Freedom of information and how rapidly it disseminates these days.
You could have a cell phone video of a police beating taken on your cellphone in the morning. Withing 24 hours millions of people can see nearly exactly what happened, and the information withing can be aggregated and expanded upon. Go back a 15 years, and information could only travel by word of mouth (which includes phones) or TV station (which are open to control by the state). Go back 150 years and you would have to use telegraphs, and it would be purely one persons word against what someone else said to determine what happened). Go back 200 years and it would be purely word of mouth and newspapers, information would take weeks to travel from place to place, and was easily distorted. Go back 400 years, and getting information from one place to another (eg. China to England, US to Italy), would take months and months, and you would have to hire someone to send it or go personally. Go back a millenia, and information didn't travel outside of the immediate area that it was in, no one living in England even knew of Japan, or the name of which dynasty ruled in China, those in China knew nothing about which King ruled in Italy, or even of the existance of England.
On the slightly less legal side, anything you want information wise you can obtain.
A copy of pretty much every book ever written? Done, you can have a million books on your laptop within hours.
Any computer game released in the past 10 years? Done, with a good internet connection its faster then driving down to the store and back
Any movie released between yesterday-50 years? Done, even movies that you could never find in a store.
And TV series released in 10 years? Done, even those obscure ones that no one has heard of.
Do note that its not that the they are in practice basically free (and that I can get it for free), its the idea of it, that you can wake up, and download something made half a world away, with a good connection in half a hour you can be playing a game that requires a device that would probably be worth the lives of a million soldiers in WWI or WWII, that dukes would have given their realms away for, you can look at realtime images on cameras in major cities, you can try to solve major scientific problems (that protein folding game that they used for crowd sourcing and people got something to help out against AIDS comes to mind), and so many other things.
And it will only get crazier from here on out, the limits on information dissemination will continue to lessen and disappear, as they have been doing for the past millenia, processing power will go up, having a ten terabyte harddrive will be quaint and amusing, like my old 128 meg flash drive, or floppy disk even. I am no science fiction writer, or no scientist, and I don't know what will come technology wise, but unless something really really bad (eg. nuclear winter, crazy nanotechnology problems, supervirus, AI revolution (which I suppose would be its own increase into the infinite future however) happens, it will just keep growing and getting bigger and more fantastical. Who knows, one days we will look back, cybernetically enhanced and genetically engineered, each one of us being able to get technology that could kill everyone on the planet today (eg. nanotech that could expand without other nanotech to stop it, custom designed superviruses that don't effect anyone living in that time period since they would have nanotech/genetically engineered themselves to be immune to them), and we will still probably go "GODAMIT, MY METALINK TO ALPHA CENTURI 1 HAS 150ms LATENCY, GODAMN MENTAL INTERFACE NOT WORKING PROPERLY", and "I hate spaceship food, the flight costs tens of thousands of dollars, and they still make me pay for my bloody pretzels myself".
I just kind of which I was born a few centuries later, just to see what the future holds, because I don't think that I will see the end of it, and see whats to come. Who knows though, I am only twenty, and have (assuming that there is no immortality tech made publicly available and cheap enough in the next decades), can live for another sixty years.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16205824 times)