Really? I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t have one.
Assuming the fundies don’t continue to protest the HPV vaccine on the grounds that it’ll make girls more likely to have sex. :rolleyes:
Yet.
I think he means that most people will either have wireless plans, or the voicemail will be handled by the phone company. I had that even in 1996 for my landline, so I could get my messages from anywhere.
Ah. I’m not a nurse, though; I’m an EMT. I try not to have stuff hanging from my shirt pocket or from around my neck - patients tend to grab at it.
I’ve called out to quite a few clients who still have a traditional answering machine. The beep and delay of those are unique.
But, in aggregate, an answering machine is cheaper than phone company supplied voice mail service, and I believe that most models, these days, allow for remote access of the messages. Certainly I had no trouble finding one that did that when I last bought one in the mid 90s.
The concept of the ‘housewife’. Takehome pay will continue to shrink until it will no longer be possible for two people to subsist on one income at any but the highest of upper-management positions.
Tie clips.
Car stereo stores. I see the stereo being part of the PC that will be built into the dashboard of every car, so what would be left to replace? Speakers?
Conventional radio. Its free… so it needs to be privatized so that you will have to pay for it. Some regulation will come along to allow current radio users to rent a converter-boxes for only $150 a month, which will at that time be equal to 3 Euros.
Freeways. Once GPS and EZ-pass things are mandated to be in all cars, the government will sat-track you and bill you for every single mile you drive as a hand dandy convenience. Some crony will tout it as part of his/her plan to ‘eliminate toll booths’.
Camping will require a license and be discouraged. It builds too much self-reliance and dissapates the fear of being ‘off the grid’ that the goobermint desires so as to maintain total control over us.
America as a super-power. Once enough structure is put in place to maintain control and ensure an orderly sucking-dry of our assets/resources, America will become a very poor nation struggling through the worst Depression in its 300 year history. Think breadlines, food-riots, and the horrors of starvation and death from lack of the most basic healthcare. Homeless communities… Bush-villes… will undergo regular pogroms and beat-downs that will be justified by vague rumors of ‘Al Cada’ cells among the homeless.
The entire Bush family moving to a military compound in Paraguay to live in oppulent-but-secure luxury. This will be shortly after Paraguay officially renegs on its extradition treaty with the US.
I might say that answering machines with tapes will disappear, but not answering machines altogether.
We sell heaps of them at work, and most cordless phones have one built into the base station now; especially if you’re getting a set-up with more than one handset. I’d hardly say they’re “almost extinct”, although they should be when you consider everyone has either a cellphone or Telstra MessageBank.
Analog recording for serious purposes: The tin-eared audiophiles will always rant about how what they can’t hear is the best, but as solid-state storage becomes cheaper, more reliable, and denser (more bits/in^3) it will be very difficult to justify the bulky, slow, and electrically-inefficient tapes used by professionals.
Disk drives: By disk drives I mean spinning platters and moving heads. They’ve already had an amazing run, but solid-state storage is only getting better and disks aren’t getting quieter or more physically reliable. (Leastways, not fast enough to get your hopes up about their long-term prospects.)
The Windows desktop monoculture: Microsoft isn’t going away and neither is Windows, but the era of MS and Windows owning the desktop is already over. Now we just have to wait for the trends to play out. (And no, MS won’t own the coming handheld revolution, either.)
Mainstream opposition to nuclear power: The rational environmentalists realize that the only serious alternative, coal, is worse. The irrational ones are getting more and more marginalized.
The RIAA and the MPAA: This is my big, blowout prediction, but it’s also one of the ones I feel surest about. The RIAA and the MPAA have no more cards left: Their laws are only loosely enforced, their DRM is broken in months at the outside, and the courts are getting sore wroth and full sick of their crap. The fact they’ve been hoarding all of the money collected through lawsuits has precipitated their own artists to sue them. What’s worse is their abuse of copyright law has caused a generation to grow up with nothing but contempt for copyrights in general. Laws are not enforced by policemen and courts: Laws are enforced by the individual’s own mind (“the cop in your head”) or they are entirely unenforceable.
I don’t see that happening. Microwaves cooking is very different in its results from stove cooking and conventional oven cooking. Try making stir fry in your microwave. Try baking a cake in a microwave.
I came in here to say this. I can get a digital answering machine for $15 new at discount stores that runs rings around the $100+ machines from just a couple of years ago, with remote access ‘n’ all that jazz. Cheaper than a voice mail plan, by far. I agree that it’ll be the death of the landline that kills the answering machine… not sure if we’ll see that happen for a while, since legacy communications systems tend to linger for decades (telegrams, Telex). (I’ll be one of this century’s versions of the older folks who keep on renting their rotary phones-- I can’t see ridding myself completely of a landline.)
I have a feeling USENET will wither away to meaninglessness; message boards have already usurped the majority of text forums, and P2P/Rapidshare/other file-sharing methods are taking out the binary postings. It’ll linger, of course, but it will become more difficult to get good providers.
And, I might have missed it in an earlier posting-- I think we’ll see more big American car marques disappear, like Oldsmobile and Plymouth before. I’d honestly be surprised if all three of the “big three” still exist in a decade.
No? You’ll note that I didn’t say *why *it would disappear. Even if it is just natural warming (which I don’t agree with, incidentally), it would still be a huge ecological change. Are you saying that there hasn’t been a decrease in the average size of the polar ice cap from the historical average?
Thanks for your reassurance, but I’m afraid I don’t share your blithe optimism, unless you can back it up with some facts. That would be a matter for another thread, though.
They will change the food to all microwave. Conventional stoves/ovens will be pricey add-ons for the rich.
I predict just the opposite. As the maturity level declines in young adults there will be a market for clubs where social standards are met.
It won’t happen until digital camera’s can duplicate film quality. It’s OK for home use but digital cannot compete against film for uncontrolled lighting situations. Not even close.
Do you cook much Jim ? I’m just wondering if you have tried microwaving a hamburger or trying to get French fries crisp in a microwave.
I’ve tried cooking a hamburger once in a microwave, the result turned out to be some sort of gray mess that I wouldn’t feed to my dog. 
As for my prediction I think Sam Stone has it right. Solid state all the way baby.
No, and I am the wave of the future. We will heat pre-cooked food, and learn to like hot grey messes. 
That’s either already happened or it will never happen. Remember: Fidonet and Gopher (look 'em up) still exist and have user bases. They’re both too cheap to die, and I think Usenet exists in that same area. Shifting a mostly-text medium around is so cheap a mostly-hobbyist or only-hobbyist user community can easily foot the bill, and people still hold in high regard the things only Usenet can provide you (complete control over the threading model, complete control over the filtering in force, complete control over the UI, anarchy, etc.).