Everyone Wears Glasses

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

For the most part, the articles posted here are supposed to point out Future Things that get passing mention in the books. This time, I’m going to talk about something that will be getting left out of the books entirely.

Augmented Reality Glasses.

That link will take you to an article that claims augmented reality glasses are at least 20 years away, but it also provides a good glimpse into what augmented reality glasses are. If you’re any kind of a fan of Hathor, you’ll probably find yourself scoffing at some of his objections, too. But, of course, Hathor’s fiction.

Still. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, augmented reality glasses are eyeglasses that project a heads-up display in your field of view that’s contextually appropriate to your environment. Common examples include, for instance, looking at a restaurant and getting access to its menu, or looking at any storefront and seeing its address and phone number, its hours, details about its corporate parent or the neighborhood or customer reviews….

Sound familiar? In the books, that’s the sort of information you get with the phrase, “Details to my handheld.” But, y’know, then you have to look at your handheld.

One of my favorite aspects of the first book’s cover art was its ability to capture the artifacts of the Hathor system — the headset and handheld, the Hippocrates watch, and even Katie’s identity-lock handgun. Dreaming up those artifacts was pretty central to dreaming up the everyday experience of living in Hathor.

And when I was dreaming them up, I was very aware of augmented reality glasses. I spent several weeks thinking about how they’d work, where they’d find their power and how they’d refine their location details and how they’d handle their processing (all issues referenced in that article I linked above).

I spent a lot of time researching, and a lot of time imagining, and in the end I decided to leave them out of Katie’s future for one simple, fairly obvious reason:

They would look stupid in the movie.

What can I say? I’m a practical fella at heart. So every time Katie has to look at her handheld, scroll through pages and pages of casefiles, and type out her comments on that tiny screen, you can know that’s a punishment I doomed her to for totally superficial reasons.

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Blog Posts Still Show up Late

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

Even in the Hathor future, you’re going to have to wait on content providers to get you the material you’re waiting for.

Although….

Well, those are some topics I want to discuss. I’m not going to get to them in detail just yet, though. I’ve been overwhelmed with the publication and promotion of Ghost Targets: Expectation that I’ve gotten behind, and didn’t prepare a proper post for this week. (I missed a week’s worth of writing advice over at Unstressed Syllables, too.)

But while we’re on the topic of content production and consumption, there are some interesting ideas to consider. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about content production, from how attribution and content licensing will work (making it easy for you to, say, include the lyrics from a popular song in a book you’re writing and everyone involved gets their due share of revenues), to how people will pay for entertainment and informational content in general.

That’s going to be a pretty large industry, too, because as we’ll discuss soon, this technology promises us all a 20-hour work week. As free time goes up, demand for recreational content goes up and supply goes up (as we all find a little more free time to develop our own creativity).

There will also be some pretty impressive systems in place to connect consumers to producers. Right now, that’s things like Amazon’s suggestions and star ratings (and Pandora’s radio recommendations), and that technology is only going to get better as it gets access to more and more sample data.

So, sure, blog posts will still show up late from time to time, but I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding other interesting fare to keep you busy. And, y’know, maybe all that extra free time on the bloggers’ hands will help them stick to their schedules.

I wouldn’t count on it, but you can always dream.

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Crimes Solve Themselves

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

Back in 2008, two weeks after I finished writing Gods Tomorrow, my house was robbed. No one was there (thank goodness), but my wife came home to find the garage door standing open and parts from our XBox left in the driveway. She got inside, and found the whole place had been ransacked.

That was a tough time for me (as it would be for anybody), but it was especially tough because I’d spent the last six weeks living in the imaginary world of Hathor. I’d been actively thinking about just those sort of events, and imagining them in a context where they were significantly robbed of their sting.

In the world of Hathor, it would be incredibly difficult to get away with something like that, because the system would already be doing everything it could to identify you at every step of the way. Sure, maybe you get it into my house (maybe I forgot to lock a door, and you noticed that by watching the pervasive surveillance system), but when you walk out with my electronics, the system knows you just walked out of my house with my electronics.

Wherever you go to sell it, you’re selling my electronics. That record would be in the system. If you take it home to play with, you’re going to be connecting to the network with my stuff (and the network would know).

