I tried to google for this item, but I couldn't find it due to the generality of my terms: I seem to remember a few years ago that someone identified fragments of specific rna or dna fragments in petroleum. I have no idea how difficult that is to do... But it seems like it would be possible.
So if there was petroleum, and all the molecules were right-handed, but were complex in the same manner as to be attributed to biological synthesis, it would say something just as fascinating about the universe.
I feel compelled to point out that your view of U.S. history is myopic.
stuff seemed to be working 1776-1950, because globalization had not arrived by then yet, and there werent many huge megacorporations that had economies greater than many countries.
Just pulling a counter-example out of my rear: The Gilded Age.
I think you may have to work harder than that to make the case that the rise of megacorporations was due to globalization.
Disclaimer: I'm not a "corporationist". I'm a total pinko.
I see that h4rm0ny was talking about telco immunity... For some reason I thought you were talking about the recent FCC decision. Reading comprehension FTW.
I really wish I could take you on a ride in the what-if machine. I want you to see the real agenda of the people who manipulate you by your simpleton "regulation is bad, m'kay" philosophy.
Tunneling of any kind is banned. No encryption allowed except on whitelisted "eCommerce (barf)" and banking sites. Only pre-approved applications can be run on your machine. Your operating system must be "safe" for the network, and must have technology to fight "piracy" and protect the big four's so-called IP.
I'm not making this up. Do some research, watch some CSPAN, read telco lobby policy papers, open your eyes. Stop being gullible and trusting anyone who feeds you Libertarian platitudes.
Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, as it appears you're getting points from the contrarian mods. Oh well.
Fwiw, the only automatic proof of life would be direct observation of the life itself. Oil is evidence as strong as fossils (intuitively). In fact, I think Phoenix's instruments could determine the chirality of an oil sample (although I'm not sure that right-handed molecules would disprove a biological origin).
So you're either being pedantic or you're mistaken... The presence of the stuff that we call oil here on Earth would be almost totally conclusive evidence.
Mods: The "Abiogenic Petroleum Origin Hypothesis" is garbage.
It's mainly used to comfort people by telling them there is a limitless supply of petroleum, and that energy crises are frauds perpetrated by the one world government in preparation for the arrival of the anti-christ. It's popular in the WorldNetDaily Hal Lindsey circles of charlatanism.
I think parent is kidding, btw... (apologies if you're not)
It was just the spam that got my goat, really. Were it not for that, it just would have been background stupidity.
About the homophobia, randomly from the front page:
What's up ass-captains? I've been very fortunate to be able to watch you guys shit your panties [...]
I want to find the FSF/terrorist thing funny, as I'm not so mad anymore, but I just can't, mainly because of this:
You guys are like the Al Jazeera of tech journalism.
I have so many problems with that sentence that I don't know where to start. For instance, what's wrong with Al Jazeera?
The foss community has a freaking awesome sense of humor, our cup runneth over with funny memes. We don't have to prove to anybody that we can take a joke. I mean, we can claim Linus "You are all stupid and ugly" Torvalds; we're obviously cool with some smack talking.
I suspect you're being disingenuous about your concern for Mexico and Nigeria'a environmental regulations. And when was the last time Canada worked against our interests?
I'm a thinking person, and I think efficiency gains are much more powerful than handing over the last protected areas to oil companies.
The statement that any increase in domestic production is desirable has as its corollary the belief that our environment is valueless.
I appreciate your honesty about having trolled earlier.
I didn't mean to suggest that I was ashamed. Socrates was a troll in real life, among others.
My opinion isn't that there is a zero-sum game between parties interested in power - although power vacuums tend to get filled. It's that governments have done a great deal of good, and can be the people's greatest tool against exploitation.
My argument wasn't intentionally attacking a strawman. I was trying to (poorly, perhaps) demonstrate that lots of different (indeed, opposing) ideologies can lead to the same kind of rule that you fear. It was actually meant as a reductio ad absurdum argument. Individualism is not a perfect antidote to tyranny.
I present as further evidence the United States' Gilded Age. This was the most ideal small-government, individualist era in the nation's history. It took government might and labor unions to restore liberty to the people.
I will take you at face value regarding your point about orthodoxies. This means that I am hoping that you will not take my belief in social and environmental responsibility as Stalinist Communism, just as I will no longer take your individualism as Fascism.
