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What's Always Next?
bettiwettiwoo writes "In its 'What's Next' issue, Time has a charmingly silly piece called What's Always Next? , in which is provided '[a] sampling of the future that wasn't': things that have been predicted since day dot, but have somehow never materialized. The examples they give are: videophones; moon colonies; food in pills; cars that drive themselves; jet packs; and moving sidewalks.
... There are, after all, so many and varied things -- ranging from the very serious to the down-right silly -- that are predicted time and again, yet seem curiously absent in our daily lives. Examples: global catastrophies of the Armageddon kind (be they population overload, total environmental disasters, plagues, asteroids, or nuclear wars); a secure and bug-free Windows; the end of Madonna's singing career (her 'acting' career was, I believe, still-born)." So what are you waiting for?
I'm still waiting for Skittlebrau.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Here's the link: http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030908/xalways next.html
According to science mags 40 years ago, we should be on the moon by now in colonies, i dunno about you, but i haven't made a videophone call to my pals on the moon lately... no article link? strange.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
3D TV!
- Ralph Kramden
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, The hands acqui
Flying Car? Hasn't there been concept sketches of flying cars in popular science since the 1920's? It's the year 2003, I was promised flying cars.
Team Fortress 2... And seemingly Half-life 2
I have a 3G mobile video phone on my desk and it works, so that one can be struck off the list.
...*BSD's imminent death ...Apple's imminent death ...Pigs to fly.
... is here
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Remember Y2K? Me neither. Guess I'm still waiting for those missiles to accidentally launch.
Proper holographic displays where the device will sit on your coffee-table or hang from your ceiling and the image will float in the middle of your oom and replace TV as we know it. That would be cool. /. and russia jokes.Oh crap.
At least we can be sure of some things.
Suppose we're gonna see lots of crappy flying car jokes here on
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
So videophones never materialised? So what's this in my pocket?
Video mobile phones are around and on sale in at least the UK and Australia. I've got the NEC e808 which is a bit big but does have a Qwerty keyboard. See www.three.co.uk for more info.
Dont know whether this is true of you lot over the pond but 3G phones, which in effect are mobile video phones have been around in the UK for a few months and in europe a bit longer. But ive got to agree with some of the above posters.....I want me flying car!!
All of these assertions were based upon their immediate operationality.
Now, for each of the civilization advances, we knew some drawbacks : every occidental now has (or could have) a car, but the level of pollution has grown to a serious level, hence the priority change.
At this moment, most of these researches may have had their priorities lowered to face the consequences of the previous inventions...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Flying cars, wristwatch videophones, people walking around in shiny plastic suits all the same design, the Starship Enterprise, site to site matter transportation, the end of money, the end of war, the end of disease ...................
I'll settle for the flying car.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
Actually, I'm still waiting for some of the drivers on the local freeways to start exhibiting real intelligence.
I wouldn't buy a car that could drive itself unless that was all there was - I just like driving too much. I imagine they'll happen eventually, but I think that if it does, then amateur racing (like SCCA autocross and such) will become hugely popular for people who still love to drive. On a side note, I'm still waiting for the flying DeLorean with the Mr. Fusion machine. Aren't vidphones already here, or at least making their way into common usage?? I say give them a few years - seems like the tech is there, and its getting cheap enough.
this is about the best I can find
But I wore the juice
What about; A linux with a nice GUI?
Or better yet; An open source project with useful documentation?
LOL.
Where's the fusion power, android robots, "real" AI? C'mon dudes, it's 2003 already!
I really expected more. I went through all the trouble of RTFA and that's it? One page? With a bunch of stupid complaints and she haven't even heard of 3G. And the guy in the picture will burn his ass off with that jetpack. This link sucks.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
For six years I've been listening to Linux-heads at work tell me Linux is going to take over the desktop world.
Did Time mention anything about that?
I'm waiting for pasting links working on slashdot...
I once had a book in wich utopias from the end of the 19th century were presented. Many of them are reality today like mobile phones. But one of them was a train that would travel in vacuum tunnels (to reduce air drag). The problem with this invention was that it was meant to be pushed by a propellor. I think this will remain an utopia for a long time.
When tons of spam is delivered through electrons?
I'm waiting for Skynet to become self-aware. Aren't we pass due?
Since the 1930s, effective anti-aging treatments (making us effectively immortal) have been predicted. So far, nothing. (Not that this would be a good thing for overpopulation but...)
-Brendan
I'm still waiting for my paperless office. It hasn't happened yet: no matter how much I cut back, my coworkers always want to print repeated drafts of documents to review interim versions, print emails and notes for archiving where they can find them, and so on.
thousand of them... that cling to your [body] hair during the day and crawl out to cut your hair, clean your teeth and trim your nails while u sleep.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
No self driving cars, but I did see that toyota has made a self parking car.
I think people will never be able to give up complete control over their car.
I don't believe there to be anyone, even mister bill himself, that would have ever predicted a secure and bug free windows.
;)
Sheesh, I can't even keep the windshield on my car secure and bug free
No Comment.
We do have moving sidewalks. Ever been to an airport?
Sorry...
Duke Nukem Forever!
food in pill form - well any moron could have told you that was pure science fiction - it's all a matter of density and quantity. we -could- do it, but you'd need a plate-full of pills.
jetpacks - just like flying cars, it's primarily a safety issue. we have the tech - but no-one wants the cast of Friends crashing their hover-porsche into people's homes. on the ground there are trees, and curbs and bushes to slow them down when they leave the road. not so above.
cars that drive themselves - well honda's already park themselves. darpa is holding an unmanned vehicle race through the desert - i can't imagine commercial applications will take too much longer.
videophones - are already here. videoconference much? just because the consumers have decided that thus-far, the cost outweighs the benefit doesn't mean science is holding anything back.
it's simply a matter of consumer adoption.
moving sidewalks - already here - in malls, in airports. why aren't they in manhatten? because who pays for that? who benefits from a moving sidewalk downtown? when there's a business case for them, they exist. when it's left to the public sector, and there's no tangible benefit to outweigh the cost - the just don't exist.
once again, a problem of business, not of science.
plague - hello, HIV/AIDS, cancer ?
now how about the things we have that we never thought to ask for?
the internet, gps, multivitamins, the ISS, remote surgery, the genome map, cellphones, tazers, velcro, stain resistant dockers, nano-tube-spun ropes, teflon, sunscreen, moores law, p2p networks, etc?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Yeah... i don't care how impractical or impossible they may be... i want my f*cking flying car!
It might be popular to dis Madonna, but she has more singing and dancing talent than 99.999% of the people out there.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Hell, /. even had a story about it.
Then the crash recorder data could be used to iron out any remaining bugs. :)
And... yes, the beta program should include some MS-like EULA... :P
Still waiting.
...just my 2 gil.
As for videophones, well general interactivity on the Internet took over from that really. People do much prefer to hide behind an electronic persona and too high a proportion of people don't like being in posed photographs, let alone on video. Those who do like it have webcams, and webcam conversations are in general between lovers and family. SciFi Movies still feature videophone communications though, although realtime one to one video communication may never really become popular to the point of replacing the telephone.
As for jetpacks, moving sidewalks, moonbases and whatnot, I don't think a lot of people even believed those at the time. Better predictions are those which really do look at current trends and technology, seeing the barriers properly, and going for it.
Like the Segway... what am I saying?
I'll tell you why it isn't popular: the same reason motorbikes aren't mainstream popular. They are terrible to use in the rain, you can't give people a ride on them with you, they don't allow you to hide all but your head and shoulders, and they don't have a stereo. Simple.
A truly, completely modern city might be somewhere to look to for futuristic ideas, but then Stevenage in the UK, for example, a concept city just outside London with cyclepaths all over the place, yet people don't all cycle, most still use cars. Because a car also comes in handy when you need to go hundreds of miles. Sadly the site doesn't mention the cyclepaths except in section 5.1.5 of some transport review. Notice how in section 5.1.2 their transport policy "focused on accomodating the car" in spite of their miles and miles of cycleways.
I grew up near Stevenage, and it's not the idyll you might think, indeed it's a rather characterless place, bit too much of a concrete jungle, but the revolutionary ideas that went into the town planning were spoiled by poor fashions in architecture at the time, and ongoing council policy which did not match with the original town planners idealistic philosophies...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
Fuel cells win!
In a perfect world you wouldn't need a Utopia.
Suck figs.
one thing that's been around in any "future movie" is robots that keep humans from doing The Hard Work.
:)
I know that there is already a vacuum cleaner around, but I'm still waiting for the day where I can sit and ask my robot to bring me my PS2 so I can have some fun while he makes something to eat.
This also falls in the World Destruction prediction aka Terminator stuff..
Teleportation... please, I hate driving/ flying etc. Living in the UK, the roads are always jammed and the trains never run on time, and lets face it, were all a bit dubious about flying.
It'll also be a faster method of getting my pizza to me before it gets cold
We have some old 1950s Popular Mechanics magazines -- around 1958 to 1960 -- in our family cabin in Colorado. They aren't all that much different than today's versions of the same publication. Some of the stuff that comes up in 1958 and 1998:
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The article is a bit lacking in substance. There only seems to be a few short paragraphs, I can't find a continutation page. Was it really worth posting?
