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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.'"
Almost true...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg27ckAgEiw&feature=related
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Goddammit, I want my flying cars!
Even forty years ago, he wasn't naive enough to suggest Duke Nukem Forever being available.
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
More accurate than Nostradamus, but not as amusing as Criswell--almost though. This one made me laugh out loud: "People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours." As if any society would ever let its plebes goof off that much!
Careful What You Wish For....
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
Speak for yourself...
Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars!
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
How the hell did you manage to pass grade 2 English?
But i don't know if its what you're looking for...
Ice Cream has no bones.
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?
...in his prediction of intelligence pills.
Either that, or a lot of people I encountered today need to adjust their dosage.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
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....
Seeing as this was all hypothesised in 1968, they were pretty good estimates. Though they may be wrong about fast, flying cars etc, remember how different the world was back then. Computers and other modern technology were only in the early stages of development, TV sets were only just new, and still in Black and White.
For someone of that era to have estimated Credit cards being more used than paper money, and most homes having large TV sets is pretty spot on.
And even though flying cars haven't been made quite yet, things like aeroplanes are now far more common, and private flying cars are likely to be coming around in the near future.
"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.
No seriously, I thought I just had it right here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.
They got it almost spot on: 4 hours actual work; 2 hours slashdot; 2 hours talking; 2 hours walking around the office; 1 hour making coffee's; 3 hours replying to emails; 3 hours answering telephones; 1 hour break time; 2 hours travel time; 2 hours home study time; 2 hours sleep. Rinse-and-repeat.
You got your flying car way back in 1979.
And I think there was a certain black Trans-Am that flew at least once a couple years earlier than the General.
where I can make $20 an hour laminating stuff.
If you post it, they will read.
Reminds me of the skit by Harry Enfield about Life in 1990
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdYDREry3do
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
he would have predicted the top speeds in KM/H, like most of the worlds MEDC's use, except the USA of course.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Like radio shows that let you text in traffic news?
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
By 2048 the concept of a national currency will have devolved back into a token based economy founded on barter. Those few that survive will focus on securing the necessities of life. Whole regions will be uninhabited as global warming turns them progressively to desert.
Personal transportation will be a thing of the past. What movement occurs will either be human powered or the preserve of the feudal lords. The only areas where an energy rich economy continues to exist will be those of the Middle East, at least those parts not a radioactive wasteland. Most oil will be vegetable oil, and with the collapse of intensive agriculture there won't be much of that.
Many of the major cities will be going underwater as sea levels rise following the accelerating collapse of the Greenland glaciers and the lack of funding to support management measures. Diseases come in waves across the globe, each wave wiping out more than are born. There is a general malaise, a depression of opportunities lost. Most do not want to bring children into this world.
Well, we might have wireless access to our pets. And be able to watch porn during sleep. And the newest windows operating system will do the same things as today with 10^8 times the space.
In 2008, people will travel in levitating, hypersonic personal aircraft called mePods.
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.
He describes a world where the entire infrastructure has essentially been rebuilt in 40 years. I can't see how that would have seemed plausible even back then. That said, portions of it are impressively accurate.
> two-passenger air-cushion car /flat TV screen / Tapping a button changes the page. ... feeds/receives signals to and from all cars / keeps vehicles /apart. /from 15 to 50 mi. outside all major urban centers.
Didn't happen sadly
> national traffic computer
Read "GPS system"
> morning paper
Your basic ebook
> smooth plastic road
Still concrete, altho progress has been made in using polymers in road construction
> cities... covered by the new domes
This one didn't happen
> The traffic computer
GM has prototypes that do just this. It's creepy to see them on the road.
> attache case / draw the diagram with / infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen
You basic tablet
> The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate's office, 200 mi. away.
Have this
> He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device.
The printer
> vehicle parks itself / municipal garage
Again, GM has made leaps and bounds for this
> Private cars are banned inside most city / Moving sidewalks and electrams carry the public
Your basic Arcology idea, but not yet in practice.
> With the U.S. population having soared to 350 million
Close, only 270 million
> transportation is among the most important factors keeping the economy running smoothly.
Quite true, and also where we are starting to break apart
> Giant transportation hubs / located
Some cities have done this, but not in the US to date
> Tube trains, pushed through bores by compressed air
This is ancient, but not in use
> launching pad from which 200-passenger rockets
Commercial rocketry is currently for the super-rich, and only a gimmick for now.
> SST and hypersonic planes
Concorde was retired a few years back
> jumbo jets.
The mainstay of transportation
>Electrostatic precipitators clean the air
Ionic Breeze anyone?
>climatizers maintain the temperature and humidity at optimum levels.
We have this in spades
> Robots are available to do housework and other simple chores.
Vacuuming is about all we have here with the Roomba
> New materials for siding and interiors are self-cleaning and never peel, chip or crack.
He got this one right
> Dwellings / prefabricated modules / attached speedily
Dead on here, most home construction now involves at least some prefabrication.
> job that doesn't take more than a day.
Didn't wind up this fast save for Extreme Home Makeover
> Such modular homes easily can be expanded to accommodate a growing family.
This sadly did not wind up the case.
> A typical wedding present / a fully equipped bedroom, kitchen or living room module.
Man, and all I got was 4 waffle irons....
> determines in advance her menus / prepackaged meals / automatic food utility
Didn't happen
> microwave oven and is cooked or thawed.
Did happen
> disposable plastic plates / knives, forks and spoons / so inexpensive they can be discarded
This very much happened.
> The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer.
100% bingo!
> These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.
We have not gotten to this point yet, however, it is appearing piecemail
> Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities.
This is now almost a decade old
> Not every family has its private computer.
