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Comment by cowboyhero | Hacker News Reader

It's a good post and it reminds me a little bit of those old tv commercials from Qwest and AT&T about how you'll be able to "watch any movie ever made in any language" in a dumpy roadside motel or 'send a fax from the beach' that were run in the 1990s.

But that's not really science fiction to me. That's just iterative and incremental improvements on a global network.

There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs).

There's not a whole helluva lot different between a Mac Performa and the iMac I'm using to type this message (drive bay, hard drive, ram, cpu, etc. Similar designs and similar interfaces).

Yeah, Google Maps and GPS are neat but a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.

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Yes, and running a marathon is just putting one foot in front of the other over and over. Everything is incremental. It's how we get from "here to there" in every conceivable sense, but it's ok to step back sometimes and marvel at how far we've come. Just because we're not colonizing planets doesn't diminish all of our other accomplishments.

The glass is half full. I'm certain of it.

This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

I'm surprised you don't think computers have changed much. To me, sitting at a desk staring at a big CRT while using dialup AOL is a completely different experience from sitting in bed with a laptop or on the couch with an iPad watching YouTube over wifi.

"LA to Paris in 45 minutes"

The weird thing about flying is that the bottle neck has become the "security" measures, flight delays, and all the other time spent from leaving your home to when you actually arrive at your destination.

Speeding up all of those steps probably has even more effect on door to door travel time than reducing the amount of time the plane has to be in the air.

For some trips, yes. The travel to the airport and time through security and boarding are fixed. Taking a 1 hour flight from Detroit to Chicago almost isn't worth it when you can drive it in 4 hours, because you've got probably an hour to the airport and an hour of waiting around at the airport to board, then more time at the other end getting more transport to your final destination.

But those same ~2 hours prep pale in comparison to, say, LAX->SYD. :)

Every time I make that trip on the A380, I'm Louis CK for the whole trip. I'm going as far as I can go without starting to come back again in one night and all I have to do is sit here and eat the snacks and watch my choice of movies on the tv in my seat. Bump future.

Oh yeah, LA to Sydney would be a good fit for a sub-orbital airliner. Maybe in 16 years?

When man is walking on Mars, you'll be thinking the same thing- "meh, incremental improvement on space shuttles"

LA to Paris in 45 minutes is about Mach 9.8. The X-43A can do that. [1] Future, now, etc.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-43

Sure, but the legroom in the X-43A sucks...

I hate to do this but: it still beats having to deal with the airlines...

> a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.

But these ideas are not unimaginably far from what we presently can do.

Previous sci-fi ideas were unbelievable. I'd like to hear some ideas which are unbelievable again. Everything I heard so far just seems quite sensible and achievable.

There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs).

No, the hardware may not have changed much, but the usage of computers in general society has changed, a lot. due to the internet.

When Windwos 3.1 was popular, odds are you couldn't use it to order cinema tickets at your local cinema, buy pizza, order your shopping, send a message to your mother, or watch the latest film as soon as it came out at whatever time suited you.

Now, when Windows 7 is popular, you can do all these things.

And oh god i had to install it from floppies. I think windows NT was 20 of them.

"There's not a whole helluva lot different between a Mac Performa and the iMac I'm using to type this message"

There's a lot more difference between that Performa and an iPhone.

I don't know why you're being downvoted so savagely. You've just set the bar high. I do disagree with you, though. The internet and its potential still amazes me...

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