The Mindset of the Class of 2029

theodp writes "In response to Beloit College's 10th Annual Mindset List, which takes a stab at describing the worldview of the incoming Class of 2011 (grew up with bottled water; have always had the World Wide Web), Valleywag's Nick Douglas presages The Mindset of the Class of 2029 (have always been able to use a cell phone on a plane; 'Lord of the Rings' looks fake and the effects are laughable)."

Comments

Not sure thats a good thing

[also-rr]

The mindset of anyone who has had to sit on a plane for 9 hours listening to an inane cellphone call will not be healthy. The only hope of salvation is that by then your cellphone/camera/gps/projector/printer/mp8player/s extoy/flashlight/pda/radio convergence device will have a battery life of 3 seconds, and/or banned from the plane by the government to stop you pirating the in flight movie.

Re:Not sure thats a good thing

[Praedon]

The only real hope for this mindset list, is that all of us will be in power by the time it rolls around. We must spread the word about Mario, 4chan, Mr. Rodgers, and Dick Chaney. We must also clone Robin Williams. We must also keep George Lucas around to digitally remaster Lord of the Rings. We also need to conspire against silicon valley in the future. The world can never forget!

They can't believe...

[DynaSoar]

... that people were ever against euthanasia. If all those old people were ever to accumulate the hospital industry would collapse. Maybe that's why they called them "boomers".

They will be horrified...

[nebaz]

That the government was so big and bloated before Emperor Bush dissolved the Senate.

for the class of 2029, they forgot...

[wpegden]

... "grew up on bottled air"

Re:for the class of 2029, they forgot...

[Praedon]

They also forgot: "Half of them didn't make it during the invasion of robots."

if i have kids..

[jimbug]

They don't know what a LOLCat is or why it talks that way. i will make sure this NEVER happens

Re:if i have kids..

[Anonymous Coward]

"They don't know what a LOLCat is or why it talks that way."

  Though ironically, Tubgirl & Goatse remained a staple of internet culture that everyone clearly understood.

In 2029...

[Stanistani]

The world's largest Theme Park is HolyLand, run by the Disney Corp. It "features the colorful and historic actual former countries of Palestine/Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Of course, all inhabitants are Disney employees wearing colorful costumes. Parting of the Red Sea at 10 am, noon, and 2 pm. When asked what happened to the former inhabitants, the tour guides always say, "We don't like to talk about that," and offer a two-for-one coupon for the donkey ride in Jerusalem.

Re:In 2029...

[GPL Apostate]

Also, people who ask how all the prop sand from the beaches of the Indian Ocean was transported onto the large sheet of glass are asked to leave.

Re:add another one to the list

[friedman101]

Believe Memphis was always a popular surfing destination

And

[AbbyNormal]

Duke Nukem is still not out yet.

Re:And

[cashman73]

And Windows Vista still won't run on any existing hardware,...

And 640 terabytes ought to be enough for anybody,...

an oldie but a goodie

[larry bagina]

2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.

100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.

10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.

3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.

2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.

1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.

490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".

399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.

336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.

4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.

A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.

A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.

A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.

A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.

A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.

A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.

A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".

A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)

A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.

A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).

A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.

A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".

A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."

A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).

A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.

A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.

A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.

A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.

A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".

A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.

A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.

A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a sever

Re:an oldie but a goodie

[GPL Apostate]

Who/what the hell is ESR???

Don't worry about it.

It's easily wiped off with a dilute solution of bleach in water, and a garage rag.

'Lord of the Rings' looks fake???

[Anonymous Coward]

'Lord of the Rings' looks fake

Yes, everyone knows that orcs, trolls and ents don't look like that.

Re:Sea change

[pete-classic]

I hope I live as long as I can!

You're in luck! I assure you that you can!

-Peter

The Lucas Factor

[Treskin]

'Lord of the Rings' looks fake and the effects are laughable)

My prediction: Lord of the Rings will become a cult classic among the youth of the next 20 years. When it has become accepted as a mainstay of American culture, Peter Jackson will admit he was never truly satisfied with the poor quality of the special effects and release 3 "Special Edition" movies. These will feature new special effects and opening sequence in which Sauron was just actually just kicking back in Mordor, enjoying a lemonade on his gazebo with the orphans he just adopted - when suddenly Elendil walks up and pimp slaps Sauron across the face with a mace. This will trigger a campaign known as "Sauron maced first" seeking to restore the original concept and flavor of both characters.

After meeting with some success with these Special Editions, Jackson will decide to release a 3 movie prequel based on The Hobbit which will feature the dwarf Thorin replaced by a lovable anthropomorphic fish-dwarf who likes to say "Mesa gonna havea big adventures with yousa Hobbit, sah" who everyone will hate. Following their release, the class of 2029 will complain that Peter Jackson has ruined their childhoods by destroying the movies they had grown up loving so much.