Uh, perhaps I'm missing something but doesn't an "Armageddon " style catastrophe only have to happen once. After it happens there's no one around to notice.
Gentlepersons,
You will have to forgive the lack of links but did i not read just yesterday about a self parking car (does this qualify as driving), and there are cars in germany that can 'follow' the car in front so that you can take your hands off the wheel until you need to go some where different.
Here in the UK (and most of EMEA) we already have video phones that are mobile phones with built in video camera for real time webcamesque transmissions, in the UK the provider is called 3 (for 3g i suppose) what it might be called elsewhere is another matter.
just me couple of pennies worth
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
High speed moving sidewalks:
Walkway propels Paris metro into future
Oh damn ... you are after stuff that may occur in real life.
People are always predicting an end to poverty... I'm still waiting for that. Unfortunately, poverty seems to be becoming more widespread, not less. The NYT reports today that almost 20% of children under the age of 5 live in poverty... one out of every five. We all know about this vague phenomenon called "the growing gap between rich and poor," but I don't think we really recognize how profoundly it affects all of us. People are waiting for colonies on the moon? How many brilliant scientists never become brilliant scientists because they did not have adequate nutrition and education when they were young? I'm not saying poor people never do great things, but we put a lot of obstacles in their way while we allow the Bill Gates's of the world to become so astronomically rich as to be literally inconceivable.
Aside from an end to poverty, I would like to see no-fat pizza, burgers, and french fries...
too sarcastic sheesh. not like every predicted idea is worth doing or anything. And um, videophones exist - its just a silly idea that not many people really want.
These genetic enhancements that will re-wire our primative brains, letting us constantly experience bliss while eliminating all undesired pain, both emotional and pyhsical, allowing us to be intellectually creative like none before, and getting rid of primative reinforcement circiuts in our brains that cause addiction.
Is to look at the things that exist that no-one anticipated. For instance, thake the laser printer; all the sci-fi authors with their AI talking computers never imagined that a computer would do a job so mundane that it's currently done by a lump of lead, like forming letters. Similarly, using digital audio for recording music rather than just making the metallic voices of robots.
We seem to like our tech to do more humble jobs than the sci-fi authors imagined.
But I still want my jet pack. I'll settle for a flying car, but a jet pack is more cool.
"Convergence" once seemed to be the buzzword among PHBs and other chowderheads when they wanted to look like wise observers of the "big picture" in technology. Products like WebTV and Treos never really take off though because people LIKE having different tools for different jobs. You never see many people using those all-in-one golf clubs either.
I think lots of prognosticators are tempted to extend current tech to tidy conclusions that are not always in line with the realites of human needs, habits and behavior patterns.
Tech also has a way of taking abrupt turns that render grandiose predictions obsolete. In the early days of radio, futurists predicted marvelous radio-controlled devices with transistors the size of city buses! Then the transistor made the scene.
Anyhoo, I rarely hear the term "convergence" any more (but then again, I no longer work for Pacific Bell cum SBC and their legions of PHBs).
Ever see Strange Days? I want a device that could manipulate brain waves to create a virtual world of sorts. Maybe it could be re-living memories like in the movie (remember when he paid those lesbians to make out wearing the recording device so he could capture their memory?! *wink wink*) or some type of video game. But yeah, as mentioned previously, I want my damn flying car so when I hit some nasty traffic, I can just zoom up above it all and people can point and stare and think to themselves, "Ooooh that man is soo cool! I would like to get tender with him."
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
news for the camel-humping towelhead: amount of muslims easily wiped off face of planet by smart bombs: all of them if neccessary
Unless you're watching 30fps streaming video of the person you're talking to, you still don't have the video phone I was promised.
I'm just waiting for this damn computer to get a cup of tea right!
Wiping muslims off the face of the planet is all well and good, as long as you take plenty of jews and christians with them.
Many of these are viable from a technology pooint of view. They just lack a market:
VIDEOPHONES: People want to communicate more information more quickly. I get the feeling that the image of the person you're talking to simply isn't a piece of information people need.
A MOON COLONY: Suffers from being slightly useless in itself, and only worthwhile as a means to an end. People don;t want to spend billions in setting on eof these up.
FOOD IN PILLS: This simply isn't possible. You could have something like an energy bar or a thick shake of course. I guess people like eating proper food.
CARS THAT DRIVE THEMSELVES: Technologically possible with a bit of R&D involved. I have seen a car that can drive along German autobahns, and overtake safely. The basic technology exists. Getting the things to obey all traffic rules is feasable. The thing is, where's the market? People do not want their cars to take over control. It's simply not safe for them to do say. Computers can't deal with the unexpected. I seriously doubt that legislators will allow cars to drive themselves without having someone qualified to drive behind the wheel. Since you have a driver, why bother with self driving?
JET PACKS: I guess the 20 second flight time makes them too limitted to be a lot of use
MOVING SIDEWALKS: Yeah, what is it with these? It can't cost a lot more to run and maintain than a light rail network or underground system. We only see travellators in airports.
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
kcnskjcnsdkcjnsdkcjndscnkjd
...It just isn't evenly distributed yet" - William Gibson.
It's true.
we have flying cars. forget the moller skycar, the future is the xantus powered lift aircraft.
we have jet packs, but now affordable backpack aircraft only nearly nobody wants to build them.
I think some people can't handle the future. they're too afraid of getting smushed up by it.
Aren't they used for years in large airport terminals?
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Grey goo
Big brother
Asteroid impact
Nuclear war
MS-Linux
With the exception of moon colonies and perhaps nuclear armageddon, (though small nukes and worse have certainly been used in limited engagements since Japan), I believe all of those things currently exist, have happened or are in the process of happening as we speak.
The reason you don't have them, (in the case of 'desirable' items), or that you have not experienced them, (in the case of mass starvation and mass destruction of human, animal and plant life), is that everybody who might possibly be able to DO something about it has been put into strictly controlled states of limited awareness. --Boxes which are shored up and taped shut with assenine news articles which promote skeptical, reassuring, 'everything is perfectly normal, citizen' horsepucky.
TIME Magazine: News for chumps.
I notice that this article appears directly after the most recent Astroid warning. Everybody go back to sleep. You're safe. No. Really. Ignore the tubes in your nose.
-FL
Well we're not that far away:
Things I'd like to see:
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Where is Smellovision?
----
Still Waiting for the "cost of living" Raise promised 3 years ago and I'm waiting for the plague of xcuses of a weak ecomony to end.
I'm waiting for the world to hand me everything for nothing you insensitive clod!
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
I'd also hate to have my car stall mid air. In fact, it might get to the point where, a la Back to the Future II, the roads would become almost deserted so any ground-based drivers would benefit most.
Oh, come on--you were thinking it, too.
Electricity from nuclear power "too cheap to meter"..
Linux to supplant Windows on desktop PCs.
Economic non petrol based cars.
A version of Windows that loads/runs quicker than Win 3.1 on a 386sx.
An alternative quantum-type technology to replace silicon.
A good movie with Bruce Willis in.
A Genuine HAL-9000-type thinking computer.
A cheap reusable space vehicle.
3D TV..
An everlasting pint of beer. (ok thats a personal one)
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
...is some sort of mechanism - 'bot, cyborg, whatever - that can handle all of the simple, silly, repetitive junk all of us have to do every day.
- Cut the grass. Simple. Pre-programmable.
- Empty the dishwasher. The same dishes go in the same cabinets every time.
- Sweep the floor (ok, there's roomba).
- Shovel snow.
- Paint the walls/ceiling.
- Wash the walls/ceiling.
- Fold laundry.
- Etc!!!
Asimo, take me away!Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
videophones
If you're deaf, you've probably had a videophone for almost twenty years. Here there are also standby translators that will translate a normal phonecall into sign language. If you live in Europe, you already got a 3g phone with video.
food in pills
Vitamin pills? Nutritional pills? We've even got liquid food for crissakes. The only reason peaople still eat food is because it tastes good.
cars that drive themselves
Old hat.. we've even got cars that park themselves.
jet packs
Ever been to a Michael Jackson concert?
and moving sidewalks
...or an airport?
While these technologies might not be so common as mad scifi writers might have believed, it's got nothing with technology to do and all with convenience.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
is that we *do* have robo vacuum cleaners now, which I suppose is good, but the discussion reminds of me of a comment I recently read regarding the increasing rift (read "hysterical rhetoric and posturing") that exists in what passes as discourse between The Left and The Right in modern day politics.
The Right wants to return to a time that never existed, and The Left wants to move to a future that will never exist.
Sigh.
Maybe someone will post some good Trusted Computing jokes. The "in Soviet Russia" always work.
I'm still waiting for Star Wars Galaxies to finish their beta testing and release a stable version. Especially since I'm paying a monthly fee already! ;-)
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
So that I can actually view a link from slashdot with a browser that is more than a couple years old.
A fanny magnet.
All things in moderation; including moderation
Sorry, had to be said...
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
It's the year 2003, but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars. I don't see any flying cars? Why? Why? Why?