Now he called it short.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
...the article maintains a phallocentric society, where men go to the office to work, and women stay home and coo-- I mean, oversee the cooking. While some of the technological advancements have certainly come to pass (and some pretty close if we look at them analogously), the social attitude of the article is firmly entrenched in the 1960s. Consider:
The housewife simply determines in advance her menus for the week, then slips prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest.That a 1968 article can in some ways be more accurate about technology in 2008 than the internet in 2008 can be about technology in 1968.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We won't be enjoying video like these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwXI0z-wj1A&feature=related
Note: this is not a video game. This is in Sweden.
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
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
we could invest in public transportation and abrogate people's stupid, life-risking civil liberties by takin' way their cars.
SERIOUSLY. If we invested the amount of money people spend on Cars, Car Insurance and Gasoline into public transportation, we'd have some sort of awesome, pneumatic tube public transportation system a la Futurama. The reason there's so much congestion is because people have decided they each need to get to work INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED in LARGE CHUNKS OF CARBON-BURNING METAL.
Actually, the Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure programs at many of the leading auto industry R&D programs, are working on exactly this approach.
Certain portions of CA infrastructure have been equipped with the first generation of this equipment (DSRC 1000m range radio equipment) and there's even a traffic light in Palo Alto (Page Mill Rd & El Camino Real) where you can receive broadcast status and phase information as you approach.
You make the cars aware of each other, and aware of the road, at first for safety and driver-assistance purposes--and the you gradually phase in the AI portion as it matures.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_infrastructure_integration
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
What I found most interesting about this article is how shopping in 2008 is actually BETTER than was imagined in 1968. The author thought items for sale would be displayed on a television, and people would order items through a different interface -- the telephone -- by pressing on a telephone keypad.
Instead, today we can interactively view an item for sale on the Internet, get competing prices, read reviews from real people around the world, and order the item through the same interface using buttons with descriptive labels. It seems so obvious now, and as a developer I still think we have a ways to go, but look how far we've come! This wasn't even fathomable 40 years ago.
my blog
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.
*sings in high voice* In the year 2000...In the year 2000!
We'd probably have more of that cool stuff if people could learn to get along a little better. But as it stands, they failed to mention that people today still lock their doors, have automatic car alarms, and that nine tenths of the world's population not only don't have flying cars, but live in mud huts while working for some cruddy manufacturing company for pennies a day. --With unexploded cluster bomb ordinance scattered outdoors.
Neal Stephenson, were he born in the Forties, could have put a more realistic spin on this article. Too bad.
I predict that by 2015 or thereabouts, and probably a bit sooner, the earth will be a meteor pock-marked hell dealing with super-fast glacial rebound where there really is no more paper money, and the only domed cities will have George W. Bush and/or Vladimir Putin living inside them.
-FL
But perhaps we'll have machines on our desks that will help us add two numbers together, such as 2008 and 40. It's so unfortunate that we continue to make manual mistakes when we add common numbers in like bases. Then again, I suppose we could've all RTFA and realized that the author was not talking about 50 year cycles...
</flame off>
2^3 * 31 * 647
:q!
The pace of change is slowing down. Look at four 50 year periods in history.
Progress is flatlining.
"The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city's suburbs"
I don't know why but I burst into uncontrollable laughter when I imagined that in my head. Sounds like a wild ride.
The problem is smaller than what you make it out to be.
Since the data is related to every car near by, one message can help many cars.
It's easy to imagine centralized computer control of vehicles, if industry had been doing R&D on it for the last 40 years. Yes, a centralized system, designed and built at great expense with no discernible avenue of profitability, in perfect cooperation with the various levels of government that build and maintain roads, highways, and interstates, and the only reason it's not here is because the auto and oil industries have colluded to prevent it!
Seriously, you think the auto industry wouldn't love to market a self driving car? You think they haven't been pouring millions into researching ways to make cars easier to drive, with the very definite goal of coming up with self driving cars? And why the fuck would the oil industry care that a microcontroller is steering your car instead of a human? It's still burning fucking gasoline! And who would run this magic "centralized computer" system? Take a look at the FAA and the air traffic control system and tell me with a straight face that they're capable of a feat three oreders of magnitude more complex before you say "the feds".
Have you been smoking plastic army men, or were you just born that fucking stupid? Sure, it's "easy to imagine" such a system if you're an uneducated 'tard like yourself.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
That we would become the new Soviet Union in many ways.
No one ever saw that one coming.
0. 1758: the cotton mill 6. 2008: computers for real and the internet
Neither, both car owners have to sue the local government. It's the next step in American Evolution!
I hate printers.
* Life expectancy measured from birth for US males is up 10 years. For some other nations the gain has been more dramatic (typically the ones who got to the development party late).
* You know those radios, TVs, electronics, and computers? Yeah, you don't have to be a middle-class white American to own them any more.
* There are plenty of quality of life drugs (one of the reasons for constantly increasing health care costs is that our standard of care is constantly increasing). Acne, allergies, and decline in virility as a function of age are now essentially optional. Give us another decade or three and we'll add senility to the list.
* No major new form of transportation, but passenger air travel has been greatly democratized. Most Slashdotters can get a roundtrip ticket to Japan for a week's wages. It used to cost more than a month's. Domestic air travel is now price competitive with *bus fares* in many instances. It now strictly dominates passenger rail service in the US.
* Improvements in efficiency in banking, of all things, means that many, many more Americans have access to credit. No need to know the loan officer, no need to pass the "Is this man a responsible Christian gentleman?" test, no direct restriction based on income, even. This would have been a fairly radical notion in 1958. This has increased home ownership (*mostly* a good thing even with the current debacle which, it bears noting, is affecting less than a 10th of homes), made life much easier for many entrepeneurs, and greatly increased access to higher education. There are some downsides (folks going into debt to get plasma TVs), but the economist in me says "Well, they have a plasma TV now, and its clear they wanted it".
* I talk 2 hours on the phone every week to my family, across the Pacific Ocean, and pay about $10 a month for the privilege. Adjusting for inflation, that would buy less than an hour of call time to the house next door. A person from 1958 would be shocked, shocked that many phone calls are free. (I predict that a person from 2018 will be shocked, shocked that many weren't back in the dark ages of 2008! Imagine, you still pay for something as prosaic as speaking to someone in Japan! Why, its just bits?!)
* I can send a letter to anyone in the world, instantaneously, for free. If I actually want that letter to involve paper, I can send it now (2 PM) and have it arrive at 8 AM *just about anywhere on earth, without fail, tomorrow morning* for about two hours wages.
* In 1958, cheap prepared food was not a reality for most people. It now is. (I almost can't remember the last time I cooked, which is a little weird at the moment but I don't think this will remain weird forever. My mother remembers people sewing.)
* Most consumer products are so cheap that replacement is cheaper than repair. (TV shorts? Pants rip? Telephone on the fritz? Buy a new one.)
* Your main health problems are caused by an overabundance of cheap food and a dearth of manual labor taxing you every day. These are, in terms of human history, "high class problems".
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
n/t
moi
You might want to have yourself tested.
You can't take the sky from me...
Where did you get the title to my thesis?
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
While I agree that the theory of suppression by the oil and auto industries is far fetched, I do think that self driving cars could be a threat to the auto industry.
If you have self driving cars, you only have to add a little bit of networking to achieve efficient and relatively convenient car sharing programs (think automated taxis), which would reduce the number of automobiles sold overall.
The original author, back in 1968, can be forgiven for not knowing about distributed computing networks. You might consider reading up on them.
Not trivial at all. Doing 250MPH, if you have a vehicle a mile ahead of you doing 225MPH in the adjoining lane, it's not beside you or ahead of you - but change lanes and end up behind it... There's all manner of such edge cases.
Of course, that nobody has ever really specified that such things must be controlled tightly is proof positive that such things can never be controlled tightly.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle? It's plain old information theory. Just because an increase in X implies a decrease in Y doesn't mean the Uncertainty Principle is involved.
Visit the
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?
The article was written about what the world would be like Nov. 18, 2008 -- sheesh, people, last time I checked, that's still the future! It's still MONTHS away. Who knows what we can accomplish if we just put our minds to it. I think we get at least get the plastic road thing going before then...
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
It was a cartoon show, "The Jetsons." And the main character's job was to just push buttons all day long. Come to think about it, thats pretty much what I do all day long on a keyboard. But aside from auto-deposit, auto-billing, and web based commerce, pretty much everything else in the article won't be reality before Duke Nukem Forever is finally released.
QUOTE : There is a general malaise, a depression of opportunities lost. Most do not want to bring children into this world.
Change that to :
"Women place in society devolved to be a baby machine/kitchen/bed warmer, many dies in childbirth, or post-partum infection, and men now live longer than women. Since a lot of children dies before growing up, family do try to get a lot of children in the hope to have one survive".
Looking at some of the third world countries today, and remembering some of our history, it is more logical within your scenario, than people stopping getting children. On the contrary, if society goes down the drain, then so will too contraception methods, and most probably, unless this goes toward a matriarchal society (doubtful) then women place in society will also goes down the drain.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The article reads "8 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18". That's months from now. We have plenty time to get the last few details working. Who wants to be on the plastic road team? Anyone?
In 2058 someone will post a newsstory on /. about predictions made in 2008...
LOL. I was thinking the same thing as I read this.
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
It wouldn't be a threat, quite the opposite in fact. If it becomes mandatory, everyone will either need to refit their current cars, or buy a new one. I don't see how the oil companies would come into play either. The cars would still need gas, and if they haven't stopped regulations requiring greater fuel efficiency, they wouldn't stop this either.
the problem would be that cars are marketed as being vehicles of freedom. you have your own car and it's yours and you're like some cowboy or member of the a-team wandering the highways righting wrongs and smoking marlboro. if cars drove themselves, that would end.
Make that 304 million, up from 201 million in 1968.
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
http://www.infoplease.com/year/1968.html
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
... behind their flood barriers.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Self-driving tech is cool, but it's going to take a long and gradual process just to get people in a culture of having that done for you, rather than opting to steer the car yourself. I think in some ways it's being done bit by bit. A chip here to handle this, GPS here to help you navigate, etc.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
If you liked this article you might also like the Usborne book of the future
http://www.pointlessmuseum.com/museum/usbornebookofthefutureindex.php
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
*waves hand*
*types into console*
"what accident?"
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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.
It would take 2 minutes 12 seconds to run into the back of him. Surely enough time for the 'don't go faster than the car in front' rule to kick in and slow you down.
Surely 2 minutes 24 seconds is long enough for the 'don't go faster than the car in front to kick in and slow you down?
If this happens, I think it will be confined to the motorways and dual carriageways. I can't see it being rolled out to single carriageway roads.
Driverless cars will still be owned by private individuals, otherwise they would just be driverless taxis, or maybe analogous to those city car schemes. Their acceptance would therefore be limited, and there wouldn't be an appreciable route to market.
There will also be a transition period, where cars come with the necessary equipment as standard, in anticipation of the systems coming online. This means that instead of moving from a driven vehicle to a driverless vehicle, drivers will be asked to give up control of their existing cars. I can't see that happening without fierce opposition.
But at the same time, to get the most benefit out of a driverless system, you have to exclude human drivers. Imagine the hotshot business executive who's late for a meeting, and sitting in his driverless car on a motorway doing, say, 85mph. He has a £500,000 salary, a large, powerful car, an over-inflated sense of self-importance and thinks he owns the road. So he decides that 85mph just isn't fast enough, and that he can go faster if he initiates the override and puts his foot down. Chaos ensues, as every other car on the road has to compensate.
The logical extension, then is for some roads to enforce computer control, and for others to lack it. The most sensible application for computer control is on the long, straight, boring roads where many drivers are using cruise-control anyway. Other roads, where there is plenty to hold the driver's attention, and where the benefits of computer control are smaller due to less traffic, are left untouched.
The Internet. I don't think I've ever seen a prediction list that got that one. To the extent anyone predicted networked computing (which I only really saw after networks already existed) it is separated nets like the AOL/Compuserve days. I've never seen anyone that predicted a world wide network that anything could hook in to, that has all kinds of different devices, and that has become so central to communication.
Now I don't particularly blame them for this, the Internet is a very radical change in the way things are done. However it demonstrates a big problem with future predictions in that you just can't really foresee the major changes. Some times, something comes along that just really changes the way things are done. Probably can't predict that ahead of time because if you could, well then you'd probably invent it.
The other thing I find interesting is how many people predict how much houses are going to change, and they are always wrong. It seems humans pretty much know what they like in homes. While details change, the over all idea is pretty constant. Go look at a house built today and then go look at one built in 1900. Are they different? Sure, but it isn't this huge difference that so many predict. The 2008 house is still recognizable as a house in a 1900 context. I find it interesting comparing my grandparent's house, which was built in the 1940s, to my house, which was built in the 1970s, to my parent's house, which was built after 2000. The differences are primarily stylistic.
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).
I really really hate these things. You just know that in one lane, your tire falls directly on the crease. You also know one day they'll remove the pavement in one lane, and remove the shoulder on the other side. The result? You have to drive for miles on a sharp 90 degree drop off directly in the middle of two tires. Sometimes you get to change lanes, sometimes there's too much traffic.
I don't know if that's actually bad for tires, but I don't get encouraged.
You can say that again.
I believe Workers Compensation is required in almost every state except one for almost every employer. In other businesses to get licensed or operate minimum liability insurance is required.
Most of the "outlandish" predictions from years ago only failed because they didn't take energy and resource constraints into account. Most of the technology boom has been in things that are cheap in terms of energy and resources (like communications and computing). The things we haven't seen are flying cars, bridges over oceans, settlements on the moon, and frequent trips into space. This is mostly because computers get cheaper as technology improves, but bridges and flying cars haven't seen a similar fall in price.
We *could* build domes over our cities with current technologies, but the cost is prohibitive. We have other things to use all that steel and energy on (like SUVs apparently).
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Wow, I can't wait until 2008 when "families can have steak-like meals twice a day without feeling a budget pinch." Do we get to have heart-attack-like deaths too?!? (Er, guess not, the steak is made of algae, bleh). Was this guy really looking forward to "steak-like meals"?? I guess he knew he would be really old and looked forward to gumming his "steak".
What's really funny is that food is insanely cheap today, even if it is not highly processed. I guess that some would argue that steak itself has become "steak-like" based on how cows are now raised, though.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
>> With the U.S. population having soared to 350 million
>Close, only 270 million
Actually it is closer to 300 million now and he made his prediction before Roe v Wade. There have been roughly 50 million abortions since then.
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
That's the thing about telling the future, you're supposed to know all about these things that nobody has even thought about, let alone invented. From my last
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You sir, just gave me the BEST idea for what to put on my "What I want for Christmas" list.
I hate printers.
NSFW ads on page, oh, and why the hell is /. so broken for IE7? Some of us have to use this browser while at work you know.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
>So he decides that 85mph just isn't fast enough, and
>that he can go faster if he initiates the override and
>puts his foot down. Chaos ensues, as every other car
>on the road has to compensate.
More like hilarity ensues as the surrounding cars detect a speeder and form up to block his passage:)
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
On the other hand, centrally controlling all cars would do wonders in simplifying the software that manages them. Think about it: no need for sensors in cars to measure position of other cars, no need to interpret this data (just a reliable indicator of the car's position, perhaps RFID tags embedded in the road, would suffice).
Of course, if any car that's not managed enters the road or the communications breaks down and we would have an instant pile of organ donors.
And, BTW, I too don't like the idea of a single entity controlling all cars. I don't even like cameras that can scan license plates. It's too 1984-ish for me to feel comfortable.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
This story clearly contains prior art for many things that are patented today. Most notably the Amazon 1-Click patent on page 4 of 7.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Orwell did he was just off a few years.
Darn you Tom. Darn you to HECK!
Oh yeah, I hated those nylon laces. Had to go to hiking store to find good cotton ones.
I drank what? -- Socrates
In what way is a distributed computing network centralized control?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
so every household has a PC and every PC has linux installed on it
Prediction is easy; you just follow trends to their logical conclusions. Nothing in these predictions goes out on a limb; things like Dinners Club already had credit cards and computers that did the subtracting from an account. It's no leap to say all money will end up this way. Of Course like any good psychic, it's important to remind people of your successes. Arthur C. Clark (RIP) never spent that much time explaining some of his predictions about how we would have mass whale farms in the Atlantic by the year 2000. Everyone knows the sort of stuff that will happen in the next half century based on what happening now.... Quantum Computers, Computer beats Turing Test, Bio Feedback, Merging of Technology and Organic Matter, Middle Management Begins to be replace by machines (as was manual labour in the last 50 years) and so on. But the real trick is to correctly gauge how it will change human society. That was so funny about those futurama type exhibits that transposed 50's sensibilities on people of the year 2000. That is perhaps why someone like Philip K. Dick was a genius, in that he actually gauged a changing, decentring, human sensibility.
Indeed - I noticed I'd screwed up the maths and corrected - but didn't realise I had submitted the original.
Regard the standard young person. Said person likely has a collection of four-letter meta-words he considers sufficient for a practical plethora of purposes. It never occurs to him that there is any reason to delve into the depths of language to find a more descriptive word. The fault, then, is not in the language; the fault is in the pathetic application of said language.
we now have CDs and afaik they don't make car stereos without CD players any more.
