Big Big Question

In my ideal world, I would have portable phone, music player, GPS, with unlimited storage (stored securely and redundantly online somewhere) that would hold all of data and programs.

I would be able to approach any computer/terminal and that computer would auto-magically (blue tooth or wirelessly) access my data and programs for me so I could be running my desktop anywhere from the little device in my pocket.

Come on engineers, get to it.

Even though we all know that the world is not going to end when CERN fires up the Large Hadron Collider on 9/10/08 at 700 GMT, what are your plans for your time between now and then? Is there anything you feel like you need to do before the world ends science begins?

(For the record, I read that they’ll just be accelerating some particles on 9/10- actual collisions will begin in the following weeks.)

Telephones are beyond ubiquitous, but some people spend a lot of time on them (by choice or by necessity) and some hardly use them at all. Which makes me wonder:

Do you remember when you first started using a phone regularly?
Did you like talking on the phone from an early age? Did you dislike it? Why?
Have you ever done phone-heavy work? Did you get into it on purpose? Did it change your non-work phone habits?

As the world changes around us, we tend to get used to the “new”; this is especially true of those who are younger, and never really knew the “old”. Over time, this leads to a situation where it may be difficult to imagine having to live in a world without the things we today take for granted.

With that in mind, the question I pose is a simple one: what recent advancement has “spoiled” you, to the point where you simply cannot imagine having to live in a world where it did not exist?

This does not have to be limited to tech toys and gadgets; it could be social, political, or really anything you could imagine. If pressed for a definition of “recent”, I would say “within 10 years of your date of birth”; so, within your own lifetime, or close to it.

So what is it for you?

The internet will never be free of spam and shilling and astroturfers — human nature plus a profit motive is a pretty resilient thing — but are we past the worst of it, or are we just in the eye of the storm?

Are things going to get worse? What ground do you see the spammers making? Or are the hard problems solved and it’s all going to get better from here — gmail’s apt handling of email spam-filtering as a promising sign for the future?

With the increasing ubiquitousness of keyboard- and keypad- and touchscreen-driven devices in daily life, and with that trend toward non-writing input methods likely to continue over time, is handwriting (in its various forms) on the way out? When, or why not?