At one point, I had a character in mind who was specifically trained in several languages, living and dead, and would make a living writing down messages, transporting them, and then reading them to people when he got there.

If he got mugged, what are the odds that J. Random Ork Ganger could read Arabic, or would even know what to do with it?

Course, he was fairly useless in terms of actually being a team player, so he never materialized.

That would merely require a mental twitch to exchange the info between Commlinks in 2070. Even taking notes to yourself, or stuff like shopping lists would be down to almost purely a mental exercise.

And I don't really think equipment would meltdown 10% of the time.

What, you mean like: OMFG u suck i cant beleive u r so stupid rotflol!!!!1

edit: Next thing you know they're going to start allowing crap like that in universities!
........shit.

I think it's difficult for us to completely anticipate the difficulties of a hypothetical device 70 years in the future. However we can look at current trends to determine the likelihood of problems in the future.

For instance:
Cars have made transport fast and convenient. Even though almost every family in the US has at least one car, walking, running and biking are all common activities.

Cell phone use has risen dramatically and certainly fill almost all the roles older phones filled, yet most homes still pay for landline phone service.

The availability of pre-made food is tremendously high and is often more cost effective (if included the value of time spent) than making food by scratch, yet people continue to grow their own gardens and bake their own bread.

E-mail has made communication fast, efficient and cheap, yet people continue to pay for the privilege of sending snail mail letters.

I simply cannot easily accept that just because a more convenient method of writing has come along, we'll all simply give up on normal writing and see it as useless. It flies in the face of previous trends. There will still be a large contingent in two generations that think the written word on paper is valuable, and I can't imagine anything but the ultra-liberal or the ultra-poor schools will choose to drop two of the three r's.

You are right in that some people will not be affected negativly. I would however say that exactly this example demonstrates why many people will express themselves worse than now.

What will be really interesting is the effect on the japanese and chinese languages, as those will adapt real well to literal images instead of kanji. No longer will all of the kanji look like "train station". (Yeah, they don´t. Except for one. But the difference is sadly beyond my grasp).

I c'aunt tell weather this miner whole in you're grammer cheque was diliberite awe ironic.

Not even if that mass transit doesn't use fossil fuels? Damn, taking the train to work doesn't count, huh?

Oh well. I still did it for two years, back in 2002 and 2003. Got to work, got home, went to school, got my wife to work, got the kid to day care, Did all my shopping, and saw all my friends without having a car. The only times we bummed rides were when we had to get to the hospital, or those few times we took our laundry over to the dorms so we could hang with folks while we did it. It's ever so possible, but only if you specifically move so that you are within walking distance of everything you need. Also if you define walking distance as 3 or more miles. I can't manage these days because my office is dowtown, and I can't afford a loft. But the public transport still gets me there. I think It's very important to be able to live your life without a car.

That's funny, since NZ is in the eastern hemisphere and all.

Political geographers? I want some of whatever you're smoking.

~J

I've seen nothing to indicate that text will be a method of communication belonging to the past in the year 2070 Shadowrun. Voice messages could easily have been the standard on the internet even today, yet it's clearly not. So we are talking about computers translating thoughts into text, that is then read much the same way as it is today.

Remember that mindcontroled text creation will also have to conform to lexical and grammatical standards if it is to be understood by readers. Just like today there would be genres with different demands on formality, as well as subject matters that require different levels of linguetic complexity.

No computer program could ever translate the thoughts of a person—who does not understand the proper way to communicate his message—into a text that perfectly mediates what he was trying to say. Most of the time a human expert couldn't even do that! Because of the coralation between language and knowledge that you talk about, the person propably doesn't even have the right idea anyway until he has learned to express it in words.

In truth I can't see the difference between mind-controlled text creation and today's digital word prossesing as something more significant, then the difference beween the latter and writing stuff with a pencil.

Were does it say that? And what kind of format does these thought messages have? Is there actually a mechanical way of reading minds? That's not what I've gathered, but perhaps I'm wrong.

