But entertainment is also something that can be trivially copied. A single movie can entertain billions of people. Furthermore entertainment also doesn't get used up, I can still get my entertainment from 50 year old episodes of Twilight Zone. So while I certainly do agree that entertainment is growing, I don't exactly see it as a solution, sooner or later there will be enough entertainment for everybody.

Entertainment is also not immune to automation. Games can already do a whole lot of things procedurally, what's to stop them from being flexible enough in 30 years to procedurally generate a movie or some futuristic VR experience? There is still a whole lot of work to be done before you can have procedural storytelling and acting, but we will be getting there.

We already did, numerous times. All domesticated animals are essentially slaves or worse.

> does it matter that much if you play on a 4k or 2k screen?

Depends on your viewing distance and the size of the monitor. A current monitor only has 100dpi and for normal viewing distances you can resolve something around 200dpi, maybe 300dpi when you sit closer. A lot of the times it will probably be preferable to get better frame rates then resolution improvements. But monitors get bigger and computers get fasters and once you can run your games in 4k at 60fps, why not? In the end it's simply a trade-off, look at consoles, they can do HD in theory, but most games don't even do 720p, instead they render lower resolutions and scale them up, as the smoother gameplay is more important then the resolution.

Also VR is coming and the field of view that a VR headset gives you is far larger then what a monitor provides, meaning you do need all the resolution you can get.

Past machines where limited to completely repetitious jobs. They could repeat the exact same movements a lot of times and really fast, but they couldn't react to the environment. This is changing now. You now have machines that are equipped with cameras and all kinds of sensors. They are no longer limited to highly repetitious tasks, they can sense their environment and react to it, which allows you to build things like self driving cars or robots that can safely interact with humans. And that's just the start of it, the ability to react to the environment will allow them to be used in a lot of places that have traditionally could not have been automated.

It might not exactly be a conclusive proof that we never ever get to see aliens, but the basic reasoning is pretty sound. Our whole idea of "meeting aliens" is based on conditions and expectations that will drastically change as technology moves forward. The same is true with a lot of futurist stuff, people imagine what they would do when they had access to all that cool technology, completely ignoring the fact that they will no longer exists then. It will be their grand children that have grown up with that technology and will likely use it in quite different ways then their grandfathers would have imagined. Things get even worse when you throw in the whole transhumanists stuff, when it's no longer about gadgets, but about changing humans themselves, as then essentially all bets are off. How can you predict how you will behave then when you can have a implant that will twiddle your pleasure center directly and essentially allow you to complete change the motivational framework that drives you today?

The distances and time frames that come into play when it comes to aliens and space travel are simply so huge that a classic visit in 1950 sci-fi style visit will never happen. Before a visit happens we and them will very likely all be post-singularity creates that are far beyond our current biological selfs.

CSS3 allows to do some animation effects that are currently done in Javascript, but that's probably the best you will ever get. I don't think we will ever get completely get rid of Javascript, it has just become to integral to what people do on the web these days.

But it's not just the web developers that are to be blamed for this. Browser developers have done extremely little to actually derive benefit from the HTML markup. Stuff like Readability should have been a standard part of all browsers years ago, yet it's still missing in Firefox.

If you plan to die soon, you are in trouble. While you can record account logins and passwords, giving those to other people is frequently a TOS violation. Giving accounts to other people, splitting them up or merging them is simply not something most services support or outright forbid. DRM-free downloads are possible with some services, but it can be a lot of hassle to download them all and archive them in a manner that would be useful. Only chance here is that the laws get changed to give you back some of your consumer rights, it seems to be slowly happening in Europe already.

If you plan to die in 60 years or so, I really wouldn't worry. Those things being digital means that there is zero collectors value for them, so by the time the data gets handed over to your kids they will be of as much use as old VHS recordings of Star Trek, i.e. worthless, as you can get better quality versions of those shows for free on Hulu.

The kid didn't just ate them for the fun of it, it swallowed them accidentally while pretending to have a pierced tongue. You might still call that stupid, but that's well in the realm of normal child stupidity (I for one prefer to call that creativity).

It's looks like a toy, it plays like a toy and is fun like a toy. The very problem with them is that it is not obvious how dangerous those things can be.

The problem with Glass isn't the core idea of AR, but the implementation. It's drastically under featured (no stereo, one eye only, doesn't cover center of vision) and drastically overpriced with $1500. So far they also have shown nothing for what it's actually good for. To make photos and video a phone seems to be good enough. Notification about email also don't seem to be complicated enough to need Glass. There might be some rare use cases where a hands-free device would be quite useful, but it doesn't seem like something every consumer would need.

The problem isn't so much the orientation and such, but the fact that Glass doesn't cover your field of view. It's just a small rectangle in the top right, so it can't overlay any information over the real world. The best Glass can do is display some contextual information.

Judging from their latest developer presentation however Glass really seem to be extremely underwhelming. All that they have shown so far wasn't even contextual in any meaningful way, no face detection, map application or anything, it was essentially just used as a notification area to tell you when you had new mail and such. Maybe that was just a side effect of that being a very early demo, but it really looked pretty useless.

The only interesting part of Glass so far seems to be the tiny head mounted camera, but $1500 seems like a rather heavy price for that.

Freespace seems to follow the X-Wing flight model quite closely from what little I have played of it so far. As for more modern stuff, Strike Suit Zero was just released and in the not so distant future we will have Star Citizen, a new Elite and a bunch of smaller titles.

Not picking up the Idol would do that, but you had 10 minutes time...

Except for the part that they were. There still aren't really any adventure games on the market that match them even so tons and tons of people have tried. What Daedalic is putting it is getting close, but they still suffer from some polishing issues that LucasArts never had.

Just take the intros to Full Throttle or The Dig, I have a hard time thinking of any modern game that manage to establish that kind of sense of atmosphere and setting.

The genre had quite a down in the early 2000's, but it hasn't been dead for many years. Not only is TellTale putting out adventure games on a regular basis, we also have Wadjet Eye games, Daedalic, Amanita Design and a whole lot of other companies releasing new games all the time. The Walking Dead even managed to grab numerous Game Of The Year awards. The Daedalic games are probably the closest in style to what LucasArts put out back then.

While Sierra was still trying to kill you in dozens of more or less "funny" ways and allowed you to end up in dead ends, LucasArts practiced essentially modern game design practices and made sure that you couldn't get stuck into dead ends, get killed or otherwise get your gaming experience ruined by obtuse puzzle design. I think that is the main reason why those LucasArts game are so fondly remembered and Sierra not quite so much. When you load up an old LucasArts adventure today it essentially plays not much different then a modern one would, the interface is clean and polished and the game design very straight forward without any ugly surprises. When you load up most other games of that time you are greeted with a rather obtuse interface, unclear game rules and other problems that just make those old games far less tolerable in modern times.

It of course also helps that the games are just damn good, with rememberable characters, great graphics, voice acting and all that.