Manned spaceflight.
I mean, we’ve had decades of grand plans and technological innovation…but year after year, the human attitude gets more like “awww, that costs too much! It’s too scawwy! It’s so risky that people could die? No way! We shouldn’t do anything that’s not completely safe for everyone forever! And we shouldn’t think about doing it when there are so many things to fix and feel guilty about on Earth, anyway!”
“…Deep space is a cold cold place,
And death’s my destination.”
I think wristwatches will come back, and then go away again, but maybe not within my lifetime. The reason wristwatches were so popular is that it’s inconvenient to have to pull something out of your pocket to check the time. The reason they went away is that it’s unnecessary to have a wristwatch when you’re also carrying a cell phone.
So, when phones get small and cheap enough, they’ll go back on our wrists (with an earpiece that’s pretty much in all the time). Then, they’ll get smaller still, and they’ll go somewhere else. Maybe entirely within the earpiece, maybe into computerized contacts like in Rainbows End, maybe removed from our persons entirely, if there are enough active sensors around all the time that you can just talk and let the network take it from there.
Three things:
-Newspapers: declining for years, the final death blow is the internet-who needs papers when you have the Drudge Report"?
-automobile yearly model “changes”-this hoary relic is about done
-conventional marriage-it is too costly (in event of divorce); I forsee marriages for 5-10 years, renewable at the end of the contract
Not gonna happen.
Too ingrained in Human nature.
[QUOTE=Anne Neville]
Paper timesheets. <snip>QUOTE]
Au contraire. My state govt organization recently (3 years ago) converted to SAP computerized time data entry for all its personnel. Now all 60 ee’s in our small section of it (9,000 ee’s total) have to submit a paper timesheet daily, indicating the time spent on each of potentially hundreds of tasks and their field locations. The locations have 8 digits each. The time entry clerk/receptionist/file clerk now has to spend all day every day entering the time, and we are having to buy more cabinets in which to file the paper for at least 3 years and find more room for the cabinets.
They also stopped giving the ee’s the stub off the directly-deposited paycheck but because so many folks (many of them field laborer types) DO NOT HAVE COMPUTERS with which to access the payroll deduction data, now a clerk has to print a separate 8 1/2 x 11 sheet and distribute it to each ee.
Read The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail Sellen & Richard Harper
Do you wear it upside down?
Me
How so? It wasn’t ‘ingrained’ in the Western world until the Catholic Church pounded ‘until death do us part’ into Dark Age pagan skulls.
The Straight Dope Message Boards Search Function
I forsee the end of Chinese restaurants without forks and sugar for your tea.
In fact, they will probably stop serving tea, except ice tea in the south.
This will happen when the Pepsi/McDonald/KFC conglomerate runs out of new formats.
Sigh.
Rest assured, it won’t.
Anything that uses moving parts as part of a memory storage device. Hard drives, CDs, DVDs. Hard Drives will be the first to go, because there’s no distribution infrastructure for material on hard drive. The minute solid-state drives are faster and cheaper, the hard drive is dead.
A CD contains up to 640 MB of data. A 512MB thumb drive can now be had for about $5. A couple more generations from now (say 5 years), and these things will be a buck. A 2GB thumb drive can be had for $15. Five years from now, you’ll be able to get 8GB drives for the same price or lower. That’s about 2 DVD’s worth of data.
I predict that 10 years from now, buying media will be done several ways - none of which involve devices with moving parts. One will be to just download it. For those who want physical copies, you’ll go into a music store and buy your album, and the clerk will download it onto a thumb drive and give it to you. If you bring in your own, maybe you’ll save a buck on a CD or a couple of bucks on a DVD, or you can just buy one from them pre-loaded. In fact, you probably won’t even go to a store for this - just a kiosk in a mall. insert your thumb drive, select your album, pay your $5, and take your music.
Also, videotape will soon be dead. The VCR is already on its death throes, and hard drive and flash based camcorders are starting to eat away market share from Mini-DV, Hi-8, and DVD-based camcorders.
It’s going to be a solid state world soon.
These days, the Chinese are communists in name only. In practice, they’re pure capitalists, even moreso than the United States.
No. I wear it on my left wrist, and take the pulse with my right hand. Why would I wear it upside down? (You do mean with the watch face toward the inside of my wrist, right?)
Cyprus is not a Communist state, although the last election was won by the Communist Party candidate; he hasn’t turned the country into a Communist economy.
I think he was referring to the image of nurses with watches hanging upside down from their breast pockets.
Sob!
I can’t go on.
Telephone answering machines are almost extinct. They’ll be an odd site in 1980s/1990s movies.
The Pap smear. Once the HPV vaccine takes hold (as I suspect it will within the next couple of decades) and nearly everyone gets it, cervical cancer will be so incredibly rare that it won’t be worthwhile to screen for it anymore. I suspect that girls being born right now will probably get Paps, but their daughters won’t.