Well, that's creative use of the term 'lucky' but I guess we all have our way with words.
Re:Shortest Slashdot article ever?
by
cfuse
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· Score: 1
btw, did anyone notice the quasi-homoerotic moments between picard and worf? I hope future st movies will explore this aspect of their sexuality.
You see what you want to see, I guess...
I'd probably pay to see Worf banging Picard (scary stuff).
Re:Shortest Slashdot article ever?
by
Vexar
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· Score: 1
I think Star Trek has dwindling merit for entertainment. I would prefer a dizzying series of CG space combat footage with absolutely no story to "yet another time paradox/subspace anomaly episode." ST: Enterprise is exhibiting the Star Trek "signs of desperation" at the outset:
Decontamination rub-downs.
The Borg (a.k.a. crowd-pleaser ace in the hole.
Popular plot re-use (I'm waiting for a re-make of Trouble with Tribbles)
If Paramont has any brains at the helm, The Enterprise NX will shut down its warp reactor, and maybe we can hop aboard some other part of the vast Roddenberry world for six months to a year. Maybe its time we spent a season on the Vulcan homeworld, aboard a rather nondescript mining ship (complete with a pet cat), or a Romulan game show network. The door is wide open to explore anything other than a naval environment.
Imagine a "Golden Age of Sail" version of Star Trek. There's insubordination, dalliances with the natives, disease, and the occasional unexplained phenomena, topped off with altercations that bring a government to the brink of war. Sailing ships (especially pirate ships) were a commonplace multiethnic environment, just as Kirk's Enterprise (and all thereafter) are depicted. I'm imagining the clever banter while Ensigns Kim and Perris huff and puff in a longboat"
"Hey, (huff), uh Harry?"
"Yeah, what's up? (gasp)"
"This rowing is a real back-breaker."
"Tell me about it. When I get back Port, I am going to get to work on building that rotary oar idea I've had. I've been studying Archimedes' work on screws, and I think there's something there."
"When I get back to Port, I think I'll do my own study on screws!"
(contented pirate-cackling...)
First of all, that is the SHORTEST slashdot blurb I have ever seen. Secondly, I think that this can be boiled down to very simple phrase: "Life is imitating art".
Does anyone really think that the early phones would have flipped open had Captain Kirk not done the same thing with his communicator in Star Trek? Just a thought.
JoeLinux
"They have us surrounded? Well, that simplifies things. Now we can shoot in ANY direction and hit them! Those bastards won't get away this time!" -- Chesty Puller, USMC
Does anyone really think that the early phones would have flipped open had Captain Kirk not done the same thing with his communicator in Star Trek?
Yes, because folding a device in half is an obvious way to make a long device fit into your pocket. Carpenter rulers have been doing it for centuries.
Just a thought.
Not a very good one.
Re:Wow...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>> Does anyone really think that the early phones >> would have flipped open had Captain Kirk not done >> the same thing with his communicator in Star >> Trek? > Yes, because folding a device in half is an > obvious way to make a long device fit into your > pocket. Carpenter rulers have been doing it for > centuries.
Actually only US versions of mobile phones "flip open".
Many European or Asian models of the same phones do not have the (unneccessary) flipping covers.
What really bugs me is why Paramount hasn't worked a deal with one of the cell phone makers to issue a limited edition cell phone made to look like an original ST communicator. That flip up metal grill looks like almost like it is custom made to be a fractal antenna.
I know at least 2 people that would buy one instantly if they were available (and no I'm not one of them...)
Just goes to show you, Paramount is STILL clueless when it comes to the ST franchise.
I.V.
-- "These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
And, speaking of technology disappointments, who wants some stinking robot dog? Where is my robot freshman-college-cheerleader? Answer me that!
Re:Slashdotted?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
WTF made the 'troll' mod so popular for fuckhead
moderators of late? They finally get rid of 'overrated' or
something? Or maybe the mods ran out of crack and are
sniffing glue now.
I guess some loyal Aibo owner is feeling sensitive about his purchasing decisions.
Re:Slashdotted?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Flying cars are toooo energy inefficient. Think of the energy required to lift a say 600Kg vehicle vs the energy needed to roll a 600Kg vehicle. Not to mention huge traffic problems of trying to coordinate objects that can go any which way.
As for the freshman-college-cheerleader. Heh. I could do with one of those too. But it seems sci-fi robots that are anatomically correct tend to be male. eg, Data and Tasha Yar, and some Asimov story where the robotic buttler does it with a lonely house wife. Maybe a robotic penis is easier to build than an artificial vagina.
In case of a /.-ing
by
LePrince
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· Score: 0, Redundant
Science faction By Fiona Williams July 5 2003
Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot, brain implants that let you tap into people's memories and a newspaper that updates itself when a big story breaks. It's not science fiction, it's science fact, as technologists catch up with - and surpass - the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers.
Set in the not-too-distant future, sci-fi films offer insights into what the world might be like and what impact evolving technologies might have on daily life, says Dean Economou, chief technologist of the CSIRO's Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CENTIE ). Economou says the fact that cloning, virtual reality and biometrics are commonplace concepts today is partly due to representations of the technologies in film and science-fiction literature and that scientists have taken many cues from what they've seen take place on screen.
"Artists are generally very good at reflecting human nature in the tenor of their times and sometimes that leads to very valuable insights," Economou says. "If you're not constrained by knowledge of things you can't do or think you can't do, I think you can come up with some really nice insights.
"[The films] mean people have a vocabulary about the future and you find a lot of the young researchers were very inspired by 2001, Star Trek, Blade Runner or The Matrix. In a very real way, the technologists are inspired by the sci-fi people and the sci-fi people are similarly inspired by the technologists."
More than merely being inspired by technologists, filmmakers are actively seeking out scientists for advice and input. Whereas early science-fiction filmmakers could take a liberal dose of artistic licence when grappling with scientific concepts, modern science has taken away this luxury for today's filmmakers and called for accuracy in science-fiction filmmaking like never before.
Upon its release last year, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, set in the not-too-distant future, featured a wealth of hi-tech gadgetry. The film sees Tom Cruise head up a futuristic pre-crime division that prevents murder by arresting would-be perpetrators before they act, based on the psychic evidence of three "pre-cognitive" siblings. The film is highly regarded for its accuracy in projecting what life will be like in 2054 as all objects and gadgets featured in the film have very real foundations in existing technologies.
John Underkoffler is a graduate of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with more than a decade of experience in the organisation's Media Lab. As Minority Report's science and technological adviser, he played a key role in ensuring the gadgets and technology featured in the film had firm foundations in scientific studies.
"Steven insisted early on that this not be 'science fiction' per se in the way it is usually understood," Underkoffler says. "But rather what he called 'future reality'; it should be a recognisable extrapolation of what we have today with the technologies that are just emerging. What would be trends in a future that is just distant enough [to be] really interesting to look at and is engaging, but at the same time is recognisably bridgeable to now and then."
Underkoffler became involved in Minority Report when the film's production designer Alex McDowell and prop master Jerry Moss led a delegation to MIT to discuss future technology. Spielberg then convened a much-vaunted two-day roundtable think tank with Underkoffler and futurist colleagues, such as Generation X author Douglas Coupland, where he says they "ate Spielberg's bagels and drank his coffee and came up with a giant waldorf salad of notions". Many of the original ideas to stem from that meeting were retained in the final cut of the film, such as the weaponry - vomit-inducing "sick sticks" and acoustic concussion guns.
Much has been made of the "gestural recognition interface" operated by Cruise's character in t
Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot Been tryed not too sucessful Shock enviroment etc. It work in the lab (But not for long)
-- Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers
I have one of these...
by
jamonterrell
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· Score: 5, Funny
"Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot,"
And in breaking news scientists have now developed an amazing device to prevent the firing of a gun via a small lever located on the side of the gun. Prior to firing the gun will automatically scan the lever on it's side to determine if the gun should fire. They've dubbed this lever "safety."
-- I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Re:I have one of these...
by
kaltkalt
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· Score: 1
The whole point is to save our precious children. Crippling household guns will prevent stupid little kids from taking themselves out of the gene pool, thus further ensuring the demise of our species.
--
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Re:I have one of these...
by
GnarlyNome
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· Score: 1
Number of Kids killed by guns in the household last year less than 100 nationwide number of people killed by elective surgary last year more than 17000 Ban Doctors not Guns
-- Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers
Re:I have one of these...
by
silas_moeckel
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Cripaling household guns just means yet again to protect yourself you will need to be a criminal. What part of people do not want to be forced to rely on police cant our lawmakers get through there heads. Yea less guns in the civilian population makes law enforement easier. Hrm do I care does arebody realy think we need to make it easier? Things are two easy now cop shows up does a probable cause search and plants an 8 ball your doing 5 to 10. No I'm not saying all cops are bad etc etc etc I'm saying we dont have any good technical assurances they arent. Where are the helment mounted cams with tamper resistant storage? Where are the non lethal rounds for cops to use? I would rather people load rubber rounds than the gun not fire. Hell load up a blank a rubber then go to lethal rounds if the first two dont stop then the rest will. Allways remember it should be the right of a homeowner to defend themselves with lethal force cops should play test dummy with any new technology and field test it before it's ever mandated for the home they get paid to get shot at just like a marine it's part of the job.
-- No sir I dont like it.
Re:I have one of these...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
How many kids were killed by elective surgery last year? I'm as pro-gun as anyone, but countering 100 dead children with 1700 adults who took a calculated risk does not a good argument make.
Re:I have one of these...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Using yoda speak doesn't make a good arguement either. Little hint. You gotta wave your hand to do the Jedi mind trick.
Re:I have one of these...
by
GnarlyNome
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· Score: 1
If you don't count the 17 yearold louts that get involved in robbing liquor stores it's a lot less than 100 The Branch Davidians were burned out by the BATF because (according to Janet Reno) "we had to do it for the Childern (CNN) Doing it for the childern is the most specious argument of all
-- Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers
Re:I have one of these...
by
kaltkalt
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· Score: 1
no, but requiring guns (and that's exactly what they'll do) to have fingerprint sensors so only the owner can use them in order to save the lives of 100 kids who should probably be dead anyway (sorry, but natural selection ain't pretty sometimes) is not a good idea.
After watching Terminator last night, had all the guns had fingerprint sensors, Reese wouldn't have been able to use the shotgun he took to stop Arnold from killing Sarah in the club. That would mean no John Connor, which would mean either the machines win the war, or a time paradox destroys the universe. See why this is a bad idea?:)
--
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Re:I have one of these...
by
EvilTwinSkippy
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· Score: 1
Just an aside.
Most military vehicles are bereft of locks and ignition keys. In battle you don't have AAA to call...
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
No, it's never the parents problem is it. If you want a crippled gun, get a BB gun. If you want a gun, and you don't want your children shooting each other, teach them gun safety, and LOCK the gun up, and lock the ammo in a different place. I haven't read a story about a kid being shot that didn't involve negligent parents. Why were the children in a room alone with a gun in the first place? If your children express interest in marksmanship, take them to the range and teach them gun safety. If you are too busy to take care of your children, you shouldn't have had children to begin with. But you were probably too negligent then too. Put them up for adoption. Children don't shoot themselves in the orphanage. If you're that negligent, they'll probably not notice a difference.
-- Karma Clown
Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
SubliminalLove
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· Score: 5, Insightful
As someone who just put down Asimov's fantastic Caves of Steel to catch up on Slashdot, I have to say that I'm really suprised at an article that talks about the deep and lasting impact science fiction has made in the progress of real technology, and then goes on for two pages about movies. Admittedly, film has captured the public interest far more than literature in this genre, but how can the article fail to even mention sci-fi literature? With the exception of mentioning that several classic sci-fi films were based on Phillip K. Dick's work, the entire body of sci-fi short stories and books, which have had a phenomenal impact in science and everyday life, are completely ignored.
So three cheers for Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle, Robinson, Bear, and the dozens of other great writers who have produced the body of works that I think of when I hear "sci-fi".
Cheers
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
My secret shame is now revealed to the world on Slashdot... I can not read!
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
mah!
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· Score: 1
Then there are other equally inspiring, phenomenal books that I'd think of as sci-fi but I'd rather not mention titles or authors, since a few people consider them sacred and get offended if others don't treat them as religion...
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Then there are other equally inspiring, phenomenal books that I'd think of as sci-fi but I'd rather not mention titles or authors, since a few people consider them sacred and get offended if others don't treat them as religion...
It's okay to mention the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
I(rispee_I(reme
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· Score: 1
And Arthur C Clarke. For a textbook example of science fiction exploring technology's impact, read The Light of Other Days. Like a fictional The Transparent Society
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
how can you write if you can't read, wiseguy;-0?? I call bullshit!
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
mark-t
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· Score: 1
You put down Caves of Steel to read Slashdot????
*WHY*?
When I was reading the Robot series, I couldn't put it down.
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
voice recognition software.
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
Idarubicin
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· Score: 1
So three cheers for Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle, Robinson, Bear, and the dozens of other great writers who have produced the body of works that I think of when I hear "sci-fi".
Don't forget Clarke. The first popular treatment of a space elevator (with a carbon-based cable, no less!) was Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise, published in 1978.
Granted, he got the idea from Y.N. Artsutanov (Komsomalskaya Pravda, 31 July, 1968), but nobody but Russian (er, Soviet) scientists would have read that paper.
-- ~Idarubicin
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
squiggleslash
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· Score: 1
We don't have a space elevator, yet. Just saying.
The one idea we don't have an implementation of yet that I can see someone doing is Charles Sheffield's "Faxes". A fax is a combination AI and telephone answering machine, programmed to be able to answer enough questions and make enough decisions to reasonably offload a lot of work onto. With the number of relationships with other entities people have steadily increasing and attempts, if anything, to make this more and more complex, I can see technologies like these being used as a counter attack.
And I suspect it'll happen sooner than Sheffield expected.
-- You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Don't forget the other way too. You need a text-speech engine.
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
eean
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· Score: 1
This was exactly my reaction. Books are certainly what is on the frontline for science fiction. I mean it talks about robots and cites Terminator and Star Wars?!? I mean, Hondas robot isnt named Asmo (or some such) for nothing. For instance, none of the science fiction ideas presented in The Matrix are original (though maybe the brain-battery is, but only because its bogus), which I realized after reading the 1984 (as in the year) book/Neuromancer/ a few weeks ago.
Star Trek is a little different though, seeing how its a (series of) TV series, giving it time to explore ideas.
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
LandGator
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· Score: 1
Not to mention the literature of future freedom: L.Neil Smith, et al.
(Start with THE PROBABILITY BROACH, Tor 2001 edition) http://www.lneilsmith.com/lnsbooks.html http://www.lneilsmith.com/
-- There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Invention
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
But when will the invent the super-sonic dildo?
Given the rate of increasing returns, I would guess by the year 2030.
Minority Report (the movie) sucked.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Mobile vegitation? Back alley eye surgery?
The book was much MUCH better.
And the book handled the pre-cognitive issue far better.
Total Recall (the movie) also sucked. But then, the story was pretty amusing.
Damn, both of those are from P.K. Dick. Imagine that.
I liked Blade Runner (the movie). Hey, that's also from P.K. Dick.
The rest is pretty much "wow, look how cool it is that things in movies sort of resemble things that might some day appear in real life".
For a bit of a reality check, look back at what was advertised in 1950 as being the "World of 2000".
Read a book.
Imagination = Technology
by
negRo_slim
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Imagination created technology.
Technology shaped imagination.
Imagination shaped technology.
Wash rinse repeat.
I don't really see many sci-fi ideas not being able to become reality with enough time and interest...
-- On the Oregon Cost born and raised,
On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Re:Imagination = Technology
by
EpsCylonB
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· Score: 1
like a rembigulator machine ?
Re:Vehicle that runs on bad news
by
DoktorGonzo
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· Score: 3, Funny
Or one that runs on fear ("The Tick vs. The Big Nothing," anyone?). I bet Tom Ridge has one. "Red" actually means "Alaska is starting to run dry, but I won't give up my SUV."
Stuff from SF we should have.
by
Animats
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· Score: 5, Interesting
There's a whole list of technologies that are routine in SF, but we don't have a clue how to make work.
Better energy sources. There hasn't been a new primary energy source in fifty years. All we have is better oil drilling technology.
Spacecraft that are actually useful. What we have now is minor improvements on 1960s technology, with the same miserable fuel to payload ratios and insanely high operating costs.
Robots and AI. We do not have a clue how to do this.
We're not making much progress on any of this, either. 25 years ago, all those goals were thought to be closer than they are now.
Worse, those aren't fields that good young people go into any more. Who goes into fusion research, or booster design, or even AI?
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
Jah-Wren+Ryel
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· Score: 1
You forgot flying cars! Where's the flying cars? I want my flying car! Popular Science promised me and the Joneses down the road a flying car by 2000, it is already more than two years after that and I still can't buy a flying car! Seems like all there is are regular cars and that damned segway!
-- When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
mpthompson
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· Score: 1
Where's the flying cars? I want my flying car!
Well, the flying car may not be as far off as you think.
Of course, I'll believe it when I see it.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
Animats
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· Score: 3, Informative
Moller has been trying to build a flying car since 1967, and he's been hyping it as "real soon now" since 1974. His web site makes it sound like it's about to work. But notice that there are no dates on the items. Check archive.org and you'll see that he's been putting out the same hype for the last five years.
Another thing that should be working by now, and isn't, is turbines for small aircraft. Light aircraft are still putt-putting around on reciprocating engines, decades after the big iron switched over.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
ColaMan
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· Score: 1
Another thing that should be working by now, and isn't, is turbines for small aircraft. Light aircraft are still putt-putting around on reciprocating engines, decades after the big iron switched over.
As I recall , scaling from bigger to smaller turbines doesn't work very well as losses from the edges of your fantips are proportionally higher to the total engine output. Seems like a real cow of a problem to solve, too.
--
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike. There is a lot of hype here.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
Jester99
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· Score: 1
Who goes into fusion research, or booster design, or even AI?
Short answer: Nobody.
Why: Because nobody'll hire kids to go into any of the above.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
AndroidCat
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· Score: 1
No flying cars until they can be safely operated by someone who's had a couple and is talking on his cell phone!
If operating a Segway isn't always safe a flying car seems chancy.
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You point to a 100Kg helicopter.
They say it weighs 254 pounds.
That tells me A LOT about their quality.
And if you think Im being crazy, let me pass on to you some words of wisdom a teacher once gave me: *never* solve problems numerically; instead do it with literals.
That not only is easier to correct in an examination (her main point), but also will prevent you from making mistakes with numbers early in the solution (her other main point, which is actually more useful in practice).
If you stick to a coherent system of units, just substitute values at the end -- and its all ok.
BTW, one can use pounds, inches etc., but I dont recall if these make a coherent system; OTOH, the metric system is coherent. And the whole world uses it (i.e., except one or two stupid countries, which are unable to change habits).
Yeah, right, I know... "you could change if you wanted". Sure. Like quitting smoking, aint it? Very easy!
Re:Stuff from SF we should have.
by
jo_ham
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· Score: 1
There are plenty of turboprops around that are small enough for use in light aircraft, but piston engines prevail.
A turbofan/turbojet on a light aircraft would be a waste at those low speeds.
You didn't quite get it.
by
LePrince
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It could be used for cops. Like, say, the cop has its gun recognize HIS fingerprints, so if the bad guy manages to get his hands on the policeman's gun, he can't use it anyway. That's one of the use for such a gun.
Re:You didn't quite get it.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What a great idea. So now when the cop needs to fire his gun at a critical moment, it won't fire because he inadvertently got jelly on his fingers from the donut he was eating.
Re:You didn't quite get it.
by
Zebbers
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· Score: 1
and really, pretty much the only one....
and it wont be happening soon....
a gun needs to be 100% reliable
Re:You didn't quite get it.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Till the cop is shot dead, and the partner's gun jams or he runs out... and he grabs his partner's gun, but just as the perp rounds the corner and levels aim, the LCD display on the gun flashes "Unauthorized Access...Please Reprogram For New User".
Nice message to get right before you DIE. It's an unworkable solution for the police. Not much better for us. (I don't want to see my ten year old killed, raped, or maimed because I am wounded but my child can't fire my gun...)
DJ
Re:You didn't quite get it.
by
Alamaz
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· Score: 2, Funny
The end of the article makes mention of people approaching him to develop the tech they saw in Minority Report. Anybody else smell MS in the mix. Remember their failed attempt at running a battleship with NT technology?
!!! As if cops don't have enough problems . . . just picture a tiny blue screen on a police revolver:
Cop 1: Crap! Cop 2: Whas wrong? Cop 1: Blue screen of Deaaaaargh!!!!!
So program the weapon to allow access for multiple users, and pre-program partner's weapons. This would have to be done for squad car riot weapons in any event.
As far as 10-year olds go, you may have trained yours in proper weapons management. The average ten year old is *FAR* more likely to take the gun to school and wind up shooting a classmate in the playground afterwards than he/she is to defend his/her parent after they're wounded.
