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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)."
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.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
... 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".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That the government was so big and bloated before Emperor Bush dissolved the Senate.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
add another one to the list
Osama Bin Laden is still the boogey man
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.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Duke Nukem is still not out yet.
Sig it.
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
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Last year I was walking through the Home Depot. I needed an item of certain specs for a project, but I didn't know if that item even existed. I asked several employees for help, but if it didn't have a name, the thing didn't exist, as far as they were concerned. I wandered around for a little bit, wondering which isle I might find my mythical device. Then it struck me -- "I'll look it up on google!"
In retrospect, this seems astoundingly obvious. I was using my 2400 baud modem to dial-up BBSes before "The Internet", and I was asking my college classmates if they had tried Google yet for their internet searches back in '98-'99. But even though I'm relatively young and computer savvy, the information revolution has not completely saturated my mind. I'll be a foreigner who learned to speak the language late in his teen; I'll forever have an accent. I grew up in a world of libraries and card catalogs, of unhelpful adults who knew little of the subjects I wanted to learn about, and experts who couldn't answer questions that I didn't know how to pose. The world I grew up in was opaque, by default. I grew up in an information famine. If there was a weird or esoteric subject that made itself known to me somehow -- perhaps a short reference in a comic book -- I would spend days or weeks wondering about it. I would spend fruitless hours in the library trying to look it up, or getting blank stares from librarians or store owners.
But the kids these days -- anything they might want to know is sitting there in the computer room. They will never know a world of informationlessness. Everything from obscure programming langauges to Hatian Gods to currrent events, right in front of them.
Amazing things are in the pipeline. I hope I live as long as I can!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
'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.
The article is just stating current events and the author's own current likes and dislikes. More than likely many of the companies and items mentioned will be different by 2029. Especially since the rate of change is increasing. Where was Google and Yahoo 22 years ago or many of the technologies we use today? Not even on the radar back in 1985. Many of the Slashdot readers may not have even been alive yet or were still in diapers.
The only thing you can accurately predict is people will be fundamentally the same, only the tools they use will be different.
Just my 2 cents.
-Andy
Views of 2029: