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What Will Life Be Like In 2008?
tblake writes "Back in 1968, Modern Mechanix mused what life would be like in 40 years. Some things they came pretty close on: 'Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.' Some things are way off: 'The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city's suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whiz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round.' And some things are sorta right: 'TV screens cover an entire wall in most homes and show most subjects other than straight text matter in color and three dimensions. In addition to programmed TV and the multiplicity of commercial fare, you can see top Broadway shows, hit movies and current nightclub acts for a nominal charge.'"
I'm actually impressed with how dead on a lot of the predictions are. Most predictions from the 60s and 70s were outrageous. One thing I think we've gotten much better at is figuring out the technological limitations of the near future so as to not make such outrageous predictions ... sort of. Supposedly we're all going to be in flying and/or driverless cars by 2015.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
This is a little offtopic (feel free to moderate me appropriately), but I can think of no better /. and its grammar-nazis!
place to ask this than here at
From the summary:
"Money has all but disappeared."
What does this sentence mean, please?
Whenever I read it, I read it as: "Everything imaginable happenned to money, except disappear."
Or even: "Money has changed color, has lost its value, has been globally unified... but disappear? No way!"
But by the context of the summary, it seems I am getting exactly the opposite of it.
Although I consider myself quite good at English, it is not my main language.
Can someone clear this up for me?
Thank you.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
The notion of centralized control is way off. Each car (as it is now with human drivers) needs to be aware of its surroundings and behave properly in an orderly swarm fashion. Any sort of centralized system should analyze traffic and offer broadcast hints back to the vehicles for upcoming road conditions and preferred alternate routes, instead of micromanaging everything from a single point of failure.
Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.
That's pretty much my experience. I haven't used the ATM in almost a month. I either pay by CC or if I have to split the bill for lunch with friends, use PayPal to send them the money.
Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.
Hmm...that's pretty much my experience with Amazon Prime's One-Click shopping. Is this prior art?
Hmmm... just when I read that article on people trusting their car GPS systems even if they'd go down a cliff....
"When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance."
"One click", I have you now!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If this thing going 150 MPH and there is a hiccup on the network, or even let say some hacking/DDoS is going on, tons of crashes will surely happen.
The thing is, assuming that you can produce reliable sensors, there's only two rules you have to follow when dealing with other cars for freeway travel, neither of which require any kind of communication with an external controller:
1) Do not drive faster than the vehicle in front of you
2) Do not change lanes if there is a vehicle beside you
Both of those are trivial to handle, even at 250MPH. The real problem isn't ramming another car, it's finding the damn lane on the road, especially when you've got places where the government doesn't bother repainting the stripes more than once every 50 years. Or places where the road is assembled from strips of concrete where the joints between the strips aren't quite lined up with the lanes (I've seen humans who can't figure those out, hell, the first time I ever saw that type of road construction was as a kid when I was in a merge lane on an overpass where the actual lane stripes had long since worn off, and I thought I was supposed to be following the black lines diagonally across the bridge until I nearly rammed someone). Or places where the lanes are repainted every 3 months... in completely different places.
Now, surface street travel with various stop signs, intersections, lights, etc... that's a long, long, long way away, even at 20 MPH with some central command center telling every car what it's supposed to be doing in realtime.
Smooth plastic roads aside, these wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the stinkin' cops. You could easily do 150 in a proper BMW, and even 250 isn't unachievable. The 14 year old McLaren F1 was getting very close and the Bugatti Veyron actually exceeds that prediction.
It's interesting to note how this piece reflects the then-prevalent belief that technology would bring a Utopian age. No one stopped to think about the consequences of using thousands of ICBMs as transportation devices, or the industrial waste generated by wall-sized televisions and domed cities. Plastic was magical - we hadn't yet realized how toxic it could be, or how addicted we would become to it. Domed cities and millions of cars that travel 300 mph are the stuff of science fiction novels, but they'd be awful in practice - Just imagine how unbearably warn and clammy a dome would be under bright summer sun (or how quickly it would be discolored by dust storms and acid rain), or how poorly wildlife would coexist with a stream of automated bullet cars zipping along plastic roads. Somehow, we need to figure out how to do with less - much less - while figuring out how to tread less heavily on the earth. It might be an impossible task.
Not quite. Commercial TV has been around since the 1940s (in the U.S., anyhow) and color broadcasts were commonly available by 1960. My family got it's first color TV in order to watch the 1968 Olympics.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Transportation really needs to move into 3 dimensions, it's the only way to resolve congestion. Being stuck in 2 dimensions is just causing a lot of congestion and is too dangerous.
