Yeah, I would consider the ability to crack hard-encryption in a reasonable amount of time and processing power as a good definition for "magic". I'm under the impression that such a feat is mathmatically impossible. At least as far as we know. And the summary lead me to believe that they had somehow found a flaw in the underlying encryption scheme.
Hey, so in your personal view and in terms of ability, how well do the well groomed people with moderate amounts of intelligence compare to those with raw intelligence?
I ask because I'm in not-so-well-groomed-but-intelligent boat, a new father, and I'm generally worried. Now, he's going to be brought up with geek culture, and be exposed to a lot of geeky things, and by gods teeth he's going to get good grades... But I know he's getting a random allotment of genes.
If you have the education, and the motivation, you can be a smart person, right?
Yes. Yes it actually does. Learning new things and solving problems is a really good definition of "smart". But just because you're smart doesn't mean you're not going to have problems. What kind of an idiot are you to make that mistake? The fact that you're lazy and unmotivated doesn't make you stupid.
I know people with far lower IQ scores who I consider far more intelligent then myself.
That's because they have better mental health than you do. People who have their shit together and know what they want, what they have to do to get it, and are generally productive members of society aren't the mental head-cases that most ludicrously smart people are. Ignorance is bliss, and the inverse is nearly as true; intelligence doesn't make you happy. (But it DOES help to make money, which certainly helps on the happiness front).
And yeah, someone with an average intelligence, but a life-time's worth of knowledge and experience at X is going to be a lot better at X than your ignorant genius. But the genius will LEARN X and will be better at X at a faster rate than the average shmuck. If you applied yourself to something that actually made use of your intelligence you could master it. Some people enjoy mastery for it's own sake. If that's not your thing, hey, you could just glide through life and take it easy.
IQ isn't intelligence, but there's a pretty strong correlation. And intelligence isn't ability, but it certainly helps develop ability.
You're missing the "tighter gun regulation" = "less guns around" step. There are very tight laws about handguns in Chicago with legal battles in the works trying to open it up. But it's a pretty horrid example of fire-arm regulation making for a peaceful environment. Perhaps it would be even worse if you could grab a Saturday night special along with slurpee.
But I personally have little faith in the government's ability to actually limit the number of firearms. Especially if they fundamentally must allow a portion of the populace access, as per the 2nd amendment. It would work about about as well as the prohibition of booze and weed.
I'm sorry, real patriotism is BELIEVING in the Constitution, believing that it works, all of it, not just the one line you like.
You're drifting towards no-true-scotsman. But I'd say that you can't just have faith that it works. Exercising your rights every now and then is important to remind everyone involved. And yes, all of them.
If you really cared about the Constitution... You want to be a patriot? Get involved!
Do you have any idea who the fuck I am or where I stand on ANY of these issues?
No?
Are you just ranting and raving with the assumption that because I had the audacity to question your line of reasoning that I must be the polar opposite of everything you believe in? In this thread right here, you've been no better than the "preppers" who lash out at any mention of gun control.
Get your shit together or no one will give your argument any weight.
If we say, removed every gun in America, still, no less people would die from violent acts. None? Not a single one less? That's simply not believable.
And that's a much better argument than the meatless appeal to emotion and political ranting that was your first post. You could contrast this event with the knifing that happened on the exact same day in China where 20 some kids were stabbed, and lived. The firepower makes the crazy people snapping that much more lethal. But remember, even when they can't get a gun, they'll still go on a crazy rampage.
C'mon, what was a twenty-year old kid doing with this kind of firepower, anyway? Defending the Constitution?
Um, yes, actually that's one of the important reasons for the right to bear arms.
And if you really wanted a number, I'd say zero. We currently DO have regulations on firearm ownership. Presuming otherwise makes you look like an idiot. What you're arguing is for more/tighter regulation.
Well some teachers ARE sociopaths. It's just sort of a flaw in humanity and it pops up every now and then. (I think you mean a more generic term like "crazy", you don't have to be a sociopath to go on a killing rampage)
And the concern here is that an EXTREMELY small percentage of us just go bat-shit crazy and start killing people. So, no, of course all teachers are crazy. But enough of them are crazy (and/or bound to go crazy) to make arming them a very bad idea.
