Read moreThe 21st century looks more like the 14th century than it does like the 19th or the 20th. As in the 14th century, we now have empires, religious groups and fanatics, fears of the plague and superstition, multinational corporations, and city-states—Dubai is the new Venice. That is really what the world looks like today. It doesn’t look the 19th century, with clean-cut territorial empires.
Quotes
Read moreThere is a rich – if unexpected – source of inspiration for this kind of collaborative space in the history of the 19th century mutual improvement societies, reading clubs and other self-organised, working class institutions. For example, the church halls and upstairs rooms of pubs where many of them met are still common enough – and would be worth exploring as possible venues for a group trying to set up such a space today
Read moreWhat if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
Read moreDr Boss has estimated that each Sun-like star has on average one “Earth-like” planet.
This simple calculation means there would be huge numbers capable of supporting life.
“Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited,” Dr Boss told BBC News. “But I think that most likely the nearby ‘Earths’ are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago.” That means bacterial lifeforms.
Dr Boss estimates that Nasa’s Kepler mission, due for launch in March, should begin finding some of these Earth-like planets within the next few years.
Recent work at Edinburgh University tried to quantify how many intelligent civilisations might be out there. The research suggested there could be thousands of them.
In a space-age first, two satellites have collided in orbit. Early on Wednesday morning, Sydney time, a Russian communications satellite and an American Iridium mobile phone spacecraft smashed into each other, 790 kilometres above Siberia.
The cosmic bingle left both write-offs. US Air Force Brigadier General Michael Carey, of US Strategic Command, said at least 600 pieces of wreckage had been observed circling the world.
“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office.
US, Russian satellites collide in space – Technology – theage.com.au
we need Wall-E in space. *NOW*
Read moreWith 4,800 members, Ung Pirat (Young Pirates) claims to be Sweden’s third largest youth organisation.
“It is truly gratifying and shows what we are achieving with our politics,” said Ung Pirat chairperson Stefan Flod in a press release.
“It is surprising. Ung Pirat works in principle to encourage something illegal. That they then receive money from a state institution is remarkable,” said Lars Gustafsson, CEO of record company sector organisation IFPI to Svd.se.
Ung Pirat has been awarded 1.3 million kronor ($159,000) by the National Board for Youth Affairs (Ungdomstyrelsen), a government agency. The sum has been calculated based on an official member estimation of 1,284 members.
The organization claims in a press release that its membership has almost doubled in a year and is thus confident of receiving further state support next year.
“We have our finger on the pulse of the issues important to young people today. Our political issues touch us deeply, because they concern our lives,” Flod said.
The group share the Pirate Party’s opposition to a new law based on the European Union’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), that would make it easier to track people who illegally share copyrighted material on the Internet.
Read moreAs it ever has been, collapse of trade networks, cultural breakdown and internecine strife all pose the largest dangers of a Dark Age, all the more because there won’t be any one dramatic incident to defend against or prepare for, but a series of crises and interlocking problems. If the solutions to these crises come quickly enough, if the turmoil brings down enough of the old systems without leading to utter devastation, we just might get another Renaissance.
Read moreAs marketer Tim Longhurst put it: “Being socially destructive — eroding people’s confidence in each other — isn’t a simple by-product of this kind of dishonest marketing, it’s the main outcome.”
Nick Ellery had a similar take: “The line is to be drawn when you deliberately try to deceive your audience, with no real intention to cause dialogue, but simply to deceive in order to create traffic. This is no different to spamming. It sucks that this campaign is proceeding and that I will never buy anything from Witchery Man, or hire Naked as a strategy firm.”
Yet Naked continued to insist they had done nothing wrong. In a great example of marketese, Managing partner Adam Ferrier told me: “If it gets to the point where you have to be 100 per cent truthful the whole time, it becomes a very sterile outcome. People will be afraid to try different things.”
Read moreBe careful not to write anything on a blog or a personal Web page that you could not write in The Times – don’t editorialize, for instance, if you work for the News Department. Anything you post online can and might be publicly disseminated, and can be twisted to be used against you by those who wish you or The Times ill – whether it’s text, photographs, or video. That includes things you recommend on TimesPeople or articles you post to Facebook and Digg, content you share with friends on MySpace, and articles you recommend through TimesPeople. It can also include things posted by outside parties to your Facebook page, so keep an eye on what appears there. Just remember that we are always under scrutiny by magnifying glass and that the possibilities of digital distortion are virtually unlimited, so always ask yourself, could this be deliberately misconstrued or misunderstood by somebody who wants to make me look bad?
Read more“Well, I’m doing two days a week, at, uh, this airline magazine, which is not bad because it allows me to still do my three days as, like, a consultant with my old company, where now you get, um, paid by the hour. Which works well, because you can even do that when you’re traveling, which I have to do quite a bit of now because I’m also doing this speaker program for a tech company on the West Coast—well, was doing, because they’re cutting back on their off-site stuff because… ” At which point you tune out. It’s all too familiar. The white noise of the free fall.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 