This isn't limited to the high-tech stuff we all love and know. Witness the asinine bans on e-cigarettes being instituted around the country. They seem to be based on the idea that "it looks like smoking analog cigarettes, so it must be just as bad for you and everyone else." Or, "some e-cigarettes have candy flavors, therefore they are being marketed to children" which completely ignores the fact that some adults like those flavors, too. No e-cigarette bans are based on science, or evidence.

I would volunteer for that one-way mission to Mars!

Of course the trip better not take too long, because of the Alzheimer's progression. If I get there too late, I might make a fool out of myself on the mission:

"Hi, Mars, Bob Flemstein, big fan! I know you're crazy busy with us suicidal visitors and everything, but...could you sign? I don't wanna be that guy, but..."

I worked for Apple in the early 90's, when they were opening their first sites in Austin. Our group was eventually moved there (and I'm still there, in a suburb) from Campbell, CA. Anyway, at the time there was a lot of internal marketing around "why you would want to move to Austin."

With perfect timing, the local San Jose newspaper ran a political cartoon captioned "There Are Problems Everywhere" or something like that. It had a drawing of the entire United States, with descriptions of the local problems. California was titled with "Earthquakes" and a little arrow. Florida had "Hurricanes."

The state of Texas was decorated with the word "Texans" right in the center, with little arrows pointing all around.

This is still very true today. I wish I had saved that cartoon.

New technology typically goes through a phase where it is really expensive when it is first released, and then it gets less expensive, right? The Jigsaw Man is set in that initial timeframe. Breakthroughs in the medical science gave doctors the ability to transplant every organ except the brain and spinal column, but the cost was still very high and only a few could really afford it.

Niven does explore the next phase, where the cost comes down (or the technology is replaced by something less expensive), in his novel A Gift From Earth. I think the novel was written before the story, in fact.

A number of Larry Niven's short stories would be excellent examples of futurism:

The Jigsaw Man really stands out as a commentary on how power would be abused when organ transfers became nearly 100% successful (yet very expensive).

The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club talks about flash crowds.

Cloak of Anarchy deals with, strangely enough, anarchy.

I got one several months ago because I wanted to try building apps for it. If you absolutely have to play around with the bleeding edge of technology, if you are willing to spend that kind of money on a device so that you can be the one who invents what it's used for, then go for it. Otherwise, it's not worth it.

Is she taking time off?

Where you get your information, Rush Limbaugh?

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

- Alfred North Whitehead, Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

Technology that Woz describes is essentially invisible, because the user can focus on the task and not the tool. As tech people, creating such technology should be our goal. I imagine that the vast majority of us want to do that, anyway. What we need to do is convince the people in charge of the money to let us.

Anyone with even 5 days of experience will come up against a task where it isn't an option.

Good idea- replicate and rev up a natural system, and just farm the P from sewer plants in Jurassic Park. You ever run across a pile of dinosaur shit? It ain't pretty, but sometimes when I get the munchies I think of all that delicious P I could have scooped off, probably more P than those bags of Cheetos in my closet.

I figured they'd just eat into my xbox time.

Sigh... I need a better job...

Prison.

There are two problems with higher-order processing CAPTCHAs like that. One is the small problem set. A human at the website has to actually think of those connections between plugs and sockets, or umbrellas and rainstorms, or pizza and ovens, or hair and shampoo, etc. So the problem space is small. Then, blindly guessing answers still yields a decent success rate. Your particular example can be guessed with a success rate of 1 in 256.

Blurring a pair of words from a dictionary onto each other automatically generates millions of possible challenges, and random guessing won't work as well- at least some image analysis is needed.

My own idea for a CAPTCHA is to use images from Google Street View. Show random street view images of a bunch of houses, and ask, "what's the house number"? That would probably take a while to crack, long enough for me to dump my startup site's shares before all the porn gets leaked- if not for those assholes at Google interfering.