What, no jet packs? Life in 2013, as predicted in 1988

The usual grump when looking back at old predictions about the future is that a lot of the things promised back in previous decades are nowhere near fruition. It’s the old “we were promised jet packs” cliché.

But reading a piece from 1988, in which the Los Angeles Times Magazine tries to predict a day in the life of a 2013 family, has the opposite effect. Some of its predictions have not only come true, they been overtaken by reality.

The article, written by Nicole Yorkin, who later went on to become a screenwriter and producer for television series such as Battlestar Galactica and FlashForward, traces a day in the life of a fictitious family. It begins in the morning when their coffee maker turns itself on (tick) and ends with one of the family reading the collected Jackie Collins in bed on a laser disc (semi-tick). Meanwhile, the entire family’s data is stored on credit-card-sized computers called “smart cards” and films are watched on “ultra-thin, high-resolution video screens”.

Yorkin’s predictions for what cars will be like are almost dead-on, too: “Chief among these developments will be a central computer that will control a number of devices (tick); a sonar shield will automatically brake the car when it comes too close to another (tick)… Autos will come equipped with electronic navigation systems (tick).”

Some things aren’t quite so accurate. Yorkin suggests that her futuristic family will be served by home robots. And that knowledge will be available to everyone via “developments such as CD-ROM”. Bit two-thousand-and-late, that one. But it’s about as close a representation of 2013 as you’d imagine from the late Eighties. Especially compared with Blade Runner’s idea of the Los Angeles of 2019.

The fare increases are expected to bring in $25 million in additional revenue for the cash-strapped agency, but that would still mean a $38 million shortfall in the fiscal budget effective July 1. State funds are being sought to make up the difference.

With the new system, hundreds of vending machines at bus and subway stations will sell refillable cards to replace weekly and monthly transit passes, tokens and paper transfers. Riders also will have the option to pay their fare by tapping a smartphone or smart-chip embedded credit or debit card on a turnstile equipped with an electronic reader, which will withdraw the fare from a SEPTA-linked bank or other account.

The so-called New Payment Technology program will make SEPTA among the country’s first transit agencies to adopt a system that allows riders to pay fares using their own phone or bank card, rather than requiring riders to use an agency-branded fare card. The transition will begin this summer, with trial runs on new turnstiles first in the city and then the suburbs. The switchover will be completed by the end of 2014.

There are five counters near the entrance of platform No. 1 and another two counters are there for general tickets at the exit point near platform No. 4.

“One can see a lot of congestion near the booking counters in the morning and after 4pm. The situation becomes chaotic during peak hours as people have to stand in long queues to get a general ticket,” said a senior railway official.

Apart from a small pamphlet pasted on the glass window of a booking counter, there is no other advertisement about the smart cards.

One has to go to the office of the chief booking supervisor to purchase a smart card. The passengers too feel that one ATVM should be kept near the entrance of platform No. 4.

“All the four machines are situated near the entrance of platform No. 1, which makes it difficult for passengers entering though the gate at platform No. 4. They have to take the foot overbridge to book a ticket through ATVM,” said Malaya Samal, a passenger.

The passengers also feel that a person should be deployed to assist them while using the machines.

“Sometimes we have to go through technical glitches but without anyone to assist us it becomes very difficult. So, there should be someone near the machine to demonstrate its use,” said Upendra Sethy, another passenger.

The smart cards can be bought by depositing Rs 100, which includes a usable balance of Rs 50 and a refundable security deposit of Rs 50. One needs to top-up the cards in multiples of Rs 50. There is no need to submit any identification proof for obtaining a smart card.

Car crash sees two lives lost

The first - Annalese Bacon, a 17-year-old from Taupo - is dead after being flung from a speeding car driven by a stoned and drunk driver

The second - Trent Robertson, a 22-year-old from Rotorua - has just begun three years behind bars after admitting dangerous driving causing her death. While he is still alive, I describe his life as lost because he is now in jail, left for the rest of his life in the knowledge that he caused her death.

Not only was he speeding, drunk and had been smoking cannabis, but he was a suspended driver whose vehicle's suspension was being held together with plastic cable ties.

Annalese wasn't blameless in her death. She wasn't wearing a seatbelt so it won't ever be known if she would have lived.

Robertson had been travelling at speeds of up to 130km/h when he lost control, crashed into a fence post and flipped the car on its roof.

Annalese's mother, Darlene Fiveash, read her heart-wrenching victim impact statement in court on Monday.