That said, my fanciful wish is for digging tunnels all over the place so we don't have to look up at a sky clogged with millions of aircraft. Having a mechanical failure in a tunnel is safer than in the sky, too.
They had get rich quick schemes back then too! Make $12 an hour!
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Over the last 40 years the actual physical environment hasn't changed much. Imagine the difference between 1900 and 1940: automobiles, airplanes - or 1920 and 1960: Commercial trans Atlantic jet travel, satellites, H bombs, national highways. I can remember 1968. Since then we've gotten the ATM, cable TV, cell phones, personal computers but, except for the corporate mall-ing of the American highway, which was well underway by 1968 and didn't change the environment so much as stamp out local flavor, and saner environmental regulation, some lakes used to glow in the dark, this is still interstate rust belt America.
In fact, someone waking up right now would find America in the middle of a colonial war, suburban sprawl graying the countryside. "A gallon of gas costs what?!? Hey, can I see your phone?" That is, unless they were in medicine or IT.
(disclaimer: above memories are related to North America)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Speed limits are a political thing mostly. You can do 250mph on German Autobahns in a good modern car. Most other countries limit speed to 70mph, but that's not really a technology issue, more an issue of politicians limiting people's rights to protect them from accidents. Which is actually nonsense, since the Autobahns have the same safety record as roads with speed limits, presumably since people are smart enough to drive at a speed which is safe for the road.
Of course there are always new dangers to protect people from and now environmentalists want to impose a speed limit on the Autobahns too, to reduce Germany's CO2 emissions by a whopping 0.5%
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3085749,00.html
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The second group that some people imagine may know the future are specialists of various kinds. They don't either. As a limiting case, I remind you there is a new kind of specialist occupation-I refuse to call it a discipline, or a field of study-called futurism. The notion here is that there is a way to study trends and know what the future holds. That would indeed be valuable, if it were possible. But it isn't possible. Futurists don't know any more about the future than you or I. Read their magazines from a couple of years ago and you'll see an endless parade of error.
From http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-whyspeculate.html
Ah, but you didn't finish the paragraph! A closer look reveals startling truths:
Closer than you would guess! The average person works 4 hours, and spends at least 2 hours reading Slashdot (though admittedly not at home. You can't fault the guy too much for that error). The other 2 hours are split between Wikipedia bingeing, blog reading, and Fark.
Ah, a depiction of the epitome of 21st century living: The modern trailer park!
Just plain scary how close this is. If I had a nickel for every time dinner was a Kid's Cuisine or Hungry Man I'd have a lot of nickels.
Again, a vision of the future! I probably go to class once or twice a week and my end grade is indeed determined by the Scantron sheets I fill with Rorschach inkblots.
Al Gore couldn't have said it better himself. Maybe vague, but it does fit the Internets and associated tubes pretty well.
True enough. I'm sure I don't need to elaborate the "other matter". Or so I've heard anyway.
Ah ha, Kraft Foods! This amazing fellow was able to predict the rise of "processed cheese food" and "mechanically separated meat products". Brillant!
Nobody bats a thousand I guess.
He couldn't have been closer if he'd just given us the name of the wonder drug Ritalin!
Anyway, he was spot on. Finally a reviewer who didn't have flying cars in their list.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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One-click ordering described! Over 25 years before Amazon...
When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.
Recently, I watched the Top Gear episode with the Veyron on VW's test track in Germany. They said the tires (tyres) would cook off in 14 minutes at top speed. I suspect the designers sized the fuel tank to empty prior to the tires going away. Sounds like a safety feature to me ... not that I ever expect to be able to experience a Veyron [grumble, grumble].
Question for the readership:
This is an obvious, sometimes jarring feature in early science fiction too: the authors for the most part did not foresee the breakdown of traditional gender roles. People occasionally talk about predictions made by SF authors which came true; did anyone pre-1960 successfully predict the societal trend with men and women on an equal footing? (Not just individual women-- there were women professionals long before the 70's-- but women as a whole in the workforce.)
1. It's actually 130 kph.
2. If you are above this, then you count as partially liable in any accident, even if it's someone else mistake.
3. Only 30% of the Autobahn have a speed limit and these are usually in place where it is indeed necessary. The government is not completely stupid.
I'm not saying he was a saint, but Heinlein was pretty consistent at asserting the intellectual equality of women in his writing.