I'd also *love* to see some statistics on how often police officers find it necessary to fire a fellow officer's weapon, under any circumstances. I already know that they typically can NOT hit anything with their own weapons. Spray-and-pray, indeed....
-- If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Re:You didn't quite get it.
by
Wolfrider
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· Score: 1
--Even if the gun won't *fire*, BadGuy(TM) can still hit HaplessCop(TM) over the head with the gun butt!
-- .
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
This one movie I saw...
by
Erick+the+Red
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
This one movie I saw mentioned a document they refered to as "The Constitution". I hope that sometime in the future, we'll be able to live with this great invention. Some government officials, though, would call the idea way too radical.
--
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
ok
Get your SciFi right
by
Planesdragon
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Big Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect.
Minority Report (no "the") is a semi-distopia wherein predictive science has become exact and law enforcement is able to convict people before they commit their crimes. It's more a tale of the overzealousnes of technology than a horror report about the advance of technology--hell, even 1984 was about 'tech.
The "total awareness" of Minority Report wasn't even that bad--I mean, the main character was able to move about fairly easy given that an APB was out for him, and he even managed to foil the entire system, too.
Don't worry about Big Brother or Future Crime, though--they'd both be government programs, which, at least in America, are both amazingly conservative in design and embarissingly inefficient in implementation. (Note that, even though we have a brand-new national alert level, there are no laws or funding programs for local response to the increased level.)
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
benjamindees
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Big Brother was from 1984
Everyone knows this. Perhaps you should re-read it. It is not communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim that has a negative effect on the characters of the novel. It is "Big Brother's" invasive authority to regulate "thought crimes" that ends up as the undoing of the protagonist. Does that sound like another sci-fi story you can think of?
It's more a tale of the overzealousnes of technology than a horror report about the advance of technology What? They are both warnings of the ways that tyrranical governments use technology to infringe on individual freedoms. In that respect, I would label them both as distopias. Neither one, though, paints technology as universally bad.
-- "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
benjamindees
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· Score: 1
Don't worry about.. Future Crime.. [it would be an inefficient] government program.
Wasn't it the incompetent/corrupt government fucking up the implementation of Future Crime that was the entire impetus of the film?
-- "I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
miu
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· Score: 3, Informative
1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world
Not quite. It was a warning that communism's enemies in
the west (the democracies) could easily make themselves
into what they fought.
The spectre of 'Big Brother' is slightly ridiculous now,
thanks in some part to the warning that '1984' gave
us.
--
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
dazed-n-confused
·
· Score: 4, Informative
1984 is about totalitarianism in general, not communism in particular.
(And it's a dystopia, not a distopia).
"Don't worry about Big Brother" because it'd be embarrassingly inefficient? I don't want to be subjected to embarrassingly inefficient state voyeurism, either. So I still do worry.
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The spectre of big brother is ridiculous? In what backwater country do YOU live? All over Europe as well as America, the gov't is putting more and more cash into surveillance technology of all years.
TIA, nuff said.
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Note that, even though we have a brand-new national alert level, there are no laws or funding programs for local response to the increased level.
Maybe the money is being funneled into something bad. Or maybe the pockets of some people. Corrupt leaders of the world, unite!
Not quite. It was a warning that communism's enemies in the west (the democracies) could easily make themselves into what they fought.
I'm not sure if you're actually disagreeing with what the parent post had said, i.e. that communism had conquered the world. If what you're saying is that in "1984" the West had become communist, but not through military conquest, then it seems to me that you're right. Here's a little excerpt from chapter 5, which clearly describes the West (Oceania) as being communist:
'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice [speaking on behalf of the Ministry of Plenty]. 'Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs-'
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
The+Only+Druid
·
· Score: 3, Informative
There's a serious difference here, that you're clearly missing.
In 1984, there is no means by which Big Brother and the Party are actually able to know what you're thinking besides subtle clues. Granted, they keep you under nearly complete surveillence, but they're still guessing based on educated analysis of your behavior. The disturbing part is not supposed to be the observation, but instead the ability of the Party to essentially arbitrarily determine that you were a Thought Criminal. Because of this, all behaviors that might even seem innapropriate needed to be avoided, thus crippling human society.
Minority Report, on the other hand (both in the short story, and the movie), includes the accurate ability to scientifically predict significant aspects of the future. In the short story, three retarded precogs perpetually mumble and gurble snippets of truth about the future, with computers analyzing their output then proceeding to produce cards which tell the police who is going to commit a particular crime. In the movie, the precogs are not retarded, and have their direct premonitions of the future projected/recorded into an audio-visual format for outside viewers. In both cases, the police know, factually, that until they interfere that the perpetrator will [so long as all three precogs agree] commit that crime. The story, thus, is about whether or not there really is destiny, and whether or not you can change it regardless of whether you know its coming. The "big brother"-like aspects, wherein people are "ret-scanned" when walking along the street, etc. are not intended as being oppressive. In fact, it doesn't seem that they're even government administered since their effects are primarily commercial. We see the police access the tracking information, but its entirely possible that they required a warrant (which the evidence from the precogs would provide) to access that otherwise secure private system, along the lines of a phone tap. As mentioned earlier, the protagonist completely circumvents the system at several points: it is not big brother. As to your false claim that the story is a warning of tyrranical governments, you've clearly never read the story and seem never to have seen the movie. The story ends with perfect correspondence between the predictions and events, despite attempts by several people to distort the future based on knowing its course. The message is that destiny is completely written (which parallels many of Dick's other short stories involving precognition and time travel), and includes precisely zero attempt to portray it as "wrong" to arrest people for precognitive crimes. The movie also confirms the precog abilities by and large, but claims that there are sometimes "minority reports" wherein the precogs disagree. However, as also stated, the female of the trio is always correct, so the point is meaningless; it just states that the males are imperfect precogs. It includes zero instances of the government doing anything that oppresses rights or corruptly extends beyond the legal limits of the precog system. The only possible case of this is the corrupt and criminal head of precrime, who is removed when this is discovered. Moreover, his own system discovered him! You just seem to want the story to be about your perspective...
-- "Stumble before you crawl"
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Planesdragon
·
· Score: 1
The movie also confirms the precog abilities by and large, but claims that there are sometimes "minority reports" wherein the precogs disagree.
What was the "Minority Report" in the short story, then?
And while I've got your attention--what word are you talking about in your sig?
The spectre of 'Big Brother' is slightly ridiculous now, thanks in some part to the warning that '1984' gave us.
Yeah, because we don't have governments that try to watch what we're doing all the time. We don't have governments that change allegience with foreign governments, or dictatorships, on a whim. We don't have people being whisked away to imprisonment and torture without being charged with a crime or given due process. And we certainly don't have governments that lie to us or make false claims to justify their actions.
Ha ha ha! Big brother is ridiculous!
In both cases, the police know, factually, that until they interfere that the perpetrator will [so long as all three precogs agree] commit that crime.
So why do the police have to "interfere" by busting down the door and arresting the person? Why can't they just call him and say "Hi. We know you're planning on killing someone." Won't that "interference" be enough to change the event?
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Lord_Dweomer
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· Score: 1
"The "total awareness" of Minority Report wasn't even that bad--I mean, the main character was able to move about fairly easy given that an APB was out for him, and he even managed to foil the entire system, too."
Um...Last I checked he had to have his eyeballs replaced because he was being tracked everywhere he went. But I guess you have a different definition of "able to move about fiarly easy" than I do.
I'm not sure if you're actually disagreeing with what the parent post had said, i.e. that communism had conquered the world. If what you're saying is that in "1984" the West had become communist, but not through military conquest, then it seems to me that you're right.
I wasn't really disagreeing, just making what I
thought was an important clarification - that the
real danger of war can be the damage you do to
yourself to survive, the steps onto the "slippery
slope" all us
paranoids here on/. are always yammering about.
If 1984 was talking about any government, it was talking about Socialism, as the name of the government was IngSoc. This is especially interesting when you consider that George Orwell himself was a socialist. However, I don't think 1984 was so much about a particular government than it was observations about power and privacy, a lot from observing the state of the world, including British-ruled India.
I always thought the other book they made all of us read in high school, Brave New World, was more of an American-compatible idea of a dystopic future. There's definitely an aspect of big brother, but it's all much more consumer-friendly. As long as people are kept happy it doesn't matter that they've been tracked and conditioned since before they were born to be a coal mine worker, or whatever else its decided they should do, that they have no freedom, etc.
governments... try to watch what we're doing all
the time... change allegience with foreign governments, or dictatorships, on a whim...
people being whisked away to imprisonment and torture without being charged with a crime or given due process... lie to us or make false
claims to justify their actions.
Try reading "The Prince" or the Bible or the myths
of most any culture. Those activities have been
part of the art of statecraft since there have
been states. Big Brother is slightly ridiculous
because the entire idea is so inefficient and huge
and clumsy that that style of control and
survellience could not work in the US
(especially against a population forewarned).
We have to
be wary in defense of our liberties because it is
the nature of states to try to maintain
power, not
because some ideological supervillain wants to
rule over an enslaved humankind.
--
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
dazed-n-confused
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If 1984 was talking about any government, it was talking about Socialism, as the name of the government was IngSoc.
If you can read 1984 (inc. the Newspeak appendix) and come away with the impression that the names of things tell you what they are, you have a problem. Maybe the Ministry of Love can help you sort it out...
To quote Immanuel Goldstein's Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism:
Socialism, a theory which appeared in the early nineteenth century and was the last link in a chain of thought stretching back to the slave rebellions of antiquity, was still deeply infected by the Utopianism of past ages. But in each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century, Ingsoc in Oceania, Neo-Bolshevism in Eurasia, Death-Worship, as it is commonly called, in Eastasia, had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality. These new movements, of course, grew out of the old ones and tended to keep their names and pay lip-service to their ideology. But the purpose of all of them was to arrest progress and freeze history at a chosen moment. The familiar pendulum swing was to happen once more, and then stop.
So the 'Ingsoc' movement grew out of English Socialism, kept its name, paid lip service to its ideology; BUT...
Because they should still be punished for the crime. This has contemporary precedent: several states have the same punishment for attempted murder as for successful murder. This is because, to certain people (including whole classes of philosophy) it is the intention to act which is important, as opposed to merely the success or failure of that action. Moreover, we only saw [in the movie] what the police did when they had an emergency murder; one which was in-the-heat-of-the-moment as opposed to premeditated. As such, they had to bust in, otherwise there wasn't enough time. Moreover, we have no indication that anyone but violent [pre]offenders are jailed, since it isn't mentioned in the movie.
Moreover, just as Tom Cruise's character mentioned: just because you stopped someone from doing something, why shouldn't they be held responsible as if you hadn't intervened? Why does my intervention lessen the severity of your intended actions?
Coming at the argument from a different direction, one could argue that no one who would murder someone criminally (as opposed, of course, to self-defense) should be allowed to walk free. Depending on whether or not you believe it is psychologically possible to be actually rehabilitated (which is debatable) you may think that all people who are demonstrably capable of criminal murder must be isolated.
The short story (which is quite clever, and is available in the collection of his stories entitled "Minority Report", can be summarized as this: the protagonist thinks he is about to be replaced with a new guy, when he finds a card [from the precogs, delivered by computer] that indicates he's going to murder someone. He freaks out and runs, stealing the card. He irrationally believes it is a set-up by his believed-replacement. In actuality, it says he'll murder a politician. There are a series of turns here, but if I remember correctly, the only question in the minority report by one of the precogs was when the protagonist would kill this person. I.e. two of them saw it happening on one date, and the third saw it on a different date. The computer, however, doesn't print the dates on the cards (instead only the crime and the criminal) and as a result it didn't mention any confusion.
The word, you asked about, is "druid". I've explained it before, just have a look in my past posts.
-- "Stumble before you crawl"
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
ralphclark
·
· Score: 1
> You just seem to want the story to be about your perspective...
Well OK, but you can hardly blame him for being jumpy about the subject when central govt. is so openly attempting to obtain "Total Awareness" about its own citizens. Don't you find the thought of that totality a bit creepy? Few people would be comfortable with the intense level of scrutiny that the US government, in particular, apparently craves. And I fear that government in the UK, and in the EU, is headed the same way.
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
ralphclark
·
· Score: 1
The guy they put away at the beginning of the movie was not a criminal type, he was subjected to a combination of (what some would see as) extreme provocation, and unfortunate happenstance.
There was no sense of any premeditation involved in the way the scene was portrayed. Had a crime actually taken place it would need to be treated as a crime of passion, insofar as the law in the jurisdiction involved might recognize the difference between this and murder in cold blood.
This being so, I don't believe the sentence given to this movie character can be viewed as just. If the same thing had happened today in real life and somebody managed to stop him just in the nick of time before he hurt anyone - sure, he would have gone down for attempted assault or murder - but surely it is also likely that he would have been eligible for early parole given his background, circumstances and non-criminal character. He might even get his sentence commuted on appeal. Because the act was out of character and he would be so obviously unlikely to offend again.
It didn't look like the character in the movie would get much opportunity to appeal or earn parole, paralyzed inside a glass tube.
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Shadowlore
·
· Score: 1
In the movie they explained why we only saw "heat of the moment" murders. Premidiated went away. The only murders they had left were the spontaneous ones.
Criminal history shows that these types of murderers are usually non-recidivst. That is, those who who not plan it, generally don't do it again. Thus, with this in mind, stopping the act and removing the factors involved would prevent the vast majority of them from *ever* comitting murder.
For these kinds of topics, we actually have quite a bit of evidence that shows that people who kill their spouse when walking in on them (the opening murder in the movie, btw) never do it again, even when not jailed or even ostracized for it (basically, when they "get away with it").
I'll have to watch it again to confirm, but I recall them talking about particularly violent rapes occasionally being caught too. Nonviolent crimes they could not catch due to some mystical energetic pervasiveness of murder. They did talk about it.
As far as making a distinction regarding having prevented the murder, there are grounds for it. We already make a distinction between premeditated murder and "spontaneous" murder.
Given the right circumstances nearly everyone can be driven to murder. However, history shows us that those who can/will premiditate it and plan in advance a murder, are far fewer.
That is not to say that there should not be some punishment for those who commit murders of passion, just that in the world described where it is known for certain that the murder was passion-driven versus premeditated, there is a difference.
Indeed, as I recall, there was indeed a premeditated murder that was caught, at the end. It was the brown ball (IIRC) indicating that the head of the company was going to kill the hero.
-- My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
The spectre of 'Big Brother' is slightly ridiculous now, thanks in some part to the warning that '1984' gave us.
And in some part to the use of that name for several stupid reality shows...
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Planesdragon
·
· Score: 1
*sigh*. You're obviously implying that the USA is like that. So, let me think...
Yeah, because we don't have governments that try to watch what we're doing all the time
No. We have a government that wants to be able to look for patterns of behavior that can indicate terrorist activities. As long as nothing worse than an FBI investigation happens, it's all good. (Remember--it's been against the law to plot and illegal act with someone else and then go out and take even legal steps towards that crime since Rockefeller. It's called consipracy.)
We don't have governments that change allegience with foreign governments, or dictatorships, on a whim.
That's politics. And, really, it's not "whim"--it's "politics." The enemy of our enemy is a friend--but once our enemy is gone, their enemies may become our enemies.
We don't have people being whisked away to imprisonment and torture without being charged with a crime or given due process.
Torture? Well, if you consider being held without certainity of your future "torture." Though I suspect that those who have really been tortured won't agree with you.
And we certainly don't have governments that lie to us or make false claims to justify their actions. Ha ha ha! Big brother is ridiculous!
The government can lie. The government can be wrong. The government can even put out its own revised history.
Big Brother doesn't happen until the government starts putting words in the mouths of those who are not the government, or silences those who speak out against it. Military PR is one thing and tyranny is something else entirely.
Besides which, if Big Brother was on the way,/. would be first on the chopping block.
Granted we do (in the USA) make a distinction between impulse/premeditated murder (as well as attempted and successful murder), that doesn't mean we should. While the "realist" school of the philosophy of law of course would state that the existence of a law makes it right, many other schools of thought would say that law should be changed to reflect changing perceptions of morality. Personally, I dont believe in a difference between impulse/premeditated murder, nor attempted/successulf murder, nor hatecrime/normal crime, etc. I believe the action is the crime, and the context (excepting the concept of self-defense) is almost exclusively (if not exclusively) irrelevant. If you murder someone, you murder someone; period. Thats just me, though.
-- "Stumble before you crawl"
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Shadowlore
·
· Score: 1
So, you are more interested in punishment, not justice then. The criminal justice system is about prevent repeat crimes. In this case in particular we are talking about murder.
What good does it serve to put someone in prison for life if that person will not be committing another murder?
The fact that you accept self-defense means you must accept context. Context is not the same as excuses. What about defense of others? More context.
It is, IMO, a special pleading to say you'll accept some context but not others.
The fact is, that even today, impulse murders tend to be relationship related, and those who commit them tend to never commit another one. Those are facts. A "realist philosophy" of law would be required to take that real fact into account.
Of course, if you're all about revenge instead of justice, that's your bag, just don't expect the rest of us to accept that as a "realist philosophy of law". In the real world revenge does not work, and only causes more problems.
-- My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
First, "legal realism" is a defined term, not my own, which refers to the belief that merely by virtue of being law, something is morally correct. When I say a realist must automatically agree with the moral distinction which exists in law between impulse/premeditated murders, that is what I'm referring to. You must not have realized that. No big deal.
Second, self-defense is ameliorative not because of "context" but because I think the act of murder is defined as the willful termination of another individual's life who is not actively engaged in attempting your murder. As such, self-defense fails to meet the definition of murder, any more than theft meets the definition of murder. Thats not context, thats just definition. Similarly, manslaughter is not murder.
Frankly, yes, I'm concerned with both punishment and prevention. If you know that murder will always get the same punishment (although not capital, which I'm not endorsing here) then you will be less apt to do it.
Moreover, you're mistaken about the nature of the legal system, and whether or not it punishment or rehabilitation oriented. The earliest legal systems we know of (Hamurabi's Code) were explicitly punishment based, with retributory goals. The European legal systems, universally, were retributory until at the earliest the 19th century when some began rewriting certain laws to shift the nominal goals of the jails to rehabilitate as opposed to punish (although some systems, especially the British, beleived that punishment was rehabilitation, hence their extensive use of indentured servitude in the colonies as a primary means of punishment).
Finally, the nominal goal of the extant legal systems in the USA, as well as Canada and Australia is NOT rehabilitation. Ask your local criminal judge, warden or educated police officer. The majority of prisons in any of those three countries are too overpacked to be concerned at ALL about rehabilitating. Instead, they function primarily to isolate the criminals from law-abiding society, and as such protect the citizenry. If you think jails are about rehabilitation, why do none of them feature mandatory therapy/reeducation? Why do virtually all of them fail to rehabilitate (as evidenced by the disturbing recindivist behavior of the majority of ex-cons)? The real world justice system is not about rehabilitation; its about isolation and punishment.
-- "Stumble before you crawl"
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Shadowlore
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, but coming from being what my state considers a lawyer I'll have to say if you meant "legal realism" then just say it when you mean it, not similar phrases which mean different things.
Also the claim "If you know that murder will always get the same punishment (although not capital, which I'm not endorsing here) then you will be less apt to do it." is not fully accurate. Most impulse murders take place in a short and emotionally laden period of time, when *thinking* about consequences is not to be found.
Also, I never said, or even implied, that the cirminal justice system in the US was about rehabilitation, so you can take your strawman down.
Nor did I talk about ancient or even old-world legal systems. Another strawman.
And finally, your assertion that a realist must accept that law defines morality is bogus. I am a realist and I do not accept that.
Sicne you chose to not respond to my salient points (including killing in defense of another --which is the willful act of taking someone's life who is not actively trying to murder you), rather you chose to make strawmen to burn, I suppose that realistically means this dicussion is really over.
Cheers.
-- My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Re:Get your SciFi right
by
Shadowlore
·
· Score: 1
Apart from different types of jurisprudence, different schools of jurisprudence exist. Formalism, or conceptualism, treats law like math or science. Formalists believe that a judge identifies the relevant legal principles, applies them to the facts of a case, and logically deduces a rule that will govern the outcome of the dispute. In contrast, proponents of legal realism believe that most cases before courts present hard questions that judges must resolve by balancing the interests of the parties and ultimately drawing an arbitrary line on one side of the dispute. This line, realists maintain, is drawn according to the political, economic, and psychological inclinations of the judge. Some legal realists even believe that a judge is able to shape the outcome of the case based on personal biases.
Apart from different types of jurisprudence, different schools of jurisprudence exist. Formalism, or conceptualism, treats law like math or science. Formalists believe that a judge identifies the relevant legal principles, applies them to the facts of a case, and logically deduces a rule that will govern the outcome of the dispute. In contrast, proponents of legal realism believe that most cases before courts present hard questions that judges must resolve by balancing the interests of the parties and ultimately drawing an arbitrary line on one side of the dispute. This line, realists maintain, is drawn according to the political, economic, and psychological inclinations of the judge. Some legal realists even believe that a judge is able to shape the outcome of the case based on personal biases.