"When I went to the funeral home to see if it was true, I lost my legs and was in total disbelief that there was my little girl lying on the table, still and cold," she told the court. "No chattering, not smiling and no laughing. Her injuries were that bad that I couldn't even lift her head just to hold her one more time."

Annalese's brother, Henry, who was very close to his sister, had been hospitalised with broken heart syndrome, which presents itself like a heart attack.

When will young people learn they are not bulletproof? Just last month, our reporter and photographer stood on the side of Main St in Edgecumbe at midnight watching the horror unfold as emergency services freed the dead bodies of Kane Jamie Te Riini, 19, and Aidan Brady, 25. The youngsters died when the car they were in lost control and crashed into a tree.

Darlene Fiveash said this week she was disappointed with the three years' jail term. She had hoped for five years. For the loss of a life under such horror circumstances, it seems a little on the light side, in my view.

Two men, charged with the horrific gang rape and robbery of a young Pietermaritzburg woman in her home as her helpless mother looked on, made their first appearance in the city’s magistrate’s court on Monday.

The two men were remanded in custody until March 8, when they were expected to plead to the charges.

Their alleged accomplice, Khotso Mohlomi, 26, on Friday pleaded guilty to rape and housebreaking with intent to rob, and robbery with aggravating circumstances in the Pietermaritzburg High Court.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the gang rape, plus 15 years, by Judge Kobus Booyens.

Mohlomi admitted in his plea that he and his two co-perpetrators had ambushed the two women at their Northdale home on February 21.

He said that they had taken turns to rape the younger woman.

Asked why they did so, he replied: “I think we thought that by raping her, that her mother would give us what we wanted.”

He said they had planned only to rob the victims after lying in wait for them to arrive home. Wielding knives and screwdrivers, they robbed the women of jewellery, a DVD player, money, cellphone and a VW Citi Golf.

Mohlomi told the court in a statement that while he was driving the stolen car after the incident, police chased him and he overturned the vehicle.

But he managed to evade the police and went to a friend’s house in Swapo township.

However, after speaking to his friends, he’d handed himself over to the police.

Mohlomi said he was prepared to testify against his accomplices because he knew what they did was wrong.

“We were stupid and reckless,” he said. “I pray that the complainants can forgive me.”

The 26-year-old university graduate told the court she would never be able to get over what she had been through.

“I can still hear my screams and my mother’s. My life has changed. I will never be the joyful, happy person I once was, and I will always be in fear,” said the woman, who is undergoing counselling once a week.

Blurring The Lines Between Single Player

In the future, there may not be any more single-player games―but that doesn't mean what we seem to think it does every time some big publisher opens its big mouth and tells us that single-player games are dead. Epic, story-driven campaigns aren't going away; it's just that new forms of multiplayer are evolving in tandem with those experiences, rather than in opposition to them.

Developers are exploring this new frontier in gaming, and it's the most exciting thing in the gaming world right now.

At Bungie's Seattle press conference for Destiny, the Halo creators hinted that they've redefined the concept of the main menu. What I took from that was that in the future, we won't have to choose between "single player" and "multiplayer" when we're starting a game. It's all going to be the same thing, and nothing will be sacrificed to accomplish this. Games will only become more immersive as time goes on and this principle is widely adopted.

Dead Space 3 provides a great example of this. The series had already done a decent job of integrating most menus into the play experience; opening your inventory projects a hologram in front of the characters' faces and doesn't pause the game, and their health is illustrated by lights integrated into their armor. It's progressive.

But Dead Space 3 went much further by integrating multiplayer directly into the campaign experience. It did away with Dead Space 2's competitive deathmatches (by now it's clear to most involved that shoehorning competitive multiplayer into games that don't need it isn't pleasing anyone). Instead, a second player can jump into a friend's solo game at any checkpoint throughout the campaign. The story adapts, the game folds into itself, and suddenly you're not alone. It's really kind of amazing. And as was noted in Kotaku's Dead Space 3 review, it makes the game better.

The Halo games played a large part in spearheading co-op in console shooters, and now Bungie is aiming to take things several steps further. You'll be able to play solo in Destiny if you want to; they've been clear on that fact. But I believe you'll be missing out, because playing with other humans sounds like it will be the real adventure. And according to the vision that Bungie has shared so far, it will happen effortlessly, with matchmaking taking place in the background and other players popping in and out of your world organically. Their goal is to make the seams all but invisible. It's the same thing thatgamecompany did with Journey, where other players would naturally appear in your game―and you in theirs―only on a much larger scale.

