Yes, it's 2009 and I still don't have a jet pack, hovercraft, or condo on the moon. When you think about it, this future sucks.
However, we are making progress toward a Star Trek-like Universal Translator; there are many web sites just waiting to translate most any text in and out of most any language. It's fast, it's convenient, and it works about as well as the translator in Mars Attacks.
The following are excerpts from six great works of oration (and one famous bit of writing) run through a popular translation website; once from English into Japanese and again from Japanese back into English. It makes one wonder if Americans and Japanese have ever understood each other. Oh, wait...
