Can you remember the promises that were made long ago to us as children? The ones that were never fulfilled by our society? Promises made by our leaders, our media, our visionaries, even science fiction... After all, we passed 2001 and I don't see hotels in space and trips to the moon and beyond. And where is that racial equality? More than half of urban blacks end up in jail at some point in their lives. That's equality? What else?
yeah, i'm really into sci-fi, and sometimes when i read it i wonder what happened to our motivation for great things... we just haven't used what knowledge we've gained to increase wisdom, it seems. i think our western world is in love with knowledge, just pure data. anyone else get that feeling sometimes? like wisdom and learning isn't the most important, just feeling like a god who knows all?
I remember VR5, that was a great show! The blonde was HOT! But VR will have to wait a bit more. We're getting there, but slowly. Our top scientists are too busy with gov't contracts to worry about civilian uses of VR. But the military is the one with the money pushing the VR envelope these days. As we get closer to an army of robots, they'll use VR to control some of them.
i think people kept barking their shins on their coffee table and falling over it, but the data glove input device was on the market for a while and similar systems are being used for motion capture from live actors to use in 3d movies and video games. the 3d displays, well there's several ways of doing that which just happen to be kind of software intesive and the drivers aren't standard windows vxd's. but 'watchman' style 'heads up' sterio monitors were manufactured for a while too. probably still are, as mentioned for the military and other big ticket contractors. i remember a concept called a cave being used for 3d drafting for a while, but that was another only the high end shops could ever afford. but if you look arround high tek junk shops, you just might still be able to find data gloves and 'heads up' monitors. i think the main thing was standards for drivers for them. online there ARE massively multiplayer 3d universes. games like everquest. and something called second life. if you've got broadband and either a credit card or a cell phone you can join second life basic for free. you can then buy land and build on it in the sl universe. it's really quite amazing. but without broadband trying to run your avitar is like trying to control a rover on mars or something. there are other mmorpg's and environments, just no interface drivers for heads up output and dataglove input for them. really just those drivers and a standardized interface for them is all that's really missing. there's also vrml, though i suppose that's mostly kind of yesterday's news. what sl is doing way surpassess what the vrml standard attempted. i had some vrml .wrl 's that i'd programed myself on my own website when i had one. there was even and might still be a vrml webring. and there were a couple of vrml clients that were free downloads, as is the second life client now. so vr isn't entirely a 'broken promis' just perhapse incomplete depending on your perspective. most broken promises aren't a matter of the tecnology not having been developed or even not having become available but of economic and social incentives not favoring them. there are lots of things we don't have for no other reason then people putting trying to impress each other ahead of the kind of world we all have to live in. and even lots of those exist on a relatively small scale one place or another each in a different, arround our planet. co-generation is real in many places. high speed rail common in europe, rare in north america. matter of mind set and priorities. what i'm always harping on. and why. the mind set and priorities that is. only reason a lot of those things aren't a lot more commonly implimented now. some though, as implimentations attempted so far, went up blind alleys to too noisy or too energy intensive. but photovoltaic, optionaly integrated with wind and small scale hydro, de exist as real, affordable products, becoming less expensive and more available all the time. sierra solar has a web site of interest in this context. i can probably point you to several others that actualy do fulfill and live up to some of these 'broken' promises. people just have conventionality so shoved down their throats that i guess only the engineering community or goofballs like me who look for stuff like that seem to be all that awaire of them. =^^= .../\...
Nice post themnax. Mind opening. On a parallel note, the VR promise could be life saving. A lot of problems in the world today have a root to stress and peer pressure. Apart from the blatant abuse that us humans will put VR to (like everything else in life). imagine coming home after a hard day's work and instead of watching the stupid TV, to just sit on a quiet beach and listen to the waves. To be able to pick the azure water and watch it treacle through your fingers. To even go for a swim with tropical fish swimming about. VR is the one promise that computers have never fulfilled yet and I wouldn;t want to see it for computer games (war and horror). I'd probably end up having a heart attack. Imagine how mice it would be to be able to talk to friends and relatives that have died and you miss, but technology has saved their persona on file! Alright, it's far fetched and in the realm of science fiction, but I really believe that it would have a very positive effect on our world, and I don;t think that it's an impossible promise to keep.