Actually they do. In fact som of the bigger makers of car stereos are phasing out the Old Cd player for digital media.
http://www.alpine-usa.com/US-en/products/product.php?model=iDA-X001&lang=en&tab=F has no CD player, but can control a Cd changer if you really want to play those old-fashoned things.
http://www.crutchfield.com/App/Product/Item/Main.aspx?g=300&i=020FB275BB&search=SD+card&tp=5684 is a sleek nice one at a budget price. it sounds great but is for SD cards only.
and many more are going that way. Lots of new car stereos got the clue-by-four and are putting USB plugs on them so you can play music from a USB stick.
Cd is passe in a car. Having a 80 gig usb hard drive in the glove box that the stereo can play from is where it's at.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
While doing this, it would be trivial to put some kind of magnetic markers in the road to mark the lanes.
These could also store information about what speed to keep in that lane, etc... 1) Do not drive faster than the vehicle in front of you
2) Do not change lanes if there is a vehicle beside you I'd rather say:
1) Keep the lane-specified speed
2) Keep the lane-specified distance to the vehicle in front
3) Follow the marker buried in the lane
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
"But Main Street's still all cracked and broken"
"Sorry Mom, the Mob has spoken"
"Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!"
"Mono...D'oh!"
Just last week the University of Calgary announced they would no longer accept tuition payments by credit card.
http://gauntlet.ucalgary.ca/story/12288
Apparently $1,000,000 in credit card processing fees is too much for the top school in a province awash with oil and gas money.
Perhaps the forward-thinking university administrators read the 2008 forecast and decided to revolt against "the future."
Hasan
So if I'm going 200 because I've just gotten onto the road, and there's no car beside me, I can change lanes, right? How does that affect the car 40 feet behind me (in the lane I'm going to change into) doing 250 mph? Your rules, while excellent, are still lacking somewhat by the realities of road travel.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
You might want to try reading comments before replying to them.
If you are in a no-fault state, then your insurance covers your damage and the other driver's insurance covers their damage........which is probably the type of coverage scheme you'd have to go to in order for this to work.
Layne
That and talk about taking away a very FUN part of life!! I mean, I love driving my car. I've always bought performance sports cars...driving is a blast. Not to mention, what about motorcycles? I'd hate for them to take away the freedom of the open road for me to fire up my bike and hit the highway....
I guess a lot of people see transportation ONLY as a means from one place to another...but, hopefully that isn't everyone. I love to get my bike/car on the open road. I like to go with friends off-roading....but, you have to use the road to get to the places you want to go off roading.
And with these automated systems out there...how the heck will you take your boat to the lake and drop it in? I can't imagine they'll design that in right off to bat on an automated system.
No..too much to lose here...independence, flexibility....I hope it doesn't happen in my time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Do you seriously think a majority of the car buying populace wants to "share the ride" with a stranger? When was the last time you saw a hitchhiker on the side of the road? People don't want someone they don't know getting into their car with them (unless that person is carrying a case of Bud Light, which is a different story altogether).
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I think we need to make slashdot predictions for the next 100 hundred years.
I'd hate to say it, but "one" commercial fusion reactor making a profit.
Global climate change still an issue though the bulk of humanity is still around despite it being 2100.
Starting to play with large scale nano-tech.
Intel is selling chips that run 1000x faster than today for 1/1000th of the power usage for less than a $1 (adjusted for inflation) and making a huge profit.
Google Government evolved enough to handle the routine governmental tasks of your average town of less than 50K without any problems.
Democracy is the norm and people don't care. We still vote in the Hitler/Stalin types into office once every other generation.
The Hitler/Stalin types have discovered that internet list of "what I'd do if I were an evil overlord list" and try to stick to it. So the evil Tyrant gives out free internet/music/video/games to all as long as you aren't actively trying to remove the Tyrant. You can bad mouth him all you want on the internet, but if you start the physical process of removing the Tyrant, the Tyrant calls out the Strom Troopers on you.
Most people are happy, healthy, have cheap food to eat, and are very supportive of their evil overlord.
People pay vast sums for the latest toys only to throw them away or into storage after about a week/month of playing with them.
Soylent Green is People!
Man...talk about boring. I hope this never comes about. I for one own cars/bikes that are fun to drive, and I enjoy them.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'd have to dig out some anthropology textbooks or do some research ( which, given that this is Slashdot and reading TFA is considered overachieving, seems unlikely ) but if you look back at other massive leaps forward in human history, they're kinda lumpy. Fire, language, first domestication of animals and improved stone tools all happened (ahem, relatively) close together; and then 10k to 12k years ago, you get agriculture, cities, new and more complex political structure; followed by 4k to 6k years ago with writing, codes of law, etc. Maybe our perspective on the recent rapid rate of change is skewed by being towards the tail end of industrialization and informationization (yeah, Firefox spellcheck says that's not a word).
:)
As an alternative to the Singularity theory, what if we're just going to be in a developmental lull for the next few decades while society and individuals and businesses adapt to the massive changes we've gone through? Heck, most individuals in big modern metro areas are still adapting to not having extended families nearby, commuting to work, etc. which are relatively recent introductions. If your grandparents weren't doing it, odds are you're still trying to figure out how to do it right.
I'd love to have flying cars and self-sustaining off-world colonies and fiber to the home across the entire continental US, but those might need some new cheap energy source or an improved finance system or more humane living conditions for people before they come along.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Imagine a conversation at an accident scene... "Wow, this is the hundredth crashed flying car this week alone, and the black box says the same thing as all the others at the end of its log. THIS APPLICATION, FLYING CAR AUTOPILOT 2.0, HAS CAUSED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN. IF PROBLEM PERSISTS, CONTACT THE VENDOR.' You would think Microsoft would have fixed this by now!"
How ya like dat?
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$ha.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
would be possible today, if it weren't for collusion from the oil and auto industry.
Yeah, that's why they assassinated JFK and paid off the Mafia to make politicians fake the moon landing.