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
What about: "Waiting for a time when people stop waiting for something they *think* they need"? ;-)
videophones have been around for a while in the UK and in other countries(seems to be broken?). The quality still isn't brilliant but Orange(I think) have started to offer Soccer highlights over the latest phones.
moon colonies, ok, we chose to put a space station up there first, and then realised it costs a lot of money for little (commercial or military) value. Moon colonies are sadly not as sexy as say a Mars colony, or even a Mars mission, which ESA has planned in 25 years, NASA tried and continues to test methods of producing enough food,air and water, other countries,notably India and China have planned Moon landings so we are going back. Space is unfortunately used as a pissing contest between nuclear neighbours, when this stops then some more science can get done(e.g. Hubble, Galileo, Beagle 2)
food in pills. You can get food in pills, just not the calories, vitamins will give you nearly all of the trace elements you need to live. Calories are a lot harder, to get 500 Calories into a pill means eating something with 40 times the energy concentration of sugar or twenty times the concentration of fats, I doubt the human body would have much success digesting such complicated food. You can however get protein and creatine supplements which are in tablet/powder form, and sugar sweets( those silly energy sweets which taste of really sour orange) have more calories than their equivalent weight in sugar. (The protein supplements also tend to taste bad and are fed to animals instead. )
cars that drive themselves; power steering has been around for a while, as has ABS and cruise control, that is about as much as the current laws will allow on the public roads. intelligent cars have been developed, which, when combined with other intelligent cars, are actually safe. It's the human drivers who freak out at the sight of a driverless car that's the problem :-)
jet packs; Jet packs appeared in Thunderball (James Bond). You can buy them if you have enough money, or you can build them if you want. They're not used much because, much like the Segway, there are easier and cheaper way of getting around.
moving sidewalk's are in most airports now, as well as some metro stations. There have also been "moving stairs" around for just as long.
--This post brought to you by Google.com, paid for by Google For America, Inc.
vegas baby vegas, you can ride from casino to casino they are everywhere
I think that the 40's and 50's era predictions of food pills match the current reality in sports nutrition supplements and whatnot currently available in your average American grunt-head mall.
Come to think of it, since 'food-in-a-pill' is a simpler form of 'a-pill-for-everything' I'm afraid this concept has been well and truly delivered.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It's not a bug, it 's a feature!
Slashcode breaks up long words (like urls) to prevent trolls from using very long lines of text and stretching the page-width beyond reasonable proportions.
Lifting surfaces of some kind are the only practical method of getting human-scale flight of a decent range - at least until we invent Mr. Fusion :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Maybe it'll be possible some day to pack a major amount of calories and various proteins into a convenient pill form, but I really can't see have much application beyond, say, the military.
... to ...
Food is supposed to be a sensual experience, part of the feedback system that ensures we eat. Sure, there are some people out there who just eat to live, but we're pre-programmed to find eating pleasurable, from the sight of a perfectly grilled steak, its brown crust glistening under a sprinkling of whole peppercorns, to the scents of exotic vanilla beans wafting up from a mound of cold, soft ice cream, to the texture of crusty, rustic bread, hand-ripped from a lovely brown loaf dusted with cornmeal, to the taste of warm, moist, yielding carrots, drizzled in honey and butter, to
I need to change my shorts. Back soon.
an affordable, A5-sized, credit card-thin (foldable?), high-capacity, free os-compatible and W3C-compliant eBook reader.
:(
I've been waiting for this for the last three years. My eyes are tired of my Palm as my shoulders of my laptop...
Oh... and I'm tired of people funding comitees after comitees to sit and design *yet again* a "new" "exciting" proprietary eBook reader/format that never materialize.
Someday, somehow, someone with a clue will get to build this. And if the price is right, every schoolar will carry one.
You mean like what they have in Hong Kong?
An economy not entirely dependent on oil? Depending on who you ask - and, oh boy, does it depend - we've already passed the global midpoint where we're using it up faster than we can possibly find it.
No, I'm not screaming that we're going to run dry in ten years, I'm saying that oil prices are only going one way, and that it's a risky strategy to rely on a supply of new oil from Arab countries.
How about just for once we plan further ahead than the next election and begin the wholesale switch to renewable energy sources now? We put man on the moon in under eight years from declaring it. If we had eight years warning, could we we build and drive a vehicle through every mainland US state without using a drop of oil, directly or indirectly? Oh, sure we could, we'd just use solar. And, uh, no plastics. And, um, build it in a plant powered by wind turbines. And ship the parts by, uh, yuh, we'll come back to that one. And our factory workers will use geothermal power to heat their homes, and they'll, erm, cycle to work. You see how it goes? Sure, in theory we could do it, and sooner or later, we'll have to. Are we going to wait until the last possible moment to put that theory to the test?
Oil is a one off bonanza in human history. We should be investing that wealth in our childrens' future, not blowing it on wide screen TVs and leaving them to clean up the mess.
While I'm ranting, sooner or later China is going to get rich enough to support an unhealthy population of lawyers, and then we can forget shipping our toxic garbage there to be melted down. Again, we can keep building the tire mountains and circuit board cities higher and higher and leave our kids to work out what to do with them. I just hope they're not such selfish short sighted bastards when it comes to looking after us in our collective old age.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I'm still waiting for the frige that keeps track of what's inside and orders what's needed in an online-store.
I remember another predicted technology which I found in a mid-50's childrens book on robots: They said that within 20 years nuclear powered sport-boats would become available.. Somehow I don't see that happening in my lifetime..
For years, I've read about large IBM systems that have extensive fault detection, retry and repair capabilities. They have built-in spares and can automatically call field service with a list of boards that need to be replaced. The field service engineer can replace the defective boards whenever it is convenient, without taking the system down. It seems like none of this technology makes its way into small computers. You can't even get ECC memory without buying a workstation/server or building your own box with the right chipset and motherboard.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
> So what are you waiting for? Can't believe no one has said it yet... The new AmigaOS!
What about silver space jumpsuits? Its the 21st Century but I still don't have skin tight clothing with giant shoulder pads and hoops around the cuffs.
I know it is not really science but I ask you, where are the skin tight clothes without pockets?
(jokes about Slashdot readers in skin tight clothing are redundant)
Ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, i've wanted a computer that had voice recognition and could speak in a normal voice. Even though the technology has improved over the years, it's a long ways off from replicating HAL.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
What we do have are huge conglomerations, or some moron ranting on his blog. There really isn't a whole lot in between.
Philadelphia has 2 newspapers. One reads like an AP and Reuters news feed. The other borders on tabloid. It doesn't help that both are owned by Knight Ridder, the same folks who run USA Today. The little free weekly that someone in our neighborhood puts together has a lot more useful information in it.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I want one of these.
Three years ago, they matched a prototype of this car against a Ferarri, a Corvette, a Miata and a Porche Carerra on a 1/8 mile drag strip. It beat, by 7 lengths, all of these except the Miata. The only reason the Miata won was because the driver of the T-Zero forgot to disengage the hand brake.
www.wavefront-av.com
e-Paper. I remember reading an article in 1995 or so, about the MIT Media Lab e-Ink/e-Paper project, and how it would be out in "2 to 3 years". It's now 2003, and electronic paper is still 2 to 3 years away.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
H.A.L. Arthur C. Clarke's original timeline called for H.A.L. to have been first brought online in 1996. He later admitted that he was a bit too optimistic.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think the reason why some things never materialize and why some catastrophes never happen is because we can somewhat predict that they will.
I will take the point of cataclysmic events happening to the earth at the fault of humans. That one will obviously not happen. If we know it's going to happen, we're not going to let it get to the point of catastrophe. If it gets to that point, then we're certainly going to try to fix it.
Things can happen unexpectedly, and those are the ones that do the most damage. If we know that the earth is warming because of something were doing, were going to do something about it. Asteroids and plague are the two most likely to harm us.
With anything, if you expect the worst, then the worst is least likely to happen. Especially if you can prepare for it, or know you are causing it happen and can therefore stop doing it.
As for videophones, moving sidewalks, etc... I dont think anyone has a need for those things. They've been invented, and tested, and they work just fine. But no one wants them so bad as to create a market for them.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
Paperless office will come soon after the paperless toilet.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
For as long as I remember some tech journalists predict that voice controlled computers and voice text input instead of keyboard and mouse is ``just around the corner''.
It seems it's pretty far away corner...
My bet is that correct voice input system needs to understand what the operator is talking about. In other words it needs quite complex AI.
Otherwise it's gonna make thousands of mistakes like right-write, they're-their, its-it's etc.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
I am waiting for people to give up on the ridiculous notion of a paperless office. We aren't there yet with technology, we aren't even close. Stop trying to force it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
... that don't sag around the ankles, swim suits that are easy to get off when wet, a 32-bit clean version of Microsoft QuickBASIC.
Team Fortress 2... And seemingly Half-life 2
Don't forget Nuke Nukem Forever - which is the time it will take to develop and not the working title as many people mistakenly assume...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
It could happen.
Really.
*sob*
*goes back to work*
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The "food pill" concept does have a fundamental physical limitation. By "food" we usually mean things like proteins and carbohydrates, not things like vitamins, and "pill" usually means something rather small
that can be swallowed with one gulp.
Our daily requirement of protein and carbohydrate is on the order of hundreds of grams. To get 100 grams of carbos, you need at least 100 grams of material, and typically a bit more (unless you're gulping down pure sugar). This would be well beyond the size range of what we would usually call a "pill".