With that out of the way, there is a lot that I agree with in your posts. I just don't agree that there is a collectivist agenda, or that the problem is too much government power at the scale of nation-states; I think much of the woes in the United States at the moment are the result of the neutering of regulatory agencies. Maybe this point is a semantic difficulty with the term "size": Do we mean the scope of its power? Or the resources it consumes? Or the proportion of the population that it employs? In any case, I think the current government is already too weak in regulatory powers, and should spend more on infrastructure and social welfare. IMHO, of course.
I agree that people are far too passive at the moment. Far too uninformed, as well. I share your revulsion towards the convenience-is-everything culture. But I wouldn't go so far as saying people are too dependent. Is a slave dependent on his master?
I totally agree with you about the ignorance of the forces that propelled tyrants to power. I am merely suggesting that the truth is more complicated than you were suggesting. These charismatic figures didn't come to power because of evil, they came to power because their rhetoric made sense to reasonable people. It's tragic that rhetoric similar to yours was used to inspire the Blackshirts, just as it's tragic that rhetoric similar to mine was used when Stalin and Mao consolidated power. Whether this is an intrinsic property of our philosophies is a question I couldn't answer; but it seems to prove that there is more than one road to tyranny.
The reason that other people on slashdot mention Ayn Rand in response to your posts: She referred to anyone that she disagreed with as "collectivist". Her circle of friends in New York was called "The Collective" in a tongue-in-cheek manner (interestingly, Alan Greenspan, the very one who would become the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a member).
As completely opposed as I am to her philosophy, I think you may enjoy her work. (I never thought I would recommend her to anyone, but there it is).
My particular opposition with your view of the world is this: In the United States, it has been used repeatedly in the past forty years to justify transferring wealth and power from the public trust into corporations. Strict individualism has been invoked several times to move away from the New Deal and towards Corporatism. And this Corporatism is a much closer cousin to Il Duce's fascism than your feared "collectivism", sharing much of the same anti-communist rhetoric.
Large organizations are now with us to stay, as long as our civilization lasts. From the sewer system of 19th century Paris to the U.S. Interstate system, there will always now be problems that are exclusively in the bailiwick of nation-state-sized organizations. For better or for worse.
Your Individualistic utopia is as impossible as any other orthodoxy. It's only used today to trick people in handing over control to corporations, as far as I can tell.
Btw, Thoreau was a great influence on my thinking as well. However, I eventually came to see that without a government large enough to contain the interrelations of property, Walden Pond is hypoxic waste from runoff of fertilizer from the factory farm upstream.
In summary, I see a marginally responsive government as far preferable to rule by a handful of large corporations, enforcing their strange, dystopic, and wrongly-named social darwinism. I also believe that bureaucracies are not necessarily bad, and the one of the greatest assets of a government are career civil servants. Further, I believe that rigid individualism, strict emphasis on personal property, and free-market orthodoxy can lead to rule by sociopaths (the winners of the game of social so-called darwinism), just as strict propertylessness led to absolute rule by Stalin (who was the ideological opposite of Mussolini).
The world is not as simple as you make it seem. It is at once more mundane and more terrifying than you believe.
Re:2008 - The Desktop Linux Dream Is Dead
on
OSCON 2008 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
[tired of posting AC, here I am, the linuxhaterhater...]
It is not written in the style of Unix Hater's Handbook. Unix Hater's never degenerated into homophobic right-wing rants. And it was clever. And well written. And technically accurate.
I re-read the handbook for the first time in a decade when the Allison op-ed hit slashdot (and you saw the little hissy the author threw about the summary link being to zdnet, right? That wasn't a joke.) Unix Hater's is every bit as good as I remember (see my earlier comment).
Allison's point of view seems absurd to me. He thinks that the "community" has to embrace this cretin so that they don't seem humorless. That's just PR. It reminds me of Bill O'Reilly going on the Colbert Report to show he wasn't "humorless". It's not genuine, it's not necessary.
About the fonts article, I am totally unimpressed that you managed to find an article that wasn't totally uninformed, when there are a dozen articles on the front page without any merit at all.
Allison's good-humor act isn't fooling anybody on the other side of the fence. And this blog is a terrible bug report system. Linuxhaters only value to foss, as far as I can tell, is showing the problems that linux beginners encounter. And even that involves cutting away 80% of the boring pseudo-fratire lameness.
The other major reason is that there is a sort of war being waged against the concept of individuality and it's not because we have transcended ego boundaries but because our leaders have a statist, collectivist agenda.
That's insane.
