This is kinda how I feel about self-driving vehicles. People really don't seem to get it. It will change everything.

- You can call your car if you need it like Bruce Wayne calls the Batmobile.

- You can send things across town. No more courier or logistics.

- No more DUIs or drunk driving accidents.

- No more accidents period.

- No more insurance.

I know it's still a ways off, but damned if I'm not excited as hell. <3 Google.

You didn't even list the big stuff. In the short term we get the benefits you describe. In the long term the way we build cities and thus live our lives changes for the better as they become denser and much more space efficient.

I think it'll work the other way - with a self driving car, long commutes will be more tolerable, since you can do other things while you drive (are driven), so sprawl will increase. Imagine having some sort of bathroom built in to the car - you could do your morning grooming in the car, which means you could commute 30-60 minutes without losing any time you wouldn't be spending doing the same thing at home anyway.

I'm not even sure we can predict that far ahead what such a revolution would mean for human civilization. It would truly be game-changing.

Denser cities sounds like a con to me. I would much prefer to not be 2 inches from my neighbor.

A con by whom? Obviously, you may not enjoy living close to other people and will choose to live in lower density areas. Fair enough, and, at least in the US, we're not short on space. (I will only add that density is typically measured as people per square foot of ground, meaning you might simply be above and below your neighbors). But creating environments where people can live in higher densities can't be a bad thing.

And the benefits are manifold for those who do want to live in cities. Diversity of options is a big one--that food truck that serves gluten-free venison tacos can only exist somewhere with enough people that such a niche can survive, so the long tail of preferences can be accommodated. Infrastructure is in dense places is cheaper per capita; tearing up one road/pipe/sewer can benefit thousands of people instead of just whoever lives in that one cul-de-sac. Public transportation becomes more practical, enabling people to go where they want cheaper and more easily. A higher concentration of jobs and workers means there can be a better matching of needs and skills, making businesses more successful and workers happier.

So sure, you may wish to forgo all that to have a yard and some space. I'm sure the housing market and broadband companies will oblige. But in general, practical dense cities will be a boon to society, from which we'll all benefit.

Edit: clarity.

Not only all that, but there's been a lot of evidence over the past couple of decades that the rate of innovation per capita goes up with density. Density brings more people into contact more frequently, which leads to more innovation, more economic growth and more employment.

Is that still true though? (genuine question).

When I was a boy, twenty years ago I firmly believed that I would need to move to London as soon as I could, just for the British library and access to information. Then the internet happened (well the web, and it was already happening but for me, that's when it happened). The internet made distance so much less of a factor, and i suspect that this trend will only continue. I suspect the density/creativity association will break down, but I have no evidence either way, so I could be completely wrong.

Still true. If anything, it's getting more true over time as cities get more efficient at bringing people into productive contact.

lots of roads can be one lane one way if all the drivers are perfect.

There's also a downside: a huge spike in usage. People will be willing to commute a lot further if they can sleep en route. That means more traffic and more energy used.

> Why own a game system...

There's actually a service called "OnLive" that streams games, it seems pretty cool. It's a mashup between Steam and Netflix; you don't have to have a gaming PC to render the frames, just a fast Internet connection to stream them.

I... I just played Civ 5 there on a whim after googling for that service and it's pretty amazing. My jaw dropped. I'm on a 20mbps download and 1.5mbps upload for whatever it's worth. Also, the app warned me of being on an high latency connection (I don't know their threshold) but the videos and the game are smooth.

Not until we can push data across distances faster than the speed of light.

The input and video latency makes it impractical for all but the slowest-paced of games.

Your comment reminded me of:

I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?

From: http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fas...

There is user-side latency and there is server-side latency. In multi-player games it may be preferable to have less latency within the game between players than in the players' view of the game.

You can send a packet to Europe and have it return faster than your fingers can respond to something your eyes just saw.

Note that this doesn't mean the latency is irrelevant. All latency is additive. Unless it's zero, matter how low it is, shaving away another millisecond is always worth it.