Don't people even subject their conspiracy theories to the smell test any more? Why would the oil industry *not* want people going 250 miles per hour? Talk about throwing gas down the drain. And why wouldn't they want automated, safer car travel? Anything to make people more comfortable with spending long hours on the road. And why wouldn't the auto industry want automated road travel? What a way to sell more cars -- make it so that the overwhelming majority of people who dislikes driving every day feel that they have to upgrade!
There's no need to insert a conspiracy in every shadow. In the real world, cost-effective engineering is simply really difficult sometimes. Not everything can be done, and not everything that can be done can be done affordably. Sometimes even the best efforts fail. That's just the reality of the world we live in.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
+1 depressing but unfortunately possible? :)
9/10 of the world's population in mud huts is a rather large overestimate, with 6.5 billion people on Earth that would mean everyone outside of the US and Western Europe, which obviously isn't the case. If you go by GDP purchasing-power-parity per capita (that's one long ugly acronym there, GDP-PPP-PC, maybe GD5PC?), it's more like 2 billion people on the planet who are really bad off, living on under $1 per day, with another 3.5 billion in actively developing economies like Brazil, China, India and Russia who are quite a bit better off, and a bit over 1 billion in the United States, the EU, Japan, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand who enjoy a standard of living that would be the envy of kings and emperors from any previous point in history.
Numbers aside, there's places on the planet like the Niger Delta which, from our perspective among the most prosperous billion people, look like a nightmarish science-fiction story. Shinra Electric Power Company, anyone?
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Afterward they would only know by hearsay. After 2 generation there would not be any difference at all with the 3rd world or middle age.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Actually, in the 50s Chrysler did have a record player as an option.
http://www.roadkillontheweb.com/arp.html
Eh, it's pretty simple. This will begin to be rolled out as driver assist features already coming online, like radar range finding and collision alerts. And then automatic brake application for collision prevention and "smart" cruise controls that maintain distance. It'll move from there to basically the equivalent of HOV lanes for automated vehicles (non-automated vehicles driving in them would be reported and ticketted; radar range finding would still be needed for "unexpected circumstances").
More Americans hate driving than those who enjoy it "a great deal", and the ratio is continually shifting against driving. Even those who overall like to drive, many of them would readily give up their ability to drive in exchange for greater safety, less pollution/fuel consumption, faster transit times, and so forth. If these techs do come and do turn out to be popular among their users, expect big fights in cities for steadily increasing the percentage of lanes that are automated, up until complete automation of in-city traffic becomes standard (cities would like it a lot because it'd reduce smog, increase throughput, and decrease the need for further road construction). Those who like to drive would probably fight this tooth and nail, but I can't picture them winning. As a new generation grows up on increasingly automated road travel, it seems likely that even out of city, manual driving would increasingly become an "offroad" and "country" activity.
This all assumes that the tech does make it to market via the incremental approach currently being pursued, that it works, that it is safer than human driving, and that it is affordable enough to become widespread.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
Those things in which government has a virtual monopoly, such as roads, are stuck in technology from 40 years ago.
Those things which are highly regulated, but for which there is at least some competition - such as automobiles - have enjoyed technological improvements, and could certainly meet the specs laid out in the article if the market were to demand them.
Those things which are virtually unregulated, such as computing power and network technology, have expanded beyond the widest dreams of sci-fi authors 40 years ago.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
It's interesting that on page 5 is also the second half of an article on the 'new' Boeing 747 - little did the writers know that this plane would still be in use and be the height of common air travel luxury in 2008. I just want those 15 hostesses that were promised!
Some things today are better than described - the internet, online shopping and bill pay, mobile communications and intarweb - a lot better than drawing on my tv-phone with an infrared pen. The domed city thing was WAAAY off though!
parent is a troll...i'm the grandparent poster, fyi...I'd even venture to say parent is a plant from the oil or auto industry...just read the post carefully and any moderators, I think, will see the trolling
Most of the posters whose comments generally supported my point were modded higher, so that's good. OTOH, I somehow became redundant. I didn't see any other posts that made the same point when I posted (i view at 3+), but them's the breaks.
Thank you Dave Raggett
He said "smooth", not "frictionless". A newly paved blacktop road is very smooth but people can stop and start just fine. A smooth plastic road that never wore down would be a fantastic improvement over current roads. BTW there are plenty of car stereos that don't have cd players, they still make tape decks, radio only, and even hard drive based systems.
A lot of the things they predicted are available, but no one wants them:
...except in America, where we have the highest infant mortality rate in the 1st world (Sicko, Michael Moore).
...with the state of education, you'll still be smarted than the next generation for the foreseeable future.
TFA: Dwellings for the most part are assembled from prefabricated modules...
Despite the marketing efforts of modular home builders claiming that they're better quality, modular homes are still considered "low end" and buyers are afraid the home won't grow in value with the rest of the market.
TFA: prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates. These plates, as well as knives, forks and spoons of the same material, are so inexpensive they can be discarded after use.
Microwave meals and disposable housewares all both available and cheap. But the quality is so bad that they're rarely used. TFA also didn't consider where all that trash would go.
TFA (correct): The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer.
TFA (wrong): These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance.
TFA (corrected): These electronic brains suck America's productivity dry by keeping us busy playing video games, looking at pr0n, and watching low-quality video of idiots who deserve Darwin awards on Youtube.
TFA: TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center.
Granted, the mouse hadn't been invented, but they couldn't imagine keyboards or touch-screens? Idiots.
TFA: Medical research has guaranteed that most babies born in the 21st century will live long and healthy lives.
TFA: No need to worry about failing memory or intelligence either.
Actually they were right-on about the roads - lots of municipalities (Pennsylvania, and Bellevue Washington come to mind) are experiementing with new paving materials such a "Superpave" and others that contain rubber particles and provide a smoother and quieter ride
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
No sig for the moment.
Illinois, the one that's more a cartoon than the 2D Springfield on TV!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
or to argue the other point
wrecks become less commonplace, so cars don't need to have as much steel in them to protect against a wreck that will never happen, cheaper materials make for cheaper cars. These cars use less gas because they participate in a managed traffic system and are made of lightweight materials.
