101–110 of 128 posts
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Uhhh.... http://www.google.com/images?q=Trek+communicator&um=1...
What am I looking at here? The Star Trek communicators are voice-only.
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Ubiquitous cell phones are definitely a revolutionary development. This becomes obvious when you read or watch fiction of any sort. How many story lines would be completely disrupted by the presence of a cell phone? As it turns out, a great many, even for stories being written today, as many writers haven't fully absorbed the way things have changed.
Very interesting point. I feel like the situation is even more extreme in a sense. It seems like ubiquitous information disrupts a large percentage of all possible story plots . Most story plots hinge on ignorance and discovery. With no physical personification of ignorance, a plot is simply less compelling. Imagine - * Odysseus travels through exotic, distant lands, that he just forget to do Google earth on beforeha…
Kasparov complains that there aren't enough revolutionary technologies that push the world forward, as opposed to incremental improvements driven by wanting to please consumers. And then he says the last genuine technological revolution was ... the Apple II? Huh? The Apple II was a fine product. But it was an incremental advance on its predecessors like the Commodore PET and, er, the Apple I (whose existence Kasparov…
The internet is older than the Apple II. Apart from GPS and FMRI, i dont agree that the other consumer-products are revolutionary at all. CDs are notoriously unreliable data storage mechanism which are already obselete; laser printers haven't done much other than enable people to waste more paper ; digital cameras are just dense CCDs, nothing great or new about that.
> The internet is older than the Apple II.
Depends on what you mean by "the internet". The core protocols are older than the Apple II, but e.g. the linkup between ARPANET and NSFNet wasn't until the 1980s.
> CDs are notoriously unreliable data storage mechanism which are already obsolete
CDs were revolutionary because they were the first widely used digital music format. And they may be "notoriously unreliable", but my CDs are holding up better in terms of sound quality than a similarly-aged collection of LPs would without heroic measures. Sure, they're certainly obsolescent now, if not actually obsolete, but so is the Apple II.
> laser printers haven't done much other than enable people to waste more paper
Laser printers made it possible for anyone to produce near-publishable-quality documents. This is a Big Deal, even if for whatever reason you don't like it.
> digital cameras are just dense CCDs, nothing great or new about that.
And the Apple II was just a slightly better personal computer. Digital cameras have made traditional film cameras obsolete. They have completely changed the way in which people take pictures by drastically shortening the feedback loop from initial capture to inspection, and by making it essentially free to take large numbers of pictures. They have greatly increased the role of photography in most people's lives. (Still more as they have become commonly integrated into mobile phones.)
Now, if you wish to define "revolutionary" very strictly, then of course you can say that none of these things is really revolutionary -- but then the Apple II will come out also not being revolutionary. Kasparov is wrong either way.
We went from basic monochrome computers that could barely hold the text of a single book in memory to having instantaneous access to the sum of human knowledge from a device that fits in your pocket. Perhaps my definition of revolutionary is different than his.
The Apple ][ had color, you insensitive clod.
Good current example would be sequencing the human genome. As of right now its mostly useless, but 30 years from now it may be seen as that revolutionary spark. Then some other critic will talk about how nothing big has happened since.
This clearly shows that being very wise and being very intelligent are not the same thing.
I'm not sure that being the best chess player in the world is evidence that Kasparov is very intelligent--any more than being the best poker player, the best piano player, or even the best marketer. Chess is a learned skill just like any of those. Put another way, looking at all of the world's very most intelligent people, the fraction that care enough about chess to become the world champion if they had the aptitude…
There are lots of people who play chess as much as Kasparov does. Few of them are even remotely near him in skill.
I'm not sure who the best poker player would be, but I've met most of the names that would be thrown out there if you asked the top people, and they're all scary smart. Piano playing is a different type of intelligence than poker or chess, but whoever the world's best piano player is I promise you has a lot of that type.
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As cool as pornography relative to sex.
Could you explain your analogy in a bit more detail? Google Maps is like pornography, and ... what ... is like sex? Physical paper maps? (I'm not seeing the big difference compared with electronic ones.) The actual full-size terrain itself? (OK, sure, but that's a bit tricky to carry around with you and use for route planning.)
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But has it drastically changed the games, books, music, and movies?
It's changed the content that an average person has access to without replying on what as being distributed locally. It has allowed those that would have never been able to get wider distribution of their content, those producing niche material to access a big enough market to make their projects viable. So it may not have changed the content on the whole but it has certainly changed the content that most people are…
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This drives me nuts whenever I read anything by Connie Willis. Her time travel books play (partly, obviously) decades in the future yet there are constantly people running around and frantically looking for each other and not finding anyone. I always want to scream “Pick up your goddamn cellphone!” (Some of those were written in the nineties which explains their lack of cellphones but even her most recent books from…
Pity the poor artist who establishes their reputation in one medium, then sees the medium do a big shift. Willis probably could write books which fully encompass the cellphone-era worldview. But will they be Connie Willis books? Or will the loss of all those old tropes make her new style inevitably different from her best-selling old style? Think of PG Wodehouse, blithely writing novels set in early-twentieth-century…
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Earth serves as an effective spacecraft, we're just running low on supplies and making a mess of it; the economically and ecologically optimal move is migrate mining and industry to heaven.
Still, if we can get a couple more spacecrafts, the chance of everyon dying gets much smaller. Not only that, but the skills and knowledge we gain with it make us even harder to kill. One of these days we may even surpass cockroaches.
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Ubiquitous cell phones are definitely a revolutionary development. This becomes obvious when you read or watch fiction of any sort. How many story lines would be completely disrupted by the presence of a cell phone? As it turns out, a great many, even for stories being written today, as many writers haven't fully absorbed the way things have changed.
We have a long running series of phone ads in the UK which make fun of exactly this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlX9G7s2AnQ