I dunno. I think we've done pretty well over the past 50 years. In 1958 there were no modem, integrated circuit, LCD displays, microprocessor, laser, barcode, scanning tunneling microscope, videogame . No personal computers, word processors, spreadsheet, email. No internet, Wi-Fi, GPS, cellphone. No Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, iTunes, Slashdot. No audi cassette, VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, MP3s, HD-TV, iPod, iPhone. No space shuttle or hybrid cars either. No halogen lamps and no LED light bulbs. No fiber tip pen, acrylic paint, perma press fabric, nano fabric, gore-tex, coolmax, astroturf, kevlar. No artificial heart, genetic engineering, Hep-B vaccine, disposable contact lens, lasix surgery, cochlear implant, MRI, Prozac, Valium, HIV protease inhibitor, RU-486, Statin, Viagra.
That is nothing more than an ignorant view of the world.
It's harder to appreciate how things have changed when you're actually living in that change.
Let's take a closer view of 1958 -> 2008. Here's a brief list that I can think of:
1) Solving major environmental problems (air pollution and water pollution are way down from the 60's and 70's). Obviously there is a lot of progress to be made, but there have been great strides in environmental protection. The near future shows the potential for continued expansion of clean fuels such as solar, wind, and nuclear. Nuclear took a hit because of the cold war fear of everything "nuclear", but it is making a comeback.
2) Computers and the Internet. While you may say that this is a relatively small change, a person from 50 years ago put into today's world would disagree. Computers (combined with the internet) have changed, quite literally, everything. While perhaps it is not as outwardly visible as going from horses to cars, it is internally far more important. The way we conduct business has changed dramatically. Information can be produced and exchanged at unbelievable rates. Research and design has changed dramatically because of computers and the internet. The world's information is at anyone's fingertips. Many of the major "annoyances" in life can be taken care of automatically online: paying bills, balancing one's checkbook, and paying taxes, for example.
3) Cell phones. It's easy to take these for granted, but it has completely changed social dynamics. Once again, imagine a 1958 citizen coming to 2008. Being in contact with everyone at any time is a luxury that we take for granted. Once you have gotten used to having a cell phone, can you imagine life without it?
4) Social advances. While there is still a lot of work to be done in this area, there have been great social improvements. Ethnic and racial minorities, gender differences, and sexual preference. While these are still "hot-button issues", take that 1958 citizen (especially if they were black, or equivalent) and put them in today's world. The difference is unimaginable. Not to mention, almost wholly effective contraceptives. Easy to ignore, but effective contraception completely changes the social dynamics in terms of population trends in every country that it is used. Oh, and don't forget, peace. While there was the cold war, and there are always a couple of conflicts going around in the world, we now have diplomatic systems that prevent mass war. No developed country has directly entered a war with another developed country since World War II, with the possible exception of the two Iraq wars.
5) Pure research. The general body of knowledge in the world has increased astronomically in the past fifty years. Everything from genetics to material sciences to astronomy. So much more is known about the natural world than fifty years ago.
5) General increases in the quality of goods and services. This is a huge area. Quite frankly, people take for granted the quality of goods today. Every year, we expect something better to be created. Whether it's a better model car or a better model super soaker, it needs to be better. Faster computers, clothes that don't fade, soap that moisturizes, makeup that doesn't smear, more efficient air conditioners, and better televisions. A new dish washer uses half the water and cleans ten times better than a two decade old model. Your car has more horsepower, is safer, cleaner, and more efficient than the model made just a decade ago. Plus, it has better sound, a comfier interior, dual-side climate control, automatic-everything, and heated seats. All at the same price. We live in a world of such absolute abundance that the average person from the 1950's would be shocked at. We have closets stuffed to the brim with high quality clothes. Our houses are filled with gadgets. Your average American household has 3 TV's, 1.5 computers, and a wide abundance of electronic and physical goodies. While people claim that the poverty rate has i
The original author, back in 1968, can be forgiven for not knowing about distributed computing networks. You might consider reading up on them.
Architecture isn't much different from what was modern in 1968. Cars are more boring if anything. Traffic more intense. Social norms have changed, but not compared to what was considered "advanced" in 1968 (or 1928 for that matter).
Is the rate of change increasing or decreasing?
It's the same in the UK. Though originally it was possible to make a "specified deposit" to a government bank account instead of purchasing insurance. But the required amount has been increased so quickly (e.g. from £15,000 to £500,000 between 1988 and 1991 - see section 20 ) so this is essentially not really an option for most people anymore.
Would you support mandatory liability insurance in other areas like employment? What about mandatory insurance that covers more than third party liability, like Hilary's health care plan? What are the criteria for making insurance mandatory do you think?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If you take the vehicle off of the regular roads and put it on a track out of the way of most of the complexity we have around us. The algorithms they're using at the moment are synchronous rather than asynchronous, it guarantees that you get a routing slot all the way to your destination without delays. You can get higher capacity using async algorithms but you run into queues and delays within the network then rather than having them outwith the system.
