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Disney Takes Another Stab at the House of the Future
Disney has announced that they are going to take another stab at showing us the "House of the Future". The 5000-square-foot house will appear normal from the outside but will house gadgets like lights and thermostats that automatically adjust when someone enters the room and countertops that can identify food placed on it and suggest recipes. "Millions of Disneyland visitors lined up a half-century ago to catch a glimpse of the future: a home teeming with mind-blowing gadgets such as handsfree phones, wall-sized televisions, plastic chairs, and electric razors and toothbrushes. [...] The $15 million home is a collaboration of The Walt Disney Co., Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., software maker LifeWare and homebuilder Taylor Morrison. Visitors will experience the look of tomorrow by watching Disney actors playing a family of four preparing for a trip to China."
Shouldn't a "house of the future" be smaller than current houses? If they are to be available to all humans, I mean.
Also, I still have hope that USians will start using the metric system someday... so overall, I'd suggest that a more sensible house of the future would be about 100 or 200 square metres.
What would be cool though is fridge that checks it´s contents and tells you recipes along with thigns you could make with just a little extra.
It would solve the "there's nothing to make, but the fridge is full" dilemma.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
While I think it would be awesome to see the art and decor transform depending on who walks into a room...this just highlights to me that we may become more disconnected from each other as we optimize the digital world to our own personal likes. Not that it's bad...maybe we were all meant to relate to each other through screens, keyboards, and mice. Maybe the benefit of the digital world is that it provides a better way to share experience when we choose. Either way, it's good to recognize what's going on.
Better yet, it keeps track of how long stuff has been in there or
checks for chemical signs of spoilage. From this it can either tell
you that it's time to clean things out or time for a "leftover casserole".
"Warning: Jar on back of bottom shelf has not been touched in 123 days..."
"The 6th Day" had a pretty good Future-Fridge.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I got this from somewhere. p2pnet I think. What if the bad guys win? Going to the movies is not what it used to be. Security at the studio-owned theatres is heavy, it's not a trip to be taken lightly. But if you want to see the film everyone is talking about without waiting a year for the home release, you have little choice. When you enter the lobby the first thing you see are long ranks of tiny, thumbprint activated lockers. This is where you must leave all of your electronics, your personal server and peripherals, even your watch, and you had better not be wearing smart spectacles or contacts. As you enter the security zone you're scanned for anything you may have forgotten. Cochlea and optical implants must be capable of responding with a coded RF identification signal to indicate their systems are secure and cannot record. People with older models, or models implanted abroad where such interrogation is illegal, are turned away. Perhaps they would like to see one of the older releases? Once through the scanner you must submit to a biometric ID test - this is where the known bloggers, hackers and spoilers are ejected. Finally there is the non-disclosure agreement to be signed - these days most moviegoers choose to sign via the MPAAs annual subscription, just trying to take some of the hassle out of visiting the cinema. Finally you get to see the film. In the auditorium the audience is constantly scanned by an AI looking for suspicious activity, so don't rummage in your pockets for too long. It's strange that all this effort to protect the movie industry has done so little to improve the movies. You don't really own your home computer, or even the data you keep on it. Oh, you paid for it, just like you paid for the fibre-optic Internet connection that it can't function without, but now it squats under your TV using your electricity and does more work for the content industry than for you. The nightly security patches it downloads for itself don't secure your computer against attackers, they secure the system and software against you. TV-on-demand seemed like a dream come true when you first opted in and upgraded all your hardware, but the slowly encroaching charges are becoming a disincentive to turn on at all. Sometimes the last episode of a series makes up 50% of the cost of the whole season. The Internet is not what it used to be. It's expanded, naturally, the technology giving everyone mobile PCs with vast ad-hoc networking capabilities, it's faster, more efficient, and more available, but it's also more restrictive. Since the ISPs were made responsible for the content they deliver their filtering has become neurotic. Anti-terror, piracy, plagiarism and libel filters search every request and response for signs of illegal activity, always erring on the side of caution. Wikipedia's index has been decimated. Popular blogs like Boing Boing now have more lawyers involved than contributors (the one's that have survived that is). Even if you managed to get something illegal through the filters your operating system's regularly updated self-check mechanisms would eventually root it out, or report you to the authorities, usually both. These days it seems like every time you turn on one of your gadgets you have to fight with its DRM to get it to do what you want. The home movie of your daughter opening her birthday presents is ruined by a patch of grey fog that shifts with every movement of the camera, tracking sluggishly to keep the TV screen in the background obscured. From the codes embedded in TV's update pattern your camera had decided the show was not licensed for this form of reproduction and blocked it. You wish you had thought to turn it off at the time, but squinting into the camera's tiny screen it hadn't looked so bad. Even once recorded, your own media is not safe. Everything is stored on your home PC, trapped in the solid-state drive's proprietary filing system. Once there, the only reasonable way to transfer it is to another trusted drive from the same vendor - the DRM won't recognise any other brand of
every gadget will have NO REPEAT NO lights, not even the smallest flicker. Even the damn mac has the green light on the power line. My epson printer has three, and one continually blinks.
Profound changes must take place, and NO LIGHTS is one of them.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious