I don't know, I can't see immortality being so different from the current state of affairs, given enough time one form of procreation would simply take over the other?

I imagine that after a few hundred years (let alone a thousand) our views on many things that we currently hold so dear to us would change dramatically.

Just one point I have to make on your contention: if solving all of the world's hunger and resource problems leads to overpopulation then why is it that it is currently primarily those countries that HAVE NOT solved said problems (yet) which still face the massive problems of overpopulation / lack of resources?

I use DeCSS to watch Blueray's purchased to play on my Windows 7 media Centre machine running the copy of PowerDVD that came with my drive! Why because last year I found that without paying for an upgrade to the latest version of PowerDVD I would only be able to watch approximately half of my purchased Bluerays!!

In the end I spent a quarter of the money on a perpetual license for AnyDVD HD, that fixed the issue with PowerDVD. Problem solved.

Sales Force

Oh and .com, not really a word.

The cloud is not about Gmail and Hotmail, heck thats 20 year old tech! It's about tools to do the same things better, which is all any enterprise company be it Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP or whoever has been trying to sell forever, today however it's just a new platform for the same thing. Ask anyone who uses the aforementioned salesforce.com which I think is a great example of how the cloud is not something that we're all going to be using in the next 10 years, but that it's something that most of us have been using in one way or another already for the past ten years!

You're correct it is about the data however what is being outsourced is the tools used to access that data and incidentally the location that data is stored. There is nothing much new there IMO, ever heard of offsite or online backup?

People seem to insist that "the cloud" means Google Apps. It doesn't.

It means SalesForce.com, etc.

So you're half right, if you were to look at this question as a matter of statistics; Taking the whole time that the Galaxy has existing then looking at how long the Earth has existed and then looking at how much of that time we humans have existed, then you can immediately see that the odds of finding another race at the exact 0.0000001% of their existence (ie, one just asking this question) is very slim.

Sir Arthur C Clark made this observation long ago (Apes or Angels), I don't thing I have ever read a better 'what if' scenario of what Aliens might be like. Certainly not this "resource gatherer nomad" view?

Err, just so you know it is a 10mbit broadband.

In other words it's not the downloading of the patches that is the slow part it's the 15 different apps attempting to update when they are first used or actually a program that depends on a program that depends on a program that depends on them is used.

If you use the computer every day it is not, however if you only turn it on every week or two (like my mother) then expect 30minutes of prompts for different updates!

Last year I bought for my mother a new computer, she is quite computer literate but I was shocked to find 3 months after purchasing that she has gotten into the habit of turning it on once a week just to give it an hour to "update itself". That was to allow her to spend 30mins every other week doing her online stuff..

I literally couldn't or didn't believe it, but then I actually was there one day and watched as all the mostly default installed apps when through their motions of requesting updates. It literally took about half an hour before to computer was usable without something prompting "Do you want to install this update..."!

In the end I removed some of the crap like Java and the HP printer updater, and told her to turn it on only ever other week for the updates!

Definitely there is some need to consolidate updates into one program..

Although I never made it as far south as Salerno, in Positano the buffalo mozzarella pizza was the best thing I have ever tasted.

Yep that's right - base, sauce and buffalo mozzarella, that's it I was in heaven! Okay sometimes with some parma ham also, but seriously it didn't need it!

Oh and worst pizza ever: Rome. Enough said.

Hang on, um I'm no expert on the topic but don't millions of teenagers each year dye their hair with peroxide to make it a lighter colour?

That would make it a perfectly reasonable question as undoubtedly some of that would end up in your ear and any reasonable person would want to know if there are any adverse affects??