Deleted
Actually, the NHS comparison brings up another issue. If the goverment runs a mandatory scheme, then at least in theory they have some say in the payouts*. But if private companies do, they can just small print their way out of a big chunk of payments. E.g. in the current cut throat US healthcare system, it seems quite possible that the healthcare industry would just take the extra premiums from HilaryCare and then try to minimise their payouts. So the net result would be a massive transfer of money from people who would not have bought healthcare because they can't afford it to a healthcare industry that is highly skilled at avoiding payouts. Which seems like a disaster to me.
Admittedly really poor people would probably get government help, but as I understand it there are people who are too rich to get government aid but don't currently buy healthcare. They'd end up being forced to pay for something that was pretty much worthless. And middle incomers who pay the majority of taxes would end up paying for the government help to people who can't afford stuff either. I'm not sure, but the whole thing looks like it could be a a net loss of significant numbers of people.
It's like pensions really. Lots of European Countries have discussed making private pensions mandatory for all but the poorest people. But I don't have a private pension because I don't trust the people selling them to be able to pay me anything when I retire, so I'm strongly opposed to being forced to be a customer.
* In practice this might not be very helpful. E.g. my grandparents voted Labour, which set up a state pension scheme and dutifully paid their compulsory National Insurance contributions. But when they retired the state pension scheme was starting to get expensive and Margaret Thatcher deindexed it, so it effectively devalued at whatever the inflation rate was per year. Since it wasn't very generous at that point anyway, that was disasterous. So the net effect was that government control of payouts worked very much against them. My parents had privately run University pensions, which turned out to be a terrible deal too.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
An automated traffic system would drastically cut down on fuel consumption. If everyone was moving at the same speed, there would be no traffic to speak of, it would be like a giant sheet of ice floating across the water. Without constant deceleration and acceleration, the amount of fuel a car would consume would basically bottom out.
Also, I tend to believe that when there aren't any more car accidents, a lot less cars are going to be sold. And when cars maintain constant speeds with minimal acceleration, the engine and other components of a car would last a lot longer, thus increasing the lifetime of every car.
It's not that far fetched of an idea. Both industries have a vested interest in preventing it from happening.
The State of Montana used to have no speed limit during the daytime. It was "do not drive faster than conditions allow". So one day a cop ticketed a guy going ~90 mph. The guy sued the State saying 90 was safe, the court ruled the law was too vague, and the State created a daytime speed limit of 75.
How speed limits are set:
- Highway engineers design most interstates for 120 mph travel, per Congressional law. ---- Traffic engineers observe how fast everyone is driving, and make an observation "70% of drivers are moving 84 mph or less. 30% are driving 85 or higher. We recommend the 70th percentile speed of 84 mph for maximum traffic flow and minimal accidents." ----- Politicians step-in, kiss a couple butts, and impose 55 or 65 "for safety's sake" or "gas savings" or some other bs (perhaps bribery from the insurance company, or a desire to collect more money off speeding tickets).
And then you have a mess.
Some people are doing 75-85mph, per the traffic engineers' original recommendation. Other people would like to drive faster (after all the interstate was designed for safe travel at 120), but they are only doing 55-60 for fear of getting a $150 extortion....er, fine + increased insurance rates. The resulting disparity of speeds (55 to 85) creates a dangerous situation like bumper cars in an amusement park... a situation that would not exist if the Politicians had bothered to follow the Engineers recommendation.
But I'm an engineer so I'm used to not being heard by management.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
In the tech world? Probably no-one. However, go and look at your local supermarket: the cashiers, the stockers, etc... Those do 8h a day or more. Most manual labour, I guarantee you that. You're usually tightly supervised and you're gonna have time for a cigarette or a coffee a few times a day, but that's it.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I got a chuckle out of the "smooth plastic roads". First, if roads were smooth it would take a LONG time to get the car stopped. And accelleration wouldn't be easy either; didn't the author ever hear of friction and its uses? Maybe he was an engineer, the one who designed the round nylon shoelaces I bitched about in that K5 article a few years ago that seem to have gone the way of the dodo (thank God). I guess eventually the short-bus engineers run over themselves with their short busses and the more intelligent ones take over.
