There's actually a SF treatment of a society like this. I want to say it's Sterling.... I'll try to find it and post a link.

I suspect the bigger issue is one of human psychology. What do we do when 25% of the people are working, but 3/4ths aren't? with the 25% really be OK with that? Can people really sit around and mostly consume doing just what they want? What does society look like? Is this the economic equivalent of immortality, i.e. does having to work to live spur us to build things in a way analogous to the way limited lifespan spurs us to do what we can before we die?

Brad,

Ian's post isn't anything really new. If you eat well, eat limited amounts and work out, you'll stay skinny/lose weight. Um, yeah. The thing I didn't like about it and generally don't like about those kinds of posts is that it was either/or. Either his kind of a diet or Totino's Pizza. Those aren't the only choices though and his regimen sounds, well, dull and boring. That doesn't mean you have to fall back to prepared garbage though.

What we've lost since the 80s is the habit of actually cooking stuff from scratch. Prepared food is evi - usually high salt, sugar and fats which means calorie dense. All people need to do is learn to cook a dozen health meals that they like and then try variations. You can easily end up with 20 or 30 different meals that take 30 minutes to prep - and I reject the notion that most people don't have the 30 minutes.

Tons of science contradicts you. The point is to eat some food - not to eat 3000 calories. Instead of the crap you list, have some decent cereal or oatmeal. Will you lose 10 pounds if you eat nothing for breakfast vs high fat high calorie meals? Duh...

Um, Marshall... before you use a prominent blog like RWW to declare a market dead... didn't you CALL any of these companies? Talk to people? Do research? You didn't even watch their screencasts? I get the pressure at RWW to remain current, but stuff like this is worrying.

Hmm. 10/10 for coolness. But I didn't see anything in that video that I can imagine doing in my day to day life even 20 years from now. Yes, I get that you can grab things and manipulate them and zoom around in 3D information environments - I just don't get why I'd do that outside of needing to demo a product.

I'm not being snarky - I honestly don't see a lot of use cases for this. As an adjunct to other things? Yeah. As a primary way that I interact with computing? No. For example, how would this make your authoring of this post better? Or my reading it? Or commenting? Or online banking or a myriad of other things?

ON the positive side, I can imagine some amazing things you could do in data analysis with this and I can see flicking a cool video onto a friend's picture with that gesture meaning 'send this to ben'.

The future of HCI doesn't have just one path and thinking it does holds us back - some things are better done with a keyboard, the Oblong UI will excel in other areas and a simpler mobile interface will be great in still other areas. People 20 years from now will fluidly move from one to another much as we turn on a radio, flick on a light and grab a remote to turn on the TV (all of which are interfacing to a technology) today.

And finally, we'll have implicit HCI too, ala wearable computing. 20 years from now I'll be 70 (ack!) and fully expect to have detailed health monitoring that I don't even notice with data flowing from a small data patch to my 'phone' and then being distributed to my home network, my doctor etc. Emergencies will be handled automatically - a heart attack changes blood chemistry, so if the monitor detects that change it can alert 911 even if I can't. Mundane tasks too - automatic uploading of data from the patch to my fitness program with recommendations on how to adjust my routine based on my results.

Short version? As computing becomes ubiquitous and situational. HCI will become fragment and adapt the uses. g speak is cool, but is just one niche of what HCI will be.

Sure... if you want to elect people who are well known. Because that's what happens in systems where you shorten the cycle too much and eliminate primaries. You favor the well-known candidates who can raise a lot of money initially. Bill Clinton might well not have been President and it's very likely Obama would not be the nominee this year.

The problem with the length of the cycle is that the media tries to crown a nominee based on the first couple of primaries, so you need to campaign for a while before those to make sure you show well... then you have to slog though the others. And, usually, the primary cycle is meaningless after about March 1 as the nominee is almost always decided by then... but you still need to hold all of the rest of them even though they mean nothing.

Another way to solve this is to mandate regional primaries separated by, say, 2-3 weeks. The cycle starts on March 1 and is over by June 1. This STILL favors known candidates though and I think we benefit by letting lesser known candidates emerge somehow.

Hmmm I *am* a wine geek... I'll have to check out the Billionaire's Vinegar.

Glad you enjoyed Glasshouse - cool book. Not sure if you got it, but Stross just released Saturn's Children last week too. Oh and if you like SF... check John Scalzi's stuff. Excellent mental floss. Start at Old Man's War, then Ghost Brigades.

Hmm... I like most of his stuff and love several of the books. Try the Tears of Autumn and the Miernik Dossier to start. The Last Supper is also quite good. Several of his books contain a recurring character, Paul Christopher and I think those are generally his best. Don't start with Old Boys or Christopher's Ghosts though - they're the last two in the series and, while you could read them as standalones they're better if you've read previous books.

Oh and if you want to read something eerie, grab The Better Angels. it posits a divided America at the time of a closely contested election, under threat by islamic terrorists using suicide techniques and loaded planes as bombs. The reason it's eerie? He wrote it in 1979.

Hmm I didn't get a lot of sympathy when Boulder had sun and Seattle didn't.. but hey we've got PLENTY of sun so.. (grabs Fedex shipper.... )... There you go.

I agree with you about Halting State... if you liked it, try his other books - they're uniformly good though some are more SF-y than Halting State.

Oh and by the way, a much belated thanks for turning me on to the John Rain books - they've been much fun to read. You know Charles McCarry's work?

People have the option of firing their Rep or Senator every few years. You might have heard of these opportunities - they're called elections. Oh, right, you want to rig the elections so they conform to your idea of what's right. You want people like us... well, we just had 8 years of a president who was 'ilke us'. How'd that work out? Yeah, not so freaking well. I don't WANT Joe the Plumber running the country - I want people are top notch, people who are intelligent, thoughtful and who don't seek simple solutions to hard problems but who try to understand the problems and work for real solutions, not nice talking points.

While people will whine and bitch about 'Congress,' they overwhelming re-elect their own representative and senators. Either people are hypocrites, they genuinely believe their congresspeople are good and others are bad, or they don't feel that replacing an incumbent will bring change. But it's still, one by one, the people CHOOSING to re-elect Congress. It's a system that's worked tolerably well for close to two and a third centuries... and we should toss it and adopt your idea... why? So you can feel better?

As for your analysis of how we got here... Where's the responsibility of the various banks? Not just Freddie and Fannie, but AIG, Lehman, Wachovia, WaMu etc? You seem gung-ho to blame government, but it was by and large private enterprise unchecked by much regulation that created this mess. How about we fire every board and the senior management of the banks that have been poorly managed first?