Last weekend at Fry's I saw that they were selling wristwatch FRS radios -- that seemed like a rather cool toy.
Doesn't somebody make a wrist cellphone?
Yes, I think Chester Gould's Dick Tracy was rather lame, and the wrist is kind of a natural homing point for this sort of gewgaw, but this serves as an excellent illustration of how technology can meet, surpass, and leave in the dust the futuristic visions of the past.
Asimov's Foundation was published in the early 1950's. When I read it 20 years later, the HP-35 was the geek calculator of choice. In Foundation, the mathematician Hari Seldon kept his calculator in a pouch on his belt, and "red symbols glowed out from the gray".
The red symbols had to be a coincidence, because LED technology drove the color of the display. But each HP-35 was shipped with a leather belt pouch -- which became the ultimate geek symbol. It would be easy to believe that someone in HP borrowed the belt pouch idea from Foundation.
Sadly, pocket calculators and computers in general have not approached the power of Seldon's handheld, which could do symbolic mathematics at a level beyond current understanding. But that's what SF is about.
Just please educate me. What is so wrong about the card?
Germany was a favorite hangout for the guys that slammed those planes into those buildings. Along with all the other problems mentioned, this is the best evidence that the idea just won't help anyone except Larry and Scott.
We have ID cards, they are called drivers licenses. The problem is that the feds and the states have never bothered to consolidate and share the data. They could do so with hardly anyone noticing, and it would cost a lot less than all new cards. Most states will give an ID card for those that cannot drive.
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Last weekend at Fry's I saw that they were selling wristwatch FRS radios -- that seemed like a rather cool toy.
Doesn't somebody make a wrist cellphone?
Yes, I think Chester Gould's Dick Tracy was rather lame, and the wrist is kind of a natural homing point for this sort of gewgaw, but this serves as an excellent illustration of how technology can meet, surpass, and leave in the dust the futuristic visions of the past.
Asimov's Foundation was published in the early 1950's. When I read it 20 years later, the HP-35 was the geek calculator of choice. In Foundation, the mathematician Hari Seldon kept his calculator in a pouch on his belt, and "red symbols glowed out from the gray".
The red symbols had to be a coincidence, because LED technology drove the color of the display. But each HP-35 was shipped with a leather belt pouch -- which became the ultimate geek symbol. It would be easy to believe that someone in HP borrowed the belt pouch idea from Foundation.
Sadly, pocket calculators and computers in general have not approached the power of Seldon's handheld, which could do symbolic mathematics at a level beyond current understanding. But that's what SF is about.
Just please educate me. What is so wrong about the card?
Germany was a favorite hangout for the guys that slammed those planes into those buildings. Along with all the other problems mentioned, this is the best evidence that the idea just won't help anyone except Larry and Scott.
We have ID cards, they are called drivers licenses. The problem is that the feds and the states have never bothered to consolidate and share the data. They could do so with hardly anyone noticing, and it would cost a lot less than all new cards. Most states will give an ID card for those that cannot drive.
Which is conveniently sooner than the end of the UNIX epoch, so we won't have to fix our 32 bit time counters. How did the Mayans know?