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On Tech Brief today: the future is not so bright, cheap starbases and no Windows for new Googlers.

• You would think that science-fiction writers, as creatures who spend so much time in futures of their own imagining, would be happy when the world catches up. But, no. :

"Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over."

His ennui runs deep but he fears it will be worse for our offspring:

"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely... more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian."

• There are other authors who can still see drama glittering in that avalanche of stuff. when there is no crime, no wars, no poverty, no famine and everyone is connected to everyone else. All the time.

"But it's not utopia. There are still lots of reasons to be miserable or less than ecstatic. There's still money, but not enough for everyone to have as much as they'd like (so scientists still have to fight for funding, and artists still have to take on tacky commissions), and there are still nation states and governments and politics. There are still some forms of scarcity and the environmental damage of the previous two centuries is only slowly being undone. In other words, it's a future that, right now, I can sort of take seriously."

• You know how it is. You make a small change and suddenly you find yourself knee deep in damage. Think then, how it must be when you do that to the universe you run. :

"Within a day of the expansion going live, players discovered that by refining a combination of cheaper starbase structures, you could obtain all the necessary parts for more expensive ones at a discounted rate. Players rapidly began building large control towers, normally costing 360 million ISK, for as little as 100 million."

CCP intervened by wiping out all the changes. And made it worse.

"[T]his has had the side-effect of making the players that were heavily into refining starbase modules the sole suppliers of that market. Prices on control towers have already risen to 450 million in some regions and those who were gambling on CCP's error are making an even bigger fortune than they previously were."

• Windows and computer security. They go together like fish and bicycles. No surprise then that :

"Google's policies surrounding the internal use of Windows aren't clear-cut, though. Some employees can still install Windows on their laptops, but not their desktop computers. However, Googlers need explicit permission from "quite senior levels" in order to keep using the Windows OS. "

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