It's fucking 2010

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

It's 2010. Weren't we supposed to have, you know, affordable flying cars ten years ago? Futurism has let us down again.

The main modes of transportation are still based on fire, and mostly variations on the theme of the steam engine (we've done away with the steam mostly, but still). Our computers are, by and large, as finicky as they were in the early 1980s -- we just have our friendly neighbourhood systems programmers to make everything look nice for the end users.

Tesla -- both quite a genius and quite mad (and it is sometimes difficult to tell which is which) -- managed to get better range out of 'free energy' devices than we can now (we probably shouldn't, of course -- nobody wants to blow out all the wifi receivers on the block), and heavier-than-air load-bearing craft based on the Hall effect is for now science fiction.

Maybe it's just me, but most of the stuff around seems pretty anachronistic lately. It's not even a necessary anachronism, either -- not only has the notoriously hairy intel x86 architecture survived, but it has become the de-facto standard even for macs, growing more and more bags on its side between long mode, multiple cores, various and sundry incompatible domain-specific auxiliary instruction sets, etc. rather than much of anyone switching over to some architecture that supports these things cleanly (MIPS? PPC? ARM? Well, maybe not ARM. Nobody likes to implement software division routines). Hybrid cars aren't nearly the improvement they are hyped to be, and electric cars aren't worth it either. Hydrogen fuel cells kind of fail a priori because of the second law of thermodynamics. I don't mean to go all Gernsback Continuum, but at the same time, I feel like 2010 really shouldn't be (and doesn't need to be) a slightly smaller slightly faster version of 1996.

Wtf, future?

[Cramulus]

IT'S 2010, WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE LASER BEAMS?

I EXPECTED WAY MORE LASERS.

[AFK]

And where are the teleportation devices???  C'mon Al Gore.  Who the fuck cares about an electric car.  If I can just fucking beam myself from my kitchen to my office, now that's green! 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I seriously want teleportation.

However, most of the time I are amaze by all the technology and how much things have actually changed in my lifetime.

[maphdet]

If I can just fucking beam myself from my kitchen to my office, now that's green! 

Yes.
Most agreed with the above.

Ohoh and and the automated food machines, please!~

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm still waiting for vat meat.

[Template]

How are hydrogen fuel cells worse at energy storage and conversion than rechargeable batteries of other sorts?

[Remington]

IT'S 2010, WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE LASER BEAMS?

I EXPECTED WAY MORE LASERS.

You just have to take the right college courses.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Cram, I must note that many children's toys now come equipped with lasers, which, when Mario discovered this, first made him completely flabbergasted, and then made him proceed to shoot me in the ass with a Nerf gun every time I turned my back.

They also make superb cat toys.

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It's 2010. Weren't we supposed to have, you know, affordable flying cars ten years ago? Futurism has let us down again.

No, it probably saved our lives.  I don't trust humans to drive on the ground, let along fly while texting/calling/being dumbasses.

[Salty]

I'm waiting for some kind of change in our reproductive skills. We should totally keep sex, but drop the whole nine-month gestation thing. It's bad for women's health for starters, and a pain in general.

Pods, people. Pods. We must build them.

For the children.

[Cramulus]

Louis CK has this to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkusicUL2s

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

How are hydrogen fuel cells worse at energy storage and conversion than rechargeable batteries of other sorts?

Hydrogen fuel cell works kinda like this: hydrogen goes into a box, and the box strips the bare proton away from the bare electron. The electron goes through the circuit, rejoins its brother, hydrogen goes out, meets oxygen, and we have water. Problem is, the easiest way to generate hydrogen is to use an electrolyzer. By the second law of thermodynamics, the hydrogen fuel cell is an overcomplicated contraption that uses a bottle of flammable and highly reactive gas to turn a good battery into a slightly less good battery.

Now, it's quite possible that in some situations a hydrogen fuel tank and fuel cell will be so much lighter than the number of batteries needed to move the same thing that the lost energy is worth it. This is, however, in comparison to an electric car, and with the exception of the Tesla, electric cars generally suck at everything (except for transporting golf clubs). It also does not change the flammability risk, and I figure a tank of hydrogen is probably more flammable than a bunch of nickel metal hydride or lithium-ion batteries.

The other thing, of course, is that you probably want to carry a tank of oxygen around too, in order to make sure that the hydrogen binds to oxygen rather than to something else in the air that will turn nasty. That, of course, makes the whole unit even more flammable, and further makes you wonder why you bothered electrolyzing in the first place -- and then you remember that you can't electrolyze on-board because then you'd just be carrying a battery with more capacity than the fuel cell that you should really be using instead.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'm waiting for some kind of change in our reproductive skills. We should totally keep sex, but drop the whole nine-month gestation thing. It's bad for women's health for starters, and a pain in general.

Pods, people. Pods. We must build them.

For the children.

No, because then it would be even easier for assholes to have even more children, because it would be easy and it wouldn't hurt. It's not really bad for a woman's health assuming she is healthy to begin with and takes care of herself... and doesn't crank them out year after year.

I'm more in favor of male pregnancy, and a genetic alteration that requires BOTH people to consciously desire a pregnancy for it to be able to happen.

[Triple Zero]

ooh that would be pretty cool, yeah.