The 6 Most Overhyped Technologies

Then he goes into the other room and kicks his dog. This is the true face of animal abuse in America today: frustrated A/V installations.

from FlatPanelTV.org

According to a recent Nielsen study half of the people who own HD television sets don't use them with a high-definition source. Many of them don't even know.

That's a problem, because if you happen to watch any standard definition channels on your HD TV, you'll find the picture is now distorted on your widescreen set. If we wanted to see what Katie Couric looks like 40 pounds heavier, we'd Photoshop her head onto a fat guy's body, like any normal person.

Sure you can fiddle with the picture settings to sort of resolve this; it'll likely require a couple of hours on the phone with a support center in India, and the resulting picture will still be a grainy mess. This is why Best Buy is getting irate customers dragging in returned sets with shattered holes in the screen the exact size and shape of an angry fist.

Eventually these problems will fade away, once the only type of television on store shelves is HD, and the only type of cable is HD, and the only type of DVD players for sale is HD. Mr. Johnny Average Consumer Idiot* won't have to take a six-week course to figure out what terms like HDMI and 1080p mean, because everything will be figured out for him.

*Not a real person. If this is your real name, we are sorry. For a couple reasons.

Root Problems:
Bad screens, bad batteries, l337 W@rez Pir@te5.

As it turns out, computer screens are miserable, hateful things to read on. People read on computers because they have to, not because they want to. Modern "electronic-ink" technology had improved the readability of ebooks somewhat, but other technological challenges remain--most notably, battery life. As an example, our favorite book here in the Cracked offices--the novelization of Batman Begins--never needs its batteries recharged. Can an ebook ever make that claim?

Actually, what exactly is the advantage to carrying an ebook? An MP3 player is great because it prevents us from having to carry a backpack with 100 CDs in it. An ebook isn't any more convenient to carry around than a paperback, and you can use the latter to swat a fly if you need to.

Probably the biggest obstacle, though, is piracy. We all know what happened when MP3s arrived on the scene. Internet pirates began treating the music industry in a delicate manner normally reserved for prison rapes. Wherever publishers are offering content for download, there is someone out on Gnutella offering it for free. As it is for music and movies and software, it will be for books.

Given the hurdles, we can't imagine ebooks taking off any time in the near future, even if they are probably inevitable in the long run (when we run out of trees, if nothing else). What seems most likely is that "ebooks" won't be separate devices at all, just a way to read the books on the next generation of all-in-one devices (a cell phone/MP3 player/PDA/taser). Why people in the future will still choose to read novels when they're constantly bombarded with opportunities to download clips of the popular future television show "Fisting With The Stars" is harder to say.

"Muncipal Wi-Fi" is the idea that if Wi-Fi hotspots could be carefully laid out in a city--say, one on every lamppost--then everyone in that city would have free (or cheap) Internet access. This has made the news a few times over the last couple years as various cities have announced they were going to roll it out, in an effort to fulfill an oft-forgotten part of the American Dream.

Root Problems:
Nobody wants to pay for it.

Obviously to get that kind of ubiquitous Wi-Fi signal, someone (specifically, someone else) has to actually set up and maintain all of these Wi-Fi hotspots. That means the local government has to hire a company to do it, which would be great if that company was willing to do it for free (like if it was owned by a kind old billionaire who just likes giving things to people).

Otherwise, the money has to come from somewhere and nobody is quite sure where. Everything from monthly user fees, to tax increases to ad-supported access has been suggested.

Compounding these problems is that it costs way more than was anticipated to get the cities wired up. The ones who'd actually maintain the hotspots, network engineers, generally don't like being outdoors in the first place and so they probably charge extra.

Even Google, which is fully capable of buying and selling our comedy-writing asses several billion times over, was only willing to set up Municipal Wi-Fi in their own idyllic small town. What hope does an unpopular and unattractive city like, say, Chicago, have? In most cities, the people will take to the street with torches and pitchforks when a tax increase is imposed to put a new roof on the school. What will they do when they're asked to fork over money to give everyone in the city free access to YouTube?

Hybrid vehicles, with their part-electrical, part-gasoline engines are a sort of compromise for people who care about fuel consumption, but aren't going to go all-out for some hippie contraption that has to be plugged in for eight hours before you can drive it. Ask any hybrid owner why they own one, and you'll likely hear a variety of answers like "to save the environment," "to reduce our dependence on foreign oil," and "to drive Dick Cheney back into the sea from whence he came."

Root Problems:
Hysterical, possibly Gore-fueled overestimation of value.

The problem with hybrid cars isn't what they can do, it's what people think they can do. Realistically, a hybrid car will get roughly 20-30 percent better gas mileage than a similarly sized normal car. It turns out they don't perform as well in the real world as in the lab, and the talk of 55 miles to the gallon for hybrids was pretty much bullshit ( the Toyota Prius' gas mileage was knocked back from 55 to 46 MPG by the EPA). Sure, those numbers are still light years ahead of the customized Escalades issued to the Cracked staff ...

...but don't blow away the numbers for regular ol' economy cars that cost $5,000 less.

As far as environmental impact, don't forget the manufacturing process. Just by insisting on buying a new car instead of keeping your old one, you added 27 tons of waste to the environment. It's more so for a hybrid, since their enormously powerful batteries don't grow on trees, perhaps due to an oversight on the part of God. They have to be built and shipped around the planet, creating waste every step of the way.

We're pretty level-headed here at Cracked, and generally agree that mankind should never harm the planet, except possibly in self defense. So, we applaud the goal of improving fuel economy in vehicles. But if you buy a hybrid, don't fool yourself into thinking you're single handedly saving Earth. You're maybe helping a bit, but if the planet's ever going to be saved, it will require a concerted effort from everyone, including consumers, businesses, governments and, most importantly, Batman.