Apart from the realist-formalist dichotomy, there is the classic debate over the appropriate sources of law between positivist and natural law schools of thought. Positivists argue that there is no connection between law and morality and the the only sources of law are rules that have been expressly enacted by a governmental entity or court of law. Naturalists, or proponents of natural law, insist that the rules enacted by government are not the only sources of law. They argue that moral philosophy, religion, human reason and individual conscience are also integrate parts of the law.
Notice that what you claimed legal realism means is not in agreement with the above. It is a defined term, one you are using incorrectly.
-- My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Interesting post from a purported lawyer, since you are outright wrong at least a few times.
First, you state here "Also the claim "If you know that murder will always get the same punishment (although not capital, which I'm not endorsing here) then you will be less apt to do it." is not fully accurate.", which is nonsense. I state that one cause (punishing impulse murder) will make people "less apt" to commit the crime. You then claim that its not "fully accurate". This is not actually disagreeing with me, since my statement only means some people would be affected, not all. You seem to be claiming I believe ALL people would be dissuaded.
Second, you say " I never said, or even implied, that the cirminal justice system in the US was about rehabilitation". In actuality, you did [imply this]: " The criminal justice system is about prevent repeat crimes". Thats your quote from the parent. The only way a justice system can prevent repeat crimes is to kill the criminal, permanently isolate him (a la Minority Report) or rehabilitate him.
Third, you state "Nor did I talk about ancient or even old-world legal systems." In your parent post, you stated however that "In the real world revenge does not work, and only causes more problems." which I was responding to by talking about past legal systems, demonstrating that in fact they dont necessarily cause problems.
Finally, you claim that I failed to "respond to my salient points", when in fact I did. I stated, to quote my post, that "self-defense is ameliorative not because of "context" but because I think the act of murder is defined as the willful termination of another individual's life who is not actively engaged in attempting your murder. As such, self-defense fails to meet the definition of murder, any more than theft meets the definition of murder. Thats not context, thats just definition. Similarly, manslaughter is not murder. "
So to sum up, Shadowlore, you're factually incorrect on all these points. Seems like you're the one posting strawmen.
Incidentally, regarding the definition of legal realism. Your link [from Cornell] does not say anywhere anything to contradict my claim that legal realists believe that the laws are automatically morally right. They may be superceded by later laws (which will then be "right") but nonetheless it stands.
-- "Stumble before you crawl"
And the best thing about those writers...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
they don't stop at just the technology.
They explore the cultural effects. And that, to me, is the best kind of science fiction.
If someone manages to create one of those devices, how will it affect my life?
Cell phones: Hang up and DRIVE you idiots. But now I can call anyone at any time without having to look for a pay phone. It makes it much easier to do things with your friends and to let them know you'll be late or the plans have changed.
eMail: Spammers should die and burn in Hell! But now I can stay in touch with people on the other side of the globe.
Someone hacked Slashdot!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
And posted this summary! It's part of that h4x0r challenge.
Re:Someone hacked Slashdot!
by
trompete
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· Score: 1
Maybe they were just reading the slashdot source code and realized that CmdrTaco hardcoded the password '12345' into his account. Would that still be considered hacking?
Re:Someone hacked Slashdot!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
the passwd to my troll acct is the entire ascii goatse from www.goatse.cx/contrib.html
Re:Someone hacked Slashdot!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That's the same number I have on my luggage!
[ed. note: no it isn't]
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
[ed. note: no it isn't]
I'm still waiting.
by
bobdotorg
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· Score: 4, Funny
Where are the flying cars? We were promised flying cars. It's 2003 and WTF? No flying cars.
On (in?) the other hand, which sci-fi novel predicted USB powered dildos?
-- __
Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I dont know about you, but I need more than 500mA of power for my dildo to be sufficent
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Where are the flying cars? We were promised flying cars. It's 2003 and WTF? No flying cars.
Why is everyone so excited about flying cars? I for one am glad that drunken frat-boys cannot crash through the roof of my house, killing everyone inside.
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
phthisic
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My favorite scene in Minority Report is the one where Cruise is flipping through the images using his hands. Here he is using this totally cool, futuristic, literally hands-on GUI. Then he needs to transfer some data to another console a few feet away -- so he puts it on a disk and walks it over there. Ah, the sneakernet. I've always wondered if this was a stupid oversight -- or was it an ingenious commentary on how humans interact with technology. Excuse me now, I have to go print out some emails for my boss.
I have to be honest in that I am very glad that we have do not yet have a 'flying car.' If flying cars were to come to pass I'd bet that home based phalanx anti aircraft systems would be a booming market. Or to follow the sci-fi vein, home 'defense shields.'
Can you imagine the same people you commute with each day having to deal with 3d-navigation, higher velocities, and random inputs like wind gusts? It'd be one hell of a fireworks show. Insurance companies would collapse overnight.
There is a previous step that must be achieved before flying cars are common. That's computer driven cars (non-flying).
If we must drive flying cars it would be a chaos.
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Maybe the computers are separated physically so that hackers can't break into the other network...?
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Aha ha ha. I piss myself _EVERY_TIME_ someone makes this joke. It just keeps on getting more and more funny.
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Obviously sneakers need to be banned, they're terrorist hacker tools!
Re:I'm still waiting.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Forget flying cars and USB dildos, I want a flying dildo!
Re:Wow, michael
by
usotsuki
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hey, no problems here. Short, sweet, to the point, who needs more? (Besides it's 2:15 local time here, in the morning. If he lives in the US anywhere, he's probably half asleep anyway.)
BTW an On Topic.
Sci-fi gives us the impetus we need to actually get off our duffs and INVENT. It's not surprising that stuff once mentioned in SF is now making its appearance on our Earth.
In the interest of efficiency, I've replaced my Diehard with a MMORPG player hard-wired to a laptop. Strangely enough, it hasn't had any problem adapting to the simulation...
I'm using my tricorder to see if there are in fact red squares floating around the room.
Readings indicate that there are no red squares; the giant red Oracle ad is etched into my retinas.
There's lots of this now
by
Aurelfell
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The MRI concept was inspired by Dr McCoy's diagnostic beds in sickbay. I read an article that NASA was working on an Ion Engine, which makes up two thirds of a TIE fighter. And in my opinion, flip phones look a lit like communicators . . . .
Re:There's lots of this now
by
swordgeek
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· Score: 1
Uh, no.
Using NMR as an imaging technology existed before Star Trek. Sorry.
--
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Re:There's lots of this now
by
Billly+Gates
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· Score: 1
A very old 1998 story posted here on slashdot mentioned the Nasa Ion Engine. Want to know how perfall it was? It moves a whole sheet of paper at maximum thrust!
It is used in space for some sattalies and it takes many months to gain any really fast speed because they are so underpowered.
Look at all the aspects.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Cop's hands are covered in powdered sugar from Krispy Kreme. His gun won't read his fingerprints.
Call a time-out with the bad guys so he can use a handy wipe.
Security usually means time delays. Does a cop want to risk his gun not reading his fingerprint?
We have a fingerprint scanner on our door at work. If your finger is wet, problem. If you don't position your finger correctly, problem. If someone just uploaded an old file to the sensor, problem.
Does this mean that I can get my cloaking device now and walk naked around downtown?
Future tense.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
They use the phrase "not out of the question" a lot in the article. But in keeping with the fact that we don't know what will transpire in the future. How is the line between "not out of..." and "out of..." drawn?
The whole point of this is so that only the set owner can fire it. Granted, if an assailant ever got hold of a cop's gun, he could still bludgeon him with it, but I don't think there's anything that can stop that.
-- When I am king, you will be first against the wall
With your opinion which is of no consequence at all
3DES!!!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
14: ??? 15: Profit!
'real' VR devices existed before the holodeck
by
mah!
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· Score: 4, Informative
From the article: when Star Trek's "holodeck" appeared, it bore no resemblance to anything tangible. These days it is known as the precursor of augmented/virtual reality applications such as virtual surgery or holographic simulation training programs
hmm...
In fact, although the holodeck-likeCAVE was introduced in 1992 - 5 years after ST:NG's debut, VR systems had been around a few years already.
Similarly, when Star Trek's "holodeck" appeared, it bore no resemblance to anything tangible. These days it is known as the precursor of augmented/virtual reality applications such as virtual surgery or holographic simulation training programs. Although the way we embrace technology once science catches up is often at odds with the way it was depicted on screen, there's a lot to be said for the genre's foresight.
Or maybe we don't have holodecks like in star trek because technology hasn't caught up yet.
-- The shareholder is always right.
Bahahahaha
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Best troll ever!
Read the story.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The story is more about the issues of fore-knowledge. Similar to what you get in time travel stories.
3 pre-cogs.
Pre-cog #1 says you will do something. You read #1's report and you don't do that thing.
Pre-cog #2 factors in #1's report and the fact that you will have read #1's report. #2 gives a different report. Since you read #2's report, your choice changes from what #1 and #2 predicted.
Pre-cog #3 factors in #1's and then #2's report. Pre-cog #3 can correctly predict your actions BECAUSE THERE IS NO PRE-COG #4 TO PROVIDE YOU WITH A PREDICTION.
The movie made way too many errors. SPOILER: his wife got access to his cell using his eyes that had been removed by the doctor. No one thought to update their access list when one of their own went bad? One of them is CONVICTED and they don't update their access list? Weird.
Pre-cog #1 says you will do something. You read #1's report and you don't do that thing.
Pre-cog #2 factors in #1's report and the fact that you will have read #1's report. #2 gives a different report. Since you read #2's report, your choice changes from what #1 and #2 predicted.
Pre-cog #3 factors in #1's and then #2's report. Pre-cog #3 can correctly predict your actions BECAUSE THERE IS NO PRE-COG #4 TO PROVIDE YOU WITH A PREDICTION.
Um, all three pre-cogs can see the future. Specifically, all three can see the future, which includes you reading/not reading their report(s). So, all three would see and report the same thing.
Total Recall
by
ceswiedler
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My favorite thing about that movie when I was thirteen years old was the triple-breasted whore (a sly reference to Eccentrica Gallumbits?).
My favorite thing about Total Recall now is the fact that the movie never says whether Arnie is still in a vacation or not. He uses Rekall to acquire a vacation where he's a secret agent who saves Mars. He then wakes up, realizes he IS a secret agent, and then goes to save Mars.
Perhaps five minutes after the credits roll, he wakes up, and pays Rekall for his most-excellent 'vacation.'
Just after the film was released in the UK there was a special presentation of it at the IMAX in Bradford. Before the film there was a lecture by one of the production team, who pointed out that when Arnie is at Rekall (before he has the memory implant) he is shown various options. On the monitor is displayed a picture of the Martian Reactor (which bearing in mind it is a planetary secret, would seem unlikely...).
The designer said that this was always intended to show that the entire film from that point onwards is merely the implant.
A further clue is when he signs himself into the hotel. He uses the name "Brubaker" - this is the name of one of the astronauts from Capricorn one...a film about a faked Martian voyage.
What you are "missing" both are possible. The nature of Philp K Dick stories on a whole is to explore the meaning of reality.
Just look at Do Andriods Dream of Electic Sheep (cut down to Blade Runner) explores the meaning of being human. It is a shame that movie touched so lightly in this subject.
Seems like a lot of people are still confused about whether the movie is supposed to be a "dream" or not, but the quick shot of the Martian Reactor pretty much settles it. Furthermore, the psychiatrist who shows up at Brubaker's hotel room seals the deal and announces the real theme of the movie - which is somewhat self-referentially about mass entertainment - you'll the hero, the spy, a friend of the governer, but in reality you're just sitting in your chair, lobotomized.
The psychiatrist states that if Brubaker shoots him then "the walls of reality will come crashing down". After Brubaker does in fact shoot him, there is a constant, recurring motif of walls falling down throughout the rest of the movie. I've never thought of it as a great film, but it does have some interesting subtext, probably worthy of a Dick novel.
It covers it much better. And he surrenders to the government so they can do a better job of wiping his memory.
They just have to find the right memory to use. So they do a bit of research on him and find the perfect one.
And then they implant it but there's a bit of a problem.......
I think it's pretty sad...
by
ObiWonKanblomi
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· Score: 0
...that these movie producers have to rely on consulting firms to come up with these ideas. I guess that also may be why books tend to be a bit more original with terms, gadgets, and robots.
maybe it will inspire someone to make me a goddamn flying car. Yeh I can just see it 3am the bar closes and 29 drunken rednecks proceed to try to take off from the parking lot.
-- Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers
HEy you guys look watch this!(run for your life when you hear this espc if it involves cars, guns or liquor)
-- Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers
Re:WTF?!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Glad to see the Slahdot editors are modding down posts that they reflect their true selves
prior art? patents?
by
73939133
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I wonder whether science fiction can count as prior art for patent purposes: a lot of science fiction writers seem to specify their ideas in about as much detail as a lot of patents.
Conversely, when are science fiction writers going to start taking out patents prior to publishing their writings?
... unless you have enough lawyers, in which case you can patent anything. Any SF author who tried to patent the idea of pressing a single button to buy a bunch of stuff would have been laughed out of the patent office. A big corporation gets, "Oh yes sir, right away."
-- The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Re:prior art? patents?
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73939133
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Where have you been hiding? People patent concepts all the time. No working implementation is required anymore. And a lot of SciFi writing is actually quite a bit more detailed than just a "concept".
Ion engines existed before 1977, and Star Wars
by
Mandelbrute
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· Score: 1
They keep satelites in orbit.
Is "science faction" a play on words...
by
Anthony+Boyd
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· Score: 1
...or a standard Slashdot editor misspelling?
If it's a play on words, someone clue me in. I don't get it.
Re:Is "science faction" a play on words...
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Adam9
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· Score: 1
No, just a standard Slashdot user not RTFA.
Re:Is "science faction" a play on words...
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dr_tube
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· Score: 1
Uhhh... are you serious? As in FACT or FICTION. fact fiction factfiction factiction factction factt ion faction
Re:Is "science faction" a play on words...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
He meant to type "science friction".
Re:Vehicle that runs on bad news
by
Dunkalis
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· Score: 1
Actually, in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books (forget which one), there is a spacecraft that runs off of bad news, since bad news travels faster than light and all. It really didn't work well, since bad news isn't a really good thing, and nobody liked it when they arrived.
-- Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
The "new" generation of scientists lauded by everyone to be the future of this country already knows what needs to be done.
I have been involved in science and radical theories since I was a wee lad (some say I still am:-P), and came to the realization rather early what fields need more good men. AI, Aerospace, Mechanical Eng., Nuclear Physics, Quantum Physics, Partical Physics; all these fields offer such useful and potent technology should more people focus on them.
The factor keeping innovation out of those fields right now however is lack of funding or interest in said fields, because you can't honestly give an estimation as to how much time it'd take to come up with something profitable.
AI is profitable, Biometrics is profitable; a booster design that far surpasses all current designs in both efficiency and power (which is the only thing Aero companies would be interested in) is a little over the top save with years of research and testing. That's simply not a risk anyone is willing to invest in (yet).
-- Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last;)
Mirror in case of slashdotting
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Science faction By Fiona Williams July 5 2003 Icon
Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot, brain implants that let you tap into people's memories and a newspaper that updates itself when a big story breaks. It's not science fiction, it's science fact, as technologists catch up with - and surpass - the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers.
Set in the not-too-distant future, sci-fi films offer insights into what the world might be like and what impact evolving technologies might have on daily life, says Dean Economou, chief technologist of the CSIRO's Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CENTIE ). Economou says the fact that cloning, virtual reality and biometrics are commonplace concepts today is partly due to representations of the technologies in film and science-fiction literature and that scientists have taken many cues from what they've seen take place on screen.
"Artists are generally very good at reflecting human nature in the tenor of their times and sometimes that leads to very valuable insights," Economou says. "If you're not constrained by knowledge of things you can't do or think you can't do, I think you can come up with some really nice insights.
"[The films] mean people have a vocabulary about the future and you find a lot of the young researchers were very inspired by 2001, Star Trek, Blade Runner or The Matrix. In a very real way, the technologists are inspired by the sci-fi people and the sci-fi people are similarly inspired by the technologists."
More than merely being inspired by technologists, filmmakers are actively seeking out scientists for advice and input. Whereas early science-fiction filmmakers could take a liberal dose of artistic licence when grappling with scientific concepts, modern science has taken away this luxury for today's filmmakers and called for accuracy in science-fiction filmmaking like never before.
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Upon its release last year, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, set in the not-too-distant future, featured a wealth of hi-tech gadgetry. The film sees Tom Cruise head up a futuristic pre-crime division that prevents murder by arresting would-be perpetrators before they act, based on the psychic evidence of three "pre-cognitive" siblings. The film is highly regarded for its accuracy in projecting what life will be like in 2054 as all objects and gadgets featured in the film have very real foundations in existing technologies.
John Underkoffler is a graduate of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with more than a decade of experience in the organisation's Media Lab. As Minority Report's science and technological adviser, he played a key role in ensuring the gadgets and technology featured in the film had firm foundations in scientific studies.
"Steven insisted early on that this not be 'science fiction' per se in the way it is usually understood," Underkoffler says. "But rather what he called 'future reality'; it should be a recognisable extrapolation of what we have today with the technologies that are just emerging. What would be trends in a future that is just distant enough [to be] really interesting to look at and is engaging, but at the same time is recognisably bridgeable to now and then."
Underkoffler became involved in Minority Report when the film's production designer Alex McDowell and prop master Jerry Moss led a delegation to MIT to discuss future technology. Spielberg then convened a much-vaunted two-day roundtable think tank with Underkoffler and futurist colleagues, such as Generation X author Douglas Coupland, where he says they "ate Spielberg's bagels and drank his coffee and came up with a giant waldorf salad of notions". Many of the original ideas to stem from that meeting were retained in the final cut of the film, such as the weaponry - vomit-inducing "sick sticks" and acoustic concussion guns.
Much has been made of the "
Limitations of Imagination
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hi All -
I'm Erik Baard, not an AC, but the/. doesn't seem to recognize me tonight.
In short, it's the invention that counts. We pat ourselves on the backs as science fiction readers and writers too easily. Coming up with ideas isn't tough -- that's why one can't patent them. I can imagine a scenario where person A has an idea for a widget in 1978 and starts research into creating it -- an effort that bears fruit in 2002. But now person B is a science fiction writer who writes a story in 1996 talking up this invention. I'm pretty sure people in 2031 will laud the writer for his vision. I just hope the inventor gets rich! : )
Another limitation of science fiction is that it never presents an encompassing view of the future, especially regarding technology. No writer can anticipate the broad range of human inventiveness, and more importantly, how use of those inventions will influence each other across different societies and subcultures. Instead, a single idea is usually offered as a stand-in for the writer's hobbyhorse, like race, sex, greed, fear of death, loss of privacy, etc.
Science fiction does no better with social invention. The most successful stories take place in monarchies or oligarchies, or in military settings. Why? Because such hierarchies are so much easier to handle than the seeming chaos of free market democracies.
Unless, that is, the story deals with that single invention in the near future. Then the social backdrop is assumed, and we can focus on the mutation caused by the introduction of the technology (or element, like alien contact) in question.
Readers expect this and (quite reasonably) allow writers to assume a pretty light burden. Sure, write about cyberspace and leave the gender-bending technologies to the next writer, or tell me about interstellar flight but leave out the improved computer interfaces, or scare me with alien plagues from a returning probe but let's all buy newspapers with coins. I mean, who could have guessed that Viagra would be a tool of conservationists by replacing East Asian folk remedies for impotance? Or that lasers would play CDs and guide bombs?
So, point for point, these kinds of articles give scifi writers too much credit. Any invention can be said to have been anticipated by some scifi noodler. The only time science fiction is useful, apart from as cool entertainment, is when it's well written drama that reveals human character (like any good fiction) or when it anticipates the next moment -- a time when the ground rules are essentially the same but a new twist is thrown in.
Erik
Re:Limitations of Imagination
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hi All -
I'm Erik Baard, not an AC, but the/. doesn't seem to recognize me tonight.
Hi Erik -
GO FUCK YOURSELF!!!
What about OSS?
by
mpthompson
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Has the impact of open source software been anticipated in science fiction literature or movies? It seems to me that 10 to 20 years from now the impact of OSS on the technology industry and our culture can potentially be 10 times or more greater than it is today. Particularly as the grip of the media companies is tightened on an unsuspecting public with draconian DRM laws that leak into all facets of our lives through media controlled technology. The chaos of OSS may ultimately become the last refuge of innovation in a tech sector that is otherwise corralled and beaten into submission.
