In his talk at Frontiers of Interaction in Torino, Italy last week, Bruce Sterling dealt with the failure of technology and why we don't have jetpacks or flying cars:

"to say a word is not the same as engineer a thing (...) we/people think it's a smooth and practical process but it's not (...) they don't fail because of science they fail because of political frontiers between groups that we don't know how to cross (...) the real frontiers are no longer engineers' law like Moore's law or Metcalfe's law but social and legal practices"

Why do I blog this? this echoes with the list of failing factors I am trying to write-up for a project.