Secondly, the streets here in Springfield are so full of potholes it's like driving on the moon. Apparently the auto manufacturers have noticed this, because I heard a car ad that extolled "suspension for today's roads". The ad didn't say whether it's California's good, ice-free roads or the midwest's roads that are crater filled from the freeze-thaw cycle and harsh chemicals and salt used to thaw and evaporate the ice and snow.
Don't people do any reasoning at all when they write thes articles?
OTOH some time in high school (late 1960s) my schitzophrenic friend Tom prognosticated that some day we'd be playing records in our cars. I told him that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard; how would you keep them from getting scratched up? How would you keep them from skipping? He had no answers and didn't know why he thought so but was certain it would happen. But he turned out to be right, we now have CDs and afaik they don't make car stereos without CD players any more.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Man, I had to work those kind of jobs when I was an undergrad in college. Fucking nightmare stuff.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There's only a handful of cars in the world that can do 250mph, and that I'm aware of, exactly one production model car that's currently available, and that car runs out of gas after 12 minutes at that speed. (Read this thread further if you want to know which one it is) Did you perhaps mean 250km/h? That's quite doable for a large number of modern cars. Heck, I have an "economy" car, and it'll do 175km/h. (2007 Chevrolet Aveo, 103hp 1.6L inline 4, fuel injected, no turbo, using 89 octane 10% ethanol fuel... this is the stock LT configuration). Even then, I rarely feel safe taking it over 140km/h and mostly stick to around 120km/h for fuel economy.
You're right. There is a political impetus behind keeping the speed limits down. I can think of three good reasons to keep the highway speed limit around 100-120km/h: public safety, fuel economy, and darwinism. I've driven fast. Fastest I've ever gone was in a 1988 Subaru XT6... 2.7L H6 with an aftermarket turbocharger and a curb weight of about 1100kg. 290km/h on a closed track outside of Ottawa, ON, Canada. The world flies by at that speed.... fast enough that you probably won't register that you're looking at a hazard until after you've passed it. It's idiotic to the point of insanity to try that kind of speed on a public road, because human reactions simply aren't fast enough, and because a small hazard you can't even see, like a rock or nail in the road, which wouldn't really be anything to worry about at a speed like 80km/h, can cause a tire blowout. And quite frankly, most of us don't have a clue what to do if you have a tire blowout at speed. I don't remember any mention of it in *my* drivers' ed class. I've seen people flip their cars when they had a blowout at 80km/h... do you really want to imagine what'll happen at 3x that speed?
And it's not a question of teaching people how to drive better, either. No amount of education can prepare you for driving at that kind of speed. It's just not safe for a human to do it in uncontrolled situations. Even in controlled situations, it's not particularly bright.
Reminds me of an old motorcycle adage... there's old riders, and there's bold riders. You don't see any old bold riders.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Reminds me of an article I once read in which the author recalled a time, back in the early 80s, where he had been giving a speech at an electronics convention at a hotel about how it was quite reasonable to consider that the price of simple computer chips would drop to levels trivial enough that you could put them in virtually anything. During the Q&A session, one member of the audience complained that, what were people expected to do with these computer chips? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob.
The same speaker came back to a conference at the same hotel in the late 90s. All of the doors had been switched over to cardkeys.
There was a computer in every doorknob.
Anyways, I wouldn't rule out road improvements. It's just one of those things that hasn't advanced because, currently, it's "cheap" and it's "good enough". I've seen some wild ideas for road improvements, some of which are already in practice in test strips. Like embedded LEDs that let lanes change and shoulders open or close, as well as automatically and alert drivers to the best routes to take to avoid traffic; self-heating roads that contain a combination of thin-film solar cells and ultracapacitors, printed as a single bulk unit, that feed power to the grid (translucent traction surface avoids damage to the cells); solar thermal roads that pipe away solar heat and store it in underground tanks for civilian heating applications and for road de-icing; and all sorts of other things. How well they'll hold up to regular use, who knows at this point, but I think it's silly to believe that our current road system is somehow the most damage resistant design possible.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
Hi UbuntuDupe. I am the guy who responded to your sig here (the first time, the second reply was somebody else).
We have told you what the "tribute" is. You got famous (or rather, developed a well-known slashdot name) by dumping on people who tried to help you. We tolerated you in our community for a long time (make no mistake, there is not a clear line between slashdot and other tech communities, such as the Ubuntu forums) because we are a rather altruistic bunch, but enough is enough.
Apologize in a public, sincere manner (I suggest a journal entry linked in your sig) for the way you treated us. When you have done that, we'll let you sit at the adult table again.
If you aren't willing to do this simple thing (which is almost as trivial as installing linux these days), then you might want to change your sig.