Remember that it's not just your kid's math teacher who is a good shot that has the gun, it's also his failed cross-eyed jock PE teacher who just got a divorce and lost his kids.
Teachers have a right to smoke. But we don't let them do it at school.
Um, even if you outlaw all guns, this sort of thing will happen again and again.
Look up the history of rampages, some of these nuts illegally had their guns.
Even if you literally take away all the guns, and somehow succeed at disarming the populace (which would be as hard and impossible as taking away their booze), this sort of thing will still happen again and again, just without guns.
Now, don't get me wrong, it might be a good idea to have better firearm regulation, but this is a bad argument for it.
Whoa whoa whoa, did I say we knew nothing about the big bang? Not quite. Pre-big-bang environment, yeah, that's crazy-land where we really don't know much. A lot of people have some wild guesses, and some of them may be partilally true, but who knows. But for the nano-seconds after the big bang? We definitely have at least SOME knowledge of how it all works and SOME of our physical laws are still in effect. Even when ice melts, gravity still works. And even when gravity breaks down, causality still applies.
We know that molecules and atoms weren't yet in existence in the nano-seconds after the big bang. It's pretty simple actually: Apply enough energy and the bonds break down. That's true today and has been proven. And at that point in time there would have been absolutely ludicrous amounts of energy density. As all the other ways that the rules of physics were different, alas, I'll have to hand you off to the real egg-heads.
Well, the theory goes that churches/synogoges/mosques/satanist dens then go out and actually help people. That's... actually pretty damn similar to the idea that the march of dimes folks, Red Cross, Greenpeace, or the Salvation army bell ringers take your money and then go out and do some actual good. They have overhead, CEO's, and heating-bills just like the religious types.
There's a business out there of auditing charities and rating their performance, efficiency, and whatnot. (And hilariously, these places run on donations.)
So, when you donate to a charity, religious or otherwise, a certain percentage of that cash is going to filter down (dare I say trickle down?) to the people that actually need it. So it's better to argue that secular charities are more efficient then religious charities, such as churches. And it might even be true.
(And then there's the second step where you question if giving a man a fish is a better idea then teaching him to fish, or stopping his neighbor from dumping toxic sludge into the river, or keeping his dictator from taking all his fish, or establishing a legit economy that would give the person in power reason to not tear it all down. Which is a tough question without a good answer.)
Since the universe is the universe, it has to play by the rules of the universe
Well, sorta. It turns out that right after the big bang, as in less then a second, the temperatures (or energy-density if that floats you boat) were so high that the rules of physics as we know them fundamentally change. Molecules and atoms simply don't exist as we know them. The fundamental forces that hold their structure together are playing by different rules. The same way that the rules are different for how water behaves when it's -10 degrees and when it's 110 degrees. There are localized spots in the space-time continuum of our universe where the rules don't seem to behave exactly the same way. Like how life can take an external energy source and create order. Or how atoms decided how to the were going to go about forming right after the big bang. Or like how the last 5 minutes of the workday stretch on forever.
We may be able to extrapolate our knowledge to include such scenarios, but we're still working on it.
tl;dr, The rules were different at t plus 0.1s. And the rules are a god-damned mystery at t minus 0.1s.
because they assume that if it exists in any way, it can be reached scientifically, and that anything that cannot be reached scientifically, cannot exist.... That doesn't follow.
Actually that does follow. If something doesn't have any effect on our reality (that is, we can't observe it), then it is not real. If we can't observe it, if it has no measurable effect, the state before and after are identical. And don't get hung up on the limits of our test equipment or anything like that. The ancient Greeks couldn't see the cancerous DNA in the sick, but they could observe people dying. Observable effect. If there is no observable effect, literally nothing changed.
I'm using "has observable effect" as synonym of "be reached scientifically". Which works pretty well.
