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.
Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
by
SubliminalLove
·
· 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
Imagination = Technology
by
negRo_slim
·
· 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
You didn't quite get it.
by
LePrince
·
· 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.
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.
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.
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 . . . .
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?
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.'
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?
Re:prior art? patents?
by
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".
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: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: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"
You know what's scary?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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!
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
·
· 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
The W3 (brief nod to Imperial Earth)
by
LouisvilleDebugger
·
· 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:A rant on smart guns.
by
wcdw
·
· 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!
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.
And it never rains in the city?
by
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
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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 . . . .
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?
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.'
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?
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.
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.
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"
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!
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?
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
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.)
Two words: _Civil Liability_.
;). 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.
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
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!
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.
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
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.