You can put things like vitamins and a few "supplement" materials in pill form, because we only need those in sub-gram amounts. But you're not going to put significant amounts of amino acids or sugars into a pill, not in the quantities that we need them. The universe just doesn't work that way.
Also, we need a significant amount of water per day. Our biochemistry only works in a water medium. If you could reduce the proteins and carbos to a digestible but waterless form for less bulk, you'd just have to consume the water some other way. You might as well leave the water mixed with the proteins and carbos and consume them together. It's a lot more satisfying to the palate than downing pills and drinking large quantities of water.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Articles like these always confuse the role of science in society -- anything futuristic or techie is lumped under the rubric of science. Yet science really has so little to do with any of this. Scientists discover the laws, engineers develop products that make use of the laws, and businesses/governments/consumers invest in those products to adopt the fruits of the laws.
Science was done with the laws that underpin videophones, moving sidewalks, and fly cars several decades ago -- how many articles on flying cars make it into scholarly science journals these days? Engineers have been using those laws to make prototypes of the products or (more importantly) low cost approaches to manufacturing and deploying these products for quite a while.
Its the people that invest and adopt that hold up most "scientific" inventions long after science to done with the topic. Until the product is cheap enough and perceived as useful enough, all the science and engineering in the world is irrelevant. This is where marketing to cosnumers or lobbying to governments comes into play.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Look carefully at that home of the future and you'll see some old stuff that they thought would never go away.
The fassion of the future had us wearing shiny space age fabrics.
Today we wear denum, leather, cotten.
Our robot dog would fetch the paper bring in the mail and fetch our slippers.
We have no time for slippers. Paper? Mail? Download the news and e-mail to the PDA.
And about that robot dog. Well we have a robot dog alright but the trend seams to be to program them for security not fetching things.
Cars that drive themselfs....
Computers aren't powerful enough and so many people are looking for the easy lawsute will exployte any defect they discover.
(If you wear neon green the sensors crash and the car won't stop. Instant accadent with a pedestrian)
Flying cars... Apparently you need cars that drive themselfs before you'll see flying cars.
On that note...
Re. Cast of friends crashing into home... Huge amount of money
Nursing Febe back to health... priceless.
The home of the future "just add water" freeze dried food.
Today we eat out at fast food places.
The home of the future the famaly sits around the big screen TV.
Today everyone has a computer in there own rooms.
Home of the future. 2 way TV wrist watch.
Today camra cell phones and theaters who ban them.
Hotf: Push button jobs
Today got em but it's not one button....
"What do you mean you openned the "Thank you" file attachment. Are you nuts?"
"But it said it was so big"
"I don't care how much he loves you DON'T OPEN FILE ATTACHMENTS"
I don't actually exist.
I agree. That's the biggest problem with so called "innovations"... they don't help you do anything better. How does seeing someone increase the effiency of using a telephone? Now, it makes sense if your loved one is being needlessly deployed in some third world country because your current president is a nitwit. Then it makes sense that you want to see the person. However, if your just calling your wife to ask her if she needs you to pick anything up from the store, there's no point in a video phone. As for the flying car, they'll happen eventually, just not in the US. This is the reason why. Currently, if I went out and bought a single engine piper cub and popped open the engine cowling, do you know what I'd find... dynamos. Now, there are companies that make electroic ignition systems for airplanes, but because of the current rules, you can only use them if you declare your plane an experimental. However, after thousands and thousands of hours of people flying on electronic ignition, the FAA still isn't convinced it's safe. Now just imagine what some poor bastard would have to go through to even get the FAA to look at a flying car. For it to be even practical to the general public, it would have to have an obsurdly computer controlled, fly by computer control system that would prevent the thousands of possible knuckleheaded things a person could do in a flying car, otherwise, it wouldn't be flying car, it would be a flying plane. Your average person can just barely sort out drivers ed. Just imagine your crazy cubemate behind the stick of a flying car. Yeah, that would be frightening.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Remember "Mr. Fusion" from the end of "Back to the Future?" And the flying skateboards and weather control from another one of those movies? On the other hand, when I told my dad (a retired programmer, sorry, "software engineer") how much disk space I have on my computer, he just shook his head.
Whoa! This may be the king of around-the-corner technologies (or legends). Don't fountain of youth legends go waaay back?
In England we have Videophones
In Japan they have Cars that drive themselves
And the french have a Moving Sidewalk
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
I had hoped that nuclear power would have eliminated fossil fuel burning power plants for the generation of electricity. Saving the oil for those applications where there are no reasonable replacements. With a reasonable investment in research and engineering, we could have safe, standardized, nuclear power plants all over the world. Even if you ignore CO2 emissions and global warming, fossil fuels kill untold thousands every year via air pollution and deaths related to extraction, processing and distribution. They even release substantial amounts of radioactive materials into the atmosphere.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
well you will have another chance during y2k+37 when the 32 bit unix time stamp rolls over.
*I* invented the Communications Satellite!
/. account.
-- A. C. Clarke
Sorry guys, he borrowed my
Gallium Arsenide semiconductors are the technology of the future. Always have been, always will be.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
"(Playmate Baby Bright Eyes) has azure blue oversize eyes that blink, sweep the room and interact with your child. " If "interact" means to incude nightmares of epic proportions and cause damage a pyschiatrist and a priest couldn't undo, than sign me up. Hell, I don't even have children, I just want a good reason to keep them away.
The dumb idea that pops up every few months in a Slashdot article as the internet business model of the future.
Micropayments, the future since 1997.
They're pretty much worthless because there's always about 30 people just standing around on them, completely blocking the path for the few who realize that you're supposed to (gasp!) walk on them. It's actually faster to just walk down the corridors in the airport. Once again, human laziness gets in the way of a great concept. Oh, and they move too slowly as well.
Perhaps we might note that we have, in fact, had one of those. A small one, perhaps, with only two cities vaporized. But one country has used nnuclear weapons is war, and that same country has recently had serious government discussions of building and testing small "strategic" nuclear weapons. This is the same government whose public policy towards perceived enemies is proactive, preventive attacks based on what those enemies might do in a worst-case scenario.
We're not out of danger on this one yet.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Don't we already have food pills -- something like an Egg McMuffin is pretty compact and calorie dense. Or perhaps some of these "energy bar" snack/meal substitutes. A meal will never fit in the size of a Tylenol capsule, but I think it can fit in the palm of your hand.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
You want food in pills?
:)
Solution:
1. A sharp warm knife
2. A bar of chocolate
3. Start cutting
On the other hand you could just buy a bag of M&M's.
Video phones have been around for awhile, based off the H.236 standard. When I say video phone, I mean a device that lets me see the person on the other end of the line as I am talking to them, not a cellphone that takes pictures or displays video clips. I'm talking live, color video back and forth (typically 10-15fps).
A company called Vialta came out with the "Beamer" device that is sold at Best Buy. When the SARS scare hit Taiwan, the local gov't purchased thousands of them to give to families that were quarentined. Pretty cool use for the technology.
Anyhow, check out the website for the company:
About Beamer
It's won a bunch of awards, and is _easy_ to use, which makes it great for elderly relatives.
From Star Trek... virtual reality to the extreme... the holodeck!
samrolken
fusion - ohh, any day now. for the last 40 years.
We'll be at mars Any Day Now.
Etc.
I want free or at least very-very cheap energy to power my car, by boat, my hover cycle.
I want the end of Cubicle farms (and prairie-dogging for that matter). Doors would stop all of the casual interruptions that eat all of the time in my day on nothing. I would actually get to do more interesting and useful development, learning and programming (life is too damn short - and its getting shorter every day...). I want true respect from my employer - instead of lipservice.
I want true voice recognition. Coupled with doors, a good voice recognition system, that would allow me to write programs, would increase productivity immensely. This would allow us to build all of the vantastic technology everyone wants, quickly.
Finally, "I want peace on Earth, and goodwill towards men." If this would come true, I could forego all the rest...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I was at an interstate sports carnival and the food provided was not fit for my dog, or any dog or me either. So I lived on gatorade. I liked the yellow, orange or green stuff. The purple or blue stuff was a bit too scary even for me. I also drank a lot of water, but the carbs in the gatorade generally got me through some serious exercise.
I don't think I have consumed a single bottle of it since then (a year ago).
There certainly is a lot more "convenience" food around than there used to be, say 10 years or 20 years ago. But unfortunately I still can't get takeaway food at 11pm on a Wednesday night. Well I could get Maccas, but that's not food.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Very prescient comments about China. I think the dark horse in terms of countries unexpectedly upsetting our western fat cat society has got to be India, however. China will get there sooner than most people expect, but India is within a few years of seriously kicking our rumps. Just look at those software jobs flying off to the subcontinent...
Basically, we are in very big trouble, because the mathematics of having a billion Indians and a billion Chinese means that they need a much lower percentage of educated people in their countries to have a vastly larger actual number of educated people. If China or India can achieve a 10% university education rate, that's 200 million well educated Chinese and Indians - the equivalent of every person in the US having such a degree. There is a lot of complacence, because we look at those countries and see a high poverty rate, unemployment, lots of people living in poor conditions... but they are both nations on the rise and because of their immense sizes they will be hugely powerful before we know it.
