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.
I have one of these...
by
jamonterrell
·
· 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.
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
Stuff from SF we should have.
by
Animats
·
· 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?
A rant on smart guns.
by
rjh
·
· 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
Especially as movies are 30 years behind...
by
geekotourist
·
· 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.)
it's not like this is really news...
by
Malor
·
· 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.:-)
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.
"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
-
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?
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
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.)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. :-)