While we’re at it, everything is in the cloud. So you’re not depriving me of any of my data (I lost a lot of data in that robbery, including several chapters of several novels). Maybe you took away the devices I use to access my data, but the data itself is still perfectly intact.

For that matter, you’re not getting access to my data either. If you still stole my laptop (or, in the world of Hathor, my handheld), and used it to connect to the network, all you’d find on the network is your information. It’s a handy service when you borrow someone else’s device to check up on your documents, and it’s a security feature when someone tries to walk off with your sensitive electronics.

And, of course, as soon as Jurisprudence notices you’ve purloined my personal property, it goes right ahead and calls the cops for me. Ain’t that handy? I don’t have to wait to discover it, then wait for police to show up to take my statement, then wait for nothing to come of that.

Instead, Jurisprudence bundles up all the information the police are going to need in their report, dumps it on their desk, and goes ahead and supplies a glowing red waypoint on their cars’ GPS navigation showing exactly where the perpetrator is. All they have to do is show up and detain him.

As a result, Jurisprudence largely put the country’s detectives out of work. Katie mentions that in passing in Ghost Targets: Expectation, when she visits a sprawling precinct station that is mostly converted over into dusty storage rooms, its full staff reduced to a handful of workstations huddled in the middle of a mostly empty bullpen.

The police officers that are left really don’t have a lot to do. They wait for the alarm to go off, jump in their cars, and get carried straight to the villain. Then they throw him in the back of the truck like dog catchers, and go back to waiting.

Of course, there are still some superheroes out there. That’s what Ghost Targets is for, right?

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You Never Grow Old

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

This week saw the release of Ghost Targets: Expectation. I already posted a little sales blurb for you so I won’t spend today’s post on that, but I’d like to pull out the opening line from the plot synopsis one more time to start the day’s discussion.

Eric Barnes put an end to human aging. Now he’s paying for it with his life.

I like to say (and have said on this site) that even though it’s science fiction, the technology in the Ghost Targets universe is all stuff that’s within 10 years of production in real life, right now. Given that, this quote might seem a little startling (or in direct opposition).

But the premise is based on the intellectual work of Cambridge theorist Aubrey de Grey who says precisely that. He’s famous for saying that the first person who will live to be 1,000 is alive today (and could be as old as 50 or 60). You can read more about de Grey on his Wikipedia page, but a good (lightweight) introduction to his ideas can be found in this BBC article.

Here’s the introduction, in de Grey’s own words:

Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today….

It is not just an idea: it’s a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular damage that happen to us over time.

And each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined.

The promise isn’t just long life, but long-lasting youthfulness — in mind and body. Dr. de Grey insists that the processes that cause us to get frail with age are mechanical and reversible.

One of the best presentations I’ve seen of his idea was in his TED Talk.

It’s not a short video, but the information it contains is fascinating. He points out that we don’t have to figure out how to make a person to live to 1,000 in the next 40 years. We just have to learn how to make them live an extra 40 years, which will buy us time to figure out the next step.

I’ve read a lot about Aubrey de Grey, and a lot of it is incredibly scathing or condescending criticism. His predictions are by no means a foregone conclusion, but much of his reasoning is sound even if some of the particular processes he’s recommending don’t bear out.

The world of Hathor is set at the far end of that 40-year span he mentioned, and in it (as of the first chapter of Expectation), there’s a drug called Gevia that’s supposed to keep everyone young.

For the sake of my story, I don’t state whether that life-extension represents a 40-year extension or a 900-year one. Either way, I think it’s something we’d see as a welcome addition…and probably a world-changing one.

Imagine what we could do with significantly extended lifespans — all the things we could experiment with, all the skills we could develop, all the things we could know. I read recently that the total calculated worldwide processing power of all our technology is equal to the synaptic activity of a single brain. Imagine how much information we, as a species, lose every day with every person that slips away.

That’s really the heart of it, for me. It’s just like Hathor, really. The greatest promise of it is the potential to save the information we’re all working so desperately to gather and create, every moment of our lives. That’s a future I’m willing to hope for.

