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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 VLM on Wednesday January 02 2019, @10:56PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @10:56PM (#781226)

    "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

    You can take a "flying car" from JFK to downtown Manhattan and its not really that expensive and certainly convenient. Last time I went to NYC I considered it and then crazy me I took Amtrak to Penn Station instead.

    From memory its $50 in a taxi or $200 in a helo, and the helo is frankly more comfortable faster and cleaner. Supposedly takes more than an hour if you're stuck in traffic in a taxi, but the helo takes about ten minutes total.

    Arguably its more mental effort to fly from the midwest to Manhattan than it is to merely jump on a train in Chicago, eat a nice steak dinner, have a quiet night in front of my laptop, wake up in NYC a couple blocks from the meeting. The train cost 4x what a plane ticket would cost, even with a helo....

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:45AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:45AM (#781310)

    The train cost 4x what a plane ticket would cost, even with a helo....

    Planes have gone mass production and race for the bottom capitalist competition. Amtrak runs as a monopoly curiosity, almost a living museum piece. In the right circumstances, trains should be more efficient than planes, but that would require infrastructure investment that just hasn't happened in the US.

    We took the Silver Meteor from Charleston to D.C. - nice ride, except for the 30 minute delay prior to arrival at Union station. Cost less to fly home...

    --
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