From Marihuana Reconsidered:

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won’t attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort – successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

Worth noting:

Sagan’s wife, Ann Druyan is also on NORML’s board of directors, an organization working to reform Marijuana laws.

Go to Source
http://www.osnews.com/story/22655/Google_Chrome_OS_Goes_Native_Code_

And my favorite part, the tech section.

While fans wait for the February release of Star Trek: Online, they can enjoy the latest release of screenshots from the game.

There are shots of Klingons, humans and other aliens, including a horned alien animal caught in the middle of a skirmish.

Federation ships, including an odd one with four-nacelles are shown, and no battle would seem complete without several ominous Borg Cubes lurking nearby.

Several screenshots are set on planets. For the space shots, many include the asteroids that seem to be a normal part of the scenery.

Star Trek: Online releases on February 2.

Go to Source
http://www.trektoday.com/content/2009/11/star-trek-online-screenshots-2/

Fans purchasing the Blu-ray set will see an unaired alternate version of the original Star Trek pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, for the first time.

The alternate version of the pilot was acquired by a German film collector who “recently brought it to the attention” of CBS/Paramount. This version has an alternative monologue by William Shatner, different theme music and closing credits. It is presented in three parts with “1970s-style act breaks.”

The season three six-disc set includes all twenty-four episodes of the third season and each disc is Mobile BluTM and BD Live enabled. Special features include several panels from ComicCon International 2009: The Anthropology of Star Trek, The World of Rod Roddenberry and a twenty-minute piece hosted by David Gerrold (The Trouble With Tribbles.) In addition, the set includes: Billy Blackburn’s Treasure Chest-Rare Home Movies and Special Memories Part Three, To Boldly Go, Collectible Trek and Star Trek’s Impact.

The Boxee team revealed ahead of their December 7th beta unveiling that they’ve been in talks with several developers about creating a Boxee device, and have signed the first of what they believe could be several partnerships in the next twelve months.

All will be revealed in early December, but for now, here’s their announcement. Exciting stuff.

We launched our public alpha for Mac/Linux in January at CES. During the show we met with several device manufactures interested in embedding Boxee into their existing devices or building a dedicated Boxee device.

I am very happy to announce we have signed our first partnership with a CE company. At this point we can not say more about the partner or the specs of the device, but we can tell you we are working closely with them to make sure we deliver a great Boxee experience on it.



We will show mockups of the box and share more details at our upcoming Boxee Beta Unveiling event in Brooklyn, NY on Dec 7th. RSVP here.

Over the next few years there will be a great change in the way we consume entertainment on our TV. The Internet is (finally) coming to the TV and with it will come a whole new world of content, applications and innovations.

We are building Boxee as a platform that would:

• make it easy for users to consume and find content – no matter what the source
• give content owners, aggregators, and developers the tools to create unique experiences with a variety of business models
• enable CE companies to enhance their Connected devices

This will be the first connected device running Boxee, but the idea is to provide consumers with a way to get Boxee in their living rooms, no matter whether it’s on a Connected TV, game console, set-top box, BluRay player, computer, etc.

Our goal is to be on every Connected device in the living room.

We are very excited about the partnership and looking forward to sharing more at the event.

More Info: Boxee

Go to Source
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wegotserved_rss/~3/jZD4ZczMluM/

Go to Source
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Phoronix/~3/2an2dMmLnuA/vr.php

(Image not mine.)

Go to Source
http://packetlife.net/blog/2009/oct/28/why-network-neutrality-big-deal/

Chrome OS is a brand new free operating system built around the revolutionary Google Chrome browser.

The project aim is to provide a lightweight Linux distribution for the best web browsing experience.

Featured software in Chrome OS:
GNOME 2.24 desktop environment
Google Chrome 4.0.223 web browser
Google Picasa 2.7 photo manager New!
OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite
GIMP 2.6 image editor
Flash Player 10.0 plugin
and much more!

System requirements of Chrome OS:
Processor: Intel Pentium, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer
RAM: min. 256 MB
Hard disk: min. 1 GB
Graphics card: supports most modern graphics cards

Those details came from this page, so if you’re interested keep checking back there!


UPDATE: Don’t get too excited; I’m told this is simply a fan-built Linux distro with Chrome bolted on created using SUSE Studio.

Go to Source
http://www.osnews.com/story/22394/Microsoft_To_Open_up_Outlook_pst_Format