If you want to try arguing that super-natural beings exist in some sort of non-reality... go for it.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the term "can" as used in:
but simple molecules can aggregate, and become self replicating
Does not imply that the act of becoming self-replicating needs to be part of their nature. For example, a car CAN drive off the edge of a cliff, but it's not a fundamental part of it's nature, it's intended purpose, or what most cars do. On the flip-side, moving forward, transporting, and that stop-go activity ARE part of the nature of a car. That's what they do. Do cars drive off cliffs? Well, occasionally. Can cars drive off cliffs? Yes. Are molecules self-replicating? Well not fundamentally. Can molecules self-replicate? Yes. See: Life (and maybe Abiogenesis).
I'm an engineer (in a different field) so the technical side of things interests me as much as the sociological aspect of all the crazies coming out to rant when religion is in play.
...it was either always in stasis (outside of time)...
Unless there is a completely enclosed reality between each "moment"...
So what happens after the water goes south and continues to go south?
Yeah, that's insightful, but the straight-man answer is basic liability.
The people, cities, and government sue/prosecute/regulate the industry. When you can prove that, yes you indeed DID do things that violated EPA regulations then out comes the axe. The fear of being brought to the axe-block is what keeps people from doing bad things. That's, at least the idea.
So once the water goes south, this keeps it from continuing to go south.
A suspected terrorist has been taped planning a deadly attack...
Holy shit, that's amazing and extremely newsworthy, especially on Slashdot where the general consensus that the CCTV pantopicon society is a ineffectual waste of money and an over-reaching of power by asshole cops.
Oh... It's one of those hypothetical scenarios...
Yeah.....
why people who don't use Unity like to bitch and tell everyone else why they shouldn't use it either.
Because some of us understand the social aspect of it all. It really does matter what the masses do. Even if you're the smart little fox that knows the shortcut, if the herd of sheep go the long way about, your best option is to follow the herd. Because, get this: with open source software the tragedy of the commons is turned on it's head. The more a resource gets used, the more valuable it becomes. If tomorrow you wrote the most fantastic string parser ever, but it was completely different from regex, no-one would use it because it'd be a big pain to learn something new and the benefit of having something even more powerful then regex has minimal gains. The fact that a lot of effort has been put into regex makes it a better option overall.
Look at the shift from desktop computers to smartphones. For most lay people, non-geeks, a smartphone has more than enough raw processing power to meet all their computing needs. If the masses simply stop using desktops and use smartphones instead, then the desktop becomes a niche item. Then the companies making desktop components lose business. Then the price of these components goes up while the quality goes down. Even though a stationary desktop with 3 monitors, an ergonomic chair, and a real fucking keyboard might be the best solution for you and a subset of the masses, that becomes a neglected side-market if the masses abandon it.
It's a reputation-based economy, and we're investing elsewhere because we can see the cliff he's driving towards.
Essentially, it's the same reason we bitch about windows.
What is your short- and long-term perspective on including restricted drivers and non-free software in Ubuntu? Is your approach simply pragmatic, do you hope to bring long-term change in industry practices by making free software a viable and important desktop platform, or something else entirely? Thanks!
Shuttleworth: Well, I feel the same way about this as I do about McCarthyism. The people who rant about proprietary software are basically insecure about their own beliefs, and it's that fear that makes them so nastily critical. ...
If you think you'll convince people to see things your way by ranting and being a dick, well, then you have much more to learn than I can possibly be bothered to spend time teaching.
Huh, going with the "something else entirely" option I see.
I guess it's time to try out Debian again on the netbook. Because as I see it now, it's the long-term insightful thing to do over using Ubuntu. Almost entirely due to your outlook on free software.
Now, whoa whoa whoa, lemme get this straight... You can't convince people by ranting and being a dick... But mentioning non-free software gets a rant comparing it to McCarhyism? Huh?
It's as if we can use money to get the things we REALLY want...
If you're really concerned about it, why not start a garden? We had a nice batch of shallots last year, but we couldn't be bothered to harvest the peppers and they rotten on the vine. Maybe you could be a lumberjack as a hobby? Pick up looming? You can knit into your old-age.
OH MY GOD, that's terrible. If the population remains stable in the USA we'll be facing economic CRISIS!
If only there was a MASSIVE HOARD of people wanting to get in to help us maintain our expected levels of growth.
If... only...