Right now we can see this with IT jobs going to India... but how soon until there are hordes of Chinese accountants? Indian engineers? One only has to look at the speed with which the high-tech industry took off in SE Asia, where most of the manufacturing is still done, to see how quickly such sectors could be taken overseas with great speed. We won't just be wearing shirts made in China, our knowledge work will be done there too. Unfortunately we won't be able to afford any of it because we will all be unemployed.
IMHO you are absolutely correct in your assertion that we should be moving now, with great rapidity, to build a new set of ideals for our societies. We need to really migrate from the industrial, oil-swilling, third-world-will-pick-up-the-pieces mentality to an information age, high-tech, renewable, sustainable future. We have all the technology, we just need to put it into practice. If we don't, the west will become a hideous, decayed place full of social problems and memories of the era when we ruled the world.
Read Pynchon.
No. An idiot is the one who cannot recognize that 'history class' promotes the version of reality as directed by the politicans, who are in turn directed by big business/military-industrial concerns. Which is to say, if you observe the prescribed channels, you are only ever going to see what somebody else wants you to see. To think otherwise is childish.
Go out and find some Dyncorp people, (or similar), and ask them to show you their version of reality. There are more wonders in the earth than you have yet imagined.
Most people live in self-willed dreams where they think they know all the answers because television told them so. --But you know that. It has all been said a thousand times before. If at this late juncture you cannot bring yourself to listen even once, then there is a very great danger that your life will have been spent entirely blind, dumb and deaf, -and much shorter than you expect.
-FL
"videophones; moon colonies; food in pills; cars that drive themselves; jet packs; and moving sidewalks. ... "
/. on a parking car, and there already is a truck that can drive the highway..
Videophones - on sale now in Tokyo
Food in pills - well aren't protein and amino acides food?
Cars that drive themselves - today's
Moving sidewalks - already used widely in Tokyo, usually in 1 to 3 segments of 50 meters each..
Ah, so that's what life would be like had I invented the Finglonger. sigh.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Prime Curios is indeed an interesting site.
Good news! It's a suppository.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
> Well, I'll stick to my point. We can do this now. So, why aren't we? Why are we going to suck oil until we go blue in the face and leave nothing in reserve?
The obvious answer is that it's cheaper than the alternatives. It's not really rational to expect that we'll stop using a resource that's available now, with an already-exisiting distribution infrastructure, for no reason other than that we need to stretch it out over some indeterminate length of time in the future.
> I'm thinking of my kids, but longer term, we're due another ice age real soon now. Failing that, god will drop a rock on us sooner or later. Our descendants are going to have to bootstrap themselves from wood burning stoves to nuclear power. Good luck to them.
What? Why would you think that they'd have to do this? By the time that next ice age rolls around, or the big rock falls, how can you know what we'll use for energy? Besides, why would they progress from wood to nuclear power at all? I can personally think of several options better than that, and I can't predict the future any better than you. You seem to think that we need to move away from fossil fuels right away, and I don't see anything in your argument to explain why. Yes, they're running out, but what's the point to having a huge world reserve of oil by moving away from oil entirely? Doesn't that defeat the use of having the reserves, if nothing you do requires that reserve? As the supply gets harder to provide, the price will rise, and when it rises high enough, we'll move to a different source of energy. Expecting the human race to do anything else is irrationally Utopian.
Virg
(Or have the predictions just got less accurate now- who can say?)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I'm still waiting to see all kind of products "connected" to the internet using CueCat :)
According to theirpage, you can keep on waiting:
If you have a Cue Cat, save it. The patents and technology created by DigitalConvergence will again be available for business and consumer use.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
"I'm can't swallow that!"
"Good news! its a supository!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Wine 1.0
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Perhaps the 'problem' here is rather that most of these things materialize so gradually.
The desertification of the Sahara over the past three thousand years never made the history books. People just gradually moved out of its way.
The shoe phone of Agent Maxwell Smart/Star Trek communicator is here and so ubiquitous that young folks forget that it used to be on the Always Next list.
Video conferences are getting more use as bandwidth widens, and some day within a decade cell phone manufacturers will take the then obvious step of turning their camera phones into live feeds - tadaa, video phone!
Toyota just presented a car that parks by itself.
If the global AIDS pandemic seems 'curiously absent in our daily lives' it's just because we intentionally ignore it as 'too depressing.' Most of the sub-Saharan states have HIV infection rates of some 20%, and it's spreading unstoppably elsewhere as well. If that doesn't feel catastrophic to you, its because you're used to it.
People adapt to anything. Unless it happens overnight and is hammered into your conscious by daily news coverage, you will regard anything as normal.
Madonna has been acting since the eighties, actually ('Desperately Seeking Susan'). Quality is irrelevant in Hollywood. You could hardly act worse than Arnold Schwarzenegger, could you? Success is a matter of luck.
So I mostly disagree on the 'never' stance, except for jet packs and bug-free Windows. They'd be probably suicide to use, anyway.
I would really like to have some easy way to quickly eat a meal. There are all the meal bars but they taste pretty bad and are just too much work to choke down. Even if it was 15-20 pills it would work for me. I like having nice meals, but I don't need one every time I eat. I just spend too much time on food. Day to day, I'd like to just swallow something quickly and be done with it. Have a nice cooked food sit down meal just for dinner or special occasions. I really don't understand why this option doesn't exist. Seems to me there would be a pretty good market.
David
You forget about business. sales people like to see who there dealing with, people who purchase, like to see who there buying from.
Then there is the 'killer app.' for video phones. Porn. Of course, I have all this on my computer, I just need the other people to have a web cam.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Does anyone else find these sorts of lists filled with the sort of idiocy that I do? First off, there always the standard "they promised" mentality that pervades the thinking of vaporware gadgets. Who promised? When? Where? Was it the voices in your head or was it something your saw on the TV? How can anyone actually be upset at "they"? Secondly, some of these ideas are just flat out stupid and would never have passed a common sense test, like the jetpack (admittely cool, just insanely unsafe).
Thirdly, some of these things do exist, but since they are not in the form "they" said they would be in these ideas are somehow a failure? This is just rank whining.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
But I used Yahoo chat's video and audio features to woo my now-wife a year ago. Sure, it isn't something I need to hold to my ear and talk, but the computer is a lot more flexible, sending images, copy-pasting quotes, etc.
Videophones are here, but they (not surprisingly) do not look like the original 1950's inspiration.
The paperless off is nearly achievable right now. I say nearly because stick notes are so damn usefull.
However it is a social issue, not a technology one. Any company that puts iyts mind to it in a serious way, could reduce paperwork by 50%, easy.
I think if the person who is in charge of supplies had the power to say, "You are not allowed to print emails" would be a good use of empowerment. espcially if they got a bonus tied to cost savings.
I worked with a team of 10 people and we all committed to a 'less paper' office. We never had any hard paperwork with anything that was involved within the group. It was all digital, which was a pain in the ass sometime, but we got over the hurdles. there were 2 problems.
1)other group or departments always wanted us to print stuff, but we would only send electronic forms.'
2)stick notes are so damn usefull.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I agree, but I think that before we get too complacent about the advances in autopilots, etc, we should note that we still don't have anything remotely like an autopilot in a car, which would give a far better idea of how this stuff is going to work than a plane's autopilot will. Traffic volume at the least will be wildly different.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
There are a number of companies working on this goal but they all seems to be following different strategies.
BMW and Mercedes in Europe have working prototypes which work by using cameras to visualize the centre of the lane that the car is in and sensors to prevent it driving into the car in front. Overtaking continues to be an issue though.
The US car manufacturers are basing their research on indicators implanted in the roads to keep their cars on track but they all seem to be using different systems plus the big problem will be upgrading all the roads and highways to support the system.
Ultimately it come down to price and standards (as usual). The questions whether the government or customer wants to pay for the system along with its coverage and comparability will determine which system ultimately succeeds.
This is FLAMEBAIT. Flamebait, I say! CAN'T YOU IDIOTS SEE IT? It's 100% unadulterated brown as shit flamebate. Fucking mods can't pull their heads out of their own asses long enough to smell the burnt smell of flamebroild bullshit!
We have robots that cut the grass
there is a two drawe dishwasher where you keep the dished in the lower drawer, put them in the upper when dirty, then wash them in the upper and put them in the lower drawer when dirty then wash them there, and so on.
if we have automated lawnmower, why can't we have an automated snowplow?
Paint, I would love to ahve a machine that did my painting for me. I hate painting.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Good news! there soon to be American countries!
"I just hope they're not such selfish short sighted bastards when it comes to looking after us in our collective old age."
They won't. Mostly because there will not be enough of them to support the baby boomers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Obviously, many people will hesitate to swallow a nuclear device, but I'm sure many geeks could be persuaded with targetted advertising promoting the benefits of becoming an "Atomic Powered Superman!"
Alternatively, the devices could use some form of broadcast energy.
Wow... That was so subtle, I almost missed it. Nitwit...
Huh? We *had* videophones. Nobody wanted them. There's a Picturephone(tm) in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It's the only one I ever saw in person.
Moving sidewalks? Try the airport.
