Chie wrote:I'll say this though, I miss the days when we looked forward to what the future might bring. It seems that technological advancement has stagnated and all people have got to look forward to now is the release of the next iThing whilst poking fun at the past, as though we are the SMASH robots looking down at another world. Haven't you noticed that on the TV? Lots of mulling over the past; very little about the future. The stagnation is reflected in fashion, music, films (remakes of the good stuff I mean - only not done to the same standard). There's just no perceptible hope or aspiration anymore. It's like what we have now is good enough and if it gets boring we can amuse ourselves with the past. So the next iPad will have twice as many gigabytes of storage as the last one and the resolution of Super HD TV will be marginally bigger than HD. Wow.
As Peggy Lee once sang: is that all there is?
Where's the future? Seriously, I'm considering taking Ronnie's advice and becoming a pot-smoking, tree-dwelling hippy, because most days I wake up now thinking oh my God, it's the same old thing every day! Climate change this (been going on since the 70s), terrorism that (that's been going on since the dawn of time), oh a politican used the term 'date rape' when he meant consensual rape. That's the most interesting thing that's happened all week, let's make a song and dance about it; oh no, wait, an ice sheet just melted. Jesus...
I don't recall him telling anyone to live in a tree or be a hippy, whatever that is, just to smoke some pot and relax.
The irony is that weed is pretty expensive as habits go, so it tends to be professional people who smoke it to unwind, or kids who have no tangible expenses aside from their mobile bill.
In answer to your observation about predicting the future - wouldn't you agree that technology is currently developing faster than consumers can consume it?
Tomorrow's World heralded CDs and microcomputers - but up to that point, things you had in your house in the 80s were largely the same as things in your house in the 70s.
That's not the case now. Who would have imagined tablets and netbooks and even the internet? Flexible OLCD displays, 3D TVs? The only thing left to imagine is teleporting and holography, and both are being developed.
Unless you've got some gems you'd like to share with us?
And as to Ken Clarke, lets not get into that one, shall we? Suffice to say that if you're going to make comments about rape during a phone in (which included a rape victim), its probably best to get your terms correct - and "date rape" was certainly not the right phrase to use in the context of what he was trying to say.