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Ghost Targets: Expectation

Posted on February 15, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

The series continues! Aaron Pogue and Consortium Books are proud to announce the digital release of Ghost Targets: Expectation, the hotly-anticipated sequel to Gods Tomorrow.

Eric Barnes put an end to human aging. Now he’s paying for it with his life.

FBI Special Agent Katie Pratt returns to the Ghost Targets team to find herself and the rest of the team under investigation for corruption by a government agency. Katie’s relationship with Martin Door, one of the creators of the Hathor system and its surveillance of everyone and everything, leaves her especially vulnerable.

The new boss assigns Katie to a case in Boulder, Colorado, to save her from ongoing interrogation, but the case quickly steals the Ghost Targets team’s full attention. A scientist, violently attacked in his own lab, is in a coma.

The victim leads the research for a drug that could end human aging, extending lifespans to thousands of years. The key to the drug is locked in his slumbering brain, but even in this world where every action is recorded in Hathor, the records of the attack on him are gone. Katie must uncover the truth to protect the miracle drug and regain her own reputation.

Katie’s search for answers will force her to scale a mountain of secrets and lies whose summit is the overwhelming power of human expectation.

Available for Kindle, Nook, and all other e-readers at $2.99. (The paperback edition is coming soon.)

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You Receive Constant Medical Diagnosis

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

Today we’ve got a guest post from Carlos Velez. He was one of the first people to read a draft copy of Gods Tomorrow, and he’s been a dedicated fan ever since.

You might also know him as one of the photographers responsible for the incredible cover art on Gods Tomorrow and Ghost Targets: Expectation (along with his wife, Julie Velez of Julie V. Photography). It’s a testament to the quality of art you can get when the artist is actually a fan of the book. (Not to mention the quality of art you can get when the artist is Julie V. Photography!)

Anyway, he was inspired to write a guest post for the site, and I’m thrilled to share it with you today. It just happens to fit into our month-long theme on Hippocrates and medicine in the world of Hathor, which is even better!

There are many medical benefits in a world where Hathor records the endless stream of constant data in our lives beyond the immediate medical emergency response we see in Gods Tomorrow. A major one that I long to see become reality is constant diagnosis of any illness or medical conditions we may have or develop.

Today, information is becoming so widespread on the internet that your average human is becoming less and less dependent on (and less and less trusting of) doctors. But imagine a world where every symptom you have and everything you eat or do that might have a negative or positive impact on a health condition is recorded in full detail. And not just yours — everyone’s.

Hathor (or Hippocrates) would learn over time what exactly aggravates an illness or chronic condition, what relieves it, and what cures it. Comparing your personal medical history, daily eating and lifestyle habits, and circumstances to the billions of other people in the world, you could receive a constant evaluation of your situation.

Just like Hathor can find you the perfect apartment in seconds, it could also recommend medicines, foods, and lifestyle changes in order of statistical probability to work. It could immediately make adjustments to your treatment when something does not work, without the need of setting appointments with doctors.

If certain foods give you allergic reactions or worsen symptoms for you, Hathor will already know from past occurrences and others’ experiences. It will warn you when you are about to buy or order food that will do you harm. It can show you exactly what symptoms you’ll suffer and can even play recordings of the worst experiences if you need reminding as to why you should make the right choice.

Hathor will create a meal plan for you and order your groceries based on what is good for you to eat and what you actually like…not to mention what you’ll actually cook. No matter what a friend or website might recommend, Hathor won’t tell you to buy more apple cider vinegar because it knows you made a grimace the first time you tried it and it’s been buried in the back of your pantry ever since.

Hathor will keep your prescriptions filled so you never go without, and it will automatically remind you to take your pills or vitamins so you never miss a dose.

Hathor will give you regular reports to show you exactly, in as much excruciating detail as you can handle, how your illness has progressed and what has affected it.

Over time, the root causes of many illnesses will be revealed, treatments will be standardized, unique exceptions will be documented and instantly used to make adjustments in treatment wherever appropriate. And it will all happen on a constant and immediate basis.

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You Don’t Call 911, You Just Call, “Help!”

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

I’ve talked about some of the cool technologies and some of the cool services on display in Gods Tomorrow, but as we come up on the release of the sequel, Ghost Targets: Expectation, I’d really like to spend a few weeks talking about my favorite of the services:

Hippocrates.