However, self-drive gives me images of Demolition Man:
Stallone: Self-Drive!
car: error...unable to comply
(car heads towards large fountain)
Stallone: SELF-DRIVE YOU MICKEY MOUSE PIECE OF SH*T!
Several *years* ago CalTrans here in California had a test were a single human driver drove a cars, and a small "platoon" of automated cars followed along behind in a freeway lane maintaining distace and direction of travel. It was way cool. :)
The real problems are (as is the usual case these days) legal ones.
If you're injured when your automated car crashes on the automated highway, who gets sued? Would you want to enter a market like that?
I'm reminded of a drug many years back that held promise to allow severe schizophrenics to lead normal lives. However there was some very very small chance the drug could cause cancer. No one would sell it here because of the potential for lawsuits. Lawyers. No one asked the schizophrenics.
--- Ban humanity.
Videophones: They exist, there expensive and people don't like them. However the webcam accomplishes the same thing and is everywhere. Moon Colonies: We have the technology but not the budget. Food in Pills: Doesn't really exist but GNC will try to sell it to you anyway. Cars that drive themselves: Smart cars exist but are unaviable to the public at large because of safety concerns. Also they're not cheap. Jet Packs: They exist. Buy one here http://www.forbes.com/2003/07/21/cx_zc_0721tentech .html Minimum Price of one million dollars.
Moving Sidewalks: They exist. Mainly in large airports i.e. Detroit Metro. Keeps passengers from having to drag the luggage long distances.
While I agree with the sentiment often, I don't agree in the case of 'videophones'. It helps for the same reason that the phone is sometimes better than email. Subtle nuance and expression is lost in the translation.
Humans are best equipped to interact with another human face because of millions of years of evolution. Sure, I don't always want to use a videophone for every situation... most of the time I don't even want voice, just email (or time-shifted text message, if you will) is fine.
I use the phone when I want to convey something a little more complex emotionally. Those things get totally lost in email.
I use iChatAV to do videoconferenced meetings essentially when I need telepresence. That is, when I require not only voice but actually seeing the other person's face. This is good for clients or other brainstorming-type meetings where you need to kind of witness another person's thought process and facial ticks. You get a lot more out of what they're trying to say.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
That's what I'm waiting for.
Capitalism as it exists now is a nightmare of big companies fighting for the right to screw the consumer harder, and colluding on it at the same time. It exists to grown and consume, and for no other purpose.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I agree that the speed of innovation in aviation is terribly slow (other than avionics). Litigation nearly destroyed the industry. However, take a look at this.
Or at least Fry's. They're there, in the consumer electronics section, which to me pretty much means we can cross that off the list.
The enemies of Democracy are
This was the epitome of the dot-com irrational exuburence in predicting the stock market would go 50% every year when the component companies were faking profits.
Its interesting to look back at futurist predictions of previous decades to see what they got right (little), over-predicted trends and complete misses. Some of this sillyness is captured at Disneyworld- Tommorrowland, Epcot Dome, Carasoul of Progress, etc. Amusing!
The whole point of the orignal Star Trek was not to predict the details of future technology. They just presumed that human-machine interfaces would have become convenient. For example a talking computer is much more convenient than typing for the masses of humanity. Star Trek devices were named after the generic action they preformed, e.g. "transport", "communicate", "scan", etc. rather than some technology (3G) or commercial brand name (Xbox).
Hasn't this been "just around the corner" for about 5 years?
michael to get fired. But it never seems to happen...
(Note: if Taco didn't despise his readership, it would have happened ages ago)
Population problem is here now.
Politicians who represent their constituency!
Well, science fiction tends to be a reflection and extrapolation (to some extent) of the society it comes from, right? So in the 1950s we had the "bait-n-switch", in that while John W Campbell was publishing Asimov and Heinlein stories about a bright future among the stars for humanity, Philip K Dick was exploring the dark underbelly, the paranoia, the looming threat of atomic war and a mutated post-atomic horror.
A lot of Vernor Vinge's work isn't particularly dark and depressing; I haven't read much else recent (still chugging down the classics) but I assure you that the 'cyberpunk' sensibilities that William Gibson brought forth may have been appropriate for the 1980s, but are hardly the be-all and end-all of where SF stands today.
Hell, James Tiptree Jr was a lot more depressing than... well, than anything else I can think of, and he started writing in the late 1960s.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"Your average person can just barely sort out drivers ed. Just imagine your crazy cubemate behind the stick of a flying car. Yeah, that would be frightening."
Just need stronger roofs. Buildings have all sorts of defenses against errant cars. Look at government buildings with their setbacks and concrete barriers. Even civilian buildings have some barriers to prevent accidents. If larger numbers of people had flying machines, then we would just see the equivalent vertical barriers being put into place to protect property on the ground.
I've not seen a good comparison between flying safety and car safety made, but tens of thousands of people die in car crashes each year, while well under a thousand people die in light aircraft per year. So, the question really becomes one of risk and perception. It is clear that no major relaxation of flying rules will be allowed as long as people view aircraft as terrorist weapons or just an object of the liesure class. But light aircraft are far less dangerous as a weapon than a car, since they can't carry very much weight. And light aircraft are reserved to the liesure classes primarily because the required training is very expensive. That the actual aircraft is expensive is only because of the low volume and the certification requirements. A car by comparison would be much more expensive than an aircraft if it needed to go through the same legal process and was produced in as low a volume.
All that said aircraft won't be practical as "flying cars" until they are made to be end-to-end forms of transportation, but here also new regulations would be required to allow machines like the "Skycar" to land in residential and business areas legally. But the discussion has been so corrupted by irrational fear rather than practical concerns, that no one will be allowed to do much more than jump off the ground without fifty years of development and hundreds of billions of dollars spent on systems of control to make us perfectly "safe" even when it should be clear to any thinking person that to accept the risk and allow flying "cars" to take off without such onerous and impractical rules as are now proposed would be another economic revolution akin to the development of the Model T.
Here I don't think the effects of practical personal end-to-end air transportation could be exagerated. Openning up vaste areas of land to economic development. Substantially reducing resources spent on transportation infrastructure. Indeed, space is more than just an abstract contruct, we need it to prosper, and as we reach certain density as population grows it is hard to imagine greater economic growth without openning up the skies to transportation and commerce. Free skies mean prosperity.
Several of you have made a mistake of stating that it is a fundamental physical limitation that food cannot be taken in pill form. Granted, for an active adult male, it would take close to a half-pound of pure fat a day to meet energy requirements. Let's not forget, though, that the whole point of eating is to produce energy in form of ATP. Clearly, eating ATP pills ain't gonna do much, since you probably burn your body weight in ATP every day--it's made and used very rapidly. The solution--pills with enzymes that produce larger molecules--sugars, fats, maybe ATP itself--from carbon dioxide and water in the air. Yes, just like plants, a la photosynthesis. After all, skin is the largest organ, why not put it to work? It's perfect--we expell CO2 and H2O in respiration, so if we recycle it, all we need is sunlight, and we even would produce oxygen in the process. It goes further--since you don't need outside oxygen anymore, you can live underwater in bright sunlight. My guess is the pill will be eventually eliminated altogether, and photosynthetic enzymes simply incoroporated into human genome. Green-skinned humans, anyone? If that's too radical for you, consider the other scenario--"overpopulation and famine" . Modification of digestive enzymes will be needed, to allow humans to survive on things like cellulose (i.e. grass and trees). GM foods are already here, and GM humans are around the corner! Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated!
You are willing to give up the splendor that is Taco Bell but not willing to give up taking a crap? If I never crapped again that would be fine by me.
Please provide any examples of nukes used in anger since Japan.
You give no citations and no details whatsoever. The Dyncorp reference seems to point to radiation being used to poison people, but that is hardly the implication of your original assertion of small nukes used in warfare.
How about some details to investigate? Help us out.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Well, there's actually a power source where I live which is better than burning wood or hitching animals to something that rotates. It's called "falling water". Granted, I live in eastern New England, which is chock-full of steep, powerful rivers.
Funny story here. Some company which eventually became Connecticut Light and Power, then Northeast Utilities, bought pretty much every hydroelectric power station in the state. (The waterwheel used to run the mill; it would pretty much power the city if hooked to the grid.) They then disassembled all of these, removing or breaking the waterwheels, and made several central-generation nuclear boondoggles, which are currently costing the state a great deal of headache.
Oh, I know that hydro power doesn't work everywhere, but there's free power crashing down onto the rocks by the old mill, twenty-four hours a day, and not a damn thing is being done or will be done about it. Well, maybe the construction of another horrendously expensive nuke plant. Yay.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
..a cool Slashdot Poll. Now these chance gets lost unused.
Great. I don't call my mom anywhere near as much as she'd like as it is.
Now I'll have to wait 15 minutes every time I DO call for her to "put on my face."
This space available.
Sliding Doors. Really? The ones at Wal-Mart and Stop-n-Shop go "whoosh" when they open, and I don't even have to hit any buttons.
Jumpsuits. When was the last time you went to get your car repaired? Mechanics wear jumpsuits because they cover pretty much everything and can go over regular clothing, absorbing the grease, coolant, gasoline or whatever else sprays on them.
