Dalton Trumbo never recanted either. I guess it was OK to blacklist him then.

The Apollo space capsule didn't have a glass windshield up front and the astronauts managed to get all the way to the moon and back without a BSOD killing them. I think I can handle a trip to my local Piggly Wiggly without one.

That's more or less what I already do with Amazon. I have ditched the car altogether for most shopping trips and replaced it with a virtual shopping center that has almost everything I need right there on my 24" computer monitor.

I assume submarines have replaced the captain looking thru the periscope with his eyes to a camera mounted there and a Star-Trek-style viewscreen viewable to everyone in the control room. If they haven't they should. You can add infrared sensors and stuff to the video. And no more red light so as to not damage the captain's night vision.

I always wondered why aircraft don't have embedded cameras all around. One to observe the landing gear, one pointed at the tail rudder, one for each engine, one for the ailerons/flaps etc. No more guessing what is going on based on instrumentation and sending a crewman to look out the window to see if he can spot the problem. Easier to detect icing, snow load on the wing while on the runway, etc.

What about ditching the windshield and replacing it with a 4k HD screen? Then you can embed the driver lower-down and deep inside a protective hardened shell. A no-glass car all around.

If you go to college and pick cosmology classes expecting cosmetology classes, you will be in for a big surprise first day of class. And if you pick them vice-versa as well. I don't know which situation would be more interesting -- maybe there's a TV sitcom in the concept somewhere. A young Howard Wolowitz-type mistakenly goes to cosmetology class, decides to stay with it what with all the girls there and all, and is vastly rewarded for doing so.

You are 100% correct no matter what the source of energy. The course we are on is unsustainable at our current rate of energy consumption. Tom Murphy's excellent essay "Galactic-Scale Energy" made the case rather well (and it deserves its own Slashdot entry if it hasn't already had one -- I'm too lazy too look it up). About 1400 years from now (which is less time into the future than we are from the fall of the Roman Empire) we will be using more energy than is currently produced by the entirety of the sun if we don't back off on the growth of our energy consumption, which is showing no signs of easing up. It doesn't matter if the source of the energy is fossil fuels, nuclear fusion, or some future magic, the earth cannot host that amount of energy consumption. The planet will have reached its thermodynamic limit long before then.

Then they would ticket you for driving at night without use of any forward beams at all.

"There's something very important I forgot to tell you. Don't cross the laser beams. It would be bad. Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously."

"Career killer"? In what world is life as a Air Force officer and eventual retirement as an O-5 or above while still in your early 40s (late 30s even) not considered a successful career?

Hmm, we have a sort of precedent for that. Did the native peoples of the New World put aside their petty differences, rally together and be on the same side for once when the Europeans came over or did they split apart, some siding with them, some siding against them, some forming temporary alliances for quick gain, some shifting with the wind depending on which side was winning, fighting each other etc? Same for the native peoples of Africa.

I see this all the time with photographers. Bottom line: your photographs are not all that valuable. Some are, yes. Most are not. Pare them down. Delete the bad ones, the failures, the misfocussed, the bad exposures. The greatest photographers the world has ever known are only known for a few dozen photos at best. Do you really need an 8 TB photographic archive? Who's going to ever look at them all? Save the best. Delete the rest.

Let me second this. I have an old LG Versa which is not a smart phone but does have HTML browsing. Activating it on PagePlus costs $10 for four months access for 100 minutes and 5 cents per text. You can top it up whenever you run up against the $10 limitt. And if your are very frugal, that $10 can last the whole four months. That's $2.50 a month. And it's on Verizon's network, so the service is rock-solid. Beat that.