If the name sounds familiar but you can’t quite place it, it’s a reference to an ancient Greek physician who’s considered the father of Western medicine. In the world of Hathor, Hippocrates is an always-on, always-listening medical service that exists to save your life, pure and simple.

Hippocrates starts out easily enough as the Electronic Medical Records that the Federal government is currently pushing on hospitals and clinics.

Analysts predict that electronic medical records could save the U.S. billions of dollars in health care spending, and their use has been linked to better patient care.

At the heart of it, Electronic Medical Records are a massive, persistent, monitored database. In case you missed it, that’s exactly what Hathor is. The benefits are largely the same (although with Electronic Medical Records and Hippocrates you’ve got more specializiation), and the technology is identical.

Hippocrates represents more than just EMR, though. It’s a service, and like most of the other Hathor services it provides both passive monitoring and active response to voice commands. In this case, the most important of them all is the simple keyword, “Help!”

In the world of Hathor, the word “help” is monitored by two major services: Hippocrates, and Jurisprudence (which we’ll talk about in more detail in a couple weeks). Any time anyone utters the word, both services run intensive, specialized diagnostics on the particulars of the speaker’s situation.

If there’s any indication of immediate violence or other physical danger of a criminal nature, Jurisprudence swings into gear, dispatching police to deal with the threat. If the speaker seems to be trapped, the system can send a fire truck or a locksmith (or just open a locked door) depending on the nature of the problem.

At the same time, if Hippocrates will check the speaker for any signs of physical duress or trauma. An ambulance can be dispatched immediately (and, of course, Hathor knows exactly where to send it), and the paramedics riding along can have access to a detailed, personal medical record for the patient they’re rushing to save.

And where does all that information come from? Watches. In the world of Hathor, Hippocrates designed personal medical monitors in the form of watches, and gave them away for free. In exchange, Hippocrates got access to a constant stream of individualized medical data for hundreds of millions of people.

That’s the information they used to fill the database. It’s a detailed stream of all your vitals, every moment, for years. If your heart misses a beat, Hippocrates knows. If your blood pressure spikes, Hippocrates knows. If you suffer a petit mal seizure, Hippocrates notices as it’s happening and immediately starts recording critical details during the event, for later analysis.

And all of that information becomes available to your physician. It becomes available to the paramedics rushing to the scene of your accident. It’s a service that would be awfully hard to turn down…and as soon as you’re hooked on it, you’re on the grid. Forever.

Some people get a couple chapters into Gods Tomorrow and then tell me they have a hard time believing anyone would be willing to put up with a surveillance system like this. I think about all the lifesaving services it could offer, and I have a hard time believing we haven’t already got one.

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You Forget about Your Bank Account

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

Today I’d like to introduce what is going to be a long and involved topic here: money. Right after mystery (which I sort of depend on for my storylines), money in the world of Hathor is one of the biggest challenges for me to understand and maintain. That’s because, just like mystery, total information awareness would radically change the way we value, use, and think about money.

I’ve put a lot of thought into it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, once everything is working right, the end result is that we won’t think about money very much at all.

For one thing, positive identity eliminates the need for things like credit cards. If Hathor knows who you are, and Hathor knows how much money you have (and where it all is), you can walk into a convenience store, grab a bottle of soda, and walk right back out the front door. No cash register, no card reader, no PIN. Hathor could remove the soda from the shop’s inventory, and Hathor could remove the cost from your bank account.

Minor, everyday purchases that fit within a person’s budget would probably be handled precisely that way. There would need to be some behavioral monitoring, some sort of alarms to warn you if you were reaching for something you couldn’t really afford (I’ll get to that in a moment), but the easy stuff would feel like free.

When it comes to the harder stuff, the purchases you actually have to stop and think about, well, Hathor shows up there, too. I’ve talked before about Hathor turning into a perfect personal shopper, helping you out when you wander into the grocery store, or the restaurant, or even the real estate market, with a handy list of exactly which product will best serve you. There are several elements that go into that:

  • Your preferences
  • Your shopping habits
  • Your actual usage habits (your personal shopper isn’t going to recommend you buy an elliptical trainer if you’ve already got a perfectly good treadmill gathering dust in storage somewhere)
  • And your finances

I talk a lot in the books about Midas, the money management software of the Hathor future. In the first book Katie meets the inventor of Midas, who bemoans the fact that it originally turned into a source for high-interest loans, but then announces proudly that he bought it back, and converted it into something useful.

