Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit links to a grousing essay in England's Daily Mail whose headline says it all:

Tomorrow's World it ain't! The fantastic innovations we were promised never materialised... so when WILL the future arrive?

The future is here--it's just not the mid-20th century Jetsons, Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey future, which essentially extrapolated out advancements in industrial machinery, but not electronics. The former's development has of course flattened out, while the latter has undergone a tremendous and arguably still accelerating revolution in the last generation.

To wit: I'm writing this post on a self-published blog. I'm in the middle of prepping, in my den, the latest edition of a weekly radio program that will be beamed up to a satellite for national distribution. Earlier today, I was writing the script for my own TV show, which I'll videotape in my garage (which I also use to appear on an Internet-based TV network) and edit on (yet more) software on the PC in den before uploading to the Internet--which itself is a global computer network that didn't exist before (take your pick) 1969 or 1992.

No, I won't be getting into a flying car, or taking the Pan Am shuttle to Space Station V or the Moon anytime soon. But it always astonishes me how much futuristic technology we have right at our fingertips, and completely take for granted.