It's a tragedy of the commons. Daily Mail readers like parent poster are convinced the country is going to the dogs. Since many of them have the power, money and/or influence to do some small thing such as set up private CCTV surveillance of public land, or deny public space to a disenfranchised group (only by ageism of course - watch for a proper fight if they try this on a race-related basis), between them they can damage our public spaces and society. The same people will write the council demanding double yellow lines outside their house, and write to the council bemoaning lack of on street parking near their favourite shop.
Eventually you end where we are now - with local councils using anti-terroism laws to create mini intelligence agencies for the school admissions system. That is not a joke. Google it.
the free shipping to the UK and the aggressive price point was what got my pre-order. A while back I was looking at the FitBit, which specifically said 'we only ship to US right now'. FitBit should partner with a shipping specialist, since the device is small, and people like me would be willing to pay quite a lot of postage.
Yes. Online grocery shopping with dedicated delivery services is huge here (in the UK). Imagine how much bigger it would be when you could order stuff in much smaller batches at more regular intervals? Loaf of bread and a pint of milk to home at 7am, and a sandwich to your office at 1pm?
If you include the postal system and all those little trips people make, we are moving stuff between various hubs and houses several times a day anyway, often with dedicated trips using our hugely inefficient, slow and polluting vehicles. We could really get the eco crowd onside with this one.
The only thing that prevents from thinking about this idea in the same way as flying cars is our water delivery network. if we could build that 100+ years ago (albeit at gigantic expense), perhaps we have finally reached the technology level where we can expand to an extremely high-speed automated 24-hour postal service.
When you think about it, society is already curving back towards more delivery services and less 'go and fetch' services - I know I now do more shopping online than I do in an actual shop, and those thousands of dedicated supermarket delivery trucks (and attendant drivers_ are a huge saving waiting to made, alongside the postmen.
What we need is for the government to step in and finance a really large scale trial in co-operation with the postal service and the various home delivery services. Mail, pizza and groceries would be enough of a tipping point I think.
Exactly. The point of this is not one celeb who's number inadvertantly became public domain, it's the rest of us poor sods who are forced to use our unique contact information like phone numbers and mailing addresses to get regular services, and then watch that information get bought and sold until it ends up in the hands of scumbags, at which point the junk mail, automated phone calls and spam texts become a denial of service attack which is very hard to guard against.
autonomous (even flying) cars need HW and SW advances. People have been banging on about brain-computer interfaces and augumented reality for years, both of which needs some serious hardware and design advances to be really usable (and would people be happy with wearing an OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator? lol). Futurist Michio Kaku reckons we might be close to force fields and telepathy.
It's a tragedy of the commons. Daily Mail readers like parent poster are convinced the country is going to the dogs. Since many of them have the power, money and/or influence to do some small thing such as set up private CCTV surveillance of public land, or deny public space to a disenfranchised group (only by ageism of course - watch for a proper fight if they try this on a race-related basis), between them they can damage our public spaces and society. The same people will write the council demanding double yellow lines outside their house, and write to the council bemoaning lack of on street parking near their favourite shop.
Eventually you end where we are now - with local councils using anti-terroism laws to create mini intelligence agencies for the school admissions system. That is not a joke. Google it.