Kind of a High End Gift Shop

Well, really the way it worked was that I had probably built fifty robots before Mystery Science Theater, and I had sold them in a store in Minneapolis in a store called Props, which was kind of a high end gift shop.
—Joel Hodgson

Post about future tech/equipment, with which I kick off a new tag relating to same, "production design/props". If you feel like browsing by tags, you might wanna periodically inspect that one, 'cause it's gonna take a bit for me to go through and tag all the old posts.

• So I think, though I'm not really going to go into much depth, that the human computers in my thing will run, roughly, Linux. In part because it's probably only a matter of time until Windows comes to be built on Linux the way the MacOS is, and in part because it's apparently huge in China (also, apparently, Latin America).
  
  Of course, by this point, which of the big 3 a computer is running is essentially trivial; they all look alike. I mean, I remember when Mac windows had the maximize button in one corner, the close in the other, and could only be resized from the bottom right.
  
  That trend to sameness is only going to continue, and I figure by the 24th century there'll only be one system, running both desktops and handhelds (and yes, you'll still have desktops, there are lots of jobs where you do, in fact, have to sit at a desk and enter information, and typing is simply more comfortable than writing with a stylus on a handheld).
• Similarly there's still TV, but TVs are actually computers that can download any video you wanna see and have volumetric displays (holograms). Radios are probably the handhelds (phone volume and radio volume controlled separately), as are ebook readers and wallets. Though, your biometrics are actually your ID and all you need to pay for things.
  
  I'm endlessly amused by people who think it'd be just terrible for the government to know your biometrics—like it pretty much does already. And seriously, the argument actually is "you have nothing to fear if you don't do anything". They only need a search warrant to give you a court-ordered prostate exam now, you know, and all one of those means is a judge signed off on it.
  
  You remember in Larry Niven how Earth is so over-crowded that pickpocketing laws are unenforceable? (We will forgive him not having crunched the numbers—it was before Wikipedia and even before cheap calculators—but actually 105 billion people, far more than his Earth has, would still need only 15.3% of the ice-free land surface, including their agricultural land.) Yes well if your bank account is accessed by your retina scan, you are your debit card, and you don't need a wallet. Pickpocketing is impossible (well, people's handhelds might still get stolen).
• Meanwhile I think zled networks use something like the Tumblers from Project Xanadu, though probably not purely numerical. In many ways their Signalers' Sodality is a lot like guys like Ted Nelson, except (partly because they're not so hard-up for funding) less ranty.
  
  'Course, thanks to how their grammar works, they're also less portmanteau coiny, because damn. Any "sociolosopher" who coins words like "docuverse" and refers to synthetical knowledge as "intertwingularity" should be slapped. It's not just Nelson—all of our more casual computer writing is rife with it. E.g. various Transhumanists, with, e.g., their Jupiterlects and their Adhocracy and their Contelligence. Doesn't it make you want to defenestrimmolate them?
  
  You'd think people who are as orientalist as the average Transhuman would know they sound like a third-string Japanese comedian's C-game. Or maybe not; I suppose the definition of orientalism involves having only a shallow knowledge of the culture in question.
• Speaking of Transhumanists and computers, have any of them realized that it's completely impossible to upload anything even approximating a mind? Even assuming it were just a set of energy states in the brain, and it isn't, brains aren't digital.
  
  Think of digital audio with the ten layers of white noise, or digital images with all the dithering to conceal the jaggies. I don't know about you but my mind is not accurately representable by a crocheted sampler.
• Speaking of digital noise, my Luddite aunt and grandmother got a DirecTV dish I think less than a year after the switch to all-digital broadcasting. Why? Noise. See, a bad reception on an analog receiver is still a show. A bad reception on digital looks like the chest of a general—a whole bunch of little stripy ribbons.
  
  This raises issues RE: space. You'd probably use green lasers or at least tightly focused beam-radio, and for some things (SOSs, certain safety beacons) ships would have analog equipment—an analog radio being a hell of a lot easier to juryrig in an emergency than a computer with a transmitter is.
  
  Incidentally, considering we're already largely shifting away from the "radiating like a star in the radio band" that SF of previous generations claimed was the sign of any high-tech civilization, the Fermi paradox looks to have turned out to be a case of "the frog in the well knows not the wide sea". The kind of radio transmitting they were doing when Fermi first asked "Where the hell are they?" is already ceasing to be the kind of transmitting we do. And our SETI has always been something of an afterthought, and even it was born of a number of cultural ideas that are far from universal, even among Carl Sagan's contemporary conspecifics.
• I have just found a site that ever science fiction writer needs to devour. It's called "Gajitz.com", and their "unbuilt concepts" tag is awesome. It's full of nifty ideas like the clothes-hampers in apartment buildings each being a detachable, central drum for a communal washing machine. Admittedly, every other idea on that page (except maybe the quadruped Roomba) is dumb.
  
  Also? This. A paper-thin battery made of lithium-soaked carbon nanotubes. How do you affix it to a device? I'm thinking conductive glue—the battery is a sticker. And it's rechargeable.
• I don't think I mentioned it here, but it'd occurred to me that given handhelds of the future are likely to still have cameras, they can be used for "augmented reality" displays. Anything the stereotypical future-person gets from surgically-installed artificial eyes, you get from your phone. I'm sorry, which is going to be a hit with more consumers?
  
  Of course, you don't walk around holding up an iPhone in front of you if you're in a war-zone—you wear a Bluetooth with a scouter built in. Come up with your own "over 9000" joke, I'm tired.
• So if you needed proof of my theory that, pace Heppenheimer, space colonists will simply replace hydrocarbon-polymers and wood with silicone and bamboo, I've done some looking about on the webs.
  
  Bamboo furniture—frequently marketed as "sustainable", which is not just for hippies, on a habitat-ring—is everywhere, though a lot of it is in the form of gimmicky rattan. Personally I suspect most future furniture, like most of ours, will be particle-board Ikea stuff, but with the particle-board made of ground bamboo instead of wood sawdust.
  
  As for silicone, anything you can make out of rubber can be made from silicone, and is. E.g., I'm not sure about all of them but at least some of those little white erasers, which I much prefer to the pink ones since they don't dry out, are not rubber at all. Nope, silicone. Also you can get it in any consistency from gel to rubber to hard plastic, whereas generally hydrocarbons need different polymers for multiple consistencies.
  
  Also? You can make clothes from silicone, though it's a bit weird; it'd be more likely to be used in a supplementary role the way it is now (t-shirt ink, for instance). More likely for space-colonists' clothes is bamboo fiber, and, well, cotton. Hydroponic cotton, as described in this paper from the Canadian Journal of Agricultural Science.