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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-gyro-pistols dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

Welcome to 2019, the year in which Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi film masterpiece Blade Runner is set. And as predicted in this loose adaptation of a 1968 Philip K. Dick story, we have flying cars.

The reason you don't have a flying car was explained by author William Gibson, who famously observed, more or less, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

If you're Sebastian Thrun, you've already flown in Kitty Hawk's Flyer, which is more flying boat than flying car. If you're not, chances are you will have to wait a bit longer to live your sci-fi noir transport fantasy.

Topics include flying cars, artificial pets, voice driven photo enhancement, the Voight-Kampff machine, ad-festooned airships, space colonies, artificial organs and replicants.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:30AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:30AM (#781302)

    Newsflash: I developed "avionics software" for a small drone company - they had the most horrible non-redundant safety culture I have encountered anywhere, with the possible exception of the video security company I worked for after them. Even so, we only ever lost one plane and, no, it wasn't their only plane and it didn't stop operations, but it did encourage them to not fly without trackers onboard anymore - did I mention a really shoddy safety culture?. Compare that record with the military drones that go astray seemingly all the time in the news - seems like they're not much better.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:05AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:05AM (#781322) Journal

    Every new car, airliner, train, etc. is controlled by software to some extent. Will shoddy software cause more deaths than human error? We'll see.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:15AM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 03 2019, @03:15AM (#781355)

      CSX & Amtrak have been wetting their pants over fully relinquishing train switching control to software for decades. I don't think they're 100% there yet.

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