This opens car ownership to people who previously couldn't own a car. People upgrade cars more frequently because it is cheap to do so. I bet Cherry & Tata could come up with a nice business plan for a more affordable car even if Ford and GM can't
Technology Consulting & Free Downloads
Mod parent up. That's a significant, and seldom mentioned, point. When communism was taken seriously as a competitor to capitalism, capitalism had to deliver a better standard of living for the average worker. That's no longer the case.
Then again, look at China's growth rate.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Cd is passe in a car. Having a 80 gig usb hard drive in the glove box that the stereo can play from is where it's at.
Back in the stone age when I was young it was all about high fidelity - making it sound as much like there was a real live musician playing a real instrument. The eight track was the exception.
Watch, in another ten or fifteen years it will go full circle when storage density gets to what we now would consider insane, again fidelity will matter.
There were only a handful of LPs I could crank and be fooled into thinking there was a band in the living room (Van Halen 1 comes to mind). I have yet to hear a single CD that would fool me, let alone an MP3. I suspect that if you raised the sampling rate by a power of ten, and doubled the bitrate, you might have some fairly high fidelity.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
My Springfield's funnier. Plus it's in 3D!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Which part of my post indicated that I drive where I might jeopardize your life?
I cruise on my motorcycle (not a crotch rocket)....my performance cars, I drive as safe as driving conditions permit (traffic, road conditions, weather, etc).
Not to mention that a massive singularly controlled system is not likely (at least in the US) to be convenient, in that you won't be able to go door-to-door anywhere you want with such a system. Also, how will people carry around and drop their boats from home...no more camper trailers for camping trips?
A unified system, if it takes over everything will cause us to lose a great deal of independence in exchange for what it does give...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In the centrally controlled scenario, you would still have a dangerous situation, but, if the situation could be adequately relayed, all other cars around the problem would either start braking, steer clear or accelerate out of the accident before it happens.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Talking about audio fidelity in a car stereo is mostly pointless though, all of the small details you get from a high quality home audio system would be totally lost in a car with the road/wind/other vehicle noise around you. The noise floor is just too high in a car.
I read the internet for the articles.
You forgot the simple fact that you can't say publicly that you enjoy tuning cars, driving them or just looking at them before some economical family drive-just-because-he/she-must troll jumps on you claiming you for your license because you actually enjoy to drive.
.2...
The posters (I'm not reffering to the one in the grandparent) that say this forget that alcohol,drug use & people that fell into sleep stands for most accidents and are harder to control than anything else. Speed checks are regurlar because this is the simplest way to "avoid" traffic accidents the politicals say, but I just think it clogs up traffic and creates more frustration, and frustration behind the wheel never is a good thing (it leads to dangerous overtaking for instance).
If you think the roads are too dangerous for you, take the bloody train and stop whining. Just my
If you have self driving cars, you only have to add a little bit of networking to achieve efficient and relatively convenient car sharing programs (think automated taxis), which would reduce the number of automobiles sold overall.
We could call them... buses.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Smooth plastic roads would probably be good for the:
From the article "two-passenger air-cushion car".
I am not an Engineer, but I do remember taking Physics classes in college and performing experiments on cushions of air that had smooth surfaces underneath like an air hockey table to try and simulate frictionless environments. Wouldn't a "air-cushion car" work just like an air hockey puck on a smooth air hockey table?
Forget the automatically controlled cars that go 150MPH, what about that 4 hour work day?
Now that would be sweet...
Talking about high fidelity in a car is incredibly funny.
Cars have crappy speakers (Yes those $399.99 a pair speakers are crappy) horrible soundstage, horrible audio reflections everywhere, horrible seating positions, over 100DB sound floor from the noise outside the car, lots of sound adsorbing material where it should not be, etc....
Mp3's even at 64Kbps sound FANTASTIC in a car. That's what all the Sirius and XM listeners consider CD quality sound. I consider Sirius and XM to be bad podcast quality.
Yes even in you dump $25,000 into a car stereo it's sound quality will be only slightly above crappy. you can not make any car have good sound. it is not possible. Well maybe a large panel van with one chair in the middle and everything else removed... No windows, fill the walls with cement and tar paper, and also add 2 inches of sound insulation to the outside. you might make that work.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Don't believe the lies. It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!
My fellow Americans, let's restore the death penalty for child rapists. Let's do it . . . for the children.
Obviously not the one covered by a dome.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
I thought the "smoking plastic army men" was pretty goddamn funny.
Obviously, the 3rd dimension would only be used by those of us that DO know how to drive, so that'd eliminate a lot of congestion right there.
I'm only half-kidding, here. If you set up your flying car to do a direct flight from home to work, with the minimal fuel use, and all of your neighbors do the same, how close do you think your car is going to get to theirs, on average? If you had a reliable plot of what path every car in the neighborhood was on, how hard would it be to assure a minimum safe distance between yours and the others?
Most people imagine flying cars running in lanes just like the 2D road grids we have now - you see that all the time in Sci-Fi movies. But the road grid is an artifact of the need to pave roads for cars to travel on. To a flying car, any airspace is just as good as any other.
Yes, there's no way that arbitrary flightplans would work in the city. Then again, driving a car in the city doesn't make much sense, either.
Sure, you'd have time to slow down - but having what effect on traffic you are now in front of? I was merely pointing out that what is locally optimal for you may not be globally optimal, and that 'beside' is a fuzzy concept and not black and white. If the car in question is only a hundred yards in front of you, things get hairier, etc...
Now reduce the distance to just a hundred yards... or fifty yards. "Beside" is much more fuzzy and much less black and white than the OP thinks. (And what effect does your braking have on the traffic behind you? These things ripple and local optimal solutions may lead to globally suboptimal conditions.)
It isn't. Which is my point.