DVD featured in Robocop, CRTs in 2001
by
alien_blueprint
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I was watching Robocop on DVD with friends for the first time in years the other night - and there was Clarence Boddicker popping what was clearly a DVD disc into a player, so that he could play a final message to his current "hit" from his employer.
Okay, it wouldn't have been called a DVD back then, but I suddenly remembered how the first time I saw that movie in the late 80s, I thought, "That's what we want, movies on CD discs!".
And now we have them.
Watching that scene again, and seeing how offhandedly the disc was used, I realized that in a few years people will probably watch that scene and not even *realize* that back then we had to use infernal video tape, that these movie-on-a-disc things didn't exist, and the whole setup was an attempt to look like "the not too distant future"!
But I'm guilty of this, too - take the computer screens in featured in 2001. None of them were real - they were all projected onto the surface from projectors mounted inside the desks/consoles/whatever. I never realized that until I saw a "making of" documentary on 2001. Now, I'm not sure if either CRTs weren't used with computers back then, or they were just way too expensive for the film's budget, or what, but I had never even *considered* that they might not be real, live screens until I saw that documentary.
Re:DVD featured in Robocop, CRTs in 2001
by
Hogwash+McFly
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· Score: 1
I suddenly remembered how the first time I saw that movie in the late 80s, I thought, "That's what we want, movies on CD discs!".
That's funny, I saw that movie and thought, "that's what we want, kickass bulletproof cyborg police officers!"
-- Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Re:DVD featured in Robocop, CRTs in 2001
by
puckhead
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· Score: 1
IIRC, laser discs were around in 1980 or so.
-- Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
Re:DVD featured in Robocop, CRTs in 2001
by
squiggleslash
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· Score: 1
IIRC, VCDs (CDs with movies on 'em) came out in the very late eighties (but were never really widely adopted in the West.)
There was also a cut-down laser disc that allowed something like 5 minutes of laserdisc-like-analog video on a CD type disc. Can't remember the name of the format. That also dates back to the mid-eighties.
-- You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:DVD featured in Robocop, CRTs in 2001
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
>None of them were real - they were all projected >onto the surface from projectors mounted inside the >desks/consoles/whatever.
Geek trivia:
That's the ONLY reason why Enterprise's cockpit is so dark in the first Star Trek movie.
A rant on smart guns.
by
rjh
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Ask cops sometime what they think of smart gun technologies. Of all the cops I've asked, they all hate the idea. Admittedly, my sample isn't representative; the cops I know are all ones I see at the local shooting range.
Their opinion comes down to basically guns need to be kept as simple as possible. That's been the major direction firearms technology has been taking for the last 50+ years; not making more complex weapons but simpler and cheaper weapons. A modern Glock handgun is cheaper, more reliable, and (most astonishingly!) has fewer moving parts than a revolver of 50 years ago. A modern SIG-Sauer is cheaper, more reliable, and has fewer moving parts than a 1908 Luger.
This trend--towards weapons which have fewer moving parts, fewer breakable parts, and are thus cheaper to manufacture and more reliable--has been overwhelmingly welcomed by shooters. It's been so welcomed that I don't know a single shooter who doesn't welcome it, and I've been shooting for 20 years. In fact, the only people I've ever seen advocate adding complexity to weapons are people who neither shoot for sport nor carry a weapon as part of their daily job.
What happens as soon as you add a fingerprint-recognition system to a firearm?
Well, first, you've got some kind of optical reader... how well does the optical reader work if you drop your gun in a mud puddle? I've dropped an M1911A1 in a bucket of mud before, pulled it out, given it two shakes to dislodge mud from the barrel, and gone through 21 rounds (three magazines) without a failure. I was spattered with mud and the gun was literally steaming by the end of it, but it fired perfectly--zero failures. Could I repeat that kind of reliability experiment with a fingerprint-reading gun? No? Okay, great. Your new smartgun is now less reliable in the face of hostile environments (like mud, water, etc.) than a pistol first designed in the early 1900s.
The next thing you need is some kind integrated circuit controller and wires between it and the optical reader. Do you know why there's been such a push towards simpler and simpler firearms designs? Because when you fire a semiautomatic pistol, parts of it are subjected to internal stresses of hundreds of G-forces and tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. It's not uncommon to have bullets loaded to generate 50,000 pounds per square inch. Take hundreds of G-forces and repeated exposure to huge overpressures and you get an environment which is very, very hostile to everything; the fewer moving parts you have, the fewer parts which can break. Can wires and integrated circuits be built which handle these things? Sure. An example would be the Army's Copperhead artillery system, which uses artillery shells with built-in integrated circuits. The question isn't "can we do it", though: the question is "do we want to be totally dependent on the circuit". If a load of Copperheads doesn't work, the artillery crew can just fall back on conventional high-explosive warheads--they're back in action almost immediately. If your smart gun doesn't work, you're best off throwing the gun at the bad guy. Big difference.
Third thing you need is a battery, because ICs don't run on nothing. Great. So now do you not only have to make sure that your gun is loaded, that a round is chambered, that all safeties are disengaged, you now also have to make sure that your battery hasn't run out? Most cops--the majority of them--shoot very rarely. They don't inspect their guns very often. They go to the range once a year (or however often their department requires that they qualify) and then they forget about the gun the other 364 days. You ever had a power outage and then discovered the batteries in your flashlight are out? Do you really want the same thing happening to your firearm when the bad guy is shooting at you, your life is on the line, and all you want to do is get home safely to your wife and kids?
... Also, take a look at how many cops are shot by criminals with their
Just a thought -- perhaps, if these "smart guns" become the trend, they could give the shooter the benefit of the doubt. What I mean is, if it isn't able to read the print, then it will let you shoot. It would only prevent you from shooting if it could read the print and was certain that the person firing was NOT the owner.
Then again, I'm one of the aforementioned people who don't own guns and don't use guns in their daily work. In fact, other than my father's hunting rifles, I've never actually fired a gun, much less owned one. So I don't really care about smart guns:)
I like that camera idea, though. It makes more sense than cameras in cell phones, anyway:)
Even if the system works perfectly, it's quite easy to imagine situation when it may put cop's live into danger. What if not criminal, but somebody who is on the cop's side gets his hands on the gun? Maybe he could help the cop, was he able to fire the gun, but since it's protected, he's out of luck.
I would like to see some statictics how often this happens, but generally, it might be more commonplace then criminal getting hands on the gun, since policeman may be activelly cooperating or at least not trying that hard to prevent that from hapening.
-- "Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, the most dangerous moving part of a gun is THE BULLET!
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I agree whole-heartedly with everything you said except the last paragraph. Why do homeowners need to be careful about shooting intruders?
If someone has broken into my home, I expect that they wish harm upon me or my family. I'm not going to try and figure out if they are armed or even what they are there for. They safest thing for me to do it to shoot them. And shoot to kill..
In Oklahoma we have a law nick-named the "Make My Day" law. Basically it protects homeowners by saying if you are an intruder, you are a target. Don't want to get shot, don't break into people's homes.
So fix the law, not the gun.
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I didn't realize bullets were part of a gun. You guys must have some pretty nifty guns where you live.
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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EpsCylonB
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· Score: 1
Could I repeat that kind of reliability experiment with a fingerprint-reading gun? No? Okay, great. Your new smartgun is now less reliable in the face of hostile environments (like mud, water, etc.) than a pistol first designed in the early 1900s.
We are talking about police that operate in the urban enviroment, it worries me that police could be so careless with their guns that they might accidently find a puddle of mud and drop it in.
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If someone has broken into my home, I expect that they wish harm upon me or my family.
Personally, I expect them to be after the VCR. YMMV.
I'm not in law enforcement, but I do carry, and I agree with most of your comments about 'smart' guns. However, I do believe your rant is somewhat constrained, in that it only addresses current technologies.
I *definitely* do not want to rely on optical recognition for any weapon (especially since I often use a mexican carry rig, which introduces its own issues with dirt, et alia).
OTOH, there _are_ significant advantages to the concept. Imagine a weapon which, say, uses your brain waves to induce a positive safety system, powered by a micro-engine good for years. Or even a thermal fingerprint reader, where one could wipe the surface mud off, and the reader could still distinguish ridges using heat differentiation. This weapon always fires when *you* pull the trigger (well, at least as often as today - *not* 100%), yet is either inert in the hands of an opponent, or, better still, sends a taser charge through the grips if the trigger is pulled by someone else.
I'd want such a weapon to fail in the 'will fire when trigger pulled' direction if something went wrong with the recognition system, and I'd want such a system to be _at least_ as reliable as e.g. my Glocks. (There are also many registration / transfer issues with the potential to further abuse my civil rights, but I'll skip those;)
The biggest problem with the concept of smart guns is that the recognition technology - today - is not reliable enough. The advantages of smart guns (safety, insurance, ease-of-access since you don't have to lock them up away from your kids) makes this a market which will only get bigger. And as for the potential for gun control which could be incorporated here, well, as my bumper sticker says, "I wasn't using my civil rights anyway".... <sigh>
I do like the idea of fiber optic cameras alongside the gun barrel - particularly one that runs full motion vid when the trigger slack is taken up, the way some laser sights work. Or, in a 'smart' gun, whenever the gun senses it is being pointed.;)
-- If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Re:A rant on smart guns.
by
wcdw
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Two words: _Civil Liability_.
It doesn't matter _squat_ if it's an obvious enough case of "Castle Doctrine" and the cops haul the body away and leave you your gun, even (unlikely;). You can still lose everything you own in civil court, sued by the relatives of the dead intruder. Let's face it - being right can mean little or nothing, depending on the mix of judge, jury and lawyers involved.
Also, not all states support castle doctrine, or only support it in a limited fashion - it pays to know the laws of your own state.
-- If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
True. But all states should support it. It's stupid to think that a homeowner, who has probably just been woken up in the middle of the night should even be expected to have to make judgement calls like this.
And I do know the laws in my state. Other states where lawyers have more control (ie: California) may be different. Wouldn't make any difference to me though. The law and what is right don't always agree but at least one of those never changes..
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
at least one of those never changes You mean that the ass does not get bigger?
The right to defend one's home _ought_ to be 'inalienable', preferably at the constitutional level.;)
I hear you about what is right vs. what is legal, and we agree about how much difference the then-current legality would make.
I was fortunate to live in Florida, where the right to defend one's home (and one's self) is very strong. My current state of residence (GA) is not quite as generous, but does clearly give me the right to use deadly force, both within my home and to defend life (not property). Hopefully I'll never be called upon to live in less enlightened states -- or we'll get a federal carry permit, and perhaps subsequent collection of such laws at the federal level.
-- If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Yeah, right. One more reason for criminals to wear gloves.
Well, whatever. The idea just popped into my head as I was reading the original post.
Re:A rant on smart guns.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
put a small digital camera into an enclosure the same size as a mini-MagLite flashlight. Have a connection between this and the trigger. Require that all the city's police officers have one outfitted on their firearms. It doesn't impair the usage one bit, it doesn't affect reliability, but it does provide concrete evidence for each shot fired--who it was fired at, under what conditions, if the suspect was armed, etc.
Hell, I'd jump at the chance to buy an aftermarket accessory like that, too. In the first place, it might convince homeowners to be very, very careful before they go about shooting intruders--and it would also dissuade frivolous lawsuits brought by intruders who claim the homeowner was shooting recklessly.
I hear a piece of gum over the lense can work wonders....
First, I really don't mean to be rude here, so please forgive me if I come across that way.
A smart gun weapon system which defaults to allowing someone to fire is pretty much useless. It's a matter of only a second or two to drop the gun in a mud puddle, or to remove the battery, or whatever, at which point you've circumvented the access control altogether.
If you're going to use technology to control access to something, it almost always needs to default to no access.
We are talking about police that operate in the urban enviroment, it worries me that police could be so careless with their guns that they might accidently find a puddle of mud and drop it in.
One of the officers I shoot with recently had a drunk puke on him. Not "a little got on his shoes", instead "as I was hauling this guy up and away from the bar, he leaned in towards me like he needed support and just let loose all down my uniform".
Or what about if a drunk driver goes off the road and winds up half-submerged in a river? Officers don't say "well, hell, I guess I'd better remove my firearm and put it down right over here" before wading in. They go straight in without wasting time like that--so their firearms had damn well better be able to fire after being totally submerged in water.
Being a police officer is a messy, messy job. On a good day you'll just run the risk of drunks puking on you. On a bad day you run the risk of having to wrestle a suspect to the ground, and that tends to be a very dirty thing. You ever seen how dirty a seven-year-old gets while wrestling outside? Now imagine it's between two grown men, one of whom is actively trying to kill the other.
Policing is not a sedentary job, and it's not a clean one.
Re:A rant on smart guns.
by
rjh
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do homeowners need to be careful about shooting intruders?
It's people like you who give gunowners like me a bad name. YOU NEED TO BE CAREFUL BECAUSE YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT TAKING A HUMAN LIFE, YOU DOORKNOB. This isn't something wherein you can say "whoops, my goof, sorry Frank, sure we've been friends for 30 years and sure your car broke down and sure you thought we were out of town and sure you came in using the house key we gave you 20 years ago, and sure you just wanted to use the phone. Tough shit. You were fair game."
Before you go about shooting someone, you need to damn well make certain--and I mean certain--that they pose a clear and present threat to your life, your family's life, or some innocent person's life. If you don't do this, then you're not an armed citizen, you're a thug with a gun.
Would a gun camera help cut down on reckless shooting? I think so, yes, because it would allow accountability. If a homeowner was shooting at an unidentified shadow, the camera would show that, and the homeowner could be held accountable for it.
Here in Iowa, we have Castle Doctrine both on the criminal lawbooks and the civil lawbooks. It's a lovely little bit of law: if you're found to have been acting in self-defense (either by the DA refusing to file charges, or by being acquitted in court of criminal charges stemming from the shooting), you're totally immune from all civil litigation surrounding the act.
In other words, if I shoot the intruder in a clear case of home defense, his estate can't file a lawsuit.
It's a great law, and I wish more states adopted it.
That *is* a great law. I'm curious, though - you used the term self-defense. Is self-defense required for Castle Doctrine cases in Iowa? Or is it assumed based on proof that the dead person did not have legitimate access to the premises?
(I keep wanting to say 'victim' instead of 'dead person', except that of course the homeowner is the real victim here.)
-- If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Re:A rant on smart guns.
by
The+Asmodeus
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· Score: 1
So what your are suggesting is that it's MY responsibility to figure out the motive of someone breaking into my house? I'm supposed to not only quiz them as to their intentions but also figure out if they are capable of deadly force?
And you called ME a doorknob??? Did you even think before you posted that? I'm not talking about guarding a VCR but protecting my family.
Someone breaking into your house. Yes, you do need to do a little "Friend or Foe" to make sure you aren't shooting a family member but basically if you don't have a reason to be in my house, the worst can be assumed and YOU are taking your life into your own hands. YOU are the one that NEEDS TO BE CAREFUL. And in my state, Oklahoma, you can be running out the door and shot in the back and I'm still justified by the law.
Reckless shooting and defending your home and family have NOTHING to do with each other.
Highly dependent on the circumstances. If you shoot a burglar who's carrying a weapon (even a holstered one), most DAs won't bat an eyelash: the guy was armed, your action was reasonable, the death certificate gets listed as a homicide and it gets processed as justifiable self-defense.
In Iowa, "self-defense" doesn't necessarily mean responding to an attack. Preemptive attack is acceptable, provided you're acting in response to a perception of a clear and present danger. If the bad guy's unarmed and only wanted your TV set, but he was sneaking into your bedroom and you had a reasonable fear he was going to kill you, you're safe. If the bad guy's unarmed and he's sneaking out your back door with your TV set, you can be successfully prosecuted if you attack, since there's no clear and present threat.
Warning: IANAL.
Re:A rant on smart guns.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Shooting someone in the back while he's running out the door, and defending your family have NOTHING in common.
Before you go about shooting someone, you need to damn well make certain--and I mean certain--that they pose a clear and present threat to your life, your family's life, or some innocent person's life.
Although I would really like to agree with this, when someone has broken into your home, you simply do not have the luxury of being certain.
First, any intruder almost certainly is a clear and present threat. Life already is cheap, and people get shot for far less reason than breaking and entering, and everyone knows this. Thus, rational people simply don't do it. They knock and identify themselves first. Even the police knock first most of the time, contrary to what you might see in movies. So anyone who does break in is likely irrational, making them almost certain to be a threat.
Second, you will have only seconds to decide, IF you're lucky. It is very likely that you are sleepy and the intruder is not. He already has the advantage of surprise. He almost certainly is armed. If you are still alive after the several seconds it will probably take to quietly retrieve, un-safety and aim your weapon, it means he has not seen you, and you definitely want to keep it that way. Once you announce your presence, intentionally or not, you'd better be ready to shoot faster than he can, or you and your family are dead.
Finally, the safety of your family greatly outweighs that of some random intruder. If it has to be one or the other, hopefully the intruder has made his peace with God.
I don't want to sound like a callous, heartless asshole (even though in that situation I probably would be - I hope to hell I would). It's just that homes are locked for a reason, and if someone breaks in, especially in a dangerous areas, you have to assume hostile intent, or else you and your family end up being dead instead of the criminal.
The Wonderful Future
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The "next big thing" to stimulate the IT job market is not going to happen any time soon, so stop waiting.
The boom during the late 90s was enough to keep big industry going for 10-20 years - go get a real job!
The "buggy whip analogy", so popular around here, does not apply now, since what is being gradually replaced by machines in this time period is not human physical labor.
Most jobs in the future will be government (either direct-paid or the "we can't afford an unemployed revolution")-type jobs wherein the main goal for the empoyee will be showing up on time every day. Think "Adult Daycare", since gov't-created jobs are essentially time-wasters anyway.
Don't expect the pay to be very good.
Re:The Wonderful Future
by
fferreres
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Nice point. I've been thinking about this issues for some time. But there's a twist to it, what would companies sell? If there is a lot of unemployed (read: goverment paid or financed jobs), and salaries as low, so will be the sales. And if goverment need to charge a lot of charges so to feed people with purchasing power so that they can survive, they do it buy taking money away from these same companies.
No, your line will not work. Yes, it can work when the unemployed to employed ratio is low.
What will HAVE to happen is companies will just give up trying to make their fortunes selling stuff to the masses. They will have to focus on making the rich happy.
Rich people, at some point, will have to either start spending their money (become real consumers), or losing it. For example, there is NO point is speding much money in investment projects right now. You have extra capacity. What you need is consumers. So you need the rich to start spending their money, and thus employing the uhg, unemployed.
You could think an extreme case: let's say Bill Whatever discovers a machine that can materilize whatever, anywhere, with zero cost, and that how the machine works it's a trade secret. What happens? Nobody can compete. So at first, every consumer buys from Bill Whatever.
If Bill Whatever doesn't spend his income, you have a problem. Suppose he puts it at a bank, and offers loans to consumers. Great! The weel keeps moving for a while. After some time, what??
No, Bill Whatever MUST spend his money in some way, he has to demand something back from everyone else in this world. But he can't stop the world. In this case the goverment can start printing paper and giving it to people for free, at which point Bill Whatever starts to feel the pressure to hire people.
The economy is trade, if few people have a lot, and they do not want to trade good for goods (read: demand services for their own consumption), only goods for money, the wheel stops, and you'll have the goverment expanding credit as a short term solution, then raising taxes, then..going into panic more, and after that, making a case to move to put rich people in line with reality (that is, making war, fear of losing everything for everyone inside their country).
That's what a recesion is. Tax increases do not solve the issue. Only wealth taxes would, or enforced consumption of the ones that have purchasing power (or you could just print money if there was a single world currency).
But the world having countries doesn't help, money moves very fast from country to country. So...
The real question really is, if we ever reach a point where we don't need everyone to work so that there is anough food and houses, why the heck would you need capitalism? I don't mean comunism, but why capitalism? If things are NOT scarce, economic rules do not aplly, and you only have "laws" of who owns what, and will shape the world we'll live in. The economy years are counted. This century is about the law...we are already seing this with stupid patents and laws like DMCA, Patrio-t Act, etc.
It looks like a lot of the movies presaging future technologies are based on the works of Philip K. Dick. If that isn't a good reason to be mildly schizophrenic, hide out in your bungalow and eat LSD all day, I don't know what is!
Minority Report Accuracy?
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KrispyKringle
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"[Minority Report] is highly regarded for its accuracy in projecting what life will be like in 2054 as all objects and gadgets featured in the film have very real foundations in existing technologies."
Yeah. Existing technologies. Especially the part about the coked-out siblings who see the future through disturbances created by murders in the metaphysical plane. I bet Spielberg really researched that one, too.
You know what's scary?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
If you combine the topic and summary for each:
Build Your Own Bar Stool Racer angkor sends in this site about the new and fascinating sport of bar stool racing. Science Faction tqft sent in this article about science fiction devices and concepts making it to the real world.
They're the exact same length!
You wouldn't
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It's a black thing.
MOD ABUSE ON PARENT - SLASHDOT CENSORS TRUTH
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
In the future we will have newspapers that automatically repeat themselves.
