dave

And how many milliseconds would it take to simulate intellectual growth of twenty years in a simulated environment?

And then there is the issue that networked systems can all pool their learning and may never forget.

See also "The Two Faces of Tommorrow":
    http://www.webscription.net/10.1125/Baen/0671878484/0671878484.htm

On sensory deprivation, yes, maybe:
    "The Schumann Computer"
    http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=146

And deeper issues:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes'_Error

And there may also be a law of diminishing returns to intelligence. But, not before smart machines drive the cost of most human labor to near zero, ending mainstream economics as we know it.

Would make for a couple of life injections.

CC.

I get the impression that the mods saw big words and assumed this was a joke about buzzwords, but in fact that's a reasonable approach to this problem.

Somebody must be hitting the punch early today. I immediately thought of this when I read the summary:

...ICE patterns formed and reformed on the screen as he probed for gaps, skirted the most obvious traps, and mapped the route he'd take through Sense/Net's ICE. It was good ICE. Wonderful ICE...

...His program had reached the fifth gate. He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments. Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card.

The gate blurred past. He laughed. The Sense/Net ice had accepted his entry as a routine transfer from the consortium's Los Angeles complex. He was inside. Behind him, viral subprograms peeled off, meshing with the gate's code fabric, ready to deflect the real Los Angeles data when it arrived.

Given the level of precision apparently needed, it seems unlikely that simply plopping on a cooled helmet is the best way to go about reducing brain trauma.

Of course not!
You need coolant rods inserted directly into the brain.

Not just The Space Merchants. From Technovelgy

"Chicken Little from Pohl and Kornbluth's novel The Space Merchants [1952].

"Carniculture from H. Beam Piper's Four-Day Planet [1961].

"Pseudoflesh from Frank Herbert's Whipping Star [1969].

"Vat-Grown Meat from William Gibson's Neuromancer [1984].

"Food brick" from Larry Niven's Ringworld [1970]

"ChickieNobs from Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx and Crake [2003].

You're right, it is a good idea to separate those things, digital from physical right now.

I'd go a step further and suggest a big problem these days is that people lump under "capital" both imaginary fiat dollars (ration units) and physical things like cement plants. As suggested by another poster, if we want a new cement plant, it takes time to build one. But an endless supply of fiat dollars can be created by the stroke of a pen in Congress. Digitally, there is so much capacity now relative to basic needs like surfing the web that, compared to when one hand to spend a lot of money to buy a few IBM mainframe computing cycles, most computer and network access costs now are too cheap to matter much.

But, still, for a post-scarcity future, consider the resources you mentioned.

* Water. We have oceans full of it. With enough energy (like from wind and solar), it is easy to desalinate it. There are desalinization breakthroughs mentioned on slashdot quite frequently.

* Food. The USA alone can produce enough food to feed something like three billion people. Unfortunately, much of it goes to animal feed:
"The Truth About Land Use in the United States"
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
We've plenty of food for a mostly vegetarian diet for a much bigger population than we have now. And that's even without effectively farming the oceans or people moving off-planet to space habitats.

* Land. See the above link on how much land there is in the USA. We can also build seasteads. And eventually we'll be building space habitats. We can build thousands, even millions, of Earths worth of surface area for materials in the solar system, like Princeton Physicist Gerard K. O'Neill showed how to do.

* Megan Fox. Sure, human relationships will always have a scarcity aspect. Still, digitally there is a vast quantity of Megan Fox around:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Megan+Fox&btnG=Search+images
We'll no doubt see virtual actors soon -- there are already all sorts of interactive games with virtual people. And look where this sort of robotic technology is going:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2188
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/dec/14/aiko-fembot-robot
Also, no doubt there are millions of women who look a lot like Megan Fox, or act like her. So, I question just how scarce Megan Fox as a concept is. But yes, sure, if you want to point to specific people or rocks in the world, yes, there is a scarcity there of that one person or thing. But, then think how scarce and precious everyone on the planet is. Maybe they all deserve a basic income as a human right, to have some claim on the fruits of an abundant industrial commons? Even Megan Fox? Maybe if she had had a guaranteed basic income every year to meet her living expenses for life, she might have had a happier life? And maybe all the people around her would not have been so eager to exploit her, and she could have had a more authentic life?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Even millionaires like (likely) Megan Fox may be better off with a universal basic income:
"[p2p-research] Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/003949.html

Consider:
"Megan Fox Opens Up About Weight Loss, Depression: "Transformers"

Robot then solidifies into hundreds of tiny scalpel blades, which chop up the tumor.