Designer drugs. Well, Ritalin is pretty much all we have for nootropics. "Fun!" is, unfortunately, not considered a good business case for a pharmeceutical company. Oh, and who could have predicted Viagra? But seriously, if you're looking for a clear tube with crystals in it that makes you zonk out, try crack.
Universal nudism. It's a subculture thing, but plenty of people do it. I think they call themselves "naturists" or somesuch.
Free sex. It's, again, a subculture thing, but it's hardly 'died'. Go find a swinger's (aka "the lifestyle") club. What's that? You're a single guy looking to get laid? Sorry chum, in this culture you're going to have to pay for sex.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
One of the most exciting things happening now is Aggregators. There was a slashdot story on them just a day ago. They really change everything about the web, wiki, etc.,. Everything becomes real-time.
We do not have a clue how to do strong AI. Nobody does, including the people who say they do. All the old ideas, from predicate calculus to neural nets, have been taken about as far as they're going to go. There hasn't been a really good new approach in years. It's not lack of CPU power, or there's be good systems that were really slow. The best that's been accomplished is systems that fake intelligence (Eliza, AskJeeves, Cyc, Cog, Microsoft Barney for Windows) by interacting with people in ways that lead people to overestimate them.
Even industrial robots are really dumb. Most of what's in production has almost no sensing. The advanced models do some visual correlation to fine-tune position alignment. No industrial robot deals with an unstructured environment.
Driverless cars are coming along well. Even there, though, we're a long way from noticing that the ball rolling into the street may be followed by a child.
You can get this, but it costs $10,000 and weighs 400 pounds. Improvement is slow and sizes are limited. Plasma panels have the assembly problem from hell - they're made of two big flat pieces that have to align at the pixel level. Wrong answer. "Printable OLEDs" are still vaporware.
The end of our oil supply is near!
(Reality: if we're using up our oil, why aren't reserves decreasing?)
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell
Skittlebrau
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Admiral Crunch.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
The rest of the world doesn't need drug development that focuses on losing weight without exercise and maintaining an erection for more than 30 seconds without a ruler and gaffer tape.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
Over the years we have had many new things come and go. It seems to me that the ones that stick around are the ones that are more productive in nature. The CB radio didn't exactly stick around but the cel-phone has. The digital watch is okay but it sure hasn't replaced the analog watch. The 8-track tape lost out to the cassette and VHS beat Beta-max (still don't quite understand that). Technologies have changed and replaced other things that seemed that they would be around forever, the LP is all but gone, replaced by the CD.
For new tech to work, the consumer seems to need to see an obvious benefit but the manufacturer has to see an obvious profit. Without buy-in from both sides, a new tech will not fly. It is pretty simple. In some cases, the manufacturers have enough clout to throw a technology down our throats. This pretty much happened with the CD.
Another thing that I have noticed is that a lot of what they said would free us has acted more as a chain. The cel phone and pager are two obvious examples. I can no longer really get away from work and I can not get away from my personal things either. There is no such thing as getting away anymore. Sure it is nice bing available but I have been called into work while I was in the boat fishing. I've been camping and had my mother-in-law call me with computer questions. In the eveing at home, I can pull out the laptop and do some work... We no longer have the clear work/home family/profession lines that used to divide our time and responsibilities. This has the effect of attaching us rather than freeing us.
If we could teleport network packets, we wouldn't need an Internet at all. Just teleport bytes from hard drive to hard drive.
Democracy and Western Civilization.
Both truly excellent ideas that have yet to appear.
I think we should explore the sea by using an underwater lab.
> Well, there's actually a power source where I live which is better than burning wood or hitching animals to something that rotates. It's called "falling water".
Damming has been used to great effect in many places, but it's not the panacea that some would make it out to be. Like any other source of energy, it isn't "free" for the taking. Water wheels are not a reliable source of electric power, since if the water level by the wheel falls it stops turning (and both the Charles and the Merrimack rivers in your area suffer from large depth fluctuations), so you need to dam the river and build a reservoir behind the dam to compensate. This profoundly affects the nature of the river, from ecology to navigability. In some cases, the changes can be so severe that it's not worth the damage to do it. It seems in your area that the power companies are tending more toward nuclear plants than other alternatives to oil-fired generation plants, but assuming that simply harnessing the waterways would necessarily be better than that is too simplistic.
Virg
manhood enlargement that really works
Because 80% of human communication is non-verbal. This is one of the main reasons companies spend lots of money sending executives half way around the world to have face-to-face conversations with people who they could reach by telephone.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Ummm...being clear is bad ? Perhaps they weren't making a joke (which might require subtlety), but were showing annoyance...
As everyone knows, Slashdotters come in two flavors, those who read the articles, and those who don't.
Ergo, vis-a-vis, concordantly: No Slashdotter read the article.
_______________________
Sigs are insigificant.
I guess that's why this never "got off the ground".
One interesting development is the achievement of fusion temperatures with the comparatively simple dense plasma focus device. Check it out at the Focus Fusion Society. To me this looks simple and promising.
As an aside, the guy running this, Eric Lerner, is a prominent plasma fusion researcher who has written a very fascinating book on plasma cosmology, a competing theory to the Big Bang Theory. I had no idea, but it seems there are a lot of scientists that don't buy Big Bang Theory.
--porkrind (too lazy to log in)
And we know why it isn't here.
That is all.
While there is something to be said for the above, one must also point out that some of those fears were justified.
While overpopulation of the world didn't happen, it didn't happen in part due to everyone controlling the number of children they had when they got rich. In places of poverty overpopulation was a reality. At it did have dire consequences. One might say that nature is compensating with various plagues (i.e. HIV) and starvation/war (i.e. Somalia/Ethiopia). But anyone with a portion of humanity would be horrified at that strong of a social Darwinist approach to human populations.
Nuclear war was a real threat and it really was a miracle it never happened -- although with terrorists and the nature of the technology of bio-weapons and nuclear weapons, it will remain a threat to humanity until we start having off-planet colonies.
A secure and bug free windows? Well there is OSX or Linux. They have Windows. (grin)
I think that global warming is still to be reckoned with. While I'm not convinced regarding the degree technology causes it the phenomena itself is real. Glaciers are rapidly melting and I think we're starting to see weather changes. If something happens with say the gulf current be prepared for major problems in the world.
And when she does, I'm gonna get a hell of a blowjob. She promised.
-- Jari
Jee, I don't know...(forests on fire, really hot europe, less fish etc..), I think that the eviromental collapse is just now starting to show itself....I guess it's time to stop financing the military and wars (lets see, 6 billion/month for afghanistan and iraq..), lets start by taking THAT money and investing in a massive world-wide nanotechnology "manhattan style" R&D fest to develop all the less-polluting and Enviro-recycling/regenerating technologies we really need right now (actually: yesterday)..Imagine a future where there are no Bill Gates creating endless useless money making technologes, but where nanotech fixes the eviroment, stops aging, where nerds can do their own nanotech research, people download plans for the latest nano-manufactured item (if you don't like the old item, don't throw it out, reclycle it into the next new item). We seriously need this as human history is an experiment in evolving civilization, right now, we have evolved capitalism to it's max, the system now is reducing the middle-class to the lower-class and just the rich, funny thing, if people make no money, they don't buy stuff...remember, we can't go back (ie: feudalism etc.), we mus go forward to a nanotech future where solar energy makes everything, nerds come up with cool ideas to drive this new economy...after all, it's not much different than today..farmers get free light to grow plants, fishermen get ocean-made fish, the biospere supports farms (okay, so the original farmers got the land for free, any other land since then costs money)....The thing is, we need to probably invest 100 billion/year quickly to get a crash program going..after all, the 4 billion invested during WWII was for a 3-4 year program to develop the bomb, that investment and massive R&D pushed nuclear technology ahead 36 years into the future in a space of 4 years, we need to do the same today, except now you get all the industrialized countries to contribute resources/manpower, in a few years you can bring in lots more people in developing countries (remember, internet is everywhere now..). Right now it's expensive to do nanotech, but soon, once we develop small nanotech labs, we could send them all over the world...remember, there are 100's of milions of nerds out there waiting to create/invent/disover something new...perhaps it's the next solution to a problem we need soved..
The non-verbal communication seriously helps the efficiency of using a telephone.
My wife picking something up from the store? I describe with my hands.. it's this big, shaped like this, etc.. It would also help when you say something sarcastic but have a smile on your face.. much easier to see what the person is actually intending to say.
As for seeing people when they wake up, etc, it's easy enough to have a little button that will turn the video feeds on/off.
The concern I have is sick people calling random numbers and displaying nasty stuff on the screen.. though I guess you could just have the video off by default until you know who you're speaking with.
Actually, I think this would have a chance of getting off the ground, in conjunction with the Internet due to the advertising possibilities.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
I think current cell phones could be considered videophones - with the embedded digital cameras and screens it's possible to have a conversation with real-time (albeit with slow frame rates) images of one another.
John Kerry is a Joke!
Seeing women applying makeup and men catching up on the sports pages while barely piloting their two-ton tin can down the highway is more like what I was talking about. I don't particularly care if they crash and burn all by themselves -- that's Darwinism in action -- I just don't want to be involved in their stupidity. But since I can't always choose who is next to me on the road, I curse their stupidity on Slashdot instead.