Still, even if messeges are actually pure thoughts trasfered from one person to the next, they would have to undergo some kind of formating. My thoughts are horribly irratic before I write them down or speak them. And I think most people would shy from leaving that formating to a computer.

The way I see it; the only way we could dumb down communication in every feild would be to give up vast amounts of our collective knowledge. The knowledge is already there, and we have to manage it somehow in order to evolve. It doesn't seem to me like the people of the sixth world have less knowledge then we have today (but rather the opposite), so there's propably an even bigger need for formalized communication. And I think that any new form of communication that would somehow make such a thing impossible simply wouldn't catch on.

That being said, I think that people are getting dumber in some ways as technology evolves. We are getting worse and worse memory, but are getting better at scrutinizing information, for instance. Concidering AR and the matrix in Shadowrun, that development will propably have taken some extreme steps.

I'd point out that much mass transit still uses fossil fuels, even the trains and buses with electric motors and batteries.

It's just where you can't see it. Coal or other fossil fuel-fired electrical power generation is still very common.

I wonder. How are the pollutants from a normal car, compared to the pollutants produced by a power plant for the equivalent amount of electricity, to go the same distance?


-karma

Carbon dioxide. Nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused until it's barely radioactive, and our current coal plants emit vast amounts of radioactive material to boot (along with their carbon dioxide!).

And, like I said, even if all current evidence turns out to be false and in a hundred years nuclear power plants are going to kill the planet, we can switch to something else. That's the power of adding a layer of abstraction, whether it be to electricity, hydrogen, or any other energy-storage mechanism.

~J

Been there, done that. Two years. Live on campus, walk anywhere that's needed.

Followed by living a 20 minute walk from campus, and walking everywhere. That's including an hour+ walk to a few different destinations. Far enough it used to worry people, in fact.

No one uses cars, there's too much traffic!

...yeah this country sucks when it comes to other forms of transportation.

The reason we don't have good train service is not because of city planning, but because of shortsightedness and profiteering. One of my theses in college concerned the demise of the intercity passenger rail, interurban, and streetcar lines after WWII. Basically the systems were sold out by a bloc which included Standard Oil, Goodyear Rubber GM, Ford, Chrysler, and the Highway Construction Lobby.

At one time Los Angeles boasted one of the finest transit systems in the world (the old Red Car). Now the running joke about the transit system there is "RTD - Reason to Drive"

For some good background check out The Progressive Magazine - "Off The Track, How America Lost a Sane Transportation System" This was written in the late 70s and details how Amtrak (then called the NRPC) was purposely set up to fail (the appointed chief executive was from the airline industry - no conflict of interest there ) and how the "Auto Bloc" basically destroyed the streetcar and interurban lines. I remember taking the old North Shore line from the south side of Milwaukee (it made several neighbourhood stops) to Chicago with the run taking about 70 min. At that time, driving the same route took nearly 2 hours yet the excuse for dismantling the line was because it was "outdated"

The popular movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" also dealt with the issue of dismantling the old LA Red Car lines.

Keep in mind Truman's old adage, "...a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage"

Ours is about a buck a litre [US] here in Sydney right now, but it just dropped quite a bit.

Oh wait, you're from one of those countries that uses commas and periods opposite from me. You mean one dollar, fifty-eight and nine tenths of a cent. At first, I thought you meant one thousand five-hundred eighty-nine US dollars, which, by US numerical conventions, is exactly what you wrote.

..I take it the Tram was replaced by a diesel bus.

As I understand, The CTA (Chicago) is testing fuel cell busses. FC power makes more sense than some of the other exotic fuels (such as LPG). A few years ago, Portland's Tri Met was experimenting with LPG. The busses had poor range and very mediocre performance. Currently Tir Met is evaluating several Hybrid vehicles which is at least a step in the right direction.

In Seattle and San Francisco, they brought back the"Trackless Trollies" but the only strike against this is that they can only operate on fixed routes. While a good portion of Seattle's fleet are also dual power diesel/overhead electric, FC electric would still be better since it is not restricted to overhead wires and does not need an auxiliary powerplant to operate "offline".

