I suspect the new OS will be based on one of the pre-existing Linux distro (Ubuntu?) with the Google layer built on top to enable constant synchronising of data when online and caching mode when offline (ala Google Gears?). When it is released, hopefully it will free us all from having to worry what or which computer we are working on at any given time. To a certain extent, I have already implemented some of the ideas of cloud computing by using Google services to synchronise my calendar on my notebooks and phones. I guess the only other thing that I would like with the Google Chrome OS is cheaper data rates. This issue of data charges is what prevent a lot of people from utlising cloud-based services more often on their wireless devices (phones).

What was worse, was that it took quite a few more hours (almost 40?!) for the rescue team to arrive and to begin entering the mine where the accident took place. Furthermore, many members of the miners’ families were first told that all twelve had been found alive when the truth was actually a lot worse. Hours after the good news somehow spread, the true extent of the death toll (eleven miners were killed and there was only one survivor) disappointed and angered many.

The mine has a long record of safety violations over the years. Last December alone it was found to have had eleven breaches of safety regulations. It can be assumed that breaches of safety regulations are now such common occurences that no one takes any notice anymore, until accidents take place. It can definitely be assumed that this mine is not the only one that breaches safety regulations on a regular basis.

In fact, with the endless drive for productivity being implemented across industries, safety regulations must be seen more and more as impediments to the increasing of exploitation and the extraction of profits by industry operators. This is the true reason for the increase in incidents of industrial accidents and fatalities.

For all the discussion about the security holes in Firefox, I have so far never encountered any nasties in the years that I have spent traversing the web. This is in contrast to my experience with Internet Explorer up to version 6 which certainly makes using Firefox a no brainer. If ever I encounter problems with Firefox, it was early on when it had just become known as Firefox, due to to a combination of bugs in the browser and the fact that in those days people(web designers) seemed to think that it was OK to test their site in IE only. These problems, however, I experience less and less these days thanks to bug fixes and awareness in the web design community about standards (don’t get me started on the support for standards in IE).

I still remember the days when the browser world consisted of Internet Explorer and Netscape. I had both installed, plus Opera so I can use them to visit different websites and to test them in different browsers (blink tags anyone?). I had a brief affair with Netscape 4.7 then version 6.0 and then I switched to Mozilla, mainly due to the fact that Mozilla will also run on Linux (never was much of a fan of Konqueror myself). When I heard that there was a new browser that was lighter than Mozilla called Firebird, I immediately jumped ship and used Firebird all the time.

Now, I am upgrading all my machines to Firefox 1.5 and virtually everybody I know is using it for their everyday browsing needs without any regrets. Congratulations to everyone on the Firefox team!

A Waverley Council ranger tells a street musician to move on because the management of Eastgate Shopping Centre (Spring Street, Bondi Junction) does not like people busking in a public area. They called the ranger when they realised that the could not evict a street musician from land that is not theirs. The management representative claimed that shop owners complained of noise, as a lame excuse to victimise a musician serenading the public. In cases like these, usually there is no complaint, just concocted stories emanating from the centre management.

It did not help that the server, at the new premises, had to be put behind a router and firewall, which meant more configurations had to be changed. Previously, the server was sitting as the network gateway. I took this opportunity to also reconfigure and update a few things on the server, such as openSSL, etc to the latest versions.

Thank you all for your patience, everything is now back to normal (and running).

First, Menezes himself was not aware of the blanket surveillance that has been carried out by the British police and Scotland Yard of the block of apartments that he had been living in. Far from trying to run away from the police, he had no knowledge at all about what had been happening around him. That fateful morning, Menezes simply got out of his apartment and walked to catch a bus to go to work. At this point, as he was boarding a bus, an authorisation had been issued to use force on him without any attempt to verify his identity.

At the end of his journey, he alighted from the bus and walked towards the tube station. Far from the claims of the police that he was running away, he simply walked down the steps, through the turnstyles and after picking up a free newspaper he walked on the escalator down to the platforms. It was when he boarded that train that armed police stormed into the carriage and shot him about eight times, all while his arms were held behind his back, all at point-blank range. He was shot a few times in the head and the rest in the torso.

All the claims about Menezes wearing a heavy coat in a summer’s day is also an outright lie. From the photos from the scene of the shooting (showing his body on the floor of the train) he was not wearing anything heavy, only a light denim jacket. This was also verified by footage taken from the station’s surveillance cameras.

It is clear that fearing a backlash from the public for police brutality, a story was quickly hatched by the media unit of the police and Scotland Yard to be fed to the media for public consumption. This kind of event, while it has not happened in London or Sydney for a while, will be more and more common as the “shoot to kill” authorisation will be used more and more in the so-called “war on terrorism”. Remember, everybody is now guilty, until they are proven innocent, if they get the chance.

There it is, a warning from someone who has been the president of one of the world’s most powerful institutions. He is not your average middle class media commentator who cannot see past their noses. He represents a layer of the world’s ruling class who is only too aware of the situation that has been developing in the past two decades. At 71, he would have been born in the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression and people of his generation still remember the echoes of what his parents’ generation would have gone through.

So the question is, what is it we are going through? We are going through the biggest period of upheaval in the economic and political sense since the Great Depression of the 1930s. All around the world one regime after another is rocked by instabilities. The strongest expression of this growing instability is the growth of militaristic adventurism by the world’s major capitalist nations and nowhere is this more strongly expressed than in the adventures undertaken by the US military forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

In the economic sense, we have been living through the greatest reverse-redistribution of wealth in history. Since the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher wealth has been redistributed from the developing countries to the transnational corporations and the World Bank and from the general population in the developed nations into the hands of the wealthiest 10%.

So when Wolfensohn warns of an impending catastrophe in the future, he is not necessarily talking about the need to eradicate povery, but he is warning of a growing destabilisation of the whole capitalist order in the face of inter-nation rivalries around the world and massive social inequalities within those nations themselves. Someone like Wolfensohn who is worth an estimated $400 million is surely not going to give away his wealth to eradicate poverty (I forgot, he pledged $10 million over the next five years to the Brookings Institute in Washington).

Titled Daily Observations From Korea, the site contains Ellis’ own observations of Korean society in words and photographs. Why Korea? Ellis, originally from Ireland and a some time resident of Australia, has been living in Seoul for the past few years.

I would like to wish him good luck and congratulation for a site that is uncluttered and regularly updated.