It's always beneficial, that doesn't mean it's always worth it. I could spend $300+/month on an internet connection with a tenth of the bandwidth of what Google's rolling out here (seeing that I don't live in Kansas City) and it would certainly be beneficial for me, but it's certainly not worth it

I have a line with that connection, and its only 50 euro a month (only in the cities though, out in the bogs its 8mb if you're lucky).

Depends on the distance. I have 14ms roundtrip latency to the closest google CDN -- that's less than what the typical monitor adds. Most of world's population lives in cities where putting up a game CDN is potentially worthwhile.

Errr. Have you tried it?

I've spent several playing first person shooters and it's easy to forget you're not playing locally.

There has to be latency issues, but as anyone that used to play Quake over dial-up can tell you: you get used to it.

A local client does not suffer from input latency and the client does not validate camera movement (mouselook) to server snapshots . There's also some leeway into other kinds of movement so latency jitter and a few dropped packets do not inadvertently disrupt the player's flow. Furthermore, the server does latency compensation that is crucial for actually hitting anything, especially with hitscan weapons lacking AoE damage. All the above is a very simplified explanation of what happens, more details at following PDF [1].

Games on OnLive lack the above features and you also have input lag, where, for example, a camera movement with the mouse will take the full network RTT plus processing time to reflect on the client's screen.

[1] http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/courses/4513-B03/papers/game...

That's true, I remember there being lots of prediction and compensation in QuakeWorld especially.

I haven't played the OnLive stuff so I'm not sure what it's like, but with a decent connection I'm guessing it's something that your brain just ends up dealing with. Although if it's anything like using RDC for a long period of time I can see it getting annoying.

Wow you just brought back memories. I remember when a 250 ping was fantastic :)

Give onlive a try... it really is on the level. AFAIK, they receive your input and process it server-side. What you get is in essence a live video stream. I am sure that it is more complicated in execution, but they make it work - and damn well.

Probably with a gigabit in bandwidth, it's possible that OnLive could use some kind of predictive modeling based on what you're currently doing and what you've done in the past to see what actions in the future are likely. It could then run (in parallel) all the likely actions and send them down simultaneously (example: simultaneously send what would be displayed if you panned right, left, up and down one or more frames before the user has given input and the client caches these frames and renders the one that the user ends up doing).

Sure it would be a "waste" of compute power and network, but that's certainly one way to, in a sense, "push data across distances faster than the speed of light". That's exactly the kind of approach which would be unimaginable in a scenario where you have to worry about compressing media in order to get a single stream across in a timely manner (read: now), but might actually fall within the realm of possibility when gigabit bandwidth is ubiquitous.

I think computing power would be a much bigger issue than bandwidth. You'd need to run many instances of the game for each user, and continuously kill and fork them.

And frankly, a $500 computer today can already display quite good graphics. Maybe by the time gigabit bandwidth is ubiquitous, computers will be usable enough that installing and running a game locally will be as seamless as clicking a link on a web page, so we won't need cloud gaming amymore.

And then a cheating client will be developed that uses the information in these "alternate timeline" frames to alert you of enemies around the corner, etc.

I'm not saying that's catastrophic, but I think the impossibility of cheating is one of OnLives clear advantages. Sure you can write a bot, but it will only have access to the same information a human player does.

> Not until we can push data across distances faster than the speed of light.

Ok, how is that possible? I genuinely am curious about the science. Feel free to provide links.

The current approach is as follows: 1) User sends next action to OnLive. 2) OnLive renders the frame and sends it to the user. 3) Repeat.

The "faster than light" approach is: 1) OnLive renders several frames that could be the outcome of all the possible actions by the user, and sends all of them to the user. 2) User chooses the next action. 3) The frame is already available and is rendered ASAP. 4) The action is sent to OnLive. 5) Repeat.

It is of course not actually faster than light, but it's faster than the time required to send light to OnLive and back. Although, if you're going to this trouble, you may as well just render the frames locally and not bother with OnLive at all... :-S

I'm pretty sure that was sarcasm.

Well, going faster than the speed of light isn't possible, but if compressed really well, you could theoretically send massive quantities of data really quickly.