Stop making out with Ayn Rand's corpse. It's gross. Besides, there are tons of elected officials who believe this objectivist tripe. I think your half-baked ideology is actually in control at the moment.
That's probably still not enough to overcome the bad blood with users who interacted with the malware known as RealPlayer, and their pushing of the privacy envelope.
I remember a tech support call around 2000, where their representative tried to hard-sell an acquaintance of mine into buying customer data from them. It was like a street corner hustle.
It is a rationalization that I am beginning to have some compassion for (even though I agree that the Bush regime is qualitatively different than everything else in U.S. political history).
I think GP's line of reasoning is attractive because just about everyone absolutely hates being wrong.
Anyone with any awareness at all (excepting the most extreme loyalists) can no longer deny the regime's authoritarian leanings and complete disregard for U.S. law.
Since all of us sometimes have trouble accepting our mistakes, a number of U.S. citizens have fallen into a trap and unconsciously rationalized their bi-annual election decisions (or even just advocacy with friends and family) in 2000-2006 with the following logic: Since all Republicrats or Demicans are the same (evil), my decision to vote for the Administration and support the Administration's party in the legislatures was moot.
It's not true, of course. The world would be a vastly different place had Gore been elected in 2000, or if Kerry had been elected in 2004, or if the Senate had a Democratic supermajority.
Everybody fucks up. If you supported these guys in the past, suck it up, and learn from your mistakes (stop listening to AM radio and reading NewsMax?). And watch out for claiming that Bush just wasn't a true Scotsman.
I meant to ask about the existence of something like Etoile in my comment above. Thanks.
Re:2008 - The Desktop Linux Dream Is Dead
on
OSCON 2008 Roundup
·
· Score: 1
and who isn't?
Me.
I don't even have a linux desktop right now. I just think it (linuxhaters) isn't any good.
It reads like it was written by a 18-year-old sub-literate kid who missed the "satire" part of "fratire". Even if the writer (writers?) understood linux, I couldn't read it due to the latent homosexuality making me so uncomfortable on the the author's behalf (why is everything about balls, cock, and ass to you?).
Back in the day, we had UGH. Now that was some good hate.
Slashdot Mirror
That is very very funny.
No. "Right-To-Work" is doublespeak for "anti-union".
It's an outrage.
Either way, it would be amazing.
I tried to google for this item, but I couldn't find it due to the generality of my terms: I seem to remember a few years ago that someone identified fragments of specific rna or dna fragments in petroleum. I have no idea how difficult that is to do... But it seems like it would be possible.
So if there was petroleum, and all the molecules were right-handed, but were complex in the same manner as to be attributed to biological synthesis, it would say something just as fascinating about the universe.
But yeah, I think your bet is a pretty good one.
I feel compelled to point out that your view of U.S. history is myopic.
Just pulling a counter-example out of my rear: The Gilded Age.
I think you may have to work harder than that to make the case that the rise of megacorporations was due to globalization.
Disclaimer: I'm not a "corporationist". I'm a total pinko.
I suck cocks.
I see that h4rm0ny was talking about telco immunity... For some reason I thought you were talking about the recent FCC decision. Reading comprehension FTW.
Sorrysorrysorry
I really wish I could take you on a ride in the what-if machine. I want you to see the real agenda of the people who manipulate you by your simpleton "regulation is bad, m'kay" philosophy.
Tunneling of any kind is banned. No encryption allowed except on whitelisted "eCommerce (barf)" and banking sites. Only pre-approved applications can be run on your machine. Your operating system must be "safe" for the network, and must have technology to fight "piracy" and protect the big four's so-called IP.
I'm not making this up. Do some research, watch some CSPAN, read telco lobby policy papers, open your eyes. Stop being gullible and trusting anyone who feeds you Libertarian platitudes.
Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, as it appears you're getting points from the contrarian mods. Oh well.
Fwiw, the only automatic proof of life would be direct observation of the life itself. Oil is evidence as strong as fossils (intuitively). In fact, I think Phoenix's instruments could determine the chirality of an oil sample (although I'm not sure that right-handed molecules would disprove a biological origin).
So you're either being pedantic or you're mistaken... The presence of the stuff that we call oil here on Earth would be almost totally conclusive evidence.
Really?
Mods: The "Abiogenic Petroleum Origin Hypothesis" is garbage.
It's mainly used to comfort people by telling them there is a limitless supply of petroleum, and that energy crises are frauds perpetrated by the one world government in preparation for the arrival of the anti-christ. It's popular in the WorldNetDaily Hal Lindsey circles of charlatanism.
I think parent is kidding, btw... (apologies if you're not)
It was just the spam that got my goat, really. Were it not for that, it just would have been background stupidity.
About the homophobia, randomly from the front page:
I want to find the FSF/terrorist thing funny, as I'm not so mad anymore, but I just can't, mainly because of this:
I have so many problems with that sentence that I don't know where to start. For instance, what's wrong with Al Jazeera?
The foss community has a freaking awesome sense of humor, our cup runneth over with funny memes. We don't have to prove to anybody that we can take a joke. I mean, we can claim Linus "You are all stupid and ugly" Torvalds; we're obviously cool with some smack talking.
Short term oil fix? Where?
People conserving gasoline has already had an impact on fuel prices.
I suspect you're being disingenuous about your concern for Mexico and Nigeria'a environmental regulations. And when was the last time Canada worked against our interests?
I'm a thinking person, and I think efficiency gains are much more powerful than handing over the last protected areas to oil companies.
The statement that any increase in domestic production is desirable has as its corollary the belief that our environment is valueless.
<sarcasm>And shale mining is totally environmentally benign.</sarcasm>
Not that I agree with GP. Efficiency gains are far more productive.
Efficiency.
But it can be used as a passphrase for a key of arbitrary length. I think this may have been what GP was trying to say.
I didn't mean to suggest that I was ashamed. Socrates was a troll in real life, among others.
My opinion isn't that there is a zero-sum game between parties interested in power - although power vacuums tend to get filled. It's that governments have done a great deal of good, and can be the people's greatest tool against exploitation.
My argument wasn't intentionally attacking a strawman. I was trying to (poorly, perhaps) demonstrate that lots of different (indeed, opposing) ideologies can lead to the same kind of rule that you fear. It was actually meant as a reductio ad absurdum argument. Individualism is not a perfect antidote to tyranny.
I present as further evidence the United States' Gilded Age. This was the most ideal small-government, individualist era in the nation's history. It took government might and labor unions to restore liberty to the people.
I will take you at face value regarding your point about orthodoxies. This means that I am hoping that you will not take my belief in social and environmental responsibility as Stalinist Communism, just as I will no longer take your individualism as Fascism.
With that out of the way, there is a lot that I agree with in your posts. I just don't agree that there is a collectivist agenda, or that the problem is too much government power at the scale of nation-states; I think much of the woes in the United States at the moment are the result of the neutering of regulatory agencies. Maybe this point is a semantic difficulty with the term "size": Do we mean the scope of its power? Or the resources it consumes? Or the proportion of the population that it employs? In any case, I think the current government is already too weak in regulatory powers, and should spend more on infrastructure and social welfare. IMHO, of course.
I agree that people are far too passive at the moment. Far too uninformed, as well. I share your revulsion towards the convenience-is-everything culture. But I wouldn't go so far as saying people are too dependent. Is a slave dependent on his master?
I totally agree with you about the ignorance of the forces that propelled tyrants to power. I am merely suggesting that the truth is more complicated than you were suggesting. These charismatic figures didn't come to power because of evil, they came to power because their rhetoric made sense to reasonable people. It's tragic that rhetoric similar to yours was used to inspire the Blackshirts, just as it's tragic that rhetoric similar to mine was used when Stalin and Mao consolidated power. Whether this is an intrinsic property of our philosophies is a question I couldn't answer; but it seems to prove that there is more than one road to tyranny.
Sorry for the lame double post. I just wanted you to know that I thought your response was pretty great.
Also, I wanted to make clear that Thoreau was very valuable to me. Coincidentally, that was when I was trying to survive a U.S. public school.
I don't believe your collectivist agenda exists, but it's clear you're a pretty smart individual.
I was trolling a little bit.
The reason that other people on slashdot mention Ayn Rand in response to your posts: She referred to anyone that she disagreed with as "collectivist". Her circle of friends in New York was called "The Collective" in a tongue-in-cheek manner (interestingly, Alan Greenspan, the very one who would become the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a member).
As completely opposed as I am to her philosophy, I think you may enjoy her work. (I never thought I would recommend her to anyone, but there it is).
My particular opposition with your view of the world is this: In the United States, it has been used repeatedly in the past forty years to justify transferring wealth and power from the public trust into corporations. Strict individualism has been invoked several times to move away from the New Deal and towards Corporatism. And this Corporatism is a much closer cousin to Il Duce's fascism than your feared "collectivism", sharing much of the same anti-communist rhetoric.