Re:WTF?!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No, it's like the XBox thing. By taking Microsoft's money, the editors are helping them go out of business. Then Linux will take over and the proletariat will rule the world, and cure AIDS, solve world hunger etc, etc.
michael you mother fucker
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Trying to post more stories than CmdrTaco? Try to make them more quality than this, asshole. Fuck you.
History of virtual reality
by
jeti
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· Score: 2, Informative
I remember reports on VR experiments with headtracking from 1968. Sadly, I haven't yet found a good site on the history of VR. But this one claims that the idea already existed back in the 1950s.
Re:History of virtual reality
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entartete
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· Score: 1
I haven't found any particularly amazing sites on the history of vr but there is a collection of essays called 'multimedia: from wagner to virtual reality' edited by randall packer and ken jordan that has a lot of good material, starting with richard wagner and working thgough to the same damn chapter from 'hamlet on the holodeck' by janet murray that everyone excerpts for such collections, not that it's a bad chapter, but i'd rather see some more of her writings since i already own HotH, which if you haven't read I'd also recommend as it has a lot of historical information about VR as well as her theories about agency and authorship and such
Most ficitious scientifiul machine.....
by
myoohn
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· Score: 0
Time Machine,anyone?
No, You didn't quite get it.
by
jamonterrell
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· Score: 0
Gotcha, So when the cop draws the gun, it attempts to scan his finger, but because he has whipped it out in a hurry he hasn't gotten his finger quite on the sensor correctly and is repetitively told "Please re-align finger on scanner unit" while he has his brains blown out by a conventional (reliable) gun.
It's all too clear now!
-- I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Dont't need a flying car. Just need something that i can plug into a wall and turn my mind to mush periodically. ..
Wait a minute, I am sitting here plugged typing on a laptop plugged to wall while reading slashdot. If that's not being under the droud I don't know what is!
-- Slashdot: droud for nerds. Nothing matters.:)
Re:Vehicle that runs on bad news
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Anil+Kandangath
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· Score: 0
And in one of those books there was this rock band which blasted a zillion watts of music from their spacecraft over some planet and their magnificient finale involved having one spacecraft dive into the sun! Now that's the kind of future I want!
Perhaps science fiction's most important invention
by
vudufixit
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· Score: 2, Funny
Is the almighty "plot device." The "plot device" is basically any fanciful piece of equipment that is used, altered or modified in the service of resolving story points that actually require some real human problem solving. Many Star Trek TV episodes feature this piece of technology. Independence Day and countless other blockbuster films do, too.
The Plot Device has a real world counterpart. It's embodied in all of our technology, and all of our faith in technology to solve the problems of Nature's and Man's making.
I, for one, can't wait to see the end of that story...
More info - Ivan Sutherland
by
jeti
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· Score: 2, Informative
It was Ivan Sutherland that built HMDs as early as 1966. Here's a biography and here's a link with one more image of a HMD.
Fact is definitely better
by
Anil+Kandangath
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· Score: 1, Interesting
The world wide web is much much better than anything predicted in science fiction. We take the web so much for granted that it is difficult for us to imagine a time when there was no web/internet for us to communicate (and that was not so long ago). Could anyone have predicted that within a span of 10 years, almost every community on earth would be connected by computers without the whole setup being owned by any company or government (an amazing idea in itself) with so much content provided by people for free(amazing too). I am of the strong view that the world of the future will be shaped in ways that no science fiction author has thought of and someone will be saying these very same words in another discussion forum (wonder what they will be like in the future) at that time.
Re:Fact is definitely better
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Multivac was Asimov's massive world-girdling computer that anyone could connect to and get answers for well, anything. Sound familiar at all?
Although actually, Google's choice for the answer to The Last Question might still need a bit of work
Especially as movies are 30 years behind...
by
geekotourist
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· Score: 5, Interesting
the literature, at least. And the author appears to be entirely unaware of this, because the people she interviewed- the movie experts- also don't know this. Saying that technology is catching up with "the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers" is like saying that a new computer is catching up with "the benchmarks set by PDP-11's and Cray X1's."One is mightily easier to catch up with than the other.
Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...
Authors
Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.
Directors and others involved in SF movies...
Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.
If the technologists have caught up to the literature, let's all go off to play a game of quantum soccer with the other 10^16 posthumans in the multiverse (to give a nice 4 years old example from a state of the art author. I'd also recommend Dozois' "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections, Stross, McLeod, Vinge and most anything found in the best of the SF magazines.)
Re:Especially as movies are 30 years behind...
by
AndroidCat
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· Score: 1
Authors.. Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
Since there are relatively few Big Name authors who make a full-time living writing SF, frequently hard SF writers work in a scientific field.
Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature
It's sad, but there are really good legal reasons for them to have as little contact with SF literature as possible. If it can be shown that they had any contact with a really cool idea in a story, and they later use something like it in a movie, they're toast. Case in point: Terminator. It now has Harlan Ellison's name in the credits and a lot of money changed hands.
It's the same reason they rarely read unsolicited scripts. If they do something similar later, and can't prove that they didn't read it, they're probably fscked.
Stupid, but that's Hollywoodland for you...
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Re:Especially as movies are 30 years behind...
by
Wolfrider
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· Score: 1
--Norman Spinrad also did an interesting take on Hitler, a book called "Iron Dream" or something like that.
--Damn, is this thread over now that Hitler has been mentioned?!
-- .
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
They didn't mention quantum teleportation...been done on large groups of photons. (Star Trek, And Larry Niven, possibly others)
didn't mention Moller and his flying car thingie...been test flown. (Heinlien, and others)
didn't mention those needleless injection thingies...sold by a variety of companies (Star Trek)
didn't mention clones...rumors of human tests (a running gag in sci-fi)
didn't mention PDA's...sold by retailers all over (Mentioned as pocket computers...Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle 'The Mote in God's Eye' first published in 1974) Mote also made a couple of other subtle predictions besides everybody walking around with pocket computers, they also predicted that they would be wirelessly connected to nearby large databases...see wi-fi and a primitive internet/web-services kinda thing.
I can't think of anymore, I'm sure someone will
-- If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
didn't mention those needleless injection thingies...sold by a variety of companies (Star Trek)
As I recall, NASA already had a needle-less injector, (How do you inject someone in a spacesuit and you can't get to their arm?) and that's where the Trek people got the idea. Of course, taking a recent development and extrapolating future common use is good SF too.
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Re:no doubt
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
(How do you inject someone in a spacesuit and you can't get to their arm?)
Um, shove a needle thru the spacesuit, pull it out and slap a patch on??
Device from "The Trigger Effect"
by
agm
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· Score: 1
The device from "The Trigger Effect" (Arthur C. Clark and Michael Kube-McDowell) is the one we should all be striving for. It is an electromagnetic field that renders gun powder useless and explosives in general useless. Great book, BTW.
(The conspiracy theorist in me says it would be "swept under the carpet" like electric powered cars have been).
Re:yeah but....
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
nanotech: the gun recognizes that somebody other than the cop picked it up, and turns itself into a jello gun with dark chocolate bullets.
Not everything is possible!
by
William+Baric
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· Score: 1
The concept of brain implants, which feature in the film in the form of "virtual vacations" [...] are at least "philosophically possible", based on evolving technologies
Philosophically possible? Really? Right now we know very little about how memory works but if what we think we know is true then "virtual vacations" are virtually impossible.
Memory seems to be the result of interactions between several subsytems using different brain structures. But even if we had the technology to make precise changes in several regions of the brain at the same time, we still have absolutely no idea what changes must be done to create a specific memory. Also, since the same brain elements participate in the recollection of several memories (if not most of them), it means that a new memory is not a new structure but rather a modification of something which already exists, meaning a new memory is dependant upon previous memories, which means everyone remember things differently. Which means that in order to create a "virtual vacation" we would have to analyze a big part of the brain, down to (at least) the molecular level, in a very short time and this for each person. I'm skeptical.
Device from "Weird Science"
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Pettifogger
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· Score: 4, Funny
What we really need is a device that can be hooked to a mid-80s computer that will create really hot women from pictures we cut out of magazines and stuff.
--
IAAL
Re:Device from "Weird Science"
by
SN74S181
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· Score: 1
Magazines?
Is there something wrong with the brassiere section of the Sears Catalog that I wasn't aware of??
Re:Device from "Weird Science"
by
EpsCylonB
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· Score: 1
If only you had fired it once more, you could have also prevented Leonard Nimoy from ever recording the incredibly frightening Ballad of Bilbo Baggins video. I swear, watching that thing has on more than one occasion made me want to take a phaser to myself, just so I would not have to carry on with the memory of those hippie vulcan/hobbit nymphs prancing about. *shudder*
lets try to keep it this way - maybe its because i have A.D.D, but if they get too long i dont even read more than the first sentence, i just click on comments
Still waiting on those flying cars..
by
SystematicPsycho
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· Score: 1
Ever since I was small I've kept hearing that they'll be bringing out flying cars soon, you'd hear it every year over and over again but to no avail. The last report I heard was that they were to expensive to make.
So I'll ask again now as this question has dissapeared from the radar for a few years, are we going to be seeing flying cars soon or what?
-- Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
it's not like this is really news...
by
Malor
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· Score: 5, Interesting
SF authors have been doing this *forever*. This article did catch a few good recent ones, but there are some towering accomplishments in early SF, including:
The waterbed (Heinlein, I believe)
The microwave oven (Heinlein) (has a one-paragraph joke about how hard cooking and cleanup are.... something along the line of "I pushed the button, you toss the dishes in the disposer." For 1950s-era writing, this was a powerful insight just tossed away as a cute joke.)
Waldoes (Heinlein: the short story "Waldo", about a brilliant but incredibly weak man who lives in orbit and uses remote manipulators for everything) Even the modern *name* of these manipulators comes from the story.
Geostationary satellites (Clarke) -- This was an amazing insight for the time -- it's one of those things that's retroactively obvious, but exceedingly difficult to invent.
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck. The book was "Way Station", published in 1963. Aliens had set up a waypost on Earth, and had hired an Earthling to run it. He got to play with some amazing technology. The virtual reality thing was a room-sized hunting simulator where he fired real shells at projected images on a wall, and they reacted appropriately. It was described as being extremely real and very frightening.
This story was also my first exposure to the concept of a frictionless surface, which obviously remains fantasy at this point. I imagine frictionless surfaces were done before this, but this is the earliest example I can remember for something holo-deckish.
Cell phones -- Dick Tracy, in the 1930s, had a pretty fair approximation. People wanted those wrist radios in the worst way. As it turns out, that form factor isn't too popular, but the fundamental idea has become indispensable for most first-world citizens, and the basic idea came from comics.
Submarines -- This is a little more of a stretch, but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea showed just what submarines might someday be. It was published in 1870, which is a little after the first submersible warships were designed, so the concept wasn't quite as groundbreaking as some of these others, but the story is worth a nod when you consider they're STILL doing remakes of it -- 130 years later!
And, of course, there's the Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, another one that's a perennial favorite for remakes. This is one of my favorites, not because of the time machine (still unproven and most likely impossible), but because of the social commentary. We've had numerous Morlocks versus Eloi threads here on Slashdot, so it's not just me that finds the parallels a bit creepy. It was published in 1898 and is still quite relevant.
Most modern SF doesn't look very far ahead. It's rare for authors to invent things that are *really* amazing and inventive. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was probably in this caliber, and Gene Wolfe wrote a disturbing book about a society where people encouraged themselves to become schizophrenic as a method of tapping into more of their brainpower. (I think it may have been called "The Book of the New Sun", but that might be another novel by the same author.) Both were fascinating books... but did they really change anything?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, too -- I'm picking out the very best of the old stuff and comparing it to the run-of-the-mill schlock today. But, even so, it seems that SF authors back in the 50s and 60s truly changed the world, and the ones nowadays don't do that. They entertain, they challenge, they make us think about things.... but they don't come up with things that change how we live anymore.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this -- counterexamples welcome.:-)
Re:it's not like this is really news...
by
Trurl's+Machine
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd love to be proven wrong on this -- counterexamples welcome.:-)
Even if they did accurately predict some gizmos, they were incredibly funny with completely false expectations on how people will use them. Take computers and networking - as far as I know, nobody - NOBODY! - guessed that the network will be used to distribute pr0n. What were they thinking? It was so easy to guess. After all, the first pornographical photos were taken on the first Daguerre machines, back in 1860's. First porno movies were shot on the first Lumiere cinematograph. Was it that hard to guess what would be one of the first uses for computer imaging and network distribution?
Re:it's not like this is really news...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hello,
Clarke submitted the satellite idea as an academic brief to Wireless World in his capacity as an RAF electronics engineer. A primitive submarine was used in a failed attack on the British fleet in New York Harbor during the American Revolution. The microwave oven came out of an accident that melted a chocolate bar at a Raytheon lab in 1946. DT's wrist radio was just a small walkie talkie, not a precisely channeled cell phone.
When scifi ideas do beat inventions to the punch, it's usually because it's easier to publish words than to produce and employ a product, especially a groundbreaking one. What's more common is for a feedback loop to occur: researchers publish findings and potential uses; scifi writer reads the findings and incorporates the idea in a story; public demands or expects the product after seeing it in a movie; research intensifies in response to new, stronger market expectations.
Erik Baard
Re:it's not like this is really news...
by
Idarubicin
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· Score: 2, Informative
Even if they did accurately predict some gizmos, they were incredibly funny with completely false expectations on how people will use them. Take computers and networking - as far as I know, nobody - NOBODY! - guessed that the network will be used to distribute pr0n. What were they thinking? It was so easy to guess.
Actually, I would guess that any new communications technology will be quickly adapted for pornography. It started with the Gutenberg press and movable type, things have continued that way to this day. One of the first authors to use the press was Pietro Aretino, who in 1534 published the first editions of his Ragionamenti--dialogues about "brothel affairs". Ahem. See also Lynn Hunt's The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800.
New technology will--if at all possible--be first used for pornography and sex, followed by gambling, then crime. Hint: it is always possible. There will then be media condemnations, cynically moralizing editorials, government overreaction attempting to regulate the technology, and finally public adoption.
-- ~Idarubicin
Re:it's not like this is really news...
by
Frequency+Domain
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· Score: 2, Informative
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck.
I think Clarke gets credit for this one too. The book "The City and the Stars" opens with Alvin & friends playing a total immersion VR adventure game. They're even doing so using distributed networking, since Alvin doesn't even know where some of his friends live. TC&TS was published in 1953.
Re:it's not like this is really news...
by
Trurl's+Machine
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· Score: 1
New technology will--if at all possible--be first used for pornography and sex, followed by gambling, then crime. Hint: it is always possible.
I agree with the general line of your thought, but still have problems imagining such uses of nanotechnology, the (alleged) Next Big Thing. Suggestions, anyone?
Re:it's not like this is really news...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
New technology will--if at all possible--be first used for pornography and sex, followed by gambling, then crime. Hint: it is always possible.
I agree with the general line of your thought, but still have problems imagining such uses of nanotechnology, the (alleged) Next Big Thing. Suggestions, anyone?
Concerned about size? Don't believe the claims for penis-enlargers? Try the new Nano-Box(tm)!!! A perfect fit, every time!
Re:it's not like this is really news...
by
Scriven
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· Score: 1
You said it yourself, "the Next BIG THING", emphasis mine of course.
Spam from the future (with script-kiddie speak removed of course): Want a bigger penis to please your mate?
Only NanoCo's Micro-Schlong-Enchancer will do it!
That's Right, Just spread this cream all over your miniscule penis, and let our specially trained nanobots naturally extend your penis longer, harder, better! Women will love you! Become the porn star you've always wanted to be!
100% successful, fully endorsed by Ron Jeremy the 4th!
-- This is my.sig. It isn't very big.
--An Oldie, but a Goodie!
Re:it's not like this is really news...
by
spitzig
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· Score: 1
I was recently in a conversation about OLD submarines. There were submarines as long ago as the American Revolutionary war. I might be getting them mixed up, but the guy I was talking too talked about "The Turtle". A wooden ball from which the crew placed explosives on the sides of ships. Or maybe they drilled holes in the ships.
You say SF authors today don't "change how we live" and they did in the 50s and 60s. But, did people in the 50s and 60s say the SF authors changed the world back then? The most recent "change the world" thing I can think of was 3D cyberspace. Usually credited to Gibson's Neuromancer, but someone else did it earlier (Vinge?). The closest we have for now is online games.
Bruce Sterling did something similar to the schizophrenic thing in Distraction. It was more of a "physical" split in brain chemistry, though. The book's topic was scandals distracting people from what's REALLY going on in the world of politics. "I heard something about a repeal of the First Amendment, but I want to hear about who the Senator is screwing."--that's the basic idea.
If a red ad is etched into your retinas....
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
the afterimage would be green, not red.
And you really thought to get away with such a joke on a geek site. Heaven help you!
Err, no.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"Big Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect."
Err, no. Big Brother was a totalitarian government. Capitalism and Communism were irrelevant. You speak about Nineteen Eighty-Four as western schools twisted the story - as anti-communism propaganda. Orwell was a socialist, and hated how his book was used to attack socialism in a roundabout way.
It is becoming the real world making it into scifi.
"Trinity does it properly in The Matrix Reloaded. She whips out Nmap version 2.54BETA25, uses it to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then proceeds to exploit it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001. " ( http://www.insecure.org/ ).
And the article never mentioned "Ralf124C41".
Solution
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Mark the cops with RFID tags in their hands (wristbands if you don't want to do underskin surgical implants), then make the gun fire only if the RFID tag gives the proper response to the challenge.
Problem solved. Oh, just don't call the thing with a serial number of 666.
Re:Solution
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What is not solved at all is the number one situation that cops shot with their own weapons find themselves in: when both the cop and the perp have their hands on the gun, struggling for control. The cop's wristband will still be close enough to authorize the shot.
As the subject says, I'd love to have a couple of plates of slow glass in my flat. Transform this clunky joint in NE London to a nice spot in the Mediterranean. Guns that won't fire because of fingerprint scans? Wouldn't it just be easier to crack down on who you can sell guns to?
Re:I want my slow glass
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AndroidCat
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· Score: 1
Mmmm, all that glass with months (years) of sunlight stored in it. One brick would end civilization in a chain-reaction explosion.
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Oh, and another thing...
by
Hogwash+McFly
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· Score: 1
take the computer screens in featured in 2001. None of them were real - they were all projected onto the surface from projectors mounted inside the desks/consoles/whatever...Now, I'm not sure if either CRTs weren't used with computers back then, or they were just way too expensive for the film's budget
I'm sure you probably know this, but in a lot of films even today, when a character uses a computer screen, they are actually staring at a non functioning CRT/LCD (probably with a blue screen covering the viewable area). The actual moving image is then later 'layed on' so it looks like they are using the screen as normal. I'm sure many/.ers have noticed that the colour, light and definition of some screens just looks fake and overdone, and this is the reason.
-- Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
[OT] Spotted in parking lot
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AndroidCat
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· Score: 1
Oh, just don't call the thing with a serial number of 666.
The other day I was headed back with some groceries when I did a double-take: A car with Ontario licence plate OZZY 666. Too bad the cops probably don't call in plates verbally any more. I'd love to record that one on the scanner!
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The W3 (brief nod to Imperial Earth)
by
LouisvilleDebugger
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Just to mention in passing Arthur C. Clarke's "minisec" (miniature secretary) wireless PDA devices in his 1976 novel "Imperial Earth." One character inherits the minisec of a close but adverserial friend who has died tragically. The character has to face a password prompt, behind which are all his friend's life secrets. If he enters the wrong password, it's very possible that the minisec is set to pre-emptively wipe its memory. "Minisecs" get passing mention in another Clarke story or two, but Imperial Earth is where the concept gets the most schrift.
(There's a parallel scene in his novel 2010 with nothing more than a scrap of paper flying out of an unsealed airlock and into space: was it a message from long-dead astronauts? The parallel is the fragility of the means of communication.)
Now the Offtopic part:(
I remember in late 1993 seeing my first web browser (Mosaic, at a friend's work, EDS in St. Louis), and learning HTML. I was desparate to convince my friends about the importance of this new technology...'You "click" what?' I wondered if the web would ever catch on for real, and desparately wanted it to. It was so cool, but so obscure. I mean, you'd have to have GUI-based computers in every home, and cheap servers outside the domain of academia in order for something like the web to take off, n'est pas?
A year or so passes and every single billboard and TV ad has a URL plastered on it.
Of course I was pleased at the success of the web (and to be "in the know" relatively early.) But I was actually, irrationally, a little sad that it was suddenly everywhere and everyone knew about it, if not exactly how it worked. Very technocratic attitude, and I'm a little bit ashamed of it. To put me back in my place, I can recall reading the early HTML 1.1 specification (that defined FORM data) and thinking "This documentation isn't very well written...people are never gonna go for these forms!"