Tales from a Beloit non-grad

[SuperBanana]

Just FYI- Beloit is the armpit school of the midwest. When I went there in the late 90's:

• An entire dorm left mid-term. Something like 1/4 of the freshman class was "asked to take a semester off" (I was one of them, and I suspect it had more to do with them grossly overbooking dorm rooms and classes.)
• My physics class was taught using a self-published physics textbook developed by a nearby university. The previous year's physics 101 class sent in FORTY pages of corrections, and ours were wrong in all sorts of new and exciting ways. The class was useless, because the professor had to have the entire class go over the homework together, and you never knew if you were doing the problem set wrong, or if the problemset itself was wrong.
• the facilities were a mess (we couldn't even get lightbulbs for common areas)
• students were crammed into every available space; there were 6 and 7 people in some converted lounges. I was shoved into a double with three people, and it was a fight with res life to get furniture for the third guy; they gave us two desks, TWO BEDS, and two dressers.
• They don't serve anything except brunch on Sundays. This sucks more than you could possibly believe when you're in the middle of nowhere. It's not like you can walk a block or two into town and get something tasty and cheap. Your choices: pizza and...pizza.
• The town is full of really bigoted, angry, poor people. My roommate, who was seeing another student who had come from Indonesia, had a run in with a guy who said: "Yeeer girlll-friend Chaneeeeese?" "Uh, no, she's Indonesian." "She LOOKS Chaaaaaneeeeeeese". The guy then followed them back to campus in his pickup truck.
• The only exciting thing to do in Beloit...is to drive to Madison. YEEEHAA. Sucks if you don't know anyone with a car!
• The nearest transportation to Chicago (where you will be flying in/out of) is several MILES off campus. Do you know how much that sucks any time from fall to late spring, ie, the academic season?
• My dorm freshman year was infested with cockroaches- the basement lounge was full of them, and our room had them as well, despite it being the start of the year and the room being very clean.
• By 4-5PM people are drinking and smoking pot, and every Friday/Saturday night, the lounges would turn into what a nightclub looks like after it closes; full of broken glass, beer cans/bottles everywhere, beer coating *everything* (the furniture was never cleaned, so...yeah) and recycling bins and trashcans filled to the brim with beer.
• We had wonderful militant feminists and lesbians who all strong-armed the campus into giving them the nicest dorms on campus and making them women only. One was called "The Womyn's Center". Their favorite activity was scrolling sexual slurs like "DYKE!" on the walkways to get a rise out of people.
• Relations are so good with the town that the Beloit police department spends all night "patrolling" "town property" (aka the one public road that goes through the residential section) and ticketing people for anything they possibly can. I was never ticketed, but half my dorm had been ticketed for "open container of alcohol" because they crossed the street from one dorm to another with a can of beer.
• The local canned food plant (the only real place for people to work- General Dynamics shut down its plant and is mostly why the town was/is a hell-hole) regularly belches forth clouds of artificial cheese smell or baked beans. The student-run "Coughy Haus" is named for the cough people make when they smell the "cheese breeze."
• There's a freight train line nearby that blows its horn at every crossing....at about 5AM. EVERY MORNING.
• Thefts on campus were rampant. I repeatedly had stuff stolen off my bike by townies who considered campus an convenient automatic teller machine.

It's the fucking armpit of the midwestern liberal arts schools. Give it a WIDE BERTH. If you're stupid enough to go, don't even think of staying in "810", or its nearby dorm (I forget the number...6-something?)

Lord of the rings looks fake in the future?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which part? The giant flaming evil eye, or the running trees?
Those damn kids, they wouldn't know a realistic effect if it bit them on the ass.

Re:Teledildonics

[Jaknet]

Looking at some of todays teenagers I think you are a bit late with "worrying about computers that are smarter than they are." It's already here

Re:Sea change

[rantingkitten]

Well, did you find the item or not? Don't leave us hanging!

Re:Movies have always come in the mail

[Belacgod]

I'm afraid in the future, we'll just have to settle for watching edited montagues of YouToob snippets.

So they'll have won the format war with the YouToob capulets?

A Couple More

[E 99]

* That scientists had always agreed about the global cooling problem.
* That /. had always been populated by retirees who had never had sex.

Re:Sea change

[maxwell demon]

And, if I remember correctly, something like 70% believe that JFK wasn't killed by Oswald.

But he really wasn't killed by Oswald. He was killed by a bullet! :-)

2029 issues...

[tempest69]

They will remember that movies came in the mail when they were kids. And consider it quaint.

Photo scrapbooks will be digital, with printouts being kitschy..

Most people will max out around a terabyte of music.. because its more than they will ever get around top listening to. This will be a small chunk on their thumb drives.

The old Colbert reports will have references too obscure to follow.

South Park will be mainstream wholesome viewing... While some new show comes along to violate our sense of morality.

Mass Transit will still seem to be a pipe-dream for the US..

People will still be procrastinating the 2038 audits..

Storm