Word: exceptional
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Being nerds, however, they are rather unworldly. They are similar in dress, zip code, outlook and philosophy to the Berkeley free-speech activists of the early 1960s, except that the cypherpunks have a bigger megaphone: the Internet. They can encrypt free speech and software as well, so various uptight authority figures cannot stop their heroic data...
...about what is possible without thinking about what will actually make good business." Say you were descrying the future TV of 2000, 20 years ago. You might have predicted a remarkable, crisp, high-tech TV display. You might have called it, say, "HDTV." And you would have been right. Except HDTV is probably not in your living room. As with the De Lorean car, the mere existence of a $5,000 or $10,000 TV set isn't sufficient to persuade consumers to go into hock to get a sharper look at Dennis Franz's butt. Instead, people have stuck...
...those whatsits that the future of TV lies. Cable and telecommunications companies (among them TIME's parent, Time Warner) are racing to wire homes with high-speed data connections, similar to today's cable in capacity except--a big except--that they allow two-way communication and, above all (this being America), commerce. Meanwhile, our more adventurous neighbors are starting to install digital TV "set-top" peripherals, from WebTV to ReplayTV and TiVo, that allow them to surf the Web onscreen, interact with programming, store TV shows on hard discs or even--horrifying to broadcasters--skip all those commercials...
...COMPUTER One of the most ingenious ideas being pursued is to compute using DNA, treating the double-stranded molecule as a kind of biological computer tape (except that instead of encoding 0s and 1s in binary, it uses the four nucleic acids, represented by A, T, C, G). This approach holds much promise for crunching big numbers. Hence large banks and institutions may one day use it. However, a DNA computer is an unwieldy contraption, consisting of a jungle of tubes of organic liquid, and is unlikely to replace a laptop in the near future...
...baseball leagues and its own population of children playing hopscotch on the streets. The people we meet there will look and feel almost as real as the ones we encounter during our waking lives. If you've chosen a multiplayer universe, they may even be those same working stiffs, except that they will probably inhabit designer bodies that are a lot more interesting than their own. Our quests, our goals will be of our choosing and will almost certainly not involve corporate mission statements or our boss's action-agenda items. Here, our presence is of primary importance...