2005: The Technology Invasion

Time to play penny-ante Nostradamus.

Sometime in 2005…

On a flight from L.A. to Newark, a stock broker from San Diego will be beaten to death with his own cell phone by row-mates after they are forced to hear, “No, dude, this stock CAN’T MISS” 187 times in a four-hour span.

Third-year computer science students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute will discover that they can retrieve data from Wal-Mart mandated RFID tags at a range of 250 meters using a GameBoy Advance, $3.79 worth of parts from Radio Shack, and a half-empty can of Red Bull. Pathetically, they will use the invention only to determine when new deliveries of Maxim magazine and additional Red Bull have arrived at the campus bookstore.

All the remaining cell phone carriers will agree to merge into a single monolithic unit. Upon signing the final contracts, the sheer mass of hubris in the venture will cause the combined company to spontaneously fuse into a solid block of carbon, leaving the planet cell-phone free. In a seemingly unrelated event, the world’s population of pretty butterflies, frolicking kittens and cuddly puppies instantaneously increases by 40 percent.

An electronic copy of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince gets posted to the Kazaa file-sharing network three weeks before the book’s official mid-July release date. Forgoing normal judicial process, an army of 4,000 lawyers from Scholastic, the book’s publisher, led by armor-clad, Glamdring-wielding author J.K. Rowling, invade Sydney, Australia, and burn the Kazaa headquarters to the ground.

Despite the exceptional efforts of Scholastic’s legal department and Ms. Rowling, 1.7 billion people download the book and discover two-thirds of the way through—on page 1,871—that Rowling really needs to find a good editor again.

Happy Holidays to all!