At the press conference, Bungie co-founder Jason Jones asked, "How do we take this genre that we love so much―the first-person shooter―and turn it on its head?" But they're not just innovating in the shooter space. I think they're contributing to a larger trend that will eventually overtake the entire medium.

It's all about the human element. That's a large part of what's so good about Dark Souls and Demon's Souls. I put 50 or so hours into Skyrim and got bored, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the Souls games, which are technically much smaller. I've been over the exact same environments countless times; I know by heart the location of every enemy and treasure. Yet I keep going back for more, because the human players that invade my world or summon me to theirs make it feel fresh every single time. That's what's going to make games exciting moving forward―not better graphics or gimmicky control schemes, but that irreplaceable human element. It's everything that's good about MMOs, but applied across the board in every genre.

Tracking tools. Wearable tracking tools are becoming popular in several countries, for keeping an eye on senior citizens, children and pets. One recent example is StickNFind-little circular stickers that you can stick on a pet or your kid's bag or shoe. It helps monitor the object's movement or set up a digital leash-you can set up a range within which the object can freely move, and if the child or pet wanders beyond that, you will get a signal on your mobile. These stickers contain a Bluetooth chip, temperature sensor and battery, and are designed to be used with a smartphone app, which shows a radar image covering a 61-metre radius.

Special needs. There are several wearable technologies for those with special needs. One of the oldest examples is the hearing aid, which has become quite advanced today in capabilities and form-thanks to MEMS technologies and advanced audio systems. Consider, for example, the LINX AUDIO Premium digital in-canal hearing aid, which is said to be the first incanal hearing aid to combine advanced audio technologies with environment management tools for custom solutions to enhance comprehension in difficult listening environments and to address specific tonal sensitivities.

In EFY's January issue, we had also discussed a new technology being developed by Cogni-Wave-a hearingaid that uses rotating microphones designed to filter environmental sounds, so that the person using the hearing-aid hears exactly like someone with functional hearing, i.e., one voice at a time.

Four students from Ukraine have developed a simple and inexpensive solution called Enable Talk comprising special gloves and a mobile application, which can detect signs made by the user wearing the gloves, and convert it to text or speech on the phone. The glove is made up of eleven flex sensors and eight touch sensors, a 3D digital linear acceleration sensor, magnetic sensor, accelerometer and gyroscope in addition to an Atmel XMEGA A3 microcontroller, Bluetooth, built-in solar charger and other components.

On a more common plane, there are several wearable blood glucose meters from companies like Abbott and Medtronic, fitness and heart rate monitors from companies like Garmin, Adidas, Polar and Suunto, and customised vital-signs monitors, which are used either for personal monitoring or by doctors to monitor their wards. There are patches, head-gear, watches and a large range of health gear. Plus, the lifestyle monitors discussed earlier can also be used for various healthrelated purposes.

CARS show moves to Charlotte

The Hickory Metro Convention Center in Hickory was the site of the first two shows and CARS has rapidly grown to fill the 84,000-capacity convention center. When show officials began to look at other cities, Charlotte was the natural fit.

“We’re going to have it here thanks to a man who has been working everyday over in Lincoln County. Clint Elkins started this thing in Hickory, and I went up the first year to help him with it,” said the famed racing promoter Wheeler. ““We have 300 race teams in the area, a speedway, a drag strip; we have dirt tracks all over the place. What we don’t have, is a big national race show. This will further strengthen the Charlotte area’s claim as the real center of racing.”

The Charlotte Convention Center will be the new home for the show put on, “By Racers, For Racers.” The 280,000 square foot convention center located in downtown Charlotte will provide a permanent home for the event. The Charlotte Convention Center also houses a 35,000 square foot ballroom and is connected via an over-street walkway to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. The famed Crown Ball Room is part of the Hall of Fame and features a 40,000 square foot banquet room.

“The Hickory show was a regional show and this will be a national show. One of the things we did in Hickory was have 22 free seminars. We’ll have that in Charlotte and will bring in industry experts from all over the country, from shocks to chassis experts,” Elkins said.

A promoters round table that started out as an hour event and expanded to three hours will probably run for a full day. Other seminars and racing series banquets are projected to bring in a diverse group of racing enthusiasts.

Elkins thinks that the lessons learned in Hickory will transfer to Charlotte.

