You know what? We ARE living in the future.

Every once in a while I have conversations with friends about the lack of futuristic things in our every day lives. By conversations, I mean rants – “Where’s my flying car? Where’s my robot? Where’s my [science fiction staple]?” The kind of thing that the “Damn Scientists” t-shirt at Threadless covers.

I know other people get these frustrations. You know what though? Every once in a while something comes around which makes you take a step back and realise that we are in the future. Right now, I’m thinking of the miners in Chile. The mine collapses, and 33 men are trapped 700ft underground without anyone knowing they’re alive. Main shaft’s blocked, and that’s where the story could end horrifically. Left alone in the dark, trapped, and with no means of contacting the outside world. Slowly starving to death. That’s what could have happened. Instead we’re seeing the men raised to the surface today in the Phoenix capsules 70 days after they were trapped.For a sense of scale, the Gherkin in London is just under 600ft high.

Think about what’s had to happen to make this possible. This roughly 2ft hole’s had to be drilled to hit an exact space 700ft below the surface, tiny errors at the start and they could have missed. The capsule’s got to run smoothly up and down this hole, and the men have had to be kept alive and healthy throughout this time. The mining expert went down just before 4am UK time this morning, and we had live video of him arriving at the bottom.

Think about this – we can reach people 700ft underground in time to save them, and we can beam pictures halfway around the world as it happens from both ends of the rescue.

Take a step back, look at what’s around and think about how it would appear to a classic sci-fi writer in the 60s or 70s. There’s elements we have now that are a step change from what was around then. The obvious one’s computing power and availability, but think around the implications in automation as well. We have technology building technology, with people only providing the guidance. I might not have a flying car or a jetpack, but I think there’s definitely elements of the classic sci-fi in my every day life and in the world at large.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Willis_building_skyline.jpg

Idiots abound

I was in town the other day, and picked up Command & Conquer 4 in Game. Complete impulse buy – saw it and had fond memories of the older Command & Conquer games. Turns out this isn’t really a Command & Conquer game at all in terms of the mechanics. There’s no base building, no harvesting of Tiberium, no way to build a complimentary attack and defence set of units. That’s not my gripe though – I could have checked reviews and found that out, and also discovered it was a rather poor game in any style.

Here’s my gripe – to play this crappy game at all, you have to be online. Not if you want to play online, but even if you want to play the solo game. This kind of DRM is seriously shoddy – no playing the game on a flight or on a train, no playing it with a spotty wi-fi connection. Here’s the fun bit though – the game was released on the 19th of March 2010 according to Amazon. A quick look online shows that there were torrents of the game available from the 20th of March 2010. The pirate version doesn’t need you to be online at all times.

So, as someone buying a legit copy of the game, I have to ensure that I have an uninterrupted internet connection. If I download a pirate copy of the game, I can play it when I like.

The answer to piracy is not to make it harder to be a legitimate customer.

Two interesting ideas for video

Two interesting things which came up online recently to do with video, and the replacement of objects within. First up, there’s Jeff Crouse‘s Un-Logo, which will replace corporate logos with the faces of their CEOs or blank space.

Unlogo Intro from Jeff Crouse on Vimeo.

(via Boing Boing).

Second is a German university’s diminished reality. This allows a quick and easy select and remove for objects in video. Could be handy for amateur video makers.

(via Engadget)