For example, if you want to play a game with someone who's on the other side of the world (or the galaxy) without that annoying lag imposed by relativity, you can simply have them send you a full scan of their brain, and then you can simulate it locally (not necessarily in your computer, it can run in the nearest Google MindSharing Center™).

Heck, you don't even need to play the game yourself. Send Google a copy of your brain too, and they will simulate the encounter in their servers and insert the memory in your brain when they're done. EVERYTHING can run in the cloud!

Wonder how much the weather in Kansas can deal with this. I still might be hesitant to depend on streaming content or entirely cloud storage if I can't guarentee access in a tornado. Even without weather concerns, if I somehow mess up my configuration and don't have a reliable network connection, I don't want to be entirely cut off.

Still good, but I won't be abandoning local storage any time soon.

I've lived in Kansas City and can tell you that worrying about a tornado knocking out my internet or any sort of service was never an issue.

Is the Wizard of Oz your reference for weather in KC? ;)

Ice storms are another story. When I lived in KC I had week-long outages twice due to ice storms knocking over large fractions of trees.

My reference is living in mid Missouri - we've had a bit of fun recently with tornadoes and other weather related outages are common. Granted, I live in a small town, so we probably have worse infrastructure than KC.

I know your question is a joke but for me... it pretty much is. I know bugger all about KC, except that in the back of my head there's a connection to Dorothy.

Fun fact: Kansas City is not in Kansas. :)

Actually I do (or at least thought I did) know two other things, one being that it is split across two states, and the other being that the KC Royals come from there.

Having now Googled... wow, so they're technically two cities with the same name literally right next to each other, not one big city?

And turns out the Royals are from KC, MO, but I presume they have a lot of support from KC, KS as well?

> so they're technically two cities with the same name literally right next to each other, not one big city?

It's one metropolitan area, but governmentally, yes, it is 2 separate cities (+ a lot of suburban cities). Politically, it's a dysfunctional family. It's really hard to get anything done, but occasionally that works to the benefit because you have competing governments. Most of the time its a detriment though.

The sports teams get support from both sides of the state line.

Kansas City, KS is.

As always, it's smart to have redundant backups. However, your stuff is way, way safer, in terms of destructability, on Google's infrastructure than your own, especially in the case of tornadoes when your storage media is likely to be flung a half-mile away if you get hit.

Tornadoes are actually one of the more mild natural disasters. They are certainly not any more likely to knock out your ISP, whose cables are underground, than any other natural calamity. California's earthquakes pose a much greater threat to infrastructure than Kansas's tornadoes.

And like chucknelson, I lived in KC for years and can't recall a weather-related service disruption for my ISP.

It's quite common in rural mid-MO where I live. Storms (not necessarily tornadoes) and Ice.

Why own a game system?

Ping.

You may have a point with the rest, but response time is a really big deal with many games and a large amount of bandwidth doesn't actually mean a super amazing ping. And actually the speed of light presents ping issues that are meaningful to games so you will never ever be able to just locate computers anywhere and connect to them to play.

The biggest changing factor is not the speed but the fact that it is symmetric. Symmetric internet will change the way we use our home computers. We will be able to create and send content just as much as we consume it. Imagine the future peer to peer networks used for any and everything (in a legal manner of course).

This seems to go back-and-forth and I'm not quite ready to crown the streaming model king just yet. What happens when you have gigabit ethernet and a tablet that can hold 80 days worth of movies? Do you stream them or just download them instantaneously without regard to how much space they consume?

"Do you stream them or just download them instantaneously without regard to how much space they consume?"

"Stream" is a euphemism for "download you are not allowed to keep".

Expect to keep seeing the word "stream" for a while.

I'm aware of what a stream is. Are you familiar with the Netflix, some may call it "rental" model? Apparently they let you "borrow" movies, I'm told for days at a time. Apparently you have to have a continuous internet connection to "stream" which kinda sucks when you have to move from one place to another.

Telepresence for musicians, with zero-lag audio & HD video streams. That's what I want to build.

I detail the idea some here: http://www.fossfactory.org/project/p305

Off topic, but why did you use a 0 (zero) instead of an O for "0r maybe your right..."?

Pshaw. 640K(bps) ought to be enough for anybody.