Or the person, if things go haywire.

sounds like some of those older "sci-fi" books are going to have to get re-categorized as history books pretty soon.

Soon?

Get a (thick?) glove fill with the stuff. Possibly have the external layer contain some inserts... You can now break sticks and stones - and bones - with impunity. The original concept and the name "Karatand" appear in "Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner. It seems you can use 3do as an approximation: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1745

Actually it sounds to me like they want one of the bugs from Runaway. Hell it wouldn't surprise me if some Marine bigwig saw that movie on a late night horror fest and said 'hell, mount a camera to that bad boy and I'll take a dozen!".

Of course it wouldn't surprise me if there was some tech meeting going on in the Pentagon right now where some tech bunch is getting handed some pics of the T-101 with some big brass asking "How much to give us a couple of hundred of those bad boys?"

it's called the throwbot http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=321

Actually sounds more like those spider robots from "Minority report."

Although it doesn't sound like they really want a "robot," they just want something they can throw into a room and see what's in there. Just put a durable webcam in a clear hampster ball. Or if you do need it to move around after thrown, put the webcam on a small RC car.

Marines: I expect a good chunk of your R&D budget for this design.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=309

as a followup, here is the OAKO Realtime Smile Recognition technology probably being employed in the worker scanning. according to the sparse sites the system can operate without calibration.

It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords ... but from the great pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night.

The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud ... which is seen as a bronze rainbow at night and where the red sun becomes orange at midday.

Yama tended the pray-machine and the giant metal lotus he had set atop the monastery roof turned in its sockets. For six days he had offered many kilowatts of prayer, but the static kept him from being heard on high.

chicken little:

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002

another great one on this topic is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheep_Look_Up
John Brunner's 'The Sheep look up' a great dystopian cautionary tale

oddly enough a recent episode of 'Better off Ted' also covered this and concluded that 'you probably shouldn't name it if you want to eat it'

I'm just sayin'

Is no one going to mention Robert Heinlein and Waldo? They don't make nerds like they used to. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=23

I don't think it's loaded with much of anything. They just put some crowbars aboard, for the construction workers to use.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1582

Nothing high tech, like a nuclear warhead, or a communications satellite. ;-)

I want the Cylon water interface (for my toaster, obviously), but this is the closest thing I can find:

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1650

It's as much a robot as a RC toy car.

However, take that awesome chassis and put it on a Basil and you have a real robot bartender.

And not one that looks like a slow showpiece for robotic arms and how not to display a face (on a low-grade industrial laptop screen.)

As the video showed, it took way too long for one person to even get a drink.

So give the drink elevators a bit more speed. The ice bin at the bottom is pretty much wasted space but then you'd need someplace for the AI anyway.

It could probably be done through reading the visual cortex. Check out these references to a 1999 study that extracted recognizable images from neurons in a live cat. That is, the researchers were able to see from the cat's brain what it was looking at.

Well... yes. If you were expecting a quick action fix.
GITS and Masamune Shirow's manga in general need to be watched/read with some concentration.
Add to that Mamoru Oshii's direction who almost always goes of to a deep end of the psychology pool and it may seem unnecessarily complicated.

As for trash..

Try reading some of Shirow's manga. He would really get into particulars with every single little thing in his universe.
That is, before he figured out he can live off the royalties and churning out a borderline hentai calendars and art-books here and there.
There are no "beam guns" in Shirow's manga.
If a piece of technology is used there is a neat description somewhere of how and why that particular piece of technology works and what are its underlying principles.
There is almost no issue without some added bits of text with additional explanation for such cases.
Original Ghost in the Shell manga is a great example. There are about 10 pages of "notes" at the end of the book.

A great example of visionary "future tech" he also featured can be found in Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor.
In a story printed in 1992 (Drive Slave) he drew microrobots that travel through bloodstream using flagella for propulsion.
Such robots are widely researched today.

