In 1982, the brilliantly-named Institute for the Future, an agency under America’s National Science Foundation, published a study that was written about in the New York Times. The aim of the study was to predict what the North American household might look like in the future. Like most attempts to see the future, the predictions run the gamut from hilarious to naive to, in one particular case, down-right accurate.

For the most part, the article deals with some technologies that never really made it out of the starting gate back in the 1980′s: Teletext and Videotex. From what I can understand, this technology allowed a television screen to act as a kind of web browser, retrieving different “pages” that were broadcast by cable companies. In some cases, these pages could be stored and read later, in other cases it was up to the provider to decide what to show and when. It sounds like one of many precursors to the Internet. It also sounds an awful lot like 1984.

But, it’s the predictions that we’re concerned with, not necessarily the technology.

What the Institute for the Future predicted a society using Teletext and Videotex would look like is, in the end, a lot like what our society looks like today.

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I don’t cover technology news with an incredible fervor here on the site, but it is something I like to write about from time to time. So, when I read this, I found it way too interesting not to mention. This story is so hot off the presses that I’m burning my hands just handling it, but here it is.

Apple’s new iPhone has been found, in a bar. Yes, you read that right. While it’s been known that Apple have been working away on a new model of their popular iPhone, no details, and certainly not any pictures or prototypes have been released to the public. At least, not on purpose.

Gizmodo, a popular technology website, has just released a complete run down of the new iPhone, an iPhone which, they allege, was found in a bar in Redwood City, California. Yes, you read that right, and it gets even more interesting. Not only was this new model iPhone found in a bar, it was found disguised to look like an older model iPhone. That is, this technology was so new, and presumably so secret, that whoever was using it didn’t want anyone else to know what it was. Interesting, eh?

Gizmodo has had it, they say, for a week and spent enough time with it to know for sure that it’s indeed a new Apple product. The fact that it was found in a bar, left there, I assume, by some Apple insider, is certainly going to rub the super-secretive company the wrong way. Whether they come out and admit that what Gizmodo has found is real, we’ll have to wait and see.