By the time of the books, it is. It’s a service that knows how much income you’ve got, how many expenses, and what categories you tend to divert that money into. You can find something like that at Mint.com today, and it’s uncanny how well that service can characterize your financial habits with nothing but a username and password.

But in a world where every penny is tracked digitally, where every identity is nailed down, and every word of buyer’s remorse captured, parsed, and weighted for future evaluation, the system will be able to do far more. It’ll find discounts for you.

It won’t keep you from buying things “just for fun,” it won’t get in the way of your guilty pleasures — after all, it’s based on your buying patterns, not your accountant’s recommendations — but it will direct you away from the impulse purchases you’re likely to regret, and it’ll put up some serious red flags before you walk into a ruinous financing deal.

None of that is going to be startlingly new. With online banking, none of us has to carry around a checkbook with a balance sheet neatly tallied in pen anymore. With sites like Mint.com, and cheap budgeting software, it’s easy enough to find out where our money is going, how much disposable income we’ve really got, and most of us can instinctively feel when we’re about to sign something we really shouldn’t.

The difference with Hathor is data. Right there, at the point of sale, instead of hesitating and thinking, “Can I really afford this?” you might get an angry chime in your headset, pull out your handheld, and see a chart showing you exactly what your future spending patterns look like with the purchase, and without it.

You can see all the little guilty pleasures your personal shopper would be recommending to you over the course of the next year that you’ll be having to give up if you buy this new thing now. Maybe it’s extra pairs of shoes…maybe it’s your house (and you click right through to see listings for apartments that would be in your new price range, and take a virtual tour to see if you’d be willing to live like that).

Midas wouldn’t decide whether or not you made the purchase, it would just be there to help you make the decision with all the real costs ready to hand, immediately visible. And if you made the purchase anyway, Midas would get a little bit smarter, knowing your buying patterns even better.

And then it would get right to work making your future financial situation as comfortable for you as possible, in light of this new expense. That’s what it’s for. In the end, you’d barely think about your bank account at all.

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Painting Your Walls Is as Easy as Changing Your Desktop Background

Posted on January 19, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

I’ve already talked about Katie finding and leasing a house in a matter of minutes, but there was a fun little bit at the end of the scene that I failed to mention. After she’s chosen her place of residence, with her car already speeding that direction, she calls up her favorite color scheme and applies it to interior.

That idea was based on an article I read at HowStuffWorks five or six years ago. It was called, “How Electronic Ink Will Work,” and it described E Ink (the technology behind Amazon’s Kindle display), and all the additional uses that product would eventually be put to.

Today, the article’s title has been changed to present tense, but otherwise the section on pending uses remains the same. The most significant bit (with regard to this discussion, anyway) goes like this:

Electronic ink can be printed on any surface, including walls, billboards, product labels and T-shirts. Homeowners could soon be able to instantly change their digital wallpaper by sending a signal to the electronic ink painted on their walls.

The makers of E Ink have said that once it really gets into mass production, electronic paper will be cheaper than normal paper. Imagine the benefits of using it for wall-paper, especially in an apartment complex or dorm. Every tenant could design their interior however they wanted (no restrictions on redoing the walls just because you’re renting), and as soon as they left the walls could be wiped clean with the push of a button.

You could save some favorite color schemes — maybe you’d have one for each season, or one for days you’re feeling productive and a different one for days you want to relax. You could change your home’s interior as easily and as often as you change your clothes.

And it’s not just color schemes. Every pixel of that wallspace is separately programmable. So, yeah, you could have robin’s egg walls in the kitchen and sea foam in the bathroom and mother-of-pearl down the hall. But you could also have stripes, or polka dots, or images, just as easily as the Kindle cycles through portraits of writers for its background.

So you could set aside a couple square feet of space above your fireplace to show a portrait of your great grandfather (rendered from a JPG someone scanned back in the 1990s), or you could make it a slideshow, switching out portraits every few hours from a folder full of ’em.