In the hacker parlance I believe this is called pulling a "vannevar."
I suppose the relative inanity of most web sites was a factor too. "99% of anything is crap." (Sturgeon's Law...maybe that's the real Science Fiction principle that we should examine for its predictive success.)
Re:The W3 (brief nod to Imperial Earth)
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
In the hacker parlance I believe this is called pulling a "vannevar."
Using his last name probably wouldn't get the right meaning across.
They didn't say ALL the technologies. Jetpacks, sick-sticks, those personal-mass-transit pods, all doable within about 50 years, and all based on existing or curently-researched tech. I'd say the precogs are more of a plot device than a "tech". If PKD or the filmmakers had really wanted to they could have worked around them and found some more "scientific" way to run Pre-Crime. Statistical analysis of human behaviour? Booooring! Not to mention it'd be unlikely to be believed unquestioningly.
Plus, they needed a motive for the murder. I'm totally willing to accept certain things as given for the sake of the plot. I was being a tad facetious, but I really did think that was a particularly silly comment, and I strongly dislike Steven Spielberg.
There Is No Singularity
by
Catiline
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Will all do respect to Verner Vinge, I think this article is proof that there is no "technological Singularity" (a point where the pace of change is so rapid it is overwhelming).
Neanderthals could not envision a written word, although the Egyptians could. But the Egyptians could not envision movable type; eventually Gutenburg did. For Gutenburg, a "computer" refered to a person doing math, and was not a machine. In the '70s as computers began marching into many businesses, people cosidered cloning, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and many other things "sci fi" -- and yet they are developing now, for potential release within our lifetimes.
The pace of change over the past 100 years makes me unwilling to forecast what would come 50 or 100 years from now. Indeed, to the Neanderthal, Egyptian or even Gutenburg, the pace of our change would be beyond their tech horizon: their world was far more static and unchanging. Yet the changes over the past year -- or over the past 50 years -- have not overwhelming. The so-called "technological singularity" is not an event horizon, a point-of-no-return beyond which all natural law changes, but a traditional horizon, a permanently receeding point beyond which our future predictions become rapidly more hazy. This article helps show that we will always be able to see some distance ahead, be it only a few decades, and the change will not become instantly overwhelming. Indeed, the pace of change is limited by the ability of society to teach new thinkers what is currently the state-of-art level, and whatever technologies we invent to increase the pace of learning will also assist in increasing the pace of acclimation.
Actually, I think the examples you cite imply exactly the opposite conclusion, that some sort of event horizen will come eventually. Consider the time between Neanderthal man and the Egyptian civilization, the time between the Egyptians and Gutenburg, etc.
Technological advance is accelerating, and will probably continue to do so, barring unforseen disaster or unknown physical restrictions.
James.
-- "I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams."
- W. B. Yeats.
Re:There Is No Singularity
by
Catiline
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· Score: 1
I will agree that a casual glance would lead anyone to conclude there is a singularity to be reached, but you ignored my final statement -- which I based my selection of examples around. The historical examples cited: writing, mobile print, computers -- are technologies that accelerate learning and sharing of information. There was little change in the pace of development between the Egyptians and Gutenburg: the slowest element in the storage and distrobution of knowledge was writing it down or verbally sharing. Then as the printing press became widespread, the hold back was distrobution. Over the years as simple improvements in transportation distrobution likewise improved, until computers accelerated distrobution capacity to beyond what anyone could have imagined, and the pace of advancement still has not overwhelmed us -- because the very technology that increases the pace of advancement increases our pace of acclimation.
Yes, I know televisions are a bit older than the "2001" movie.
However, I'm only reporting what I saw on the documentary. They pulled the console apart, and there were these little projectors inside. The narration suggested that this was because they just couldn't get any computers with CRTs - but I could be have interpreted this incorrectly. Perhaps they *could* get them, but they were too expensive, or perhaps the means to synch them with the film didn't exist. But, anyway, that's my recollection from something I saw on TV five years ago.
I really should track that doco down - they showed how all the sets on the movie worked. They certainly built some interesting stuff!
The issue would have been the cost of colour, reasonable-resolution, graphics back in 1969 on a CRT. That was phenominally expensive at the time.
-- You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Movies? Everything except them!
by
swordgeek
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· Score: 1
Two points here.
First of all, this article isn't so much about accurately predicting the future, so much as creating it. SF has been giving us the vocabulary and conceptual framework for many of our modern inventions. If what we invent is similar but differently implemented than the idea of an SF writer from 40 years ago, it's not that they got it wrong--it's merely that we took the concept in a different direction than they did, when then invented the concept.
Secondly, this article goes on about movies, where in fact movies are about the most laughable bit of conservativism possible, with regards to futuristic ideas. The few decent ones are almost always based on books that have been around for decades.
Why they'd spend time talking about the five or six truly incisive futuristic movies that have been made when there are thousands upon thousands of SF stories that work so much better, I can't say.
--
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Man, you hit the nail on the head
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The concept of money, that is. Why do we need it? Why not get rid of it altogether even now? In the scenario you propose we most definitely wouldn't need money.
Re:Man, you hit the nail on the head
by
fferreres
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· Score: 1
Well, money is just a ticket that tells how much you can withdraw from the pool of offerings. When money becomes something else (ie: to accumulate wealth) you take a lot of risks, as in the extreme example I have shown. When there is a lot of unemployment, you need the markets to rearrange, and the unemployed to stop buying from the ones that do not turn their profits into demand.
After all, if they do not demand your services, why would you buy from them? Because they can be a little more effcient, thus you can't compete? No, not true. If you don't have a job, you don't care beign a little less efficient, as well as you unemployed next door. All you need to do is buy his services, and him you services (in a larger scale, i am being figurative). The real problem are goverments. They charge the most they can, basing that desicion on the more efficient companies (owned by these folks that are not spending their money). In the process, they make it impossible for less efficient people to start their own business. (simple exagerated example: suppose there are great farming technics. So a yard produces a ton of weat, or being no so productive, half a ton. Imagine they charge half a ton of taxes. If you are not 100% efficient, you you are forced to sell the property to some buy company, who's shareholders may not be willing to buy your work, thus you are unemployed Very efficient, wow. And the goverment tries to make it look they are the ones sustaining consumption, after all, they are the ones charging big companies to give away the money to the losers).
It's so sad.
-- unfinished: (adj.)
There are lots of things that came our way
by
PHPhD2B
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· Score: 3, Insightful
One thing is to dream up some sort of fantastic invention or concept, another is being able to actually develop it - it usually takes decades.
Some of you mentioned Jules Verne - he dreamed up submarines and travelling to the moon. He even predicted weightlessness, albeit for the incorrect reason. (He assumed that somewhere between the moon and the earth the gravitational fields would cancel each other out.) Well, we have both - we have submarines and we've been to the moon.
Colonies on the moon? We don't have those, but we have had space stations for decades now, such as Skylab, Mir, and now the ISS. We might even be travelling to Mars within a decade or two, and whoever goes there are going to stay on Mars for a few months.
Johnny Mnemonic / Neuromancer? We're headed that way - researchers are working on connecting computer chips directly to the brain stem to enable completely paralyzed people to robotic arms and computers so they can communicate more easily and manipulate objects.
Alternative energy sources? Several of you claim that there is no work done on these - that's patently untrue. If you would care to read a trade magazine such as Mechanical Engineering you'll find that solar energy, wind energy, and even fusion power receives more and more funding, and at the very least receives constant attention from the engineering societies.
Alternative energy sources and reclaiming waste energy such as waste heat and methane from landfills are becoming more and more prevalent, but right now are used mostly in "niche" applications where the average Joe does not see them - so the perception is that we're only using oil for energy.
And on the topic of Sci-Fi energy sources - Nuclear Power? Isn't that Sci-Fi? Although a nuclear power plant is in principle a very fancy egg boiler.
The internet? Repositories of information available from any computer anywhere? This was not Sci-Fi? In short, the means of communication that we have available now compared to what we had a few decades ago? PDAs, cell phones with internet access, Wi-Fi ?
How about GPS? You can be dropped anywhere on the planet and in an instant find out where you actually ARE. With a satellite phone and a laptop you can even pull up maps and find your way to where you're going. As one of the engineers in charge of developing GPS for the military said in an interview, "This generation may be the last one to know what it means to be lost"
So we don't yet have the holodeck or the matter transference beams, big deal. A lot of what was Sci-Fi a few decades is a reality today, but we fail to appreciate most of it.
-- --I am Sun Tzu of the Borg. Resistance is feudal.
There are dueling attractors ...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They basically do battle by word ordinance... leaving widely-acclaimed floaters in the pool for all the party faithful to salute, that sort of thing. If one really wants to go full steam ahead on the lone singularity, then I'd guess involving the UN is probably the best way to go. Unfortunately, there would be fewer said public eliminations to enjoy as a result.
The Matrix is not just a movie. It's a series, I tell you! Does anyone else think that the UN star at 58 is looking a little wrinkly? Where's my soap opera music?
Yes, I just make it all up.
missing the point
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Did you miss the point in Minority Report that there were retinal scanners everywhere? Linked to the police/government monitoring stations and that his only recourse to aviod being caught was to have his eye's replaced? Sorry, this is, to me, a Big Brother senario.
My letter to the publishing paper.
by
PeterPiper
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Oh Good Grief!
In your July 5th article titled; Science Faction, by Fiona Williams, it was described how science fiction has influenced current day technology. First of all, "Really!? Wow, nobody would have ever realized that!" Duh... What really gets my goat however is that the author (and by association your publication) seems to be completely clueless as to what science fiction IS. The author spent the entire article taking about the effect of 'movies', as if that was what the field of science fiction was. Virtually no mention was made to science fiction as a literary genre whatsoever.
The fact is that there is not a single 'science fiction' movie ever made that has had an original science fiction idea in it. Indeed the vast preponderance of science fiction movies are not science fiction at all. They are cowboy movies in space, nonsensical fantasy with the directors knowing nothing about actual science and scientific speculation and frankly, caring even less. To refer to movies as 'being' the field of science fiction is as insulting to the genre of science fiction (which is a 'literary' genre) as it is revealing of the total ignorance of the author.
This was tawdry reporting.
-- Peter
Re:My letter to the publishing paper.
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fatboyslack
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· Score: 1
Ok, I'll bite, mainly because I'm from Oz, and regularly read The Age.
Tawdry reporting? Total Ignorance? Bah. If you are going to convey the message that a lot of the technology used today was predicted previously by science fiction, which medium are you going to use? The one with a minute (by comparison) number of afficiondoes (who have read PK Dick, Asimov, Verne, Niven etc. (names chosen at random, mind)), or that with a large of people who are going to recognise the examples. Pandering to the masses, maybe, but Tawdry and Ignorant?
Also, there are few if any movies in any genre that have original ideas. Books are a wonderful medium that is woefully unused by the 'plebs', but movies create a format (often misused, of course) that makes wonderful works of sci-fi accessible to many who would never read a book.
-- Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
-- Leo Tolstoy
Re:IDEA!!!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
?? Filesharing is good. ?? RIAA/MPAA/Metallica are evil.
And it never rains in the city?
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Nf1nk
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Imagine your a cop ona rainy day, walking down a alley complete with dumpsters full of spoiling food. some one shoots at you and you dive for cover behind a dumpster. where is your gun? still in your holster that is now in that nasty puddle of mud along with your leg and other equipment. another fun place to be is cold where you need to wear gloves for extended periods of time to avoid frostbite, do you force the officer to stop and remove his gloves before he can return fire? In my opinion fewer moving parts and simpler design is the way to go
-- I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Only on /.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Wow. There are still new and wierd things on the internet that I didn't know about. You tend to get complacent and think you know it all, but this proves otherwise.
Re:Perhaps science fiction's most important invent
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Wolfrider
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· Score: 1
--It probably involves "Deus ex Machina"... http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language= english&version=NIV&passage=revelation+1%3A6-8:)
-- .
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Re:I'm still waiting, Dude!
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vortexau
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· Score: 1
Ye-ah! Just imagine . . .. "Hey! We're in the Twenty-first Century. Where's MY Flying-car, dude?" .
-- (David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter)
"My God - its full of Malware!"
The EARLIEST SF still not realized?
by
vortexau
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· Score: 1
In Verne's "Master of the World", Robur operates a combination Submarine, Surfast Ship, Automobile, and Aircraft.
That was written in the 19th century.
- Never mind your,"where's my aircar!" I say - "Where's my combination Submarine, Surfast Ship, Automobile, and Aircraft." .
-- (David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter)
"My God - its full of Malware!"
brain damaged prognostication
by
buckminsterinsd
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· Score: 1
Ah geez--
"Adcock says he was struck when he saw Minority Report as it was so in tune with scientific developments."
The article reads like a Sunday morning puff piece or some crap from Reader's Digest.
Now let's compare the short sighted scientific prognostication in that Tom Cruise (another lameass L. Ron Hubbard dicklicker) movie with this:
"And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them."
A line from H.G. Wells "The World Set Free", published in 1914.
Now THAT is a real example of being "in tune" with science and technology.
Relativity was still being debated. Quantum what? H.G. When soldiers were still riding into battle on fuckin' horses at the start of World War I. Wells anticipated the potential impact of nuclear war by reading the latest bleeding edge physics papers, understood what was incomprehensible to the average Joe, realized the potential in the science, and correctly forecast the social consequences. (Plus that stinkin' lousy little social liberal commie bastard, was boning this most gorgeous English hottie and good ol' Herbie's old lady was OK with that sweet setup. How much cooler can ya get? Let's see one of those science illiterate pundits get away that kind of scene with their ugly ass wife.)
These post modern social analysts haven't the slightest clue about what is going on in the mega geek world of physics, biology or anything technical topic with math beyond high school. It's embarrassing to let these clowns represent us to the non-technical portion of our society. The stupid asshole politicians will listen to these clowns.
Somebody please give those morons a nickel so they can go buy a clue.... big sigh
This trend--towards weapons which have fewer moving parts, fewer breakable parts, and are thus cheaper to manufacture and more reliable--has been overwhelmingly welcomed by shooters. It's been so welcomed that I don't know a single shooter who doesn't welcome it, and I've been shooting for 20 years. In fact, the only people I've ever seen advocate adding complexity to weapons are people who neither shoot for sport nor carry a weapon as part of their daily job.
On the contrary, last month I listened to a shooter on KQED radio asking that gun manufacturers include a chamber loaded indicator (a $2 safety feature) because he had taken his father's handgun, removed the clip thinking that had unloaded it, and placed a round into his five year-old sister's neck, killing her
over a four hour period.
1) Was the shooter a minor? Sure sounds like it. Minors have no business in an urban environment using weapons unsupervised.
2) If his daddy didn't teach him the manual of arms for the weapon (including the lack of a magazine safety), he should not have been touching it.
3) What was the kid doing with a weapon around a four-year-old?
4) How did the kid get the weapon? Was it in a locked container? If there are minors around, and it was not, then daddy's too dumb to breed, and should have his parenthood license revoked.
5) The "$2 safety feature" will balloon the price of the weapon because of R&D & litigation costs. Some weapons, also, cannot be designed to accomodate such an 'idiot-proofing' device. Besides, there's always a better grade of idiot ready to demonstrate your idiot-proofing device is not ready for prime time.
Conclusion: The primary safety device for any weapon is the grey matter between the user's ears.
Too dumb to breed.
-- There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Slashdot Mirror
Quite possibly.
Stop right there. I have here the only working phaser ever built. It was fired only once, to keep William Shatner from making another album.
First of all, that is the SHORTEST slashdot blurb I have ever seen. Secondly, I think that this can be boiled down to very simple phrase: "Life is imitating art".
Does anyone really think that the early phones would have flipped open had Captain Kirk not done the same thing with his communicator in Star Trek? Just a thought.
JoeLinux
"They have us surrounded? Well, that simplifies things. Now we can shoot in ANY direction and hit them! Those bastards won't get away this time!" -- Chesty Puller, USMC
Science Fiction is realized and the future is...
The Minority Report?
Yay... Big Brother here we come.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The article doesn't really say anything new, but maybe it will inspire someone to make me a goddamn flying car.
Science faction
By Fiona Williams
July 5 2003
Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot, brain implants that let you tap into people's memories and a newspaper that updates itself when a big story breaks. It's not science fiction, it's science fact, as technologists catch up with - and surpass - the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers.
Set in the not-too-distant future, sci-fi films offer insights into what the world might be like and what impact evolving technologies might have on daily life, says Dean Economou, chief technologist of the CSIRO's Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CENTIE ). Economou says the fact that cloning, virtual reality and biometrics are commonplace concepts today is partly due to representations of the technologies in film and science-fiction literature and that scientists have taken many cues from what they've seen take place on screen.
"Artists are generally very good at reflecting human nature in the tenor of their times and sometimes that leads to very valuable insights," Economou says. "If you're not constrained by knowledge of things you can't do or think you can't do, I think you can come up with some really nice insights.
"[The films] mean people have a vocabulary about the future and you find a lot of the young researchers were very inspired by 2001, Star Trek, Blade Runner or The Matrix. In a very real way, the technologists are inspired by the sci-fi people and the sci-fi people are similarly inspired by the technologists."
More than merely being inspired by technologists, filmmakers are actively seeking out scientists for advice and input. Whereas early science-fiction filmmakers could take a liberal dose of artistic licence when grappling with scientific concepts, modern science has taken away this luxury for today's filmmakers and called for accuracy in science-fiction filmmaking like never before.
Upon its release last year, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, set in the not-too-distant future, featured a wealth of hi-tech gadgetry. The film sees Tom Cruise head up a futuristic pre-crime division that prevents murder by arresting would-be perpetrators before they act, based on the psychic evidence of three "pre-cognitive" siblings. The film is highly regarded for its accuracy in projecting what life will be like in 2054 as all objects and gadgets featured in the film have very real foundations in existing technologies.
John Underkoffler is a graduate of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with more than a decade of experience in the organisation's Media Lab. As Minority Report's science and technological adviser, he played a key role in ensuring the gadgets and technology featured in the film had firm foundations in scientific studies.
"Steven insisted early on that this not be 'science fiction' per se in the way it is usually understood," Underkoffler says. "But rather what he called 'future reality'; it should be a recognisable extrapolation of what we have today with the technologies that are just emerging. What would be trends in a future that is just distant enough [to be] really interesting to look at and is engaging, but at the same time is recognisably bridgeable to now and then."
Underkoffler became involved in Minority Report when the film's production designer Alex McDowell and prop master Jerry Moss led a delegation to MIT to discuss future technology. Spielberg then convened a much-vaunted two-day roundtable think tank with Underkoffler and futurist colleagues, such as Generation X author Douglas Coupland, where he says they "ate Spielberg's bagels and drank his coffee and came up with a giant waldorf salad of notions". Many of the original ideas to stem from that meeting were retained in the final cut of the film, such as the weaponry - vomit-inducing "sick sticks" and acoustic concussion guns.
Much has been made of the "gestural recognition interface" operated by Cruise's character in t
"Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot,"
And in breaking news scientists have now developed an amazing device to prevent the firing of a gun via a small lever located on the side of the gun. Prior to firing the gun will automatically scan the lever on it's side to determine if the gun should fire. They've dubbed this lever "safety."
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
As someone who just put down Asimov's fantastic Caves of Steel to catch up on Slashdot, I have to say that I'm really suprised at an article that talks about the deep and lasting impact science fiction has made in the progress of real technology, and then goes on for two pages about movies. Admittedly, film has captured the public interest far more than literature in this genre, but how can the article fail to even mention sci-fi literature? With the exception of mentioning that several classic sci-fi films were based on Phillip K. Dick's work, the entire body of sci-fi short stories and books, which have had a phenomenal impact in science and everyday life, are completely ignored.
So three cheers for Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle, Robinson, Bear, and the dozens of other great writers who have produced the body of works that I think of when I hear "sci-fi".
Cheers
But when will the invent the super-sonic dildo?
Given the rate of increasing returns, I would guess by the year 2030.
Mobile vegitation? Back alley eye surgery?
The book was much MUCH better.
And the book handled the pre-cognitive issue far better.
Total Recall (the movie) also sucked. But then, the story was pretty amusing.
Damn, both of those are from P.K. Dick. Imagine that.
I liked Blade Runner (the movie). Hey, that's also from P.K. Dick.
The rest is pretty much "wow, look how cool it is that things in movies sort of resemble things that might some day appear in real life".
For a bit of a reality check, look back at what was advertised in 1950 as being the "World of 2000".
Read a book.
Imagination created technology. Technology shaped imagination. Imagination shaped technology. Wash rinse repeat. I don't really see many sci-fi ideas not being able to become reality with enough time and interest...
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Or one that runs on fear ("The Tick vs. The Big Nothing," anyone?).
I bet Tom Ridge has one. "Red" actually means "Alaska is starting to run dry, but I won't give up my SUV."
-
Better energy sources. There hasn't been a new primary energy source in fifty years. All we have is better oil drilling technology.