IPV6 :)
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
You really think the U.S. government would allow flying cars after the 9/11 incident? So much for the Back to the Future reality.
Security is inversely proportional to the commitment of one desiring to circumvent it.
Telling you dad that for your birthday you want a bushbaby then they should all be destroyed. I have a great idea for a wind powered hammock swinger it is a great ideazzzzzzzz.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
Fuel prices to drop for my hovercar.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
While it is a wittily written article, Time missed the opportunity to ask "why are these things Always Next?"
I strongly suspect, based on sheer curmudgeonly cyncism, the reason these sorts of things keep coming up in articles about The Brave New World Just Around The Corner is that every time somebody writes such an article, the only research they do is to read the previous article.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Same sort of thing with self-driving cars. Better, from a liability point of view, to sell a car that has absolutely no collision avoidance, and market it as such, than sell a car that avoids 99.9% of accidents but accidently kills someone by performing a collision avoidance move, even if that other person was at fault (for example, jaywalking).
It's like when you mention speed limiters, the expected response is "But what if I'm parked at a light and I see a semi bearing down on me and I need to floor it, at 110% of maximum power, or I'll die!?". Even if that speed limiter would save your life by preventing some other accident a hundred times before this scenario ever occured. Anti-lock brakes faced the same initial resistance, as did seat-belts before them.
I remember all the stories of "the guy" who survived a wreck only because he was thrown harmlessly from it onto a truckload of pillows, while his friend who was belted in died horribly as the car burned around him, yada, yada... If a safety device could ever kill someone, despite saving almost everyone else, it will be looked on as a deathtrap by everyone who didn't grow up with it. The next generation though will have trouble imagining how people got by without it.
Hey, thanks for pointing that out.
...
But it's getting to be time for a new sig anyway. Let's see; I know I've got some good ones lying about somewhere
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
funny but no one mentioned viagra - i guess everyone here thinks they got it going forever - but it won't last naturally unless you have Viagra - you can download your pr()n until you are dead now, if I could only control my premature shooting... ))))
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The predictions themselves suffered from the unreality effects of selection bias and narrow vision.
... routing issues ... liability issues ... even a short list of these things is harrowing -- and missing entirely from the predictions.
... technophilia.
The pattern dictates technological expansion that continues to "improve" lifestyles in ways that can only apply to ever narrowing sectors of population, OR, apply in ways that expand too quickly and must crash therefore.
"Selection bias" means that selectors (basically, media folk) picked them out on their own judgment, and they decided which predictions gained dispersal. It's just a model of media controls that the educated person has at least some notion of.
The "narrow vision" problem is epidemic in Human thinking. People were ready to posit things like "flying cars", without sound speculation on the infrastructure that would support such items. A thing like a flying car must operate on fuel of some kind. That fuel must be distributed and afforded. The cars themselves imply some level of skill, thus training. Safety issues
The end products overall followed a pattern of technocratic worship
Humans are not so far removed from their animal origin, so my rule of thumb with predictions is to test how far from the animal the predicted item takes us. If the metric is too big, then it's likely to be hogwash of some kind. It'll either never surface, or it'll boom and bust as the bad idea it ever was.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Hehe, I just thought about this: what if you squeezed a normal sized meal into a small, pill shaped diamond casing with a tiny nanobot on one end that unpacks it and rebuilds it in your stomach? Okay, it would be.. unpleasant, if the casing broke... but if dear departed Robert Forward can postulate an 'antigravity' device made by blasting a million ton asteroid into a diamond casing and suspending it on diamond pillars, where it would cancel out the earth's gravity underneath, then I can imagine my diamond cased nanotech foodpill.
Or wait! Even beter, and more feasible: put nanobots in food that's bad for you like ice cream and bacon double cheeseburgers, and program the things to turn it into something nutritious in your stomach. Mmmm, healthy junk food! The only problem then is when they go bad and start turning people into a giant brussel sprouts...
(a la Homer Simpson, pointing) Patent pending! Patent Pending, Patent Pending!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Those ubiquitous robots that were discussed in that incredibly assinine article by Marshall Brain on slashdot a few days ago.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
I lasted one day at my new job without having a printer set up. Then I reached the point where I could not understand the code I was working on in the limited space of a couple gvim windows on my monitor.
Ok, start with yourself. Today I can buy a new car that runs on E-85, which is renewable, and now energy positive. (Early ethanol fuels were energy negative as in for every 8 gallons output you needed 10 gallons) Why don't you have one? (I'm looking at them, I don't buy new cars, but I'll be looking for it in my next car)
Diesel has been around forever, and a lot of the problems that gave it a bad reputation have been solved. Do you have one in your car? (if not the E-85 engine) Prepare to run Bio-diesel, which isn't quite ready for prime time, but coming up quickly.
For that matter how do you drive? Fancy v-8 sports car and burn rubber off the line, or nice and easy acceleration from a tiny 4 banger?
Thats just cars, you can do a lot at home. I've replaced several of my light bulbs with compact flourescents.
I don't know what you are doing, but very few people can't do more.
Real AI. Haven't they been predicting that 'real soon now' forever? Fuzzy Logic: it was the next big thing once, if anyone's using it now, they are keeping relativly quiet about it. Holographic TV. Okay, there have been some remarkable recent advances in 3D tech, but nothing I can afford to watch porn on... Skill-in-a-pill or other form of very accelerated learning tech, like sleep training or something. Something like Larry Niven's tasp, direct stimulation of the pleasure centers at the push of a button (This one exists: I read about an experiment where they implanted some guy with one of these and let him push his own button. He said it wasn't soul-shatteringly pleasurable, and he didn't zone out or fall down in fits when pressing it, but he did press it hundreds of times per hour...) Human clones: I want to pull a Heinlein and do my sex-changed clone ;-) Oh yeah, and I want one of those pre-flattened cats Gallagher talked about, the kind you can just slip under the door when they want in and out.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm waiting for fusion. Specifically hydrogen fusion generating useful amounts of nice cheap electricity.
Sure fix the blackouts, wouldn't it?
All these things on the list are devices and/or services that turned out to be a hell of a lot harder to implement than scifi authors thought they'd be back in the day.
Flying cars won't be -really- feasible until there's antigravity widgetry you can fit in a car-sized package. Too many points of failure in a VTOL aircraft for there to be millions of the things floating around.
Most of the points of failure are with the operator as others have mentioned, but let us not forget that a flying car has to share its environment with fences, power lines, flagpoles, weather and most importantly, BIRDS. You want to be riding in an aircraft that needs four props or fans to stay airborn when it sucks a Canada goose through one of those fans? Or standing underneath it?
Me neither. Just give me better than break-even hydrogen fusion and I'll be happy.
Always waiting for that virtual world to show up... Various obligatory jokes withheld.
On a related note, I wonder what happens to the Japanese Maglev in case of a power outage.
> OK, here are my alternatives to fossil fuels: Renewable, non-polluting resources. We have wind turbines on our power grid here, and a surprising number of people have voluntarily been paying a premium on their monthly power bills to support it.
I agree that wind power is a good source of energy, but it's not feasible for good portions of the U.S.. We're getting to the point where windscrews are efficient enough for widespread power generation, but it's not yet a reasonable alternative for many people.
> Solar power is equally viable, especially with the current high-efficiency cells.
Oops. Not with you on this one. You're forgetting one of the hidden costs of solar power, and that is the hideously toxic slime that's generated by manufacturing them. Until the manufacturing process is cleaner, it's not a non-polluting energy source by any means. Also, the panels themselves lose efficiency over time, so as they wear out they need to be replaced, and the old ones disposed of, and a solar panel isn't the most environmentally friendly piece of junk I can imagine.
> And as far as reduced energy consumption, I am DEFINITELY suggesting that!
Hey, I'm with you all the way here. I merely pointed out that it's not a very popular stance, so your discussions need to address better how reducing energy consumption can benefit the average person, or you will indeed be pissing in the ocean.
Virg
I am waiting for people to give up on the ridiculous notion of a paperless office. We aren't there yet with technology, we aren't even close. Stop trying to force it.
We're darn close to it--heck, we've been close to it ever since the darn Newton came out. All we need are an assignment of portable, easy-to-read interfaces (PDAs or Tablet PCs), and a printer lockdown, and presto--paperless office.
No one who cares as a good enough reason to move, though. Supporting older staff is just too important--but if you're under 30, you had better develop your skills for paperless, because by the time you're 60 you might not be allowed paper at all.
onboard batteries kick in and it glides to a stop.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
I tried that once, went on the "40 hour famine". Started Friday night and by the third hour of serious exercise (running, sprinting, 180' direction changes), I couldn't stand up properly. I needed the sugar and probably the minerals. I decided not to try that again.
I think 40 days with only water is a bit generous, You'd probably have to be sitting still, meditating in a cave at the perfect temperature (not too hot, not too cold) and fairly fat to start with. The water supply would have to be close so you didn't have to move much (use energy/food), to get it.
Three weeks (21 days) of keeping still with only water, is a more realistic survival time.
And yeah, even with the gatorade being hi-calorie, I did lose a lot of weight. Although if I'd sat still and meditated, I probably would have gained weight on that quantity of gatorade (3 x 600ml bottles a day plus water). It was still better than the food we were served at the venue and the motel.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.