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Out of context: Reply #661
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- GeorgesII0
"Oh hell no, the first mobile phones are nearly 30 years old. I remember lunchboxes and carphones, and people with ham radio phone patches or even carrying around CB radios.
I have a gigabyte smaller than my thumbnail, and much more if I'd want to pay for it.
It takes me seconds to upload massive amounts of data. I have a gadget that talks to satellites and tells me where I'm standing on the planet. I have a half a dozen digital cameras. Sometimes I carry around about half a dozen miniaturized color displays.
We're bypassing optical discs for network-cloud and solid state storage. Up soon is holographic discs storing a terabyte on a business card, or several terabytes on a CD/DVD sized media. Other even denser quantum effects promise denser storage media, and the memristor is totally straight out of SF.
Drives are getting bigger and smaller all the time. Batteries are getting smaller. I have a dinky little hyperthreading dual-core motherfucking supercomputer in my lap that's now a low-powered, economical netbook. This shit is fucking ridiculous compared to my Apple 2 or my CP/M based portable "laptop", sort of a pre-cursor to a netbook with only 32k of user storage.
A few years ago some dumb-ass two wheeled electric scooter came out that is, really, totally sci fi no matter how impractical and expensive it is.
We have walking bipedal robots that talk and recognize faces.
Some egotistical maniac of a mathemetician just launched a fairly good natural-language parsing AI data service, even if it has an entirely unhuman hardon for numbers.
But you want a fucking jet pack. Ok.
You know why you can't have a fucking jet pack? Because you can't handle it. You're not fast enough yet. You're not evolutionarily evolved enough. Sorry, but it's true, you fat sloth monkey. You don't have the twitch skills.
It's ok. I'm not ready for it either. Neither is 99.9% of humanity. Sure, go make a few billion dollars, invent a plausible jetpack, release it at a price cheaper than a car tomorrow.
It will be a disaster. Most of us can't handle the 3D navigation skills required even given a suitable power source and reliability. It would be the biggest transportation massacre ever. There would be bodies falling out of the sky through the thin paper roof of your house every fucking day.
Yeah, you could solve the flaming, flying death problem computationally with smart systems - but would you trust a generally publicly programmed system that was programmed by monkeys that couldn't safely pilot their own jet packs?
That's why you don't have a jetpack. Because you're not ready for it.
If you were you could strap a mechanical joystick to a big honking ducted fan and a lawnmower and fly yourself all over the place, but since flying and balancing on a gimbled thrust-vectored fanbelt like some kind of aerial pogo-stick isn't natural for you, you can't. Yet.
Keep riding rollercoasters, bungie jumping and jumping on trampolines and playing 3D first-person games and maybe your grandkids or great grandkids will find it boring and totally natural. Try hang-gliding first or something.
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