The glass is half full. I'm certain of it.
The weird thing about flying is that the bottle neck has become the "security" measures, flight delays, and all the other time spent from leaving your home to when you actually arrive at your destination.
Speeding up all of those steps probably has even more effect on door to door travel time than reducing the amount of time the plane has to be in the air.
But those same ~2 hours prep pale in comparison to, say, LAX->SYD. :)
But these ideas are not unimaginably far from what we presently can do.
Previous sci-fi ideas were unbelievable. I'd like to hear some ideas which are unbelievable again. Everything I heard so far just seems quite sensible and achievable.
No, the hardware may not have changed much, but the usage of computers in general society has changed, a lot. due to the internet.
When Windwos 3.1 was popular, odds are you couldn't use it to order cinema tickets at your local cinema, buy pizza, order your shopping, send a message to your mother, or watch the latest film as soon as it came out at whatever time suited you.
Now, when Windows 7 is popular, you can do all these things.
But that's not really science fiction to me. That's just iterative and incremental improvements on a global network.
There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs).
There's not a whole helluva lot different between a Mac Performa and the iMac I'm using to type this message (drive bay, hard drive, ram, cpu, etc. Similar designs and similar interfaces).
Yeah, Google Maps and GPS are neat but a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.