-
Spacecraft that are actually useful. What we have now is minor improvements on 1960s technology, with the same miserable fuel to payload ratios and insanely high operating costs.
-
Robots and AI. We do not have a clue how to do this.
We're not making much progress on any of this, either. 25 years ago, all those goals were thought to be closer than they are now.Worse, those aren't fields that good young people go into any more. Who goes into fusion research, or booster design, or even AI?
It could be used for cops. Like, say, the cop has its gun recognize HIS fingerprints, so if the bad guy manages to get his hands on the policeman's gun, he can't use it anyway. That's one of the use for such a gun.
This one movie I saw mentioned a document they refered to as "The Constitution". I hope that sometime in the future, we'll be able to live with this great invention. Some government officials, though, would call the idea way too radical.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okBig Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect.
Minority Report (no "the") is a semi-distopia wherein predictive science has become exact and law enforcement is able to convict people before they commit their crimes. It's more a tale of the overzealousnes of technology than a horror report about the advance of technology--hell, even 1984 was about 'tech.
The "total awareness" of Minority Report wasn't even that bad--I mean, the main character was able to move about fairly easy given that an APB was out for him, and he even managed to foil the entire system, too.
Don't worry about Big Brother or Future Crime, though--they'd both be government programs, which, at least in America, are both amazingly conservative in design and embarissingly inefficient in implementation. (Note that, even though we have a brand-new national alert level, there are no laws or funding programs for local response to the increased level.)
they don't stop at just the technology.
They explore the cultural effects. And that, to me, is the best kind of science fiction.
If someone manages to create one of those devices, how will it affect my life?
Cell phones: Hang up and DRIVE you idiots. But now I can call anyone at any time without having to look for a pay phone. It makes it much easier to do things with your friends and to let them know you'll be late or the plans have changed.
eMail: Spammers should die and burn in Hell! But now I can stay in touch with people on the other side of the globe.
And posted this summary! It's part of that h4x0r challenge.
[ed. note: no it isn't]
Where are the flying cars? We were promised flying cars. It's 2003 and WTF? No flying cars.
On (in?) the other hand, which sci-fi novel predicted USB powered dildos?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Hey, no problems here. Short, sweet, to the point, who needs more? (Besides it's 2:15 local time here, in the morning. If he lives in the US anywhere, he's probably half asleep anyway.)
BTW an On Topic.
Sci-fi gives us the impetus we need to actually get off our duffs and INVENT. It's not surprising that stuff once mentioned in SF is now making its appearance on our Earth.
Rockets anyone?
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
In the interest of efficiency, I've replaced my Diehard with a MMORPG player hard-wired to a laptop. Strangely enough, it hasn't had any problem adapting to the simulation...
Does this mean I can get a lightsaber?
I'm using my tricorder to see if there are in fact red squares floating around the room.
Readings indicate that there are no red squares; the giant red Oracle ad is etched into my retinas.
The MRI concept was inspired by Dr McCoy's diagnostic beds in sickbay. I read an article that NASA was working on an Ion Engine, which makes up two thirds of a TIE fighter. And in my opinion, flip phones look a lit like communicators . . . .
Cop's hands are covered in powdered sugar from Krispy Kreme. His gun won't read his fingerprints.
Call a time-out with the bad guys so he can use a handy wipe.
Security usually means time delays. Does a cop want to risk his gun not reading his fingerprint?
We have a fingerprint scanner on our door at work. If your finger is wet, problem.
If you don't position your finger correctly, problem.
If someone just uploaded an old file to the sensor, problem.
Not everything is a technological problem.
Does this mean that I can get my cloaking device now and walk naked around downtown?
They use the phrase "not out of the question" a lot in the article. But in keeping with the fact that we don't know what will transpire in the future. How is the line between "not out of..." and "out of..." drawn?
The whole point of this is so that only the set owner can fire it. Granted, if an assailant ever got hold of a cop's gun, he could still bludgeon him with it, but I don't think there's anything that can stop that.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall
With your opinion which is of no consequence at all
14: ???
15: Profit!
when Star Trek's "holodeck" appeared, it bore no resemblance to anything tangible. These days it is known as the precursor of augmented/virtual reality applications such as virtual surgery or holographic simulation training programs
hmm...
In fact, although the holodeck-like CAVE was introduced in 1992 - 5 years after ST:NG's debut, VR systems had been around a few years already.
For example, Lanier's VPL had the first commercial interface gloves (1984). head mounted displays (1987), and networked virtual world system (1989).
Similarly, when Star Trek's "holodeck" appeared, it bore no resemblance to anything tangible. These days it is known as the precursor of augmented/virtual reality applications such as virtual surgery or holographic simulation training programs. Although the way we embrace technology once science catches up is often at odds with the way it was depicted on screen, there's a lot to be said for the genre's foresight.
Or maybe we don't have holodecks like in star trek because technology hasn't caught up yet.
The shareholder is always right.
Best troll ever!
The story is more about the issues of fore-knowledge. Similar to what you get in time travel stories.
3 pre-cogs.
Pre-cog #1 says you will do something. You read #1's report and you don't do that thing.
Pre-cog #2 factors in #1's report and the fact that you will have read #1's report. #2 gives a different report. Since you read #2's report, your choice changes from what #1 and #2 predicted.
Pre-cog #3 factors in #1's and then #2's report. Pre-cog #3 can correctly predict your actions BECAUSE THERE IS NO PRE-COG #4 TO PROVIDE YOU WITH A PREDICTION.
The movie made way too many errors. SPOILER: his wife got access to his cell using his eyes that had been removed by the doctor. No one thought to update their access list when one of their own went bad? One of them is CONVICTED and they don't update their access list? Weird.
My favorite thing about that movie when I was thirteen years old was the triple-breasted whore (a sly reference to Eccentrica Gallumbits?).
My favorite thing about Total Recall now is the fact that the movie never says whether Arnie is still in a vacation or not. He uses Rekall to acquire a vacation where he's a secret agent who saves Mars. He then wakes up, realizes he IS a secret agent, and then goes to save Mars.
Perhaps five minutes after the credits roll, he wakes up, and pays Rekall for his most-excellent 'vacation.'
the "trek" part that is
It covers it much better. And he surrenders to the government so they can do a better job of wiping his memory.
They just have to find the right memory to use. So they do a bit of research on him and find the perfect one.
And then they implant it but there's a bit of a problem.......
...that these movie producers have to rely on consulting firms to come up with these ideas. I guess that also may be why books tend to be a bit more original with terms, gadgets, and robots.
maybe it will inspire someone to make me a goddamn flying car.
Yeh I can just see it 3am the bar closes and 29 drunken rednecks proceed to try to take off from the parking lot.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Glad to see the Slahdot editors are modding down posts that they reflect their true selves
I wonder whether science fiction can count as prior art for patent purposes: a lot of science fiction writers seem to specify their ideas in about as much detail as a lot of patents.
Conversely, when are science fiction writers going to start taking out patents prior to publishing their writings?
They keep satelites in orbit.
...or a standard Slashdot editor misspelling?
If it's a play on words, someone clue me in. I don't get it.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Actually, in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books (forget which one), there is a spacecraft that runs off of bad news, since bad news travels faster than light and all. It really didn't work well, since bad news isn't a really good thing, and nobody liked it when they arrived.
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
The "new" generation of scientists lauded by everyone to be the future of this country already knows what needs to be done.
:-P), and came to the realization rather early what fields need more good men. AI, Aerospace, Mechanical Eng., Nuclear Physics, Quantum Physics, Partical Physics; all these fields offer such useful and potent technology should more people focus on them.
I have been involved in science and radical theories since I was a wee lad (some say I still am
The factor keeping innovation out of those fields right now however is lack of funding or interest in said fields, because you can't honestly give an estimation as to how much time it'd take to come up with something profitable.
AI is profitable, Biometrics is profitable; a booster design that far surpasses all current designs in both efficiency and power (which is the only thing Aero companies would be interested in) is a little over the top save with years of research and testing. That's simply not a risk anyone is willing to invest in (yet).
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Science faction
By Fiona Williams
July 5 2003
Icon
Imagine a gun that uses fingerprint scanning to prevent you firing a shot, brain implants that let you tap into people's memories and a newspaper that updates itself when a big story breaks. It's not science fiction, it's science fact, as technologists catch up with - and surpass - the benchmarks set by sci-fi writers and filmmakers.
Set in the not-too-distant future, sci-fi films offer insights into what the world might be like and what impact evolving technologies might have on daily life, says Dean Economou, chief technologist of the CSIRO's Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CENTIE ). Economou says the fact that cloning, virtual reality and biometrics are commonplace concepts today is partly due to representations of the technologies in film and science-fiction literature and that scientists have taken many cues from what they've seen take place on screen.
"Artists are generally very good at reflecting human nature in the tenor of their times and sometimes that leads to very valuable insights," Economou says. "If you're not constrained by knowledge of things you can't do or think you can't do, I think you can come up with some really nice insights.
"[The films] mean people have a vocabulary about the future and you find a lot of the young researchers were very inspired by 2001, Star Trek, Blade Runner or The Matrix. In a very real way, the technologists are inspired by the sci-fi people and the sci-fi people are similarly inspired by the technologists."
More than merely being inspired by technologists, filmmakers are actively seeking out scientists for advice and input. Whereas early science-fiction filmmakers could take a liberal dose of artistic licence when grappling with scientific concepts, modern science has taken away this luxury for today's filmmakers and called for accuracy in science-fiction filmmaking like never before.
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Upon its release last year, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, set in the not-too-distant future, featured a wealth of hi-tech gadgetry. The film sees Tom Cruise head up a futuristic pre-crime division that prevents murder by arresting would-be perpetrators before they act, based on the psychic evidence of three "pre-cognitive" siblings. The film is highly regarded for its accuracy in projecting what life will be like in 2054 as all objects and gadgets featured in the film have very real foundations in existing technologies.
John Underkoffler is a graduate of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with more than a decade of experience in the organisation's Media Lab. As Minority Report's science and technological adviser, he played a key role in ensuring the gadgets and technology featured in the film had firm foundations in scientific studies.
"Steven insisted early on that this not be 'science fiction' per se in the way it is usually understood," Underkoffler says. "But rather what he called 'future reality'; it should be a recognisable extrapolation of what we have today with the technologies that are just emerging. What would be trends in a future that is just distant enough [to be] really interesting to look at and is engaging, but at the same time is recognisably bridgeable to now and then."
Underkoffler became involved in Minority Report when the film's production designer Alex McDowell and prop master Jerry Moss led a delegation to MIT to discuss future technology. Spielberg then convened a much-vaunted two-day roundtable think tank with Underkoffler and futurist colleagues, such as Generation X author Douglas Coupland, where he says they "ate Spielberg's bagels and drank his coffee and came up with a giant waldorf salad of notions". Many of the original ideas to stem from that meeting were retained in the final cut of the film, such as the weaponry - vomit-inducing "sick sticks" and acoustic concussion guns.
Much has been made of the "
Hi All -
/. doesn't seem to recognize me tonight.
I'm Erik Baard, not an AC, but the
In short, it's the invention that counts. We pat ourselves on the backs as science fiction readers and writers too easily. Coming up with ideas isn't tough -- that's why one can't patent them. I can imagine a scenario where person A has an idea for a widget in 1978 and starts research into creating it -- an effort that bears fruit in 2002. But now person B is a science fiction writer who writes a story in 1996 talking up this invention. I'm pretty sure people in 2031 will laud the writer for his vision. I just hope the inventor gets rich! : )
Another limitation of science fiction is that it never presents an encompassing view of the future, especially regarding technology. No writer can anticipate the broad range of human inventiveness, and more importantly, how use of those inventions will influence each other across different societies and subcultures. Instead, a single idea is usually offered as a stand-in for the writer's hobbyhorse, like race, sex, greed, fear of death, loss of privacy, etc.
Science fiction does no better with social invention. The most successful stories take place in monarchies or oligarchies, or in military settings. Why? Because such hierarchies are so much easier to handle than the seeming chaos of free market democracies.
Unless, that is, the story deals with that single invention in the near future. Then the social backdrop is assumed, and we can focus on the mutation caused by the introduction of the technology (or element, like alien contact) in question.
Readers expect this and (quite reasonably) allow writers to assume a pretty light burden. Sure, write about cyberspace and leave the gender-bending technologies to the next writer, or tell me about interstellar flight but leave out the improved computer interfaces, or scare me with alien plagues from a returning probe but let's all buy newspapers with coins. I mean, who could have guessed that Viagra would be a tool of conservationists by replacing East Asian folk remedies for impotance? Or that lasers would play CDs and guide bombs?
So, point for point, these kinds of articles give scifi writers too much credit. Any invention can be said to have been anticipated by some scifi noodler. The only time science fiction is useful, apart from as cool entertainment, is when it's well written drama that reveals human character (like any good fiction) or when it anticipates the next moment -- a time when the ground rules are essentially the same but a new twist is thrown in.
Erik
Has the impact of open source software been anticipated in science fiction literature or movies? It seems to me that 10 to 20 years from now the impact of OSS on the technology industry and our culture can potentially be 10 times or more greater than it is today. Particularly as the grip of the media companies is tightened on an unsuspecting public with draconian DRM laws that leak into all facets of our lives through media controlled technology. The chaos of OSS may ultimately become the last refuge of innovation in a tech sector that is otherwise corralled and beaten into submission.
I was watching Robocop on DVD with friends for the first time in years the other night - and there was Clarence Boddicker popping what was clearly a DVD disc into a player, so that he could play a final message to his current "hit" from his employer.
Okay, it wouldn't have been called a DVD back then, but I suddenly remembered how the first time I saw that movie in the late 80s, I thought, "That's what we want, movies on CD discs!".
And now we have them.
Watching that scene again, and seeing how offhandedly the disc was used, I realized that in a few years people will probably watch that scene and not even *realize* that back then we had to use infernal video tape, that these movie-on-a-disc things didn't exist, and the whole setup was an attempt to look like "the not too distant future"!
But I'm guilty of this, too - take the computer screens in featured in 2001. None of them were real - they were all projected onto the surface from projectors mounted inside the desks/consoles/whatever. I never realized that until I saw a "making of" documentary on 2001. Now, I'm not sure if either CRTs weren't used with computers back then, or they were just way too expensive for the film's budget, or what, but I had never even *considered* that they might not be real, live screens until I saw that documentary.
Ask cops sometime what they think of smart gun technologies. Of all the cops I've asked, they all hate the idea. Admittedly, my sample isn't representative; the cops I know are all ones I see at the local shooting range.
Their opinion comes down to basically guns need to be kept as simple as possible. That's been the major direction firearms technology has been taking for the last 50+ years; not making more complex weapons but simpler and cheaper weapons. A modern Glock handgun is cheaper, more reliable, and (most astonishingly!) has fewer moving parts than a revolver of 50 years ago. A modern SIG-Sauer is cheaper, more reliable, and has fewer moving parts than a 1908 Luger.
This trend--towards weapons which have fewer moving parts, fewer breakable parts, and are thus cheaper to manufacture and more reliable--has been overwhelmingly welcomed by shooters. It's been so welcomed that I don't know a single shooter who doesn't welcome it, and I've been shooting for 20 years. In fact, the only people I've ever seen advocate adding complexity to weapons are people who neither shoot for sport nor carry a weapon as part of their daily job.
What happens as soon as you add a fingerprint-recognition system to a firearm?
Well, first, you've got some kind of optical reader... how well does the optical reader work if you drop your gun in a mud puddle? I've dropped an M1911A1 in a bucket of mud before, pulled it out, given it two shakes to dislodge mud from the barrel, and gone through 21 rounds (three magazines) without a failure. I was spattered with mud and the gun was literally steaming by the end of it, but it fired perfectly--zero failures. Could I repeat that kind of reliability experiment with a fingerprint-reading gun? No? Okay, great. Your new smartgun is now less reliable in the face of hostile environments (like mud, water, etc.) than a pistol first designed in the early 1900s.
The next thing you need is some kind integrated circuit controller and wires between it and the optical reader. Do you know why there's been such a push towards simpler and simpler firearms designs? Because when you fire a semiautomatic pistol, parts of it are subjected to internal stresses of hundreds of G-forces and tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. It's not uncommon to have bullets loaded to generate 50,000 pounds per square inch. Take hundreds of G-forces and repeated exposure to huge overpressures and you get an environment which is very, very hostile to everything; the fewer moving parts you have, the fewer parts which can break. Can wires and integrated circuits be built which handle these things? Sure. An example would be the Army's Copperhead artillery system, which uses artillery shells with built-in integrated circuits. The question isn't "can we do it", though: the question is "do we want to be totally dependent on the circuit". If a load of Copperheads doesn't work, the artillery crew can just fall back on conventional high-explosive warheads--they're back in action almost immediately. If your smart gun doesn't work, you're best off throwing the gun at the bad guy. Big difference.
Third thing you need is a battery, because ICs don't run on nothing. Great. So now do you not only have to make sure that your gun is loaded, that a round is chambered, that all safeties are disengaged, you now also have to make sure that your battery hasn't run out? Most cops--the majority of them--shoot very rarely. They don't inspect their guns very often. They go to the range once a year (or however often their department requires that they qualify) and then they forget about the gun the other 364 days. You ever had a power outage and then discovered the batteries in your flashlight are out? Do you really want the same thing happening to your firearm when the bad guy is shooting at you, your life is on the line, and all you want to do is get home safely to your wife and kids?
... Also, take a look at how many cops are shot by criminals with their
The "next big thing" to stimulate the IT job market is not going to happen any time soon, so stop waiting.
The boom during the late 90s was enough to keep big industry going for 10-20 years - go get a real job!
The "buggy whip analogy", so popular around here, does not apply now, since what is being gradually replaced by machines in this time period is not human physical labor.
Most jobs in the future will be government (either direct-paid or the "we can't afford an unemployed revolution")-type jobs wherein the main goal for the empoyee will be showing up on time every day. Think "Adult Daycare", since gov't-created jobs are essentially time-wasters anyway.
Don't expect the pay to be very good.
It looks like a lot of the movies presaging future technologies are based on the works of Philip K. Dick. If that isn't a good reason to be mildly schizophrenic, hide out in your bungalow and eat LSD all day, I don't know what is!
Yeah. Existing technologies. Especially the part about the coked-out siblings who see the future through disturbances created by murders in the metaphysical plane. I bet Spielberg really researched that one, too.
If you combine the topic and summary for each:
Build Your Own Bar Stool Racer angkor sends in this site about the new and fascinating sport of bar stool racing.
Science Faction tqft sent in this article about science fiction devices and concepts making it to the real world.
They're the exact same length!
It's a black thing.
In the future we will have newspapers that automatically repeat themselves.
No, it's like the XBox thing. By taking Microsoft's money, the editors are helping them go out of business. Then Linux will take over and the proletariat will rule the world, and cure AIDS, solve world hunger etc, etc.
Trying to post more stories than CmdrTaco? Try to make them more quality than this, asshole. Fuck you.
I remember reports on VR experiments with headtracking from 1968.
Sadly, I haven't yet found a good site on the history of VR.
But this one claims that the idea already existed back in the 1950s.
Time Machine,anyone?
Gotcha, So when the cop draws the gun, it attempts to scan his finger, but because he has whipped it out in a hurry he hasn't gotten his finger quite on the sensor correctly and is repetitively told "Please re-align finger on scanner unit" while he has his brains blown out by a conventional (reliable) gun.
It's all too clear now!
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Dont't need a flying car. Just need something that i can plug into a wall and turn my mind to mush periodically. . .
Wait a minute, I am sitting here plugged typing on a laptop plugged to wall while reading slashdot. If that's not being under the droud I don't know what is!
Slashdot: droud for nerds. Nothing matters.
And in one of those books there was this rock band which blasted a zillion watts of music from their spacecraft over some planet and their magnificient finale involved having one spacecraft dive into the sun! Now that's the kind of future I want!
Is the almighty "plot device." The "plot device" is basically any fanciful piece of equipment that is used, altered or modified
in the service of resolving story points
that actually require some real
human problem solving. Many Star Trek
TV episodes feature this piece of technology.
Independence Day and countless other blockbuster
films do, too.
The Plot Device has a real world counterpart.
It's embodied in all of our technology,
and all of our faith in technology to solve
the problems of Nature's and Man's making.
I, for one, can't wait to see the end
of that story...
It was Ivan Sutherland that built HMDs as early as 1966.
Here's a biography and here's a link
with one more image of a HMD.
The world wide web is much much better than anything predicted in science fiction. We take the web so much for granted that it is difficult for us to imagine a time when there was no web/internet for us to communicate (and that was not so long ago). Could anyone have predicted that within a span of 10 years, almost every community on earth would be connected by computers without the whole setup being owned by any company or government (an amazing idea in itself) with so much content provided by people for free(amazing too). I am of the strong view that the world of the future will be shaped in ways that no science fiction author has thought of and someone will be saying these very same words in another discussion forum (wonder what they will be like in the future) at that time.