“I use the example all the time that Humpy (Wheeler) could not have promoted Charlotte Motor Speedway for 33 years if he hadn’t promoted Robinwood Speedway and Carolina Speedway first,” Elkins said.

Early projections show as much as a 12 million dollar economic impact to the city of Charlotte in the first year. CARS has been attended by close to 10,000 people over the last two years from 31 states. Wheeler believes the numbers can have an economic impact of over 50 million dollars in the next decade.

“With a heritage that runs more than 80 years deep and an economic impact that generates over $5 billion annually, we know what an integral industry motorsports is to the Charlotte region,” said Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, who spoke at the press conference held at the NASCAR Hall of Fame on Wednesday afternoon.

NASCAR Hall of Fame Executive Director Winston Kelley said that they are delighted that the show is coming to Charlotte.

“Hats off to Clint and his whole team that they’ve grown as quickly as they have. I’m not surprised that they outgrew their location. And hats off to them for the types of folks that they’ve attracted. This is exactly the reason that we thought Charlotte was the ideal place for the (NASCAR) Hall of Fame,” Kelley said. “Also, thanks to Mike Butts, Billy McMillan, Lauri Eberhart and all the folks who were involved with pitching CARS coming to Charlotte. I’m looking forward to being here both as a Hall of Fame Executive Director and as a car enthusiast. I’m going to be wearing a couple of hats.”

The CARS staff is made up from a diverse form of motorsports representatives, with decades of racing experience. Many more announcements will be made in the coming weeks concerning details for the event.

Even with the locust raising hell across Sera, it seems the COG’s judicial system continues to dispense swift justice. Gears of War: Judgement’s story is told through a series of flashbacks, as Baird stands trial in a darkened courtroom watching the planet crumble around him.

The game’s set entirely in flashbacks, with you playing through ‘the evidence’ as characters from Kilo Squad giving insight into the moments leading up to their trial. With the Gears of War trilogy finished off, the franchise-makers want you to have another reason to go back to the universe and shoot bugs.

Cole and Baird are characters we’ve met before, and this is the only real thread Judgment has to tie everything back into the core trilogy. This is a prequel, so we’re getting to know what happened pre-Emergence Day. Heck, I love Baird as a character, so I’m happy to find out what makes the sarcastic sod tick. However, having a favourite COG member is like having a favourite wurzel. They’re all the same really. They just have different tones of voice.

Lets put the record straight: this isn’t Gears of War 4, and it isn’t even 3.5. It’s more Gears 3.1. Essentially, this is an excuse to have a little more Gears of War without a full-blown follow-up.

Playing through the game’s Old Town mission, we get to see Baird giving evidence in the courtroom before the action kicks off. Before that we’ve also learned that Baird has gone from “Lieutenant to war criminal,” gaining him notoriety among the ranks. The game drops many teasers before the first bullet has been fired, and it’s clear People Can Fly wants you to be asking questions from the start.

It becomes clear quickly that this game functions through a copy and paste template. Missions are built in blocks that typically go: kill the locust, defend against the locust horde for while and then fall back to another location.

Some players may be a little let down by this. If you’re a Gears fan you may not give two COGs, however, because it still plays great and it works.

Declassified options are a nice touch, giving you the option of raising the difficulty of each gameplay segment and opening up additional narrative. As war is war, sometimes the characters’ actions are frowned upon, so once you’ve enabled Declassified options in an area the game reveals what naughty activity or hard-pressed objective that Kilo Squad had to deal with.

New comics releases include an attention-seeking

The American government doesn’t trust the Justice League, so it’s making its own in Justice League Of America #1 (DC), the new ongoing by Geoff Johns and David Finch featuring a team of the world’s deadliest heroes. Johns assembles an attention-grabbing lineup for the group, mixing high-profile characters like Catwoman and Green Arrow with lesser-known heroes like Vibe and Stargirl, but this first issue fails to give a solid reason for them coming together. As lackluster as Johns’ first issue of Justice League was, at least it was active; Justice League Of America utilizes that time-honored team-building conceit of people sitting around a table with folders full of superhero headshots. This leads to lots of expository narration as Amanda Waller tells Steve Trevor about her candidates, with Johns checking in with the heroes to show scenes of them in action.