 
On other hand...
I fear that you have no idea what Sci-Fi is. Or Science Fiction. Or that one is primarily read, and other mostly watched these days.

GITS SAC 1, 2 and the movies are great sci-fi.
GITS manga and movies are great Science Fiction.
If nothing else, Hollywood hacks like Wachowskis ripping it off is a good indicator of its value.

It would still allow us to catch cancer cases earlier than they would have been otherwise even if we couldn't rely on it to detect 100% of all cancer cases.

Careful what you ask for, you might get it. A large number of cancers, perhaps the majority of them, are 'cured' by the immune system at very early stages. Even some Breast Cancers seen on mammograms will involute. (A Google search is in order if you're curious). If you are not very careful to understand the biology of the cancer in question you will end up creating a) a lot of angst on the patient's part b) a lot of angst on the doctor's part c) extra costs for what amount to unnecessary tests d) the real possibility that those tests might HARM the patient rather than help.

Other cancers grow so slowly that detection of small numbers of cells very early on will create enormous clinical controversies - how do you treat a $_random_cancer that is seen only in a micro array test given that standard therapy for clinically apparent $_random_cancer might include radiation, surgery or a host of chemicals that would give even Saddam Hussein the willies?

These will be interesting lab devices, but I don't see picking one up in your local Lucky Dragon anytime soon.

I don't know anyone who watched the series (before it went downhill and we all stopped...) Earth: Final Conflict and didn't want one of those phone/PDAs. If you're unfamiliar, there was an interesting announcement to something similar much earlier this year: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1410 - it includes a photo of the EFC phone (opened) and acknowledges Gibson.

The fictional EFC phone still outclasses anything I've seen dreamt-up to date.

I couldn't find a youtube of the EFC phone in use - but for EFC early-series (or music or sci-fi) fans, I found this and want to share it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3WqQfTVlTc

Well, if by "crime" you mean "making a u-turn in Iraq"

Or u-turns in the other places using such UAVs, like Los Angeles.

ALON (otherwise known as aluminum oxynitride) is an aluminum ceramic that has the curious property of being transparent while also being almost as strong as steel. It's being tested by the military for use as transparent armor. Check out http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=481 for more info.

Seems Scotty knew what he was talking about after all!

...but in a pinch, a hologram would do (à la Back to the Future).

I'll toss the scramble suit reference at your receding backside. Hey! It's a perfectly good Philip K. Dick reference!

E-ink on magazine covers is coming VERY soon... Esquire has decided to put a flashing e-ink sign on their september issue.

That sounds like the difference between a telescreen and an alibi archive. You may have a device that records everything, but the government should have no access to it, and you shouldn't be able to publish its contents indiscriminately either.

In the Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson already touched on this very concept.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=245

A mark of a good writer is that he or she not only creates a new world, but also takes the time to "age" it a little. The use of the word "toner," which most of us recognize from our experience with copying machines and printers, conjures up an image of a very fine black dust.

The "mites" referred to in the following excerpt are nanomachines the same size as dust mites.

"See, there's mites around all the time. They use sparkles to talk to each other," Harv explained. "They're in the food and water, everywhere. And there's rules that these mites are supposed to follow. They're supposed to break down into safe pieces... But there are people who break those rules [so the] Protocol Enforcement guys make a mite to go out and find that mite and kill it. This dust - we call it toner - is actually the dead bodies of all those mites.

IIRC, Harv isn't doing well in this particular scene since he's trying to explain why he's hacking up a lung after being outside for a little while.

Pain.

Can he get the prize posthumously?

Can he get the prize posthumously?

It seems that Torchwood's writers aren't above using other's ideas to good benefit. The creature in that episode was suspiciously like Chicken Little from Fred Pohl and Cyril M Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.

Larry Niven coined the term "organlegger" to describe individuals who obtained and resold body parts through less than scrupulous means.

The Wired article links to this page of inventions presaged by him. I think Spaceguard belongs on that list, don't you?

An Aibo? I'm compelled to mention the obvious: the slamhound from Count Zero.

Too late my friend, better keep an eye on your betta. Or sleep with one eye open.