Comparing authors and the literature with directors and the SF movies...
Authors
- Know about the history of SF literature, including what has become stale or cliched.
- Must be aware of scientific developments of the past 40 years, especially if the author specializes in "Hard SF"
- Get help or critiques from other writers / scientists: many of the best SF writers are both (i.e. Benford, Vinge)
- Go to SF conventions where topics include recent discoveries in science, technology and medicine; bleeding edge new writers and concepts; and which new novels or short stories should get recognized via awards like the Hugo.
Directors and others involved in SF movies...- Get away with plots and backstory that were already old 30 years ago in the SF literature
- Don't seem to want to admit their relationship with / dependancy on the SF literature, so don't read or seek criticism from SF writers. (Anecdotal evidence- they rarely participate in regular SF conventions (instead going to Media Cons) and even more rarely hang out in the audience, listening and learning.)
- Don't know the state of the art in scientifically consistent (even if not plausible) technobabble. Apparently not aware of the evil overlord's rules and other long-known lists of cliches to avoid.
- Don't have any idea about recent SF writers. Nor do their critics, so as in this case the movie/TV show will always be compared to one of "Wells, Verne, Bradbury, Star Trek, Star Wars, Bladerunner (or rarely PKDick) and The Matrix," all nice but they could use some higher standards. Leads to critics calling movies like Harris's Fatherland ("ohhhh, what if Hitler *won* WWII?") original, because they don't know that the SF subfield of alternate history is decades old.
If the technologists have caught up to the literature, let's all go off to play a game of quantum soccer with the other 10^16 posthumans in the multiverse (to give a nice 4 years old example from a state of the art author. I'd also recommend Dozois' "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections, Stross, McLeod, Vinge and most anything found in the best of the SF magazines.)They didn't mention quantum teleportation...been done on large groups of photons. (Star Trek, And Larry Niven, possibly others)
didn't mention Moller and his flying car thingie...been test flown. (Heinlien, and others)
didn't mention those needleless injection thingies...sold by a variety of companies (Star Trek)
didn't mention clones...rumors of human tests (a running gag in sci-fi)
didn't mention PDA's...sold by retailers all over (Mentioned as pocket computers...Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle 'The Mote in God's Eye' first published in 1974) Mote also made a couple of other subtle predictions besides everybody walking around with pocket computers, they also predicted that they would be wirelessly connected to nearby large databases...see wi-fi and a primitive internet/web-services kinda thing.
I can't think of anymore, I'm sure someone will
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
.... you are new here, aren't you?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The device from "The Trigger Effect" (Arthur C. Clark and Michael Kube-McDowell) is the one we should all be striving for. It is an electromagnetic field that renders gun powder useless and explosives in general useless. Great book, BTW.
(The conspiracy theorist in me says it would be "swept under the carpet" like electric powered cars have been).
nanotech: the gun recognizes that somebody other than the cop picked it up, and turns itself into a jello gun with dark chocolate bullets.
The concept of brain implants, which feature in the film in the form of "virtual vacations" [...] are at least "philosophically possible", based on evolving technologies
Philosophically possible? Really? Right now we know very little about how memory works but if what we think we know is true then "virtual vacations" are virtually impossible.
Memory seems to be the result of interactions between several subsytems using different brain structures. But even if we had the technology to make precise changes in several regions of the brain at the same time, we still have absolutely no idea what changes must be done to create a specific memory. Also, since the same brain elements participate in the recollection of several memories (if not most of them), it means that a new memory is not a new structure but rather a modification of something which already exists, meaning a new memory is dependant upon previous memories, which means everyone remember things differently. Which means that in order to create a "virtual vacation" we would have to analyze a big part of the brain, down to (at least) the molecular level, in a very short time and this for each person. I'm skeptical.
What we really need is a device that can be hooked to a mid-80s computer that will create really hot women from pictures we cut out of magazines and stuff.
IAAL
If only you had fired it once more, you could have also prevented Leonard Nimoy from ever recording the incredibly frightening Ballad of Bilbo Baggins video. I swear, watching that thing has on more than one occasion made me want to take a phaser to myself, just so I would not have to carry on with the memory of those hippie vulcan/hobbit nymphs prancing about. *shudder*
The sad thing is, we are getting a future based on StarTrek when we should be getting a future based on The Jetsons.
lets try to keep it this way - maybe its because i have A.D.D, but if they get too long i dont even read more than the first sentence, i just click on comments
Ever since I was small I've kept hearing that they'll be bringing out flying cars soon, you'd hear it every year over and over again but to no avail. The last report I heard was that they were to expensive to make.
So I'll ask again now as this question has dissapeared from the radar for a few years, are we going to be seeing flying cars soon or what?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Now crime can be preventented before it happens.
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
For the Greeks, Deus Ex Machina always worked.
For us, the damn thing is broken, and Moriarty is about to leave the holodeck.
www.bannination.com Two things float to the top he
The waterbed (Heinlein, I believe)
The microwave oven (Heinlein) (has a one-paragraph joke about how hard cooking and cleanup are.... something along the line of "I pushed the button, you toss the dishes in the disposer." For 1950s-era writing, this was a powerful insight just tossed away as a cute joke.)
Waldoes (Heinlein: the short story "Waldo", about a brilliant but incredibly weak man who lives in orbit and uses remote manipulators for everything) Even the modern *name* of these manipulators comes from the story.
Geostationary satellites (Clarke) -- This was an amazing insight for the time -- it's one of those things that's retroactively obvious, but exceedingly difficult to invent.
Virtual Reality -- I think possibly Clifford Simak had the first written version of something like a Holodeck. The book was "Way Station", published in 1963. Aliens had set up a waypost on Earth, and had hired an Earthling to run it. He got to play with some amazing technology. The virtual reality thing was a room-sized hunting simulator where he fired real shells at projected images on a wall, and they reacted appropriately. It was described as being extremely real and very frightening. This story was also my first exposure to the concept of a frictionless surface, which obviously remains fantasy at this point. I imagine frictionless surfaces were done before this, but this is the earliest example I can remember for something holo-deckish.
Cell phones -- Dick Tracy, in the 1930s, had a pretty fair approximation. People wanted those wrist radios in the worst way. As it turns out, that form factor isn't too popular, but the fundamental idea has become indispensable for most first-world citizens, and the basic idea came from comics.
Submarines -- This is a little more of a stretch, but 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea showed just what submarines might someday be. It was published in 1870, which is a little after the first submersible warships were designed, so the concept wasn't quite as groundbreaking as some of these others, but the story is worth a nod when you consider they're STILL doing remakes of it -- 130 years later!
And, of course, there's the Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, another one that's a perennial favorite for remakes. This is one of my favorites, not because of the time machine (still unproven and most likely impossible), but because of the social commentary. We've had numerous Morlocks versus Eloi threads here on Slashdot, so it's not just me that finds the parallels a bit creepy. It was published in 1898 and is still quite relevant.
Most modern SF doesn't look very far ahead. It's rare for authors to invent things that are *really* amazing and inventive. Greg Bear's "Blood Music" was probably in this caliber, and Gene Wolfe wrote a disturbing book about a society where people encouraged themselves to become schizophrenic as a method of tapping into more of their brainpower. (I think it may have been called "The Book of the New Sun", but that might be another novel by the same author.) Both were fascinating books... but did they really change anything?
Perhaps I'm being unfair, too -- I'm picking out the very best of the old stuff and comparing it to the run-of-the-mill schlock today. But, even so, it seems that SF authors back in the 50s and 60s truly changed the world, and the ones nowadays don't do that. They entertain, they challenge, they make us think about things.... but they don't come up with things that change how we live anymore.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this -- counterexamples welcome. :-)
the afterimage would be green, not red.
And you really thought to get away with such a joke on a geek site. Heaven help you!
"Big Brother was from 1984--a distopia illuminating a potential future where communism has conquered the world as communism's penchant for rewriting history on political whim is having a negative effect."
Err, no. Big Brother was a totalitarian government. Capitalism and Communism were irrelevant. You speak about Nineteen Eighty-Four as western schools twisted the story - as anti-communism propaganda. Orwell was a socialist, and hated how his book was used to attack socialism in a roundabout way.
But eh. Believe what you want.
"Trinity does it properly in The Matrix Reloaded. She whips out Nmap version 2.54BETA25, uses it to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then proceeds to exploit it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001. " ( http://www.insecure.org/ ).
And the article never mentioned "Ralf124C41".
Mark the cops with RFID tags in their hands (wristbands if you don't want to do underskin surgical implants), then make the gun fire only if the RFID tag gives the proper response to the challenge.
Problem solved. Oh, just don't call the thing with a serial number of 666.
As the subject says, I'd love to have a couple of plates of slow glass in my flat. Transform this clunky joint in NE London to a nice spot in the Mediterranean. Guns that won't fire because of fingerprint scans? Wouldn't it just be easier to crack down on who you can sell guns to?
take the computer screens in featured in 2001. None of them were real - they were all projected onto the surface from projectors mounted inside the desks/consoles/whatever...Now, I'm not sure if either CRTs weren't used with computers back then, or they were just way too expensive for the film's budget
/.ers have noticed that the colour, light and definition of some screens just looks fake and overdone, and this is the reason.
I'm sure you probably know this, but in a lot of films even today, when a character uses a computer screen, they are actually staring at a non functioning CRT/LCD (probably with a blue screen covering the viewable area). The actual moving image is then later 'layed on' so it looks like they are using the screen as normal. I'm sure many
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
The other day I was headed back with some groceries when I did a double-take: A car with Ontario licence plate OZZY 666. Too bad the cops probably don't call in plates verbally any more. I'd love to record that one on the scanner!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Just to mention in passing Arthur C. Clarke's "minisec" (miniature secretary) wireless PDA devices in his 1976 novel "Imperial Earth." One character inherits the minisec of a close but adverserial friend who has died tragically. The character has to face a password prompt, behind which are all his friend's life secrets. If he enters the wrong password, it's very possible that the minisec is set to pre-emptively wipe its memory. "Minisecs" get passing mention in another Clarke story or two, but Imperial Earth is where the concept gets the most schrift.
:(
(There's a parallel scene in his novel 2010 with nothing more than a scrap of paper flying out of an unsealed airlock and into space: was it a message from long-dead astronauts? The parallel is the fragility of the means of communication.)
Now the Offtopic part
I remember in late 1993 seeing my first web browser (Mosaic, at a friend's work, EDS in St. Louis), and learning HTML. I was desparate to convince my friends about the importance of this new technology...'You "click" what?' I wondered if the web would ever catch on for real, and desparately wanted it to. It was so cool, but so obscure. I mean, you'd have to have GUI-based computers in every home, and cheap servers outside the domain of academia in order for something like the web to take off, n'est pas?
A year or so passes and every single billboard and TV ad has a URL plastered on it.
Of course I was pleased at the success of the web (and to be "in the know" relatively early.) But I was actually, irrationally, a little sad that it was suddenly everywhere and everyone knew about it, if not exactly how it worked. Very technocratic attitude, and I'm a little bit ashamed of it. To put me back in my place, I can recall reading the early HTML 1.1 specification (that defined FORM data) and thinking "This documentation isn't very well written...people are never gonna go for these forms!"
In the hacker parlance I believe this is called pulling a "vannevar."
I suppose the relative inanity of most web sites was a factor too. "99% of anything is crap." (Sturgeon's Law...maybe that's the real Science Fiction principle that we should examine for its predictive success.)
They didn't say ALL the technologies. Jetpacks, sick-sticks, those personal-mass-transit pods, all doable within about 50 years, and all based on existing or curently-researched tech. I'd say the precogs are more of a plot device than a "tech". If PKD or the filmmakers had really wanted to they could have worked around them and found some more "scientific" way to run Pre-Crime. Statistical analysis of human behaviour? Booooring! Not to mention it'd be unlikely to be believed unquestioningly.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Neanderthals could not envision a written word, although the Egyptians could. But the Egyptians could not envision movable type; eventually Gutenburg did. For Gutenburg, a "computer" refered to a person doing math, and was not a machine. In the '70s as computers began marching into many businesses, people cosidered cloning, quantum computing, nanotechnology, and many other things "sci fi" -- and yet they are developing now, for potential release within our lifetimes.
The pace of change over the past 100 years makes me unwilling to forecast what would come 50 or 100 years from now. Indeed, to the Neanderthal, Egyptian or even Gutenburg, the pace of our change would be beyond their tech horizon: their world was far more static and unchanging. Yet the changes over the past year -- or over the past 50 years -- have not overwhelming. The so-called "technological singularity" is not an event horizon, a point-of-no-return beyond which all natural law changes, but a traditional horizon, a permanently receeding point beyond which our future predictions become rapidly more hazy. This article helps show that we will always be able to see some distance ahead, be it only a few decades, and the change will not become instantly overwhelming. Indeed, the pace of change is limited by the ability of society to teach new thinkers what is currently the state-of-art level, and whatever technologies we invent to increase the pace of learning will also assist in increasing the pace of acclimation.
Do you like Japanese imports?
You're kidding, right?
Televisions pre-date 2001 by at least 20 years. Using one with a computer was common by the 1960s.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Two points here.
First of all, this article isn't so much about accurately predicting the future, so much as creating it. SF has been giving us the vocabulary and conceptual framework for many of our modern inventions. If what we invent is similar but differently implemented than the idea of an SF writer from 40 years ago, it's not that they got it wrong--it's merely that we took the concept in a different direction than they did, when then invented the concept.
Secondly, this article goes on about movies, where in fact movies are about the most laughable bit of conservativism possible, with regards to futuristic ideas. The few decent ones are almost always based on books that have been around for decades.
Why they'd spend time talking about the five or six truly incisive futuristic movies that have been made when there are thousands upon thousands of SF stories that work so much better, I can't say.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The concept of money, that is. Why do we need it? Why not get rid of it altogether even now? In the scenario you propose we most definitely wouldn't need money.
Some of you mentioned Jules Verne - he dreamed up submarines and travelling to the moon. He even predicted weightlessness, albeit for the incorrect reason. (He assumed that somewhere between the moon and the earth the gravitational fields would cancel each other out.) Well, we have both - we have submarines and we've been to the moon.
Colonies on the moon? We don't have those, but we have had space stations for decades now, such as Skylab, Mir, and now the ISS. We might even be travelling to Mars within a decade or two, and whoever goes there are going to stay on Mars for a few months.
Johnny Mnemonic / Neuromancer? We're headed that way - researchers are working on connecting computer chips directly to the brain stem to enable completely paralyzed people to robotic arms and computers so they can communicate more easily and manipulate objects.
Alternative energy sources? Several of you claim that there is no work done on these - that's patently untrue. If you would care to read a trade magazine such as Mechanical Engineering you'll find that solar energy, wind energy, and even fusion power receives more and more funding, and at the very least receives constant attention from the engineering societies.
Alternative energy sources and reclaiming waste energy such as waste heat and methane from landfills are becoming more and more prevalent, but right now are used mostly in "niche" applications where the average Joe does not see them - so the perception is that we're only using oil for energy.
And on the topic of Sci-Fi energy sources - Nuclear Power? Isn't that Sci-Fi? Although a nuclear power plant is in principle a very fancy egg boiler.
The internet? Repositories of information available from any computer anywhere? This was not Sci-Fi? In short, the means of communication that we have available now compared to what we had a few decades ago? PDAs, cell phones with internet access, Wi-Fi ?
How about GPS? You can be dropped anywhere on the planet and in an instant find out where you actually ARE. With a satellite phone and a laptop you can even pull up maps and find your way to where you're going. As one of the engineers in charge of developing GPS for the military said in an interview, "This generation may be the last one to know what it means to be lost"
So we don't yet have the holodeck or the matter transference beams, big deal. A lot of what was Sci-Fi a few decades is a reality today, but we fail to appreciate most of it.
--I am Sun Tzu of the Borg. Resistance is feudal.
They basically do battle by word ordinance ... leaving widely-acclaimed floaters in the pool for all the party faithful to salute, that sort of thing. If one really wants to go full steam ahead on the lone singularity, then I'd guess involving the UN is probably the best way to go. Unfortunately, there would be fewer said public eliminations to enjoy as a result.
The Matrix is not just a movie. It's a series, I tell you! Does anyone else think that the UN star at 58 is looking a little wrinkly? Where's my soap opera music?
Yes, I just make it all up.
Did you miss the point in Minority Report that there were retinal scanners everywhere? Linked to the police/government monitoring stations and that his only recourse to aviod being caught was to have his eye's replaced? Sorry, this is, to me, a Big Brother senario.
Oh Good Grief!
In your July 5th article titled; Science Faction, by Fiona Williams, it was described how science fiction has influenced current day technology. First of all, "Really!? Wow, nobody would have ever realized that!" Duh... What really gets my goat however is that the author (and by association your publication) seems to be completely clueless as to what science fiction IS. The author spent the entire article taking about the effect of 'movies', as if that was what the field of science fiction was. Virtually no mention was made to science fiction as a literary genre whatsoever.
The fact is that there is not a single 'science fiction' movie ever made that has had an original science fiction idea in it. Indeed the vast preponderance of science fiction movies are not science fiction at all. They are cowboy movies in space, nonsensical fantasy with the directors knowing nothing about actual science and scientific speculation and frankly, caring even less. To refer to movies as 'being' the field of science fiction is as insulting to the genre of science fiction (which is a 'literary' genre) as it is revealing of the total ignorance of the author.
This was tawdry reporting.
Peter
?? Filesharing is good.
?? RIAA/MPAA/Metallica are evil.
Imagine your a cop ona rainy day, walking down a alley complete with dumpsters full of spoiling food.
some one shoots at you and you dive for cover behind a dumpster. where is your gun? still in your holster that is now in that nasty puddle of mud along with your leg and other equipment.
another fun place to be is cold where you need to wear gloves for extended periods of time to avoid frostbite, do you force the officer to stop and remove his gloves before he can return fire?
In my opinion fewer moving parts and simpler design is the way to go
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Wow. There are still new and wierd things on the internet that I didn't know about. You tend to get complacent and think you know it all, but this proves otherwise.
--It probably involves "Deus ex Machina"... http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/bible?language= english&version=NIV&passage=revelation+1%3A6-8 :)
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
Ye-ah! Just imagine . . . .
"Hey! We're in the Twenty-first Century.
Where's MY Flying-car, dude?"
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
In Verne's "Master of the World", Robur operates a combination Submarine, Surfast Ship, Automobile, and Aircraft.
That was written in the 19th century.
- Never mind your,"where's my aircar!"
I say - "Where's my combination Submarine, Surfast Ship, Automobile, and Aircraft."
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
The article reads like a Sunday morning puff piece or some crap from Reader's Digest.
Now let's compare the short sighted scientific prognostication in that Tom Cruise (another lameass L. Ron Hubbard dicklicker) movie with this:
A line from H.G. Wells "The World Set Free", published in 1914.
Now THAT is a real example of being "in tune" with science and technology.
Relativity was still being debated. Quantum what? H.G. When soldiers were still riding into battle on fuckin' horses at the start of World War I. Wells anticipated the potential impact of nuclear war by reading the latest bleeding edge physics papers, understood what was incomprehensible to the average Joe, realized the potential in the science, and correctly forecast the social consequences. (Plus that stinkin' lousy little social liberal commie bastard, was boning this most gorgeous English hottie and good ol' Herbie's old lady was OK with that sweet setup. How much cooler can ya get? Let's see one of those science illiterate pundits get away that kind of scene with their ugly ass wife.)
These post modern social analysts haven't the slightest clue about what is going on in the mega geek world of physics, biology or anything technical topic with math beyond high school. It's embarrassing to let these clowns represent us to the non-technical portion of our society. The stupid asshole politicians will listen to these clowns.
Somebody please give those morons a nickel so they can go buy a clue.... big sigh
best regards,
buck
On the contrary, last month I listened to a shooter on KQED radio asking that gun manufacturers include a chamber loaded indicator (a $2 safety feature) because he had taken his father's handgun, removed the clip thinking that had unloaded it, and placed a round into his five year-old sister's neck, killing her over a four hour period.
What say you, rjh?
1) Was the shooter a minor? Sure sounds like it. Minors have no business in an urban environment using weapons unsupervised.
2) If his daddy didn't teach him the manual of arms for the weapon (including the lack of a magazine safety), he should not have been touching it.
3) What was the kid doing with a weapon around a four-year-old?
4) How did the kid get the weapon? Was it in a locked container? If there are minors around, and it was not, then daddy's too dumb to breed, and should have his parenthood license revoked.
5) The "$2 safety feature" will balloon the price of the weapon because of R&D & litigation costs. Some weapons, also, cannot be designed to accomodate such an 'idiot-proofing' device. Besides, there's always a better grade of idiot ready to demonstrate your idiot-proofing device is not ready for prime time.
Conclusion: The primary safety device for any weapon is the grey matter between the user's ears.
Too dumb to breed.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA