That would be a good reason. Unfortunately there tends to be a very high noise level, and all people are subject to confirmation bias, so it doesn't usually work. Especially on general audience sites. Which is really unfortunate.
There needs to be a way in which the level of like/dislike can be measured, but that requires both closing the feedback loop and reducing the noise level. (If you don't reduce the noise level, only the noise ends up getting amplified.) But just TRY to design a filter that will do that job!
I don't use fancy features, and I NEVER experienced problems with KDE4, even 4.1. OTOH, I have not, and do not, think the user interface is as well designed. It's just better than Gnome3, which isn't hard. But the tools are nicer than xfce tools, so I end up useing KDE4 not because it's my preference, but because my preference isn't being maintained. KDE3 was the best desktop to use that I have thus-far experienced. (And Trinity wasn't as good the last time I installed it. Largely because it didn't work as well with the underlying system.)
FWIW Gnome2 was better than KDE4, but not nearly as good as KDE3. And just forget Gnome3.
Were you actually being a "Grammar nazi", you would note that "ex" is an abbreviated form of "ex-wife", "ex-husband", or "ex-spouse". (I don't think there are any other valid candidates in this usage.) As such it doesn't have a valid plural form except in the way that "sheep" is the plural of "sheep". This is because the different extensions from their plural in different ways. I mean, just consider "exives" or "exs". So if you elide the variety of spouse, then you simultaneously elide the plural form, and thus "ex" is the plural of "ex".
Stable? I doubt it. I've rarely had a (non-design) problem with a KDE desktop in the stable line. (None in the last year. Possibly none last year, but I'd need to check as I was doing some experimentation with other desktops.) The possibly valid arguement is that it is missing features, which I wouldn't know about, as I won't use MSWind due to license issues.
FWIW, xfce, which I have had occasional problems with, is my second choice after KDE. The existence of problems doesn't mean that there isn't a way to work around them. I prefer some of the ways in which it implements feature (from a user perspective, I don't design desktop software).
Actually, I'm willing to believe what he says, i.e. "most of the complaints are about actual copyright infringement", without proof. That these don't get reported is what one would expect to see, and given how easy it is to make a direct copy, one would expect that to happen often.
So what? How much harm does an instance of copyright infringement do compared with censoring one instance of free speech. Even the great predominance being valid complaints would not suffice to justify this act, and in particular the requirement of difficult proof on the part of the poster rather than on the part of the complainer. (Additionally it should be relatively easy to prove genuine copyright infringement in any clear case, whereas proving that it isn't copyright infringement is likely to require purchasing something that may not be available, and in any case would enrich the unjust complainer.)
The law as written is grossly and intentionally unfair, and I cannot accept that ANYONE who uses it is doing so in good faith without extensive proof.
Actually, an indictment of all fundamentalist religions isn't unreasonable. Anybody who believes that their religious belief gives them the right to control your actions is not sanely civilized.
It is unfortunate, but to believe that this applies to a greater percentage of Muslims than of other religions is not unreasonable. The Koran is much more explicit that followers of their prophet must enforce the belief upon others than is any other scripture that I am aware of. Therefore people who take it seriously will seriously believe that they have the right to enforce actions upon others. Most things in the Old Testament can be worked around. The New Testament doesn't really say anything that directly claims that one has the right to coerce someone else to behave as claimes. Hindu writing are contradictory, speaking for several different dieties, only some of whom believe that one has the duty (or that some people have the duty, it's not clear that, e.g., anyone besides Arjuna as the duty to kill all their cousins) to control the actions of others. And nothing in the original writings of the Buddha even seem to imply such a duty. Now there may be other religions with those values, but I don't know of them.
OTOH, many Muslims are quite willing to give a mystical or metaphorical interpretation to those sections that are most repellent to me. (Personally, I don't understand how they can justify both beliving in the Koran and allowing people who know of the Koran to live without obeying is, but I'm quite happy that they are able to do so.) OTOH, I can't read Arabic, and I've only read one translation. Perhaps if I studied it more this would make sense.
Still, to me it seems that the Muslim religion is unique in requiring that everyone be coerced into following its teachings. Some other religions promise eternal damnation if you don't, but that's not the same thing as requiring change right now.
The Buddhists actually *are* relatively peaceful, though not entirely. And they Hindus don't even make claims in that direction. *Some* of their gods favor peaceful actions, others would like to bathe in blood. Read the Baghadvagita.
It is not clear to what extent the Roman Catholic Church actively supported the Nazis. It is clear that they came to an agreement to support the Italian Fascists...but that is really a different animal. It's also clear that the aforesaid church did not behave in a particularlly principled or noble way, and did not live up to its espoused principles, but my guess is that this was largely governed by justified fear. They knew that if they challenged a superior physical force no big daddy was going to help them.
If you said "mock scientific" point of view, I'd agree with you. He did not use science, but pseudo-science. like giving IQ tests to people who didn't speak English, and then classify them as morons. (I don't think that was Lindberg. That was Binet...the Binet of Stanford-Binet.) But Lindberg's science was no better.
It's worse than that, religion isn't necessary. It's worse than that, fundamentalism isn't necessary.
Any ideology that becomes sufficiently powerful relative to competitors in an area becomes intolerant of any threat to that power. Religion is one area where that happens. Politics is another. School discipline is another. Etc.
Please consider carefully the case of schoold discipline. Being intolerant of competiors to power is not inherently bad. The ways in which the intolerance is expressed are equally a consideration. Also the motives for expressing the power. But motives are not supject to objective test.
Which is the worst offender? Sorry, I believe you think that I should conclude that its Islam, but to me it still seems that Christianity has the edge. Islam hasn't yet tried to bring on the end of the world, as some powerful Christian groups have. The tools they have used were political, and they haven't been successful, but they have tried, are still trying, and some are near the centers of power.
How about "all of the above, and a few more"? This is one of the virtues of having a wider readership that engages in commentary. Follow the threads that interest you and ignore the others.
To call a pre-industrial and pre-corporate ideology fascist is to misunderstand both. Calling it tyranny would be closer, but still wrong. It's clearly a fanaticism, but that's too broad. I hope that stupidity is, but this clearly depends on their goals and the government's reaction.
You are correct when you assert that Islam is generally opposed to freedom of expression, but that is not a characteristic unique to Islam, but is rather a characteristic that seems to appear with every ideology that acquires sufficient power in even a small area. (Just consider the reaction of male gamers to some statements by female bloggers that they considered politically inappropriate. If that seems unfair to you, then reverse it and consider the statements of female bloggers to social communication largely between male gamers.)
Exactly what kind of backlash would be absurd? Demanding that they tread pig blood on an image of the prophet before entering the country? The analogous didn't work out so well for Japan, but that doesn't make it inherently absurd.
It appears (I'm not certain on this point) that Muslims don't consider their word to be sufficient to bind them to follow the laws of the country in which they live. What I'm not certain is that they made any such promise. (If we're talking about religious motivations and matters of honor and faith, then practical matters like prospect of physical punishment shouldn't signify.)
It would be interesting to know whether the perpetrators were French citizens or not. The most radical Muslims I've encountered were native US citizens who had converted.
It was quite impolite of you to change my text and write it as if it were a quote. You are doing much worse than arguing against a strawman, you are lying about what I said, and then arguing against that lie. I do not respect the integrity of people who do that.
Speak for your own tastes. I find cocoa powder + non-fat powered milk + hot water delicious. Also cocoa powder + coffee. My wife also likes the first, but not the second. OTOH, she likes to take unflavored non-fat yoghurt and mix it with cocoa powder.
Please note that these are just our most common ways to enjoy cocoa powder. There are many others that work quite well, and none of them require sugar.
Not a price that most people can afford, a price that enough people can afford, and which delivers enough value over alternatives that enough of that group will choose to afford it.
Sometimes after it's been developed for that group then further development makes it cheap enough that a larger number of folk can choose it, and this can be a positive feedback loop, as happened with transistors. But sometimes there are inherent costs that mean it can never be developed for a wide group. He is arguing that sub-orbital flights have so many inherent costs and so little value over the alternatives that it will never really be developed. I'm not sure he's right, but he's quite likely WRT straight-forwards development. If it happens, it's likely to do like transistors, and come out of left field. No development of vacuum tubes could have given us personal computers...well, it don't think they could. I think that filament burn-out is inherent in vacuum tubes. But transistors came from an entirely different line of development. And were first used in large computers, and first miniturized in space sattelites. And their original importance was because they *didn't* burn out the way vacuum tubes do, which made more complex circuits feasible.
FWIW, and WRT the Egyptian Pyramids. Contrary to myth the pay records seem to show that the people building the pyramids were highly paid skilled stone workers. They don't say how they did it, but a couple of plausible ways have been proposed. One of them depends on there being a large amount of sand nearby, and involves huge ramps that would largely blow away when construction was finished.
How do you know they didn't need coal? Coal is a fantastic starting material for plastics, dyes, and many other products.
OTOH, if you expect Science Fiction to be prediction, you're looking in the wrong place. That's not what it's about. What it's about is saying "If you had these changed circumstances, how would responses be different?" There are a lot of sub-generes that look at specific kinds of responses, so whether the mining of coal was a significant plot element, significant enough that it needed to be justified, depends on details. (FWIW, I'm ignorant about Hunger Games in particular, and movies tend to be really bad at science fiction, so your criticism is plausible, but as phrased I take exception to it. I see no reason to believe that an advanced technology, even to the point of mastering generation of power via total annihilation of matter, wouldn't need coal for other purposes, or at least find it very convenient.)
Thanks. Maybe then when she's gone for awhile I'll update here flash...of course that probably means I'll need to upgrade her entire install of Ubuntu, but I've got permission to do that as long as I do good backups, and a hard copy of here e-mail addresses first.
The thing is, the name may be new, but the ploy is old. All they did was add "on the internet".
I actually think that "very mature, well-oiled capitalist machine" except for the comment about oil. It's not new, but rather old, so mature fits. It involves individuals (or at least non-state actors) creating a need and offering to fill it, so capitalist sounds correct. Machine is a bit dubious, but the metaphoric use of machine has a long history, so that's reasonable usage. I think you just don't like thinking of criminals as capitalists, but they usually are. Often quite poor ones, admittedly, but these folk seem to not be incompetent.
How about refusing to allow money to be transferred over the internet. That would quickly sink all this stuff back to the "give me a cookie" level. Of course, for many people money is all the internet is about. Oops.
FWIW, my wife insists on having Adobe Flash installed, even though I warn her that its dangerous. Actually, its worse than dangerous, as Adobe doesn't keep the Linux version up to date. And they are (or were) pushing some advanced version that there just isn't a Linux version for. I may end up losing her to Apple because of this. (That will be unpleasant. I've read the Apple EULA [well, not this decade] and that was why I originally switched to Linux. I won't agree to their EULAs, but she can't install software and dislikes keeping her system up to date, because they keep breaking something.)
I don't actually hate proprietary software in principle, but I do hate the EULAs they inflict on everyone, and I hate the way they manage their software. Reading an Apple EULA before every security upgrade was shear torture, and not having that problem was one of the really nice things about switching to Linux. There are also details about the implementation (of proprietary) that I really hate. Copy protected disks with no backup is high on the list, but not even having the originals to reinstall with is much worse.
How would you go about observing this? For that matter, how could you tell how fast the universe was spinning (and in which dimensions)?
Perhaps the universe is spinning in n dimensions around some axis in the n+1th dimension. That would seem to mean that there would be a force seeking to expand the universe acting perpendicular to the axis in every dimension less than n. Unfortunately, it would also seem to mean that the force acting along different dimensions could well be uncorrelated in magnitude, so this is probably a bad model.
If you mean FTL, that's probably impossible. If it weren't I'd expect that someone would have shown up around here.
If you mean a generation ship, well, sort of. The problem is that by the time people get to the destination they won't be interested in living planetside.
The reasonable alternative is a "colony ship", where the ship itself is the colony. You don't need, or want, high speed, since your desire is to be moving just slightly differently than the "free planets" around. You depend on encountering them occasionally for resources. This probably requires controlled fusion reactors, but might possibly be doable with fission. And you'll need a fairly large colony, because it needs to be a self sufficient population capable of maintaining a civilization. (If they lose it they're probably dead.) They aren't planning on a destination. They only "land" in case of severe problems that aren't too bad for them to reach a "habitable" planet (where habitable may include using extensive technology). What star systems are usually good for is reproducing. (Think of this colony as a form of MacroLife. Thank you George Zebrowski.)
FWIW, I generally envision these colonies evolving out of mining colonies out in the Oort clouds getting into some kind of disagreement with the folk back home, and just leaving. That lets all the pieces be checked out ahead of time. I'm sure, however, that there are other possibilities, with religious differences being near the top.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be a good reason. Unfortunately there tends to be a very high noise level, and all people are subject to confirmation bias, so it doesn't usually work. Especially on general audience sites. Which is really unfortunate.
There needs to be a way in which the level of like/dislike can be measured, but that requires both closing the feedback loop and reducing the noise level. (If you don't reduce the noise level, only the noise ends up getting amplified.) But just TRY to design a filter that will do that job!
I don't use fancy features, and I NEVER experienced problems with KDE4, even 4.1. OTOH, I have not, and do not, think the user interface is as well designed. It's just better than Gnome3, which isn't hard. But the tools are nicer than xfce tools, so I end up useing KDE4 not because it's my preference, but because my preference isn't being maintained. KDE3 was the best desktop to use that I have thus-far experienced. (And Trinity wasn't as good the last time I installed it. Largely because it didn't work as well with the underlying system.)
FWIW Gnome2 was better than KDE4, but not nearly as good as KDE3. And just forget Gnome3.
Were you actually being a "Grammar nazi", you would note that "ex" is an abbreviated form of "ex-wife", "ex-husband", or "ex-spouse". (I don't think there are any other valid candidates in this usage.) As such it doesn't have a valid plural form except in the way that "sheep" is the plural of "sheep". This is because the different extensions from their plural in different ways. I mean, just consider "exives" or "exs". So if you elide the variety of spouse, then you simultaneously elide the plural form, and thus "ex" is the plural of "ex".
Stable? I doubt it. I've rarely had a (non-design) problem with a KDE desktop in the stable line. (None in the last year. Possibly none last year, but I'd need to check as I was doing some experimentation with other desktops.) The possibly valid arguement is that it is missing features, which I wouldn't know about, as I won't use MSWind due to license issues.
FWIW, xfce, which I have had occasional problems with, is my second choice after KDE. The existence of problems doesn't mean that there isn't a way to work around them. I prefer some of the ways in which it implements feature (from a user perspective, I don't design desktop software).
Actually, I'm willing to believe what he says, i.e. "most of the complaints are about actual copyright infringement", without proof. That these don't get reported is what one would expect to see, and given how easy it is to make a direct copy, one would expect that to happen often.
So what? How much harm does an instance of copyright infringement do compared with censoring one instance of free speech. Even the great predominance being valid complaints would not suffice to justify this act, and in particular the requirement of difficult proof on the part of the poster rather than on the part of the complainer. (Additionally it should be relatively easy to prove genuine copyright infringement in any clear case, whereas proving that it isn't copyright infringement is likely to require purchasing something that may not be available, and in any case would enrich the unjust complainer.)
The law as written is grossly and intentionally unfair, and I cannot accept that ANYONE who uses it is doing so in good faith without extensive proof.
Actually, an indictment of all fundamentalist religions isn't unreasonable. Anybody who believes that their religious belief gives them the right to control your actions is not sanely civilized.
It is unfortunate, but to believe that this applies to a greater percentage of Muslims than of other religions is not unreasonable. The Koran is much more explicit that followers of their prophet must enforce the belief upon others than is any other scripture that I am aware of. Therefore people who take it seriously will seriously believe that they have the right to enforce actions upon others. Most things in the Old Testament can be worked around. The New Testament doesn't really say anything that directly claims that one has the right to coerce someone else to behave as claimes. Hindu writing are contradictory, speaking for several different dieties, only some of whom believe that one has the duty (or that some people have the duty, it's not clear that, e.g., anyone besides Arjuna as the duty to kill all their cousins) to control the actions of others. And nothing in the original writings of the Buddha even seem to imply such a duty. Now there may be other religions with those values, but I don't know of them.
OTOH, many Muslims are quite willing to give a mystical or metaphorical interpretation to those sections that are most repellent to me. (Personally, I don't understand how they can justify both beliving in the Koran and allowing people who know of the Koran to live without obeying is, but I'm quite happy that they are able to do so.) OTOH, I can't read Arabic, and I've only read one translation. Perhaps if I studied it more this would make sense.
Still, to me it seems that the Muslim religion is unique in requiring that everyone be coerced into following its teachings. Some other religions promise eternal damnation if you don't, but that's not the same thing as requiring change right now.
The Buddhists actually *are* relatively peaceful, though not entirely. And they Hindus don't even make claims in that direction. *Some* of their gods favor peaceful actions, others would like to bathe in blood. Read the Baghadvagita.
It is not clear to what extent the Roman Catholic Church actively supported the Nazis. It is clear that they came to an agreement to support the Italian Fascists...but that is really a different animal. It's also clear that the aforesaid church did not behave in a particularlly principled or noble way, and did not live up to its espoused principles, but my guess is that this was largely governed by justified fear. They knew that if they challenged a superior physical force no big daddy was going to help them.
If you said "mock scientific" point of view, I'd agree with you. He did not use science, but pseudo-science. like giving IQ tests to people who didