Video communication, decent but imperfect robots, psychotherapy, self-driving car technology, and processed food: these are some of the things Isaac Asimov predicted would make up modern life in 2014. The year was 1964, and his vision for 50 years into the future turned out to be surprisingly accurate. A few other predictions fell flat, like underwater colonies or human inhabitation of planets other than earth, but you can forgive the author his exuberance at the dawn of the space age. The BBC is running an interesting article looking at Asimov's vision and how it played out in real life .

These days, most teens favor dystopian visions of the future , modern life is resembling dystopia in more than one way , and the world of peace and unity seems farther off than ever.

Who today has the prescience that Asimov did in 1964? Who among the 21st century's authors, film-makers, and thinkers is most thoughtfully envisioning the world that awaits us in 2064? And what lessons do they provide for us to learn?

I've been a Linode customer since they launched their User-Mode-Linux offering in 2003. With decreasing component prices and a little help from Moore's Law, they have repeatedly increased the resources available on their VPS instances. Most upgrades take the form of "Double the RAM" or "Double the disk space" and have allowed the company to stay competitive over the years.

However, their latest "upgrade" reduces the CPU core count from 8 to 2 on the most popular plan, drastically reducing the performance of most webserver workloads. Some users have posted degraded benchmark numbers on the Linode blog that announced the upgrade. They have also removed the discounts on yearly plans, thereby increasing the cost of the hosting plans.

Other aspects of the upgrade are more welcome:

• Doubled RAM
• Same Cost (Unless paying yearly [Grandfathering available if you forgo upgrades])
• Same Storage Space (But now using SSD)
• Same Transfer (Except the lowest plan [Which gets a 50% bump])
• Increased Outgoing Bandwidth (Unless using a Node Balancer or the lowest plan [Which stay the same speeds])

Disclaimer: Both Pipedot and SoylentNews are hosted at Linode.

Ars Technica has a writeup detailing Intellectual Ventures' loss in its case against Capitol One. US District Judge Anthony Trenga declared IV's patents "nothing more than the mere manipulation or reorganization of data." Between this outcome and Google's recent success in getting the venue of its battle with Rockstar Consortium changed from East Texas to California, also covered at Ars Technica, dare we hope the tide is turning for patent trolls?