Of course the current road designs are not the most damage resistant design possible. However, they are currently the cheapest to produce! Until someone comes out with an idea that provides an immediate return on investment greater than the current design and can get through all the government political BS that is a given with public works, we will continue to use current road designs with short lived asphalt and constant potholes. Market forces can be powerful, but the initial cost of a new design is difficult to swallow.
Because SMS'ing in traffic is always a great idea... (says the bloke who witnessed a traffic collision today from someone doing just that in a < 10kph traffic jam)
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
What happens when get a flat tire in a car going 150 mph? You die. At least, in most of today's cars. You'd have to seriously overengineer new cars to survive accidents at twice today's freeway speeds.
You don't know what was important until much later. In 1908 the first airplane had flown, but who saw the potential for what we have today? It was a curiosity to most people. Same goes for computers in 1958. What, today, will we look back at and see the seeds of greatness? I'd vote for nanotechnology, robotics, and genetics at a minimum.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The future looks bleak where they track everything you do, where you drive, what you buy, what you eat, how much you work and goof off.
I bet the brainwashed idiots think this is progress.
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.
This one was written in 1900, and is surprisingly accurate:
http://www.paleofuture.com/2007/04/what-may-happen-in-next-hundred-years.html
Some highlights:
Submarine boats submerged for days will be capable of wiping a whole navy off the face of the deep. Balloons and flying machines will carry telescopes of one-hundred-mile vision with camera attachments, photographing an enemy within that radius. These photographs as distinct and large as if taken from across the street, will be lowered to the commanding officer in charge of troops below
Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn. By an automatic signal they will connect with any circuit in their locality without the intervention of a "hello girl".
The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent. Not only will it be possible for a physician to actually see a living, throbbing heart inside the chest, but he will be able to magnify and photograph any part of it. This work will be done with rays of invisible light.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Ok, I'll buy that. By "smooth" he meant "smoothER". But why plastic? I've never seen plastic that was as rough as concrete or tarmac.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Well, if your moon buggy weighed six times as much as your car then what?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
His predictions were from a time where plastics were just being introduced and they were seen as a miracle material that could be used for everything. Now we realize that they aren't perfect for everything though they do come close. A plastic road could be as rough or as smooth as we want it. During the production process a pattern could be imprinted to give cars better traction in wet weather. A truly smooth road would be ideal in dry conditions but people will want to drive when it's raining too so a texture has to be added.
The reason we haven't seen plastic roads yet is probably cost and longevity. Roads are enormously expensive as it is and a plastic road would just cost too much. Another reason is that there honestly might not be a hard enough plastic to do the job. Roads take a beating by trucks and if concrete and stone roads don't last forever I'd have a hard time imagining a plastic road would do much better. It's just like how the Grand Canyon was formed, slight pressure applied continuously for long enough can have a significant effect.
Because of the limitations and expenses involved in deploying such an architecture, they're working together. The full project is coordinated by the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium, of which Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, and BMW are members.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
His predictions were from a time where plastics were just being introduced
Um, no, I assure you that they were most definitely NOT just being introduced. I was 16 in 1968 and I assure you I never saw an automobile without a plastic steering wheel. Wikipedia says that bakelite, the first plastic, was announced in 1912. So in 1968 plastic was already 54 years old.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Ok so I don't know my plastic history. In any case plastic has come a long way since 1968 and I still don't think we have something that would be a good replacement for traditional road materials. We might but if there is I've never heard of it.
That's true, but immaterial. I was talking about the future of stereo, not necessarily car stereo.
It's also the reason that eight tracks sucked so badly - they were supposed to be "for the car" so factory cartriges were inferior to cassettes and home made eight tracks, despite the fact that the transport speed was double the cassette and the tape width was also double.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Yes, but CDs are closer to LPs than tapes. And in fact my car (a 2002) has both a cassette player and a CD changer.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You're correct, but I was talking about sound reproduction in general. I can't figure out why they don't have "car CDs", which would be the minidisks, and they could be encoded in MP3 or other lossy format and would fit in your shirt pocket.
I get a chuckle, whenever anyone remarks about how good my car stereoi sounds, it's always when I'm playing a CD I've sampled from vinyl! None of my equipment even in the house comes anywhere near audiophile quality; I just can't afford to be an audiophile.
But even my old 12 inch 3 way JBLs in the living room would benefit from a higher sampling rate.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You may be right, perhaps manufacturing methods have changed but I don't see anything different about the plastic they made transistor radios out of when I was 5, and what they make TVs out of now.
They do make more things out of plastic. TV enclosures used to be made of wood, for instance. Actually I liked the wooden ones better, at least to look at. I'd much rather have the modern electronics than what they had then; in 1969 TV sets were just beginning to be solid state. Back in the '70s they had plastic enclosures etc that were made to look like wood, they were FUGLY.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
From this prediction, and most others, we can see the tendency:
most of computer-related predictions made in the past have become reality in the present.
But for other technology, it is not true.
Seems that pretty much everything else is stagnating.
Space exploration is mostly the same as in 70's - no trips to other planets, not to mention stars.
Transportation is the same.
Health care as ineffective as in the past - most doctors cannot reliably diagnose the problem in the body provided.
And of course political problems are getting much worse every day.
I guess a code of ethics means nothing to the likes of you?
You also like to hide yourself while making snide remarks with profanity, most likely so your managers can't google your user name as it appears in their proxy server to see that you like to goof off by surfing the Internet at work, and thus fire you for it.
What you don't know is that eventually the proxy server will show you going to a web site often enough that your manager will investigate it and find comments you made about the job and company and that will be the real reason why you didn't get that pay raise and promotion that you wanted. Most likely you'll just blame Bush like the other 90% of Slashdot readers, and not your own actions and behaviors and Internet surfing.
Call me a goody two shoes if you want, but it will be people like me who get that promotion and pay raise that people like you keep getting passed over. In all honestly you only have yourself to blame for your problems.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.