Pay phones, if they’re not gone already.
The downside is if you lose your computer, you lose every single one of your songs and movies.
The remedy for this is to have some kind of agreement where the company in charge of distributing the media will give you all your songs and movies back for free. But, for instance, when my hard drive crashed and all of my iTunes songs that were downloaded were lost, I had to re-download them and pay for them again. “All purchases can only be downloaded once.”
Bullshit. Shit like that is why I like having CDs around.
It’s also a hell of a lot easier for me to fiddle with CDs and the tracks on them while driving than do the same with an iPod. CDs are big and easy to grab out of my CD visor - iPods are tiny and difficult to fumble around with. Looking at it in order to select what song I want, and using the touch-buttons or whatever the hell they are, would take my attention away from the road. Whereas it’s super easy for me to just grab a CD and push the big fat clunky buttons on my car’s CD player to select the track that I want to hear.
The northern white rhino maybe fully and for sure in the wild (Unless there is an effort at some point to reintroduce them from zoos).
Almost all types of paralysis and blindness and the way we do organ transplants from living and dead people
Except possibly in the airport or other places where people sometimes don’t have access to their cells.
Communism. At least in terms of actual governments. It’s down to five countries and it’s not thriving in any of them.
I’ve long predicted the internet would by now spell the end of:
- Home shopping networks
- Phonebooks
- Phone sex lines
So far, I’m 0 for 3.
I’m no big technical person (except for kites that is), but I think that audio and video home entertainment devices will dispense with moving parts entirely, with cd’s and dvd’s being replaced by something like a memory stick in a home computer.
No more moving parts to break or otherwise wear out.
after reading some recent financials…I’d have to say social security and medicare.
eek
Clubs such as the Moose, Lions or Elks. In most of the ones I’m familiar with all the members are over 60 years old, and they almost never have new members.
I think the institution of marriage is going to undergo some kind of radical change. Its traditional form is less relevant all the time, and one this trend reaches critical mass something will have to change.
The SDMB poster called mystified expert.
Depends - most people here will continue to use 'em for broadband for some time yet.
Good one. Convents, too. The convents in the Netherlands are already pretty much all old-folks homes, and will soon lose the last of the nuns and monks that inhabited them to old age.
The US penny and nickel are gasping for breath; there’s already a law forbidding bulk export of them, as the metal in them is worth more than the face value, and production costs just make them even more unsustainable.
Can openers will become anachronisms, as more manufacturers switch to flip-tops.
A lot of species will dissappear, though a few might still be in zoos. Things don’t look good for the resplendent quetzal, the mountain gorilla, polar bears, the aforementioned white rhino, or the Bengal tiger.
What we recognize as photocopiers will be gone; hardcopies will be made by something closer to a combo digital camera/fax printout.
I agree that “download once” policies are bullshit and iTunes will never get one penny from me because of that. Thankfully, not all companies have that policy. For instance, I’m a big fan of eMusic, which tracks all of your downloads and allows you to re-download previous purchases free of charge. It’s saved me a few times when I got a few corrupt files and once when I accidentally deleted an entire MP3 album. Sadly, I think the big labels, which aren’t on eMusic, are too greedy to allow this type of user agreement.
Cyprus isn’t a communist nation by any stretch of the imagination. Free enterprise is strong, there. They may have elected a “communist government”, but, what does that really mean?
I’m not sure what communism means in China these days, apart from the rule of the Communist Party: they seem to have embraced free enterprise pretty completely.
We may soon see the end of photographic film. The Polaroid Corporation has announced they are ending production of instant cameras and film, can the good old 35mm be far behind as more and more use digital mediums?
Real Hotel/Motel room keys that are actually keys.
Most have been replaced by those credit-card like keys that sometimes work. Give me a real metal key with the Hotel/Motel name on a giant fob anyday.
Glad I just bought a bunch on them on E-Bay before they’re all gone.
There are still people making valves and vacuum tubes, so it stands to reason than in 2100 it will still be possible to get 35mm film and there will still be places that will process and develop it.
Sure, there might only be four of them in all of Australia (One each in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane, and the last in somewhere really improbable like Launceston or Coober Pedy or something), but I think 35mm film will be with us for quite some time to come.
I worry that the sport of Target Shooting will die out in Australia in the next 100 years. A combination of Government interference, Tree Huggery, expense, and the lack of kids getting involved in the sport (because their parents don’t want them anywhere near something as evil as guns :rolleyes: ) mean that I reckon it’s going to be the Hunters, the Clay Target guys, and the Collectors by 2100, with a small group of elderly Target Shooters who all have to fly to Birdsville any time they want to fire their rifles because there aren’t any other ranges left.
I’d dearly love to be proven wrong on this one, though.
The one that I do worry about is an end to cheap international travel- a return flight from Sydney to Los Angeles is about AUD$1200, which is an extremely reasonable price to be transported literally halfway across the planet.
With fuel prices going up the way they are, and no aircraft designed to run on alternative fuels entering service that I’m aware of, I can only see air transport getting a lot more expensive in the future, to the point where people don’t bother and it all ends up like the 1930s where going anywhere cost a fortune and took periods of time best measured on a calendar…