To Mars they said.

A neat piece on the possibilities of travelling to Mars.
It also outlines some of the more 'stupid' parts of our society and the way it's phrased in relation to spending that money on space exploration or anything really, really puts in in perspective.

Definitely worth the read.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/mars-next-step-humanity-we-must-take-it

Excluding kernel updates

So, for anyone running a Linux system you will at some point update your system using one of the built in updater's such as yum or apt-get, or if you are using a desktop version, the built in updater or package manager. Doing this will eventually get you a kernel update and this is where things can go horribly wrong.
Case in point, I do all my development in a local virtual machine using virtualbox and doing a kernel update will most often horribly break things for me. The build in updater is a constant nag about kernel updates I don't want to do, so it's time to silence it.
The quick way around this, exclude any kernel updates.

This example will show you how to do with with yum. A little searching will find the same result for apt-get if that is your thing.

Using yum, from a terminal.

sudo vi /etc/yum.conf

Add this line to the end of the file

exclude=kernel*

Now save and quit

 :wq

 From here on out whenever you run yum update you will exclude any kernel updates and if you are using a desktop, the built in updater won't nag you with those kernel updates. You can do them manually if you wish but as the old saying goes "If it ain't broke don't fix it", so if your system is running fine, leave it alone and you'll be happy in the end.