The Madness of King George Jetson?
I don’t recall this ever being confirmed, but I always thought that was for dramatic reasons – similar to the way The West Wing and House always had people conversing while walking, “to give the illusion of the narrative moving forward.” Also, when they wanted to give the impression of that Picard or whoever was slammed with work, they’d have his desk cluttered with pads given him by various subordinates, to take the place of tons of paper reports
Still waiting for my autowash. Also my Leelu Dallas Multipass.
Lady Jane Grey, HOT!
Well, moderately good looking, in a favorable light.
Sedation air travel would be pretty nice too.
On the original series Battlestar Galactica, there was an episode “The Man With Nine Lives” in which a character was using a diagnostic test to find out who orphans were related to, so that they could be reunited with their families, which is something DNA testing can do now.
Specifically Starbuck (an orphan) was trying to see if a con artist was really his father. IIRC all the test could tell is that they were members of the same tribe, and related in the male line. It couldn’t couldn’t actually prove paternity.
On similar lines, I saw an episode of Old!Trek recently – “The Conscience of the King,” I believe – in which Kirk was trying to figure out if an actor he’d recently met was actually Kodos the Executioner. He had photographs of both and was examining them on screen. Looking it, I thought, “Jethro Gibbs wouldn’t even be bothering with that shit; he’d have had Abby running facial recognition software from the get-go and the entire episode would have been over with in five minutes.”
Actually, It did prove that the con artist was Starbuck’s biological father. However, Starbuck wanted to quit being a warrior to spend time with his dad, so the bio dad (played by Fred Astaire BTW) told Cassie to say that they actually weren’t father and son, since he didn’t feel worthy and also because Starbuck was more needed as a warrior.
Not to mention, hello DNA test?
I thought of Max Headroom just today. I was helping my two-year-old son Skype with his grandmother, when the babysitter rang the doorbell. I answered the door with my laptop in my hand, and “introduced” grandma (a talking head on a laptop screen) to the flesh-and-blood babysitter.
Perhaps the oddest thing was that no one thought it was odd at all.
The DNA of the criminal would definitely be on file, but it wouldn’t surprise me if using someone’s DNA without their permission counts as an illegal search in the future.
That’s how Heinlein handled almost everything in his fiction. It just was, moving on now… look at the mobile phone in 1948’s Space Cadet; throwaway gadgetry never mentioned again. (And with some very accurate social observations about its use, as well…)
Compare that with NivenPournelle’s Oath of Fealty, which was a nonstop gee-whiz gadgetfest about future super-technology. I was rereading it recently when I came across the description of the phone the head technology honcho had in his apartment. He had to stay connected all the time, and didn’t qualify for one of the multimillion dollar communication implants, so he… had his phone on a 50-foot cord.
Such vision… and in 1978, yet, when cordless phone prototypes were already around.
I think of Max pretty much every day - the creators got so many things right in that short blaze of brilliance. Have a Roku at hand? Spend ten minutes browsing the channel list. It makes the krazy-wild-nutso channels of 20 minutes into the future look tame.
I pointed this out to one of the creative team. He just sighed and said, “Prophets are never honored in their own time.” Then we went back to watching The Dog Channel.
No, not a channel for dog lovers. A channel for dogs.
They’re a great deal more common in Europe than in the US. We had them in a couple of rental flats. Wasn’t too impressed - very slow (3+ hours for a small load) and the clothes came out less than clean and not entirely dry. I guess if you’re very tight on space and light on need they’re a good option, but here even very small apartments have room for separate units.
That was in Goldfinger.* What continues to amaze me is how he was able to get real-time video coverage of the bad guys being dropped into the ocean by a helicopter on the dashboard of his Toyota in You Only Live Twice. Apparently, someone had some very sophisticated reconnaissance satellites in 1967.
*Batman did something similar with Catwoman in 1966, though he tracked her using radioactivity rather than a GPS unit
Microtapes. They were called microtapes. Apparently, 23rd century duotronic technology couldn’t handle either discs or USBs. :rolleyes:
Kodos apparently faked his own death before relief forces arrived, and the body was never positively identified (burned to a crisp). As to whether it would have been on file prior to him becoming “The Executioner,” it could have been if he had ever gone through a transporter (unless, of course, a person’s pattern is erased immediately afterward).
This makes a good question of ethics and personal privacy: If the authorities can require your hand- and footprints to be taken at birth, why should they not have a record of your DNA?
I bought one from an Italian company for my apartment in Moscow. Not only was it slow and a poor dryer, the heat from the drying unit cracked and crazed the paint on the top of the machine.
For some reason, European washers run in start-stop-start-stop-start-stop cycles. It does take them at least two hours to do a load that North American washers can finish in 30 minutes.
There is a Twilight zone episode from 1964 called “Number 12 looks just like you” set in the distant future of 2000 where people undergo “transformation” to become more beautiful. I don’t think plastic surgery has reached that capability yet, but it os probably better than 50 years ago.