Happy Rollover/Millennium/Century/Year.

(Pedants who object to the use of the words Millennium or Century can just go away now, thank you.)

So, here we are in the new year, century, millennium, even. What I want to know is: where's my flying car, personal jet-pack, protein pills and ray gun? Hey, I've seen the Jettisons, I've seen Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, any number of science-fiction movies and read lots of science- fiction books. Right about now, we're supposed to live in an idyllic techie paradise, have cheap spaceflight, elevators from Sri Lanka to Geostationary Orbit, been contacted by Alien civilisations. On the other hand, we're also supposed to have had a few nuclear wars, invasions by both aliens and communists and been taken over by machine cultures, so I suppose we're ahead a little bit.