Or if that’s not dramatic enough, you could paint an entire wall with a sprawling landscape scene. Maybe your house’s back wall needs to look like a view on the beach in Padre. Easy enough. A child’s nursery could be made to look like the inside of a Disney princess’s castle, or like the interior of the space shuttle, or like a cage at the zoo.

And that’s all still imagery, but the race in electronic paper right now is to add video. Once that technology matures, the same trick I described for putting a virtual portrait over the fireplace could be used to turn part of your wall into a virtual television.

It wouldn’t have to be static, either. You could draw a 50″ television on the living room wall while you were watching a movie with your family, then push a button to “turn it off” when you were done and it would repaint itself to match the rest of the wall. You could take it with you, from room to room, painting the TV on any flat surface in easy eyesight — resizing it on demand to fit the space available.

None of that is here yet, but it’s not thirty years off, either. The e-book market is growing rapidly, and it’s driving development of a dozen different kinds of electronic paper. Some of that technology is already being pushed into other fields, too, and the potential applications in the home are so incredible, you know someone’s already working on it.

I’m really looking forward to it (in case you couldn’t tell). How about you?

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Electricity Is Broadcast like Radio Waves

Posted on January 12, 2011 by Aaron Pogue

This one is sort of a foundational principle of my world, and it’s one that’s going to take a lot of explaining. So don’t expect a satisfying report in one 500-word post. I promise I’ll come back to it all later, though.

Anyway, for now, here are a few key premises concerning power in the Hathor universe:

  • Electricity is produced abundantly, distributed intelligently, and sold cheaply
  • Virtually everything in the world runs off electrical power, and it comes almost entirely from renewable resources. That’s not because I have any axe to grind with regard to the burning of fossil fuels, but because I want my world to use lots of power, and I don’t want a fixed limit on availability
  • Electricity, like entertainment, is bought and sold in tiny increments, and individuals are only responsible for their actual usage. Also like entertainment, the cost is marginal enough to be of virtually no concern to the common man.
  • And finally, the electricity in question is distributed wirelessly, with almost total geographic coverage.

Of all these claims, the only one I intend to address today is the last one (which is probably the least remarkable). It has a huge impact on my world, though, and treads as close as this series ever really does to magical fantasy.

This premise is inherent in the books, from the very beginning, but it’s easy to overlook. Everyone’s walking around with headsets and handhelds — with lifesaving watches strapped to their wrists — and it’s easy enough to just think of our own iPhones and Bluetooth earpieces and solar-powered Swatches and none of it seems too sci-fi.

It doesn’t work though. Maybe a reader wouldn’t notice, but i have to live in this world, to immerse myself in it until it becomes real, and there’s one glaring problem when I try to use today’s smartphones and earpieces in Hathor’s world:

Downtime.

Charging a battery takes too long. That time — that time you spend charging your devices instead of using them — is too big of a disconnect. These systems are critical, especially when you think of the HIppocrates watch. No one would be willing to give them up for several hours out of every day just to keep them charged.

It’s the same problem electric cars face now. Charging them is a slow process, and with fixed capacity you can only go so far before your car becomes a very expensive paperweight attached to the end of an extension cord.

And if you were paying close attention to my bulleted list at the top of this post, you know I’m taking electric cars for granted.

The only way to run this much super-critical tech on electricity with little downtime is to run it “plugged in,” just like we do with our laptops. Sure, they’ve got batteries, but we mainly use those for backup power, for uptime as we move from one wired connection to another. In Katie’s world, that’s essentially how everything works — cars, watched, 3D animated billboards — except instead of plugging in to a wall socket, they pull power down from broadcast towers.

The good news is, it’s real. It’s possible (way back in 2006, even). Ars Technica says so, and who am I to argue? The bad news (as that article points out) is that it’s expensive. You have to produce and broadcast lots of energy for every little bit that actually gets captured and used.

And that’s where the rest of my bullet points come from. I need ways to generate more power, cheaply, and store and distribute it more efficiently. But those are nothing more than technical problems.

And more importantly, we’re already working on them. That’s a matter for another post, though.

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