In 1982 Xerox management watched a film of people struggling to use their new copier and laughed that they must have been grabbed off a loading dock. The people struggling were Ron Kaplan, a computational linguist, and Allen Newell, a founding father of artificial intelligence.
technology
A Japanese company (Gatebox)…
A Japanese company (Gatebox) had created a “digital wife”… a device that created a holographic companion for lonely people. Now 35-year-old Akihiko Kondo has married his hologram companion. Since March, Kondo has been living with a moving, talking hologram of Miku that floats in a ShSh280,000 ( $2,800) desktop device.
Gatebox, the company that produces the hologram device has issued a “marriage certificate,” which certifies that a human and a virtual character have wed “beyond dimensions”.
The singer welcomes Kondo home every evening and tells him when it is time for bed. He even sleeps with a doll of the hologram beside him.
The residents of a neighborhood…
The residents of a neighbourhood complained of mysterious ailments from a new cell phone tower. During a meeting the owner revealed that the tower had been off for over a month. Residents didn’t show up to the followup meeting.
MIT lawyers did not patent…
MIT lawyers did not patent turn-by-turn in-car navigation in 1989 because “This will never happen.. because the insurance companies won’t allow it”.
The first ever photocopier…
The first ever photocopier, the Xerox 914, caught fire so frequently that a “scorch eliminator”, asmall fire extinguisher, was provided with the copier.
A Vision of Isolating Technology from 1906…
Punch, the British weekly magazine of humor and satire, seemed to have a talent for uncanny predictions of distant technologies to come. See for example this vision of the Skype-like “Telephonoscope” from 1879.
Digital cameras were developed…
Digital cameras were developed so spy satellites could send images back to earth more quickly. Before digital cameras in 1976, spy satellites used film. After the film was shot, the satellites loaded the footage into capsules and dropped them from orbit into the atmosphere for collection.
Tommy Hilfiger’s new line of clothing…
Tommy Hilfiger’s new line of clothing includes a weird feature. You can earn reward points by wearing the clothes, thanks to a smart chip embedded in them. You can eventually redeem these points for Hilfiger gift cards or merchandise.
Data Domination
Among the freaks and fetishists out there, there are people, who love to be dominated. For such people, dominatrixes have been around for awhile. But, times changed and demands changed along with them. Today, there is such thing as, the techno dominatrix; a person, who dominates over remote access. Meet the techno dominatrix mistress Harley.
Mistress Harley works from home. Her day begins at whenever she wakes up. She reads the mail and makes sure, that her “slaves” transferred money. A few years ago, she was a regular dominatrix, who provided her service on skype. However, soon the customers began to ask her to dominate their computer remotely: to enter their computer, to install the parental control, keyloggers.
For mistress Harley, all these sounded boring, since she has a technical background and used to work in the gaming industry. But, she took it a little further: she made her servants install cameras in the house, keyloggers, read mail, copied financial documents, personal files, resumes. The more mistress Harley knew about the client, the more they were afraid of her. And they liked it so much, that hey were willing to pay constantly.
Back in the 1980’s people were…
Back in the 1980’s people were able to download Video Games from a radio broadcast by recording the sounds onto a cassette tape that they could then play on their computers.