A good website to check for more info is Fuel Cells 2000

When I was running SR2/3 I wrote up Fuel cell powerplants (before Rigger 3 was released) and had two companies, Delta Vee (Later Aeon technologies) and I-Motive which manufactured Fuel Cell vehicles and powerplants exclusively. There were six models of cars, several utility vehicles (in co-operation with other firms) and even a UDF (unducted fan) cargo aricraft and LTA that were all fuel cell powered. I am currently translateing these over to SR4 stats.

BTW: Do you have more info on the Maglev that is currently being tested in your country? I know they had a terrible accident a while back where it hit a service vehicle.

Sorry for sort of derailing this thread, but transportation technology and systems are two of my specialties & I couldn't resist.

Australia has only recently started using gas in cars though at 3 - 20 times atmospheric pressure it's stored as a liquid (and therefore can be sold per litre; a gas has no fixed volume). Currently the main advantage of having a gas car rather than a normal petrol car is that gas is less than half the price of petrol (though in a few years a tax on gas will reduce that advantage).

He as in Butterblume, whom Bodak quoted.

According to Wikipedia 'petrol' is the most common name for petrol although North America and Canada are peculiar in calling it Gasoline. The original gasoline was a different oil, burnt in lamps while 'petrol' was a trade name for fuel sold by chemists for combustion engines.

Probably because of all the space-shuttle launches and volcano eruptions between now and 2060

Technically, according to Wikipedia, the sky could at this very moment be literally raining pink fluffy kittens that shit gold bullion. That wouldn't make it true.

Really? Can you link the page that describes such a meteorological precipitation of juvenile aureate felines? It sounds like it should appear on the page about H2G2 along with a thousand flying lightly fried eggs.

While quoting an online encyclopaedia doesn't make something true, it does lend authority to a claim. Merely claiming that gas is the standard reference for petrol outside Australia (and perhaps England) would be an opinion. It may be true or false but it lacks authority. Also a wiki entry is scrutinised by many more people than read this thread

While on the topic of degenerating the English language and the clash between cultural meanings of valid words, I'm reminded of the Niggardly farce when uneducated people force erudite people with superior vocabulary to apologise for their own ignorance. Niggardly coming from Scandinavian hnøgger, meaning "stingy" hundreds of years before nigger was derived from Latin niger, meaning "black". Such unfounded objections will likely proliferate as literacy becomes less essential and spelling and grammar are an arbitrary subjective creative expression more than an objective prescription. While at university I met people who had never read even a complete book, and had only read portions of texts they were required to for their studies. The overwhelming majority of language they read is informal (SMSes, emails, IRC, etc) or tokenised (menus, street signs, etc). Deprived of exposure to many words, the incidence of pejorative meanings mistakenly assigned to legitimate words based on phonetic similarity to a word in an impoverished lexicon will sadly increase. 'Easy' entertainment has its price.

Given the English language habit of swiping words and concepts from other languages, exactly what is the point of having Cityspeak and English separate?

A lot of people use cars. I was saying that it's stupid to do so, not that no one did . But technicly your statement is actually nearly true. Like in most european cities, the city center is really small and most people live in appartment complexes surrounding it. The streets in the center of the city has too much traffic all the time, even if most people take the tram.

I actually meant petrol aka petroleum spirit .

Because linguistic drift in some areas, say rundown inner cities, will be a different process than in other areas, like say the corp world. Teenagers in rural midwest USA pick up some new language, and at the same time kids in the slums of London pick up completely different new language. Both fit these new grammar structures and vocabulary into their idea of what English is, and neither is wrong to do so. I imagine that English could easily split into two (or more) languages, given the vast cultural differences of the people who use it. (Remember the B.I.T.C.H. test?) Of course, the folks in power get to say which one is the "real" English and which is the offshoot.

Languages are very fluid from region to region and generation to generation. They are not fixed. Our systems to categorize them for convenience have to adapt as well.