Right now its not practical to say "twenty nine" because it sounds like "29" but in 2010, do you think that people will say "two-thousand-ten" or "twenty ten"? "Twenty-ten" sounds so much more cool and futuristic.

Haha, i just did an office poll calling every extension in our firm and so far its about 60/40 for "two-thousand-ten" for the simple reason of complacency, for nine years everyone has already gotten used to saying "two-thousand..."

Food for thought.

The Intuitive Linear View Versus the Historical Exponential View:

Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the
power of future developments because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of history rather than
the "historical exponential" view. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade, as I will
discuss in the next chapter. Thus the twentieth century was gradually speeding up to today's rate of progress; its
achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We'll make another
twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express
this another way, we won't experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will
witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (again, when measured by today's rate of progress), or about
one thousand times greater than what was achieved in the twentieth century.

Misperceptions about the shape of the future come up frequently and in a variety of contexts. As one example of
many, in a recent debate in which I took part concerning the feasibility of molecular manufacturing, a Nobel
Prizewinning panelist dismissed safety concerns regarding nanotechnology, proclaiming that "we're not going to see
self-replicating nanoengineered entities [devices constructed molecular fragment by fragment] for a hundred years." I
pointed out that one hundred years was a reasonable estimate and actually matched my own appraisal of the amount of
technical progress required to achieve this particular milestone when measured at today's rate of progress (five times
the average rate of change we saw in the twentieth century). But because we're doubling the rate of progress every
decade, we'll see the equivalent of a century of progress—at today's rate—in only twenty-five calendar years.
Similarly at Time magazine's Future of Life conference, held in 2003 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the
discovery of the structure of DNA, all of the invited speakers were asked what they thought the next fifty years would
be like.5 Virtually every presenter looked at the progress of the last fifty years and used it as a model for the next fifty
years. For example, James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA, said that in fifty years we will have drugs that will allow
us to eat as much as we want without gaining weight.
I replied, "Fifty years?" We have accomplished this already in mice by blocking the fat insulin receptor gene that
controls the storage of fat in the fat cells. Drugs for human use (using RNA interference and other techniques we will
discuss in chapter 5) are in development now and will be in FDA tests in several years. These will be available in five
to ten years, not fifty. Other projections were equally shortsighted, reflecting contemporary research priorities rather
than the profound changes that the next half century will bring. Of all the thinkers at this conference, it was primarily
Bill Joy and I who took account of the exponential nature of the future, although Joy and I disagree on the import of
these changes, as I will discuss in chapter 8.
People intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods. Even for those who
have been around long enough to experience how the pace of change increases over time, unexamined intuition leaves
one with the impression that change occurs at the same rate that we have experienced most recently. From the
mathematician's perspective, the reason for this is that an exponential curve looks like a straight line when examined
for only a brief duration. As a result, even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, typically
extrapolate the current pace of change over the next ten years or one hundred years to determine their expectations.
This is why I describe this way of looking at the future as the "intuitive linear" view.
But a serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that technological change is exponential.
Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example. You can
examine the data in different ways, on different timescales, and for a wide variety of technologies, ranging from
electronic to biological, as well as for their implications, ranging from the amount of human knowledge to the size of
the economy. The acceleration of progress and growth applies to each of them. Indeed, we often find not just simple
exponential growth, but "double" exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth (that is, the
exponent) is itself growing exponentially

Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity is near