The sad thing about the broken promises....is that it started long before any of us were ever placed upon this earth.Every body looked at this thread as a focal point of short comings in technology....when in essence promises have been broken from the start.... I submit one paragraph to validate my statement; "When in the course of human events,it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,and to assume among the powers of the earth,the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them,a decent respectto the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident,that all men are created equal,that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,that among these are Life,Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.That to secure these rights,Governments are instituted among men,deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,and to institute new Government,laying it's foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form,as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." The Declaration of Independence July 4th 1776......The supreme broken promise...any way you look at it.Too bad more people aren't familiar with the documents that grant us our so called "freedoms" for the opening paragraph says it is the duty of the people to demand these things of the government. Ok I took this thread away from where every body else was going.....but that is the broken promise that stands out in my mind and the direction this country is going.
this is certainly true, that promise was broken when the declaration wasn't made the preamble to the constitutions and the one we've got was substituted instead. it was broken with hamilton's aristocracy and it was broken with jackson's genicdide of our continent's indiginous populations and their cultures. it was in a sense, from the begining a great deal of hypocracy. people tend to bring with them a lot of what they leave someplace else to get away from, and i think, more then anything else that's what happened. constitutional government was and is a great concept but as an imported culture that came to dominate a continent and now much of a planet, there were core values that were moral flawed to begin with, particularly the pretentions of morality itself. pseudo-morality based in one narrow monothiestic belief that even then the perils of were not unknown nor entirely unforseen. which is why they TRIED to seperate church and state. =^^= .../\...
Good point! Rich white folk, exploiting and oppressing poor folk. Nothing has changed since the beginning of this country (cept the fact that the rich white folk don't grow hemp anymore - just the rich white hippies!)
I beg to differ. Although there are no flying cars or elevators to the moon...or sweet cone shaped skirts like on the jetsons....slowly but sure we're making the transition. For fuck's sake, we have marquee belt buckles and church signs. We cary around telephones that are the size of a debit card. Wait- we carry our money on plastic!! We watch tv on things that quadruple as communication device, music downloading/listening device, game device. It was only in the 80s when the walkman and cassette tapes boom happened and those were a luxury! Think about it. Things don't happen over night....That's a big leap if you take out the bulk of years of trial and error products.
what is it that you're begging to differ with? yes we have those tecnologies you mentioned us having, and many others. we have many capabilities that are not widely implimented because people have voted with what they buy for more of what they already had then what the tecnologies we have are capable of. so in that sense it is our own collective priorities that have broken many promisis to ourselves. we actualy had home recording in the 60s with reel to reel, and in the early 70s for a short time 8-traks. and the audio casset we had from about the mid 70s. when the first computers you could buy in a store without having to build from a kit (the kits were availabe from 1975 onward) came out in 77, audio cassettes were what was available as an external storage to save you data and programs (we call them aplications now that most have gotten way too large and complex for any one person to write for themselves) on. no the promise that was broken wasn't that the tecnological capability wouldn't develop, most of it, but rather in what we were told we could expect of how that tecnological capability would be applied. and again to a large extent it is our own lack of forthought as to the kind of incentives our priorities, and the REAL core values those priorities express that is to blame. i don't think any of us here are immagining some other all powerful they then our own defacto collective will and our own lack of foresight in choosing those priorities that have led to the conditions and circumstances of the world we now live in. or if they are, then of course i must aggree with your disagreeing with their nieve assumptions. if it IS that which you are begging to differ with. =^^= .../\...
dang fyl beat me too it, the big broken promise, that our children would grow up in a fare and just society and as far as ya'lls racist comments go, race has little to nothing to do with it anymore, if you think greed gives a rats ass what color you are think again, and if you want to blame the white race for things, you might also blame them for almost ending slavey world wide, or are the rich and the goverment only white when they are doing bad things ? ( that was a civil war not an uprising) and skip, no offence there bubba but your not realy thinking that through, the fact is most people in prisons are poor, and most people are poor because they didnt have the advantages of the wealthy, see where this is going? personaly i have met hundreds and even thousands of people and the majority are not racist, particularly among the whites. few succesfull blacks would agree with you, and there are many, unless they are "playing the race card" or just trieing to be the new twisted politicaly correct
We have amples of technology and oodles of intelligence. Now all we need is a smidgeon of wisdom and we may just have a bit of a future.
I sometimes wear a silver "all in one" suit that is very shiney, does that count? I am trying to get my family to decorate the inside of their houses like the base in the 70's SCI FI series "UFO" as well All I need now is my own helicopter and my own jetpack and I will be living your dream
they used to sell kits for autogyros in popular mechanics and machanics illustrated. as for jetpacks, the wee teeny little problem with them is that the weight of fuel you can carry on your back is just about enough to power it just long enough to jump accross one not too wide river. after that it's nothing but very heavy dead useless weight untill you can refill it again. i think even the military pretty much gave up on them for that reason. =^^= .../\...
