As the Humane race passes its first decade of the 21st century a new series of challenges have begun to present them selves. With our population booming, and a rapidly depleting stock of recourses, many economies, and societies the world over are being challenged like never before. The Human race now stands on the presuppose, not just of Global calamities, but these socio-economic issues also coincide with mans next great scientific, social, and economic age. Like the iron age and the industrial revolution before it the Technological age is bringing with it changes and new challenges, that a bilgiered and already tensioned humanity must now face. These challenges include, the rapid expansion of technologically based economies supplanting the manufacturing, and agricultural jobs of yesterday. The rapid change in education, and the rise of the knowledge worker to the top of the economic food chain. And the social and political ramifications of an increasingly fast pace and always connected world in which no secrets, and no misdeeds can be buried for long. Continue reading
Rammstein at the Tampa Bay Times Forum “The Made In Germany 1995-2011″ Tour Review
What do you get when you mix Halloween Horror Nights costumes with performance art show? Throw in a heavy dose of Industrial rock, add some massive stage props and enough pyrotechnics to blow the roof of most venues. In a word: Rammstein!
Rammstein rocked the Tampa Bay Times Forum with their “Made in Germany Tour” show and to call it amazing may just be an understatement. If you’re a metal fan and you have a bucket list add ‘seeing a Rammstein show’ to it now! Because without it your list will be incomplete.
Now in the name of full disclosure, I have been a huge fan of these guys for years and part of it may be hometown pride, (as I also hail from Berlin). But do not let that impede the realization of this simple truth. This being these guys put on a show like no other! Flames, explosions, foam cannons in the shape of a male member, rubber dinghies – you name it Rammstein totes it up on stage. The show is more than just a concert it is an interactive entertainment experience put on by true showmen.
A future in the cloud
Today names like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix have become household names at least in the west and indeed across the world and all of these companies have something in common. That thing is they live on the internet. With more and more people spending more of their day on line than ever before. This has caused a paradigm shift in the way we view and use computers, and computing devises, and with it we are entering a brave new world, a new era in Technology, and computing; the Era of the cloud. Now the first wave of cloud based operating systems have arrived ready to do battle with the MS Windows, and Mac OSX’s of the world. The Cloud revolution has begun and cloud OS’s are here to stay.
With Google testing its new Chrome OS which is essentially a browser set on top a (barley accessible) file tree. Or the Ubuntu based Jolie OS which is a cloud based GUI skin that sits atop Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu file manager, and other functionality is accessible as well as Linux applications if you know where to look), complete with an integrated Browser, built in Social networking functionality, and an an Online web based app market alla IPhone/Android/Palm/every other smartphone maker. In fact in many ways mobile OS’s like Google’s Android could also be considered a cloud based OS. Much of the functionality of these systems are depended on 3rd party cloud servers (email, calendar, maps), indeed even many of the “apps” you download are simply glorified links to web based applications, stored on cloud servers. In this way many of the things we used to store locally on our computers is now stored on servers somewhere in a data center and pulled of the web for our consumption pleasure.
All of these are of course are the first wave in a much larger onslaught, and all of them are still not completely cloud based. But consider that Jolie OS already integrates with services like Drop box, displaying and allowing you to access files stored on the popular web services as you would local storage, in a more traditional OS. I see these as examples of the first expeditions in to a Cloud based life, while the time is not yet rip to completely abandon all the aspects of more traditional computing at this time, i believe, that time is not far off, especially as mobile phones and I Pad like devises become the new computing platforms of choice. And the question then becomes how do we keep devises that live entirely or almost entirely on the web secure?
By: Daniel Lengert
Thoughts of an Old Friend.
I received a call this evening. It was from a friend of my, he told me one of his friends had finally crossed the line, and he was considering cutting ties with him. He called to ask my advice, because he had come to a realization I had come to years ago, that is that his friend was no longer the man we both at one time considered a cherished friend. He had succumb to addiction, he let substance abuse become his life, and in the process had changed form a bright promising young man to a sad shell of his former self. This conversation set me to thinking and I decided to write a few words. I hope any one reading this sees it as both a cautionary tale, and as a plea to an old friend to come back from oblivion. I have decided in writing this to not use the person’s real name, so for the purpose of this i am going to refer to him as Jack. The name I find fitting as it was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s among others that my good friend crawled in to one day and from which, has yet to emerge.
Here is an Idea for government expenditure cuts
So you hear it every day, talk of deficit reductions, and lowering spending.
Well here is an idea!
There are 535 Congress men/women making an average of $199,420/year and that are just the salaries. The president makes another 400K/year for an average expenditure of $107,089,700/year. Mean while the average American man makes 45K/Year and the average American women makes 35K/year (disregarding this inequality for a moment) that makes an average of 40K/Year for the average American! Id says we cap all congressional and executive salaries at a level even with average American salary. This means 535 congress members + 1 president X $40K= $21, 440,000/Year. That is a savings of $85,649,700/Year! How’s that for deficit reduction!! I’m just saying
If you like this idea,Vote now at https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/cap-congressional-salaries-and-ban-congress-raising-there-own-salary/R5wn0RRs