Large organizations are now with us to stay, as long as our civilization lasts. From the sewer system of 19th century Paris to the U.S. Interstate system, there will always now be problems that are exclusively in the bailiwick of nation-state-sized organizations. For better or for worse.
Your Individualistic utopia is as impossible as any other orthodoxy. It's only used today to trick people in handing over control to corporations, as far as I can tell.
Btw, Thoreau was a great influence on my thinking as well. However, I eventually came to see that without a government large enough to contain the interrelations of property, Walden Pond is hypoxic waste from runoff of fertilizer from the factory farm upstream.
In summary, I see a marginally responsive government as far preferable to rule by a handful of large corporations, enforcing their strange, dystopic, and wrongly-named social darwinism. I also believe that bureaucracies are not necessarily bad, and the one of the greatest assets of a government are career civil servants. Further, I believe that rigid individualism, strict emphasis on personal property, and free-market orthodoxy can lead to rule by sociopaths (the winners of the game of social so-called darwinism), just as strict propertylessness led to absolute rule by Stalin (who was the ideological opposite of Mussolini).
The world is not as simple as you make it seem. It is at once more mundane and more terrifying than you believe.
Socrates?
[tired of posting AC, here I am, the linuxhaterhater...]
It is not written in the style of Unix Hater's Handbook. Unix Hater's never degenerated into homophobic right-wing rants. And it was clever. And well written. And technically accurate.
I re-read the handbook for the first time in a decade when the Allison op-ed hit slashdot (and you saw the little hissy the author threw about the summary link being to zdnet, right? That wasn't a joke.) Unix Hater's is every bit as good as I remember (see my earlier comment).
Allison's point of view seems absurd to me. He thinks that the "community" has to embrace this cretin so that they don't seem humorless. That's just PR. It reminds me of Bill O'Reilly going on the Colbert Report to show he wasn't "humorless". It's not genuine, it's not necessary.
About the fonts article, I am totally unimpressed that you managed to find an article that wasn't totally uninformed, when there are a dozen articles on the front page without any merit at all.
Allison's good-humor act isn't fooling anybody on the other side of the fence. And this blog is a terrible bug report system. Linuxhaters only value to foss, as far as I can tell, is showing the problems that linux beginners encounter. And even that involves cutting away 80% of the boring pseudo-fratire lameness.
Linuxhaters is no Unix Hater's. Not even close.
That's insane.
Stop making out with Ayn Rand's corpse. It's gross. Besides, there are tons of elected officials who believe this objectivist tripe. I think your half-baked ideology is actually in control at the moment.
That's probably still not enough to overcome the bad blood with users who interacted with the malware known as RealPlayer, and their pushing of the privacy envelope.
I remember a tech support call around 2000, where their representative tried to hard-sell an acquaintance of mine into buying customer data from them. It was like a street corner hustle.
It is a rationalization that I am beginning to have some compassion for (even though I agree that the Bush regime is qualitatively different than everything else in U.S. political history).
I think GP's line of reasoning is attractive because just about everyone absolutely hates being wrong.
Anyone with any awareness at all (excepting the most extreme loyalists) can no longer deny the regime's authoritarian leanings and complete disregard for U.S. law.
Since all of us sometimes have trouble accepting our mistakes, a number of U.S. citizens have fallen into a trap and unconsciously rationalized their bi-annual election decisions (or even just advocacy with friends and family) in 2000-2006 with the following logic: Since all Republicrats or Demicans are the same (evil), my decision to vote for the Administration and support the Administration's party in the legislatures was moot.
It's not true, of course. The world would be a vastly different place had Gore been elected in 2000, or if Kerry had been elected in 2004, or if the Senate had a Democratic supermajority.
Everybody fucks up. If you supported these guys in the past, suck it up, and learn from your mistakes (stop listening to AM radio and reading NewsMax?). And watch out for claiming that Bush just wasn't a true Scotsman.
I meant to ask about the existence of something like Etoile in my comment above. Thanks.
Me.
I don't even have a linux desktop right now. I just think it (linuxhaters) isn't any good.
It reads like it was written by a 18-year-old sub-literate kid who missed the "satire" part of "fratire". Even if the writer (writers?) understood linux, I couldn't read it due to the latent homosexuality making me so uncomfortable on the the author's behalf (why is everything about balls, cock, and ass to you?).
Back in the day, we had UGH. Now that was some good hate.