You’re guessing at what **Anne Neville ** meant to say.
I’ll confirm it, though. There may well be something special about three blocs.
I’m not sure what, game-theoretically-speaking, is supposed to happen in an n-way duel where n > 3, though. It’s been many years since my game theory class, God alone knows where my books from it are now, and a quick google didn’t turn up much.
I’m not sure just how many nuclear weapons one needs to qualify as a “bloc”, either…
Not quite blind luck. He chose Iapetus because its albedo was known to be significantly different on the different faces.
AFAIK, no SF writer ever predicted this damned infestation of blue elves screaming “MREE!!! MREE!! MREE!!” in our ears all day long every single day.
What?
Okay, I think we’ve lost the point. The critic thought Heinlein was correct, then pointed out that it was funny that Heinlein later backpedaled on what turned out to be his correct prediction.
Not exactlt “Mree”-shouting elves, but if you want SF about untouchable, perpetually talking nuisances that you can’t get rid of, read Fredric Brown’s classic Martian, Go Home!, or Margaret St. Clair’s Prott.
The major difference is that Brown’s Martians are Green, and sarcastic, while St. Clair’s Prott always want to talk about “…ing the…”
That sort of thing would be possible if there was any way to generate one-millionth of a nuclear explosion on demand. You’d have a rocket with a stupendous specific impulse; and if you had a high enough thrust/weight ratio as well, you get the fabled torch ship, with 1-G acceleration all the way to Titan and back.
Of course aside from the fact there’s no known way to do it, there’s also the slight problem of how to keep your ship from melting just from the reradiated heat of your exhaust stream. Or the fact that your ship’s exhaust amounts to an aimable nuclear blast.
Yeah, yeah. This idea is so old that Mad magazine published a satire about it back in the 1950’s.
Picture phoning’s not going to be killed by inconvenient glimpses – people will put masking tape over the lens, if nothing else. And if I keep a picture phone in my bathroom (and use it), I’ll lose the few friends i have pretty quick.
No Science Fiction story that I know of has ever mentioned an iPod…
Smurfing the smurf?
Maybe it’s because previous incarnations had some drawbacks.
Hey! Those could work…
I think picture phoning has been killed by the fact that no-one is interested in. I’ve had a 3g phone capable of video calls for well over a year. About one hour after I first powered it up I tried calling a friend of mine who had a similar phone, but it didn’t connect for some reason. Since then I have made 0 attempts to use the video call function, despite carrying my ‘videophone’ with me everywhere I go. Similarly, 0 people have tried to make a videocall to me.
Despite 3G phones being commonplace, I have seen precisely 1 instance of a videocall being made in the 5-6 years since the functionality was launched. Nowadays many 3G phones no longer even have the front-facing camera needed for videocalls.
Video phones are a solution to a requirement which seems not to exist. Text messages, on the other hand…
Sounds to me as if equipment unreliability is a better explanation than lack of interest. And most people I know don’t have any sort of picture phone hookup to not be interested in, so there’s not enough of a data pool to know how it’s received.
Did any of them predict the easing of getting credit for consumers (credit cards, easier-to-get mortgages, at least for a while, home equity loans, and the like), and the social consequences of it?
Sound Burger, anyone?
A pre-historic version of the Discman.
Heinlein (and I am a fan) predicted lots of stuff. I can dig into my collection if you need specific cites. My favorites:
- The Soviet Union will fail because their economic theory is f**ked.
- The Communists will take over the world because we’re not resisting them firmly enough.
On the other hand, he was a f**king genius, so much of what he had to say is still meaningful. His facination with “sex with his mother” (is that Panshin? in any case, see TMiaHM, all the Lazarus stories, etc.) is still a bit funky, IMHO. 
For Us the Living has something along those lines.
A graphic novel in the early 80’s (Ranxerox, the macho robot) had characters listening to music via small self-contained earbuds, tho it is conceivable that they were just radios/stereos…
L Frank Baum in “TIK-TOK OF OZ”, published 1914:
Also
Perhaps Heinlein read Baum when he was a kid?