Back in December, Big Issues addressed how Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers provided a template for putting together a superhero team. That book introduced a threat that required the team’s expansion and spent time showing why the new members would be interested in joining, two things that Justice League Of America doesn’t accomplish. When Justice League Unlimited did a storyline about the American government plotting against the Justice League, the behavior of the superhero team justified the suspicion. Thus far, the New 52 Justice League is a hypothetical threat only, and it’s hard to get behind Waller’s rationale when it’s obvious that Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman aren’t going to go bad anytime soon.

This new Justice League title is intended as the lead-in to the upcoming “Trinity War” event, but the team’s formation is a contrived way of setting up the future conflict, complete with a corkboard that explicitly outlines future matches. Readers learn why Waller wants these heroes, but not why they personally want to be there, making the lineup feel like a gathering of superpowers and skill sets without any character underneath. With an absurd cliffhanger featuring the maybe-death of a hero whose title was just completely re-hauled and a 50 states variant cover initiative that has the heroes lifting 1 of 50 different state flags, this book is starting right off with cheap tactics to generate sales.

David Finch is one of DC’s superstar artists, yet while his pencils are meticulously detailed and he knows how to create a striking splash page, his characters tend to look overly posed. This cuts into the pages’ sense of motion, and no matter how intricate the linework gets, it can’t compensate for that stiffness. Like the classic Image artists that influenced him, Finch struggles with faces, and he uses stock faces for males and females that are only slightly altered via skin tone, hair, and eye color. (The big exception is Amanda Waller, who has more masculine features than the rest of the women in the book.) That said, Finch is by no means a bad artist. His art has a darker edge that’s appropriate for a storyline titled “World’s Most Dangerous,” but it’s not enough to make up for the title’s shaky concep.

The Bard’s expansive stock of characters makes his library a perfect candidate for the Fables treatment. After producing a thrilling debut miniseries two years ago, the team behind Kill Shakespeare is back for more stories starring the ragtag group of Hamlet, Juliet, Romeo, and Othello. For Kill Shakespeare: Tide Of Blood #1 (IDW), writers Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery switch the setting to Prospero’s island, using this first issue to fill readers in on the events of the last series before heading off to a new locale. Hamlet was the central figure of the initial miniseries, but Romeo takes the lead in Tide Of Blood, struggling with abandonment issues as he watches the Prince of Denmark get cozy with his old Capulet lover. He dreams of Prospero’s daughter Miranda, and when she appears in reality, Romeo is given the opportunity to stop wallowing in drink and despair and start being a hero again.

Andy Belanger’s artwork has become tighter in his time away from this world, and his characters are now as expressive as his backgrounds are detailed. The downside to the visuals is that Shari Chankhamma’s colors are a bit too subdued and end up washing out the linework. However, that could be intentional to emphasize the dullness of the world outside of Prospero’s island; hopefully she’ll utilize a more vibrant color palette once the book moves into the fantastic location. Perfect for everyone from Shakespeare fans to readers who are just looking for a riveting fantasy adventure, Tide Of Blood is a strong continuation of a franchise that will ideally be around for a while.

Even the most talented men and women who became comic-book artists in the mid-20th century tended to think of themselves as commercial illustrators first and foremost, often dismissing claims by fans and critics that they were producing anything like capital-A “Art.” Bernard Krigstein, though, always thought like a fine artist, even when he was drawing stories about cowboys, soldiers, or gangsters. That’s why after almost 20 years in the business, Krigstein left comics to become a painter and a teacher, sharing some of the analytical approach that he brought to the pulps. Krigstein’s comics work has long been prized by collectors, and Krigstein biographer Greg Sadowski assembles a lot of it under one cover in Messages In A Bottle (Fantagraphics), an expansion of the Sadowski-edited 2004 anthology B. Krigstein: Comics.

The collection is anchored by Krigstein’s most famous story: the Al Feldstein-written “Master Race,” a post-Holocaust thriller that ran in EC Comics’ non-horror title Impact after sitting around the company’s offices for nearly half a year, stumping the editors. But “Master Race” is surrounded by almost-as-stunning stories that show how Krigstein’s style evolved quickly, from his more conventionally rendered pre-EC pieces to work that almost doesn’t resemble comics. Later in his stint as a comic-book artist, Krigstein filled pages with elaborate abstract-art exercises, with some panels containing gorgeously detailed line drawings, some containing large amounts of negative space, and some subdivided into three or four narrower panels. Krigstein treated each assignment as a chance to put theory into practice, and even among EC’s formidable roster of stylists, Krigstein stands out as one for whom the words around the pictures almost don’t matter, because the art’s so mesmerizing that it’s hard to pay attention to anything else… [NM]