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Without RSS all we'd have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

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March came in like a Lion, it should have gone out like a Lamb but actually went out like a Tiger. And now Spring has arrived.

No. April Fool. It's still Winter.
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It's more important to not buy in than to not sell out.

R.U. Sirus for president!

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If you share a post with circles, you can't share it with a community as well. Really, why not? I want to.
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So how much did the other fast food burger chain pay to get a product placement name check in tonight's episode of the BBC's Dr Who? I know it's now a global franchise, but, really? 

And they couldn't name Jammy Dodgers?

Is it reasonable to think that the BBC making money from things like Dr Who like this makes the license fee money go further and help to fund all the properly good things the BBC does, like the Afghanistan pashtun World Service (yes, I know it got cut.). Or, is that argument flawed?

Meanwhile USians have been complaining of not being able to listen to Neverwhere on iPlayer due to region restrictions. Well, I'm very happy for my license fee to pay for them to hear it. Please make it so.
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Out soon (Apr 8?). Whole EP works nicely.

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Two excellent reviewers
http://thequietus.com/articles/11760-hyperspecific-21-electronic-music-review-dj-rashad-matmos-covered-in-sand
Rory Gibb's Hyperspecific column on The Quietus is always good value.

http://whitenoisereview.blogspot.co.uk/
White Noise has his finger on the pulse of UK Armchair Dance, or whatever it's called.

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, The Jagged Orbit, Shockwave Rider should be required reading. They all resonate well with the world in 2013.
http://www.themillions.com/2013/03/the-weird-1969-new-wave-sci-fi-novel-that-correctly-predicted-the-current-day.html

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Yay! Crutchlow on pole with the fastest combined time for the three days.

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Sub-pontian idea of the day for G+
1) Collect all the most annoying people you can find in one circle
2) Give the circle an un-threatening name like, say, Sci-Fi 
3) Share the circle widely with your followers
4) Sit back in the knowledge of a job well done
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Marquez on a damp track. What is he doing? How does he do that?
http://pix.crash.net/motorsport/710/PA1296054.jpg
http://www.crash.net/motogp/picturearchive/0/126/2013+motogp/4876/photos.html

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Another example of why I find Charles Stross' blog to be essential and thought provoking reading.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/03/the-permanent-revolution.html
Today's rant is about the ideological flavour of a belief in endless exponential growth and what it means for society. 

My own thoughts are too confused here to be offer much comment. But this. Robert Wilson's and Terence McKenna's ideas about accelerating change proved to be too strong. The novelty curve didn't go vertical in an exponential growth singularity in Dec 2012. So the model was too simplistic. But a sigmoid curve where we're past the steepest part and rate of change is levelling out is also too simplistic a model. And so back to Limits to Growth again. 
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2846/28462101.jpg
That model recognises global macro economics as a whole series of interdependent variables, all with implications and all with major lags. Almost every single run results in exponential growth, sigmoid slowing and then a catastrophic correction.

Then there's Buckminster Fuller and Thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics and especially the second law are usually quoted without the words "in a closed system". So one approach for dealing with the downsides of exponential growth and this statement "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist - Kenneth Boulter, Economist." is to look for ways in which the system can be changed so that it is no longer closed. In 17th Century England, this would avoid the resource limitations of sheep and wool via imperialism. In the 21st century this might be post-industrial knowledge work, the industrialisation of space, much greater and direct exploitation of solar power and others. That doesn't nullify  the resource limits of oil energy or minerals, or the negative drivers such as pollution, but it does perhaps allow us to sidestep them.

Meanwhile, 99.9% of the population of the earth has a long way to go before it has the lifestyle and comforts of Louis XIV so explonential change, improvement and the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Another write up from a Google Reader founder. Interesting that all the same reasons for writing it originally still exist. And surprising to see the same old Atom vs RSS enmities being repeated again after all these years.

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Separated by nearly 40 years. Starless from the album 'Red' (and not 'Starless and Bible Black' surprisingly) from King Crimson vs a folk version from The Unthanks.
The Unthanks : Starless
vs
King Crimson - Starless

btw. Listen to The Unthanks, they're lovely.

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Whose side are you on,
1) people who claim there's only two sides to the argument, or
2) everyone else?
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Request: put a "Comments" tab on the profile page of G+ showing all the posts that the person has commented on in reverse comment date order.

Meanwhile, providespecial search keywords commenter:<profileId> and author:<profileId> so we can filter G+ post searches by authors.

tip: https://plus.google.com/s/%22<firstName>%20<lastName>%22%20-inurl%3A<profileId>/posts does kind of work.
 
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Most [UK] family doctors have given a patient a placebo drug
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21834440

So how does this work?
- Do patients prescribed placebos experience the side effects for the apparent named drug? ie. The Nocebo effect.
- Are the placebos branded or generic?
- Do they cost the same prescription charge?
- In these days of internet research, surely we can look up and check if a particular medicine is actually a placebo.
- Is there some special mark or acronym on the prescription which tells the pharmacist to put the special sugar pills into the "Lopitoff 80mg" box? Or is "Lopitoff" the real drug and "Lopitoff-NR" the placebo?

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[from: Google+ Posts]

If you use Feedburner and Google closed it, what would you do?

One of the things I've heard over and over from non-technical users who have the same concerns now that Feedburner is owned by Google, is where do we go if we want to switch? Ahh. There is no place to go.

Why is there no competitor?

Here's another question. If you use Blogger or Blogspot and Google turned off RSS/Atom feeds on those platforms, what would you do?

From an old post that turned up in Dave Winer's link blog and came to my attention via a feed reader. Posted to G+ and then copied to Twitter, Facebook and a blog via an Atom feed created by a 3rd party because of course G+ doesn't have Atom feeds.

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