Now I know it's not really any of my business, but it still doesn't mean that it doesn't directly affect me.  See while others are still wondering what the hell happened to ancient promises like round corners and flying cars, I tend to take a different approach.  The main reason is that most of these promises were made during the Cold War and most of them were made by the Americans in hope of being better than the Russians.  The year 2000 seemed so far away back then.  They had just come out of twenty-something wars in a period where technology was booming, what with the invention of the radar and the computer and all the rest.  Strictly speaking extrapolating on what had been achieved in the previous twenty years or so, it wasn't to far fetched to think we'd be taking our hovercar through the matter transporter into Saturn where we could all run around in our jetpacks and eat a seven course meal in pill form.  Okay, maybe a little far fetched but then again, unless you are a silly romantic American you're not going to really believe that.

And so here we are.  2009.  The only real difference between today and 1999 is that computers are as powerful as 1999 supercomputers, phones are as powerful as 1999 computers and we're in an economic crisis.  I wasn't really expecting a flying car.  I actually don't find the whole concept of flying cars that feasible.  I was hoping, but not expecting.  Now hoverboards!  Yes, we should totally have hoverboards prototypes by now.  But we're not getting them.

The thing is, that really, these failed promises, don't really bug me that much.  I promised myself I'd buy a Jaguar XK8 one day and I'm not even considering it any more.  The salesman at Galaxy Electronics in Tottenham Court Road promised me the netbook is perfectly fine to use and that I wouldn't find a cheaper deal in all of London but that didn't turn out so well either.  I promised myself that I wouldn't write a wall of text and I haven't even got to the point yet but anyway.

The point is I stumble.  A lot.  I'm addicted to stumbling.  I have over 32000 stumbles and counting and besides porn and flash games under my selected categories I happen to have science, which I tend to find interesting.  Many new discoveries are made every single day, which made me realize one thing.  Things are discovered every day, and they promise cars which run on seawater or compressed air.  Television sets within contact lenses.  Bone fractures healed in minutes.  OLED paper as cheap newspapers. 

Now keep this in mind.  These.  Have.  Been.  Already.  Discovered.  They know how to make them.  Then why the bloody hell don't we have them by now?  I remember way before SSDs were introduced, some technology which allowed up to 40gigabytes to be saved on to a 1x1cm die.  Today you just get a bloody blu-ray which takes three years to load the loading screen of a game.  Technology to transfer up to 5 gigabytes over a wire in one second.  What happened to that?  Takes me some 10 seconds to load GMail on my 20Mbit connection. 

What do they do with this technology?  Do they just go: "Oh, okay, it can be done! On to the next project.  We'll look back into this some other time"?  Why do our cars still need petrol or diesel to run?  Why is it that some high school student found a bacteria that degenerates plastic but we have to pay €0.35 per bag when we go to the supermarket?  Just stop wasting money on research which won't be used.  It really isn't that hard to grasp.  They just keep raising my hopes.  Daily.  I think: "Oh cool! In a couple of years I'll be able to charge my mobile phone wirelessly because they've just discovered power over wireless.  And here I am, two years later, carrying my charger around all the time because it can't even hold a charge for more than 18 hours.

Idiots.