So, sarcasm aside, immigrants will save us. We can open up that spigot of immigrants pretty much as far as we want. Tightening it further than it already is seems to be a problem. It doesn't seem to be cost-effective to kick out all the Mexicans just to have them come back next year. And the people talking about fences and walls need to be shot, compressed into bricks, and added to a wall.
But the USA has a REAL obvious solution to de-population: Just let more in.
Duh.
Whoa now, you're not one of those people that thinks we need to bring back manufacturing are you? Because it never left.
That's right, robots, computers, and better manufacturing processes have automated away the manufacturing jobs. And that's a good thing. We may not be able to have a society without people, but we can certainly have a manufacturing industry with a lot less people then we did before.
So if you talk about "bringing jobs back", you're going to have to look somewhere other than manufacturing. (Same goes for bean counters and secretaries. We have computers now. While there will ALWAYS be some paper-pushers, not every company needs a mail department, and not every boss needs a secretary.)
the average number of children a U.S. woman is predicted to have in her lifetime is 1.9, slightly less than the 2.1 children required to maintain current population levels
Oh my GOD! It's like we'll have to allow some people to migrate into our country just to sustain ourselves! QUICKLY, let's open the floodgates of and bring more
people in before we all just wither and fade away!
Seriously? This is an issue?
That anyone feels this is newsworthy is why we have a distruct of sociologists. They have serious discussions over "well, duh" type findings.
All that said, I see what they're trying to say: "Social Security if fucked". And while that's an important thing to say, it ALSO falls into the category of "well, duh".
(You see, it's one of those statements that's a non sequitur. While it's vaguely on topic, it doesn't actually move the topic anywhere. The fact that the money comes from somewhere doesn't do a damn thing to the fact that the jobs are gone. If you had, oh I don't know, actually tried explaining where you were going with this line of thought you might have found out that it doesn't go very far.)
And Portal references are always on-topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I would consider the ability to crack hard-encryption in a reasonable amount of time and processing power as a good definition for "magic". I'm under the impression that such a feat is mathmatically impossible. At least as far as we know. And the summary lead me to believe that they had somehow found a flaw in the underlying encryption scheme.
Hey, so in your personal view and in terms of ability, how well do the well groomed people with moderate amounts of intelligence compare to those with raw intelligence?
I ask because I'm in not-so-well-groomed-but-intelligent boat, a new father, and I'm generally worried. Now, he's going to be brought up with geek culture, and be exposed to a lot of geeky things, and by gods teeth he's going to get good grades... But I know he's getting a random allotment of genes.
If you have the education, and the motivation, you can be a smart person, right?
Does that make me smart?
Yes. Yes it actually does. Learning new things and solving problems is a really good definition of "smart". But just because you're smart doesn't mean you're not going to have problems. What kind of an idiot are you to make that mistake? The fact that you're lazy and unmotivated doesn't make you stupid.
I know people with far lower IQ scores who I consider far more intelligent then myself.
That's because they have better mental health than you do. People who have their shit together and know what they want, what they have to do to get it, and are generally productive members of society aren't the mental head-cases that most ludicrously smart people are. Ignorance is bliss, and the inverse is nearly as true; intelligence doesn't make you happy. (But it DOES help to make money, which certainly helps on the happiness front).
And yeah, someone with an average intelligence, but a life-time's worth of knowledge and experience at X is going to be a lot better at X than your ignorant genius. But the genius will LEARN X and will be better at X at a faster rate than the average shmuck. If you applied yourself to something that actually made use of your intelligence you could master it. Some people enjoy mastery for it's own sake. If that's not your thing, hey, you could just glide through life and take it easy.
IQ isn't intelligence, but there's a pretty strong correlation. And intelligence isn't ability, but it certainly helps develop ability.
Then you really shouldn't mind these non-existant people grabbing your book from PirateBay.
If animals defined "art" it'd be totally different
You mean some animals other than humans.
Less guns around = less gun casualties.
You're missing the "tighter gun regulation" = "less guns around" step. There are very tight laws about handguns in Chicago with legal battles in the works trying to open it up. But it's a pretty horrid example of fire-arm regulation making for a peaceful environment. Perhaps it would be even worse if you could grab a Saturday night special along with slurpee.
