Liquid water? On a planet? Fairly nearby? Wow. I mean, really…. wow. This means that there is a very high chance of finding earth-like worlds out there. Infact this one was found fairly easily, which means either they were very lucky or these things are super common. Now all we need is FTL to get us there!
More science wow. We may have directly witnessed WIMP’s for the first time. Half a mile beneath the crust and wearing a boiler suit may be worth it for a nobel prize?
Rejection of Commercialism, what a great idea.
Christmas is about being with your family, not seeing who can spend the most money (and fill the most pockets)
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| — | Present Sense: village group exports recycled gift idea worldwide | Life and style | guardian.co.uk |
Far left politics and post scarcity idealism
Dont ask…. it’s been a long night and an odd journey through wikipedia. No real conclusion but I dont agree with enough of the UK Respect Party’s manifesto to stump up the £10 joining fee. Perhaps in another 10 years the Parpolity may be a little closer. Although by then the capitalists will be moving onto the moon and asteroid belt and from there where does it end? Zero containment. I can see a future war between left wing and right wing or at the least a book plot line! And dont get me started on e-government! In my mind every decision should have a “vote now” button on a gov.uk website. Perhaps you would have to put in your (e)passport number or something so only citizens could vote, but then whats stopping the nefarious from extorting the poor/weak into voting for their preferred outcome? That being said, whats stopping that from happening now with the paper based system (hahaha 2009 and we are using paper votes?!). I guess the sheer number of votes in a completely open government would mean that rigging would be easier to hide. Although once we go post scarcity there is less motivation to rig votes.
No easy answers but the next 50 years will certainly be interesting in the political arena. I just dont see how the right wing parties can survive the spike…
Remember Remember…
…the annual ”lets turn the UK into a war zone” night! My garden is full of rocket sticks, my dogs are shaking in the corner, my 3 year old daughter has just about stopped crying and I need to go and check all my windows for cracks.
Yes, another guy falkes night successfully survived! I swear the noise and duration gets louder and longer each and every year. I thought we were in a recession, how do these people afford all these explosives!?
Bah humbug!
Google Chrome OS
Well there was a recent flurry of activity as google released more information about it’s new operating system “Chrome OS”. Basically this “OS” is simply a web browser that is installed on the bare metal with the minimum amount of guff required for networking and drivers.
At first I thought “what a load of rubbish, it will never work!” but after thinking about it a little I think they might have a winner on their hands. I have to admit to spending 90+% on “the internet” so it makes sense to strip out all the unnecessary OS guff that makes computers insecure. This means you can do away with all the updating, defragging, monitoring etc etc, which personally is fantastic thing. I want the computer to be a tool and just get out of the way and let me get on with whatever it is i’m doing. Time spent updating and maintaining my computer is time wasted.
The other 10% of stuff though is the unknown. Things like editing videos, burning dvd’s, making photo albums, plus the whole host of downloadable applications that are niche (such as astronomy applications) all wont work on Chrome OS as they are not web pages. Indeed anything that you do OUTSIDE the browser wont work on Chrome.
The reveal also included the surprise that google will only be releasing Chrome OS on dedicated hardware devices. i.e. you wont be able to download Chrome OS and install it on your own netbook (although you can download the open source version chromium os and build it yourself). The main reason for this is that in order to get the boot times down to like 5 seconds (or less) google are using custom BIOS firmwares. They are also insisting on SSD only which kind of makes sense as the foot print of Chrome is tiny, a few hundred meg. I can see a 4Gb CF card being plenty for this type of device.
All in all I think the next year or so will be an interesting one seeing how things develop and how much uptake we will see. I do think though that in 5 years time this type of device will be less than £100 and well into impulse purchase territory and most households will have at least one of these style of devices.
