Random Burblings Part 1
It’s Friday. There’s a light snow falling in Ottawa and it’s bloody cold out. It is very clearly December and global warming is taking too damned long.
This is an excellent opportunity to do some websurfing and there’s lots of news out there to keep me busy. IBM is ditching its line of PCs and notebook computers to the tune of 1 to 2 billion dollars. They’re likely doing this to focus their efforts on producing stomach-churning, overly complex bits of software. There’s good business sense in this move. Unlike unprofitable, rapidly changing personal computers, big software requires big hardware to run it. The huge sums of money made from the software sales invariably lead to huge sums of money made on big hardware. Win-win! They’re still supporting “PCs” with their processor sales anyway, so it’s not like they’re leaving the space altogether. Just moving up the food chain.
Then we have this guy. I’ve often said I’ve wanted to live for several hundred years (forever, actually), and Aubrey de Grey is telling me there’s a plan to let me do just that – in spite of the abuse I regularly subject my body to! This is good news, especially if it’s made readily available to the 7 billion people currently roaming the planet. I just hope the trade-off is sterility. Chances are these “complex treatments” will be very expensive though and we’ll end up with a race of wealthy methuselahs.
Speaking of Methuselahs, would you get a load of that beard? Clearly this guy has his next 1000 years all mapped-out and they’re going to involve a lot of beard-stroking, beard-conditioning and beard-soup-straining.
If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000.
(from the BBC article linked above)
as long as I can survive until the upload…