But I personally have little faith in the government's ability to actually limit the number of firearms. Especially if they fundamentally must allow a portion of the populace access, as per the 2nd amendment. It would work about about as well as the prohibition of booze and weed.
I'm sorry, real patriotism is BELIEVING in the Constitution, believing that it works, all of it, not just the one line you like.
You're drifting towards no-true-scotsman. But I'd say that you can't just have faith that it works. Exercising your rights every now and then is important to remind everyone involved. And yes, all of them.
If you really cared about the Constitution... You want to be a patriot? Get involved!
Do you have any idea who the fuck I am or where I stand on ANY of these issues?
No?
Are you just ranting and raving with the assumption that because I had the audacity to question your line of reasoning that I must be the polar opposite of everything you believe in? In this thread right here, you've been no better than the "preppers" who lash out at any mention of gun control.
Get your shit together or no one will give your argument any weight.
If we say, removed every gun in America, still, no less people would die from violent acts. None? Not a single one less? That's simply not believable.
And that's a much better argument than the meatless appeal to emotion and political ranting that was your first post. You could contrast this event with the knifing that happened on the exact same day in China where 20 some kids were stabbed, and lived. The firepower makes the crazy people snapping that much more lethal. But remember, even when they can't get a gun, they'll still go on a crazy rampage.
C'mon, what was a twenty-year old kid doing with this kind of firepower, anyway? Defending the Constitution?
Um, yes, actually that's one of the important reasons for the right to bear arms.
And if you really wanted a number, I'd say zero. We currently DO have regulations on firearm ownership. Presuming otherwise makes you look like an idiot. What you're arguing is for more/tighter regulation.
so now teachers are the sociopaths
Well some teachers ARE sociopaths. It's just sort of a flaw in humanity and it pops up every now and then. (I think you mean a more generic term like "crazy", you don't have to be a sociopath to go on a killing rampage)
And the concern here is that an EXTREMELY small percentage of us just go bat-shit crazy and start killing people. So, no, of course all teachers are crazy. But enough of them are crazy (and/or bound to go crazy) to make arming them a very bad idea.
Remember that it's not just your kid's math teacher who is a good shot that has the gun, it's also his failed cross-eyed jock PE teacher who just got a divorce and lost his kids.
Teachers have a right to smoke. But we don't let them do it at school.
That's the sort of ineffectual cost-prohibitive knee-jerk reaction we expect from the masses. I thought slashdot was better than that.
Um, even if you outlaw all guns, this sort of thing will happen again and again.
Look up the history of rampages, some of these nuts illegally had their guns. Even if you literally take away all the guns, and somehow succeed at disarming the populace (which would be as hard and impossible as taking away their booze), this sort of thing will still happen again and again, just without guns.
Now, don't get me wrong, it might be a good idea to have better firearm regulation, but this is a bad argument for it.
Ever flipped to a soap opera and could tell right away because of something to do with the video quality?
That's why.
an event where no known rules of physics apply?
Whoa whoa whoa, did I say we knew nothing about the big bang? Not quite. Pre-big-bang environment, yeah, that's crazy-land where we really don't know much. A lot of people have some wild guesses, and some of them may be partilally true, but who knows. But for the nano-seconds after the big bang? We definitely have at least SOME knowledge of how it all works and SOME of our physical laws are still in effect. Even when ice melts, gravity still works. And even when gravity breaks down, causality still applies.
We know that molecules and atoms weren't yet in existence in the nano-seconds after the big bang. It's pretty simple actually: Apply enough energy and the bonds break down. That's true today and has been proven. And at that point in time there would have been absolutely ludicrous amounts of energy density. As all the other ways that the rules of physics were different, alas, I'll have to hand you off to the real egg-heads.
Well, the theory goes that churches/synogoges/mosques/satanist dens then go out and actually help people. That's... actually pretty damn similar to the idea that the march of dimes folks, Red Cross, Greenpeace, or the Salvation army bell ringers take your money and then go out and do some actual good. They have overhead, CEO's, and heating-bills just like the religious types.
There's a business out there of auditing charities and rating their performance, efficiency, and whatnot. (And hilariously, these places run on donations.)
So, when you donate to a charity, religious or otherwise, a certain percentage of that cash is going to filter down (dare I say trickle down?) to the people that actually need it. So it's better to argue that secular charities are more efficient then religious charities, such as churches. And it might even be true.
(And then there's the second step where you question if giving a man a fish is a better idea then teaching him to fish, or stopping his neighbor from dumping toxic sludge into the river, or keeping his dictator from taking all his fish, or establishing a legit economy that would give the person in power reason to not tear it all down. Which is a tough question without a good answer.)
Since the universe is the universe, it has to play by the rules of the universe
Well, sorta. It turns out that right after the big bang, as in less then a second, the temperatures (or energy-density if that floats you boat) were so high that the rules of physics as we know them fundamentally change. Molecules and atoms simply don't exist as we know them. The fundamental forces that hold their structure together are playing by different rules. The same way that the rules are different for how water behaves when it's -10 degrees and when it's 110 degrees. There are localized spots in the space-time continuum of our universe where the rules don't seem to behave exactly the same way. Like how life can take an external energy source and create order. Or how atoms decided how to the were going to go about forming right after the big bang. Or like how the last 5 minutes of the workday stretch on forever.
We may be able to extrapolate our knowledge to include such scenarios, but we're still working on it.
tl;dr, The rules were different at t plus 0.1s. And the rules are a god-damned mystery at t minus 0.1s.
because they assume that if it exists in any way, it can be reached scientifically, and that anything that cannot be reached scientifically, cannot exist. ... That doesn't follow.
Actually that does follow. If something doesn't have any effect on our reality (that is, we can't observe it), then it is not real. If we can't observe it, if it has no measurable effect, the state before and after are identical. And don't get hung up on the limits of our test equipment or anything like that. The ancient Greeks couldn't see the cancerous DNA in the sick, but they could observe people dying. Observable effect. If there is no observable effect, literally nothing changed.
I'm using "has observable effect" as synonym of "be reached scientifically". Which works pretty well.
If you want to try arguing that super-natural beings exist in some sort of non-reality... go for it.
but simple molecules can aggregate, and become self replicating
Does not imply that the act of becoming self-replicating needs to be part of their nature. For example, a car CAN drive off the edge of a cliff, but it's not a fundamental part of it's nature, it's intended purpose, or what most cars do. On the flip-side, moving forward, transporting, and that stop-go activity ARE part of the nature of a car. That's what they do. Do cars drive off cliffs? Well, occasionally. Can cars drive off cliffs? Yes. Are molecules self-replicating? Well not fundamentally. Can molecules self-replicate? Yes. See: Life (and maybe Abiogenesis).
I'm an engineer (in a different field) so the technical side of things interests me as much as the sociological aspect of all the crazies coming out to rant when religion is in play.
...it was either always in stasis (outside of time)...
Unless there is a completely enclosed reality between each "moment"...
Just what the fuck are you smokin boy?
So what happens after the water goes south and continues to go south?
Yeah, that's insightful, but the straight-man answer is basic liability.
The people, cities, and government sue/prosecute/regulate the industry. When you can prove that, yes you indeed DID do things that violated EPA regulations then out comes the axe. The fear of being brought to the axe-block is what keeps people from doing bad things. That's, at least the idea.
So once the water goes south, this keeps it from continuing to go south.
A suspected terrorist has been taped planning a deadly attack...
Holy shit, that's amazing and extremely newsworthy, especially on Slashdot where the general consensus that the CCTV pantopicon society is a ineffectual waste of money and an over-reaching of power by asshole cops.
Oh... It's one of those hypothetical scenarios...
Yeah.....
why people who don't use Unity like to bitch and tell everyone else why they shouldn't use it either.
Because some of us understand the social aspect of it all. It really does matter what the masses do. Even if you're the smart little fox that knows the shortcut, if the herd of sheep go the long way about, your best option is to follow the herd. Because, get this: with open source software the tragedy of the commons is turned on it's head. The more a resource gets used, the more valuable it becomes. If tomorrow you wrote the most fantastic string parser ever, but it was completely different from regex, no-one would use it because it'd be a big pain to learn something new and the benefit of having something even more powerful then regex has minimal gains. The fact that a lot of effort has been put into regex makes it a better option overall.
