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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?
Here's the link: http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030908/xalways next.html
I have a 3G mobile video phone on my desk and it works, so that one can be struck off the list.
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.
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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.
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?)
30 full frames per second produces a visual roughly equivalent to 60 half-frames per second of NTSC.
It's deeper than that. I started my own company a while back, just to do some programming consulting, and I had everything *I* needed in a "paperless office" suite of applications on my computer. However, the IRS still requires printed receipts and invoices, so I had to print everything anyway, even though it didn't do me any good in that format.
Actually, I guess technically I didn't HAVE to, since I didn't get audited in 2002 (yet). But if I did, and had no paper trail... look out! So yeah, coworkers demanding paper are annoying, but the IRS demanding it is a serious problem.
Ah, so that's what life would be like had I invented the Finglonger. sigh.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Private aircraft have to submit flight plans so the FAA will know where they are at any given moment
Sorry, but that's utter bullshit. I can get in my plane here in Rochester NY, and besides talking to the control tower and departure controller until I'm 10 miles away from the airport, I could fly all the way to the Pacific Ocean without telling anybody where I am going or even turning on my radio.
The difference between flying and driving is that pilots actually have to demonstrate some skill and judgement in order to get and keep their licenses. There are bad pilots, but nowhere near as high a percentage as there are bad drivers.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Gasoline prices at the pump in the US are actually below all-time highs. You can read more about the details here.
In a nutshell, today's US gasoline pump price, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is as cheap as it was in 1986, and cheaper than it ever was before 1969. And when you consider that gasoline taxes have been raised continuously over the years (now to $0.43 per gallon), gasoline itself seems very cheap.
If you want to look at inflation-adjusted crude oil prices, look at this. More recent crude oil prices ($27-$30 / barrel) are up a bit above the hundred-year median price, but still below the highs of the late 70's/early 80's.
Crude oil cost makes up about 40% of gasoline prices, manufacturing and distribution makes up 37%, the rest is taxes.
Should oil prices ever rise, I would expect that plastics would be made with biotechnology, indeed there could be a carbohydrate economy using biotech enzymes to convert cellulose to sugar and then to ethanol.
Film is projected at 24 fps (although each frame is projected twice to improve the light levels).
In the USA, Canada and a few other countries, TV is 29.97 two-field frames per second, or 50.94 field per second (NTSC).
In the rest of the world, TV is 25 two-field frames per second, or 50 fields per second (PAL).
I wasn't constraining, I was setting a minimum. 30fps seems to be a reasonable minimum goal for streaming, real-time video. Plus, so much equipment in North America already works at this rate, it seemed like an obvious first step. Of course, given the most obvious source and demand for videophones, I guess the PAL format would be more logical.
For color. For black-and-white, it's 30 frames (or 60 fields). When color was invented, they had a design goal of keeping it backward-compatible with B&W, which meant they couldn't increase the bandwidth of the signal. So they made a slight reduction in the frame rate in order to make room for the colorburst signal.
Unfortunately, this screwball frame rate causes real problems when you convert film to color video. Instead of simply duplicating every 4th frame (to expand 24 fps into 30fps) you have to add an extra rule to not duplicate every 1000th frame.
If you're converting a B&W movie, you have to know if the resulting video will be on a color carrier (with a colorburst signal) or on a B&W carrier (without the colorburst signal). You need to know whether or not to include the "don't duplicate every 1000th frame" rule. If you pick the wrong one, the the audio will drift out of sync from the video.
Does anyone know if HDTV still has this nonsense? Or does it use a nice round number (like 24, 25 or 30fps) for everything?