Why has humanity failed to innovate in the past decade?
jodrellblank: I'm in bed typing on a triple radio, camera, touch, motion, sound and proximity sensitive phone so I can't easily get links for citations from the wotld's first distibuted volunteer enyclopedia, but I think I read there that Guinea worm infection is well on the way to being the next eradicated disease, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.I think you have rose tinted glasses on the past - in 2000 I was at university where they ran NT4 with Netscape, and was rocking a Celeron 433, with a new USB1 100Mb zip drive. Now a 4Gb pen drive holds 400x more and costs 1/25th the price and tranfers data faster.New cars today can have vision recognition blind spot checkers, radar based cruise control, pedestrian sensors, brake appliers, regenerative brakes, head up displays, Internet connections, all in ordinary models not 100k luxury ones.The UK has migrated to digital TV and Radio. In 1999 I bought a VHS recorder, now HDD recorders are standard.In 2000 there was nothing as good as Skype, train times were on paper in stations, airport checkins had queues, maps were paper based, polyphonic ringtones on phones were fancy, the HP200lx was the netbook of choice, the L prize for LED lights was nowhere to be seen, nor were snooks or really Amazon and Internet shopping and consumer reviewing on such a grand scale. Joule Biotechnologies, the LHC, ITunes university, the idea of an OLPC, virtual machines all absent.China, new fastest train recently.Now, if I had the cash, I could put a deposit down for a personal space flight!I hear you on the computer still chugging thing, but don't want Netscape back.