Look at the shift from desktop computers to smartphones. For most lay people, non-geeks, a smartphone has more than enough raw processing power to meet all their computing needs. If the masses simply stop using desktops and use smartphones instead, then the desktop becomes a niche item. Then the companies making desktop components lose business. Then the price of these components goes up while the quality goes down. Even though a stationary desktop with 3 monitors, an ergonomic chair, and a real fucking keyboard might be the best solution for you and a subset of the masses, that becomes a neglected side-market if the masses abandon it.
It's a reputation-based economy, and we're investing elsewhere because we can see the cliff he's driving towards.
Essentially, it's the same reason we bitch about windows.
What is your short- and long-term perspective on including restricted drivers and non-free software in Ubuntu? Is your approach simply pragmatic, do you hope to bring long-term change in industry practices by making free software a viable and important desktop platform, or something else entirely? Thanks!
Shuttleworth: Well, I feel the same way about this as I do about McCarthyism. The people who rant about proprietary software are basically insecure about their own beliefs, and it's that fear that makes them so nastily critical.
...
If you think you'll convince people to see things your way by ranting and being a dick, well, then you have much more to learn than I can possibly be bothered to spend time teaching.
Huh, going with the "something else entirely" option I see.
I guess it's time to try out Debian again on the netbook. Because as I see it now, it's the long-term insightful thing to do over using Ubuntu. Almost entirely due to your outlook on free software.
Now, whoa whoa whoa, lemme get this straight... You can't convince people by ranting and being a dick... But mentioning non-free software gets a rant comparing it to McCarhyism? Huh?
It's as if we can use money to get the things we REALLY want...
If you're really concerned about it, why not start a garden? We had a nice batch of shallots last year, but we couldn't be bothered to harvest the peppers and they rotten on the vine. Maybe you could be a lumberjack as a hobby? Pick up looming? You can knit into your old-age.
OH MY GOD, that's terrible. If the population remains stable in the USA we'll be facing economic CRISIS!
If only there was a MASSIVE HOARD of people wanting to get in to help us maintain our expected levels of growth.
If... only...
So, sarcasm aside, immigrants will save us. We can open up that spigot of immigrants pretty much as far as we want. Tightening it further than it already is seems to be a problem. It doesn't seem to be cost-effective to kick out all the Mexicans just to have them come back next year. And the people talking about fences and walls need to be shot, compressed into bricks, and added to a wall.
But the USA has a REAL obvious solution to de-population: Just let more in.
Duh.
(Did I really have to spell this out?)
Whoa now, you're not one of those people that thinks we need to bring back manufacturing are you?
Because it never left.
That's right, robots, computers, and better manufacturing processes have automated away the manufacturing jobs. And that's a good thing. We may not be able to have a society without people, but we can certainly have a manufacturing industry with a lot less people then we did before.
So if you talk about "bringing jobs back", you're going to have to look somewhere other than manufacturing. (Same goes for bean counters and secretaries. We have computers now. While there will ALWAYS be some paper-pushers, not every company needs a mail department, and not every boss needs a secretary.)
the average number of children a U.S. woman is predicted to have in her lifetime is 1.9, slightly less than the 2.1 children required to maintain current population levels
Oh my GOD! It's like we'll have to allow some people to migrate into our country just to sustain ourselves! QUICKLY, let's open the floodgates of and bring more people in before we all just wither and fade away!
Seriously? This is an issue?
That anyone feels this is newsworthy is why we have a distruct of sociologists. They have serious discussions over "well, duh" type findings.
All that said, I see what they're trying to say: "Social Security if fucked". And while that's an important thing to say, it ALSO falls into the category of "well, duh".
And who do you suppose goes to those parties?
(You see, it's one of those statements that's a non sequitur. While it's vaguely on topic, it doesn't actually move the topic anywhere. The fact that the money comes from somewhere doesn't do a damn thing to the fact that the jobs are gone. If you had, oh I don't know, actually tried explaining where you were going with this line of thought you might have found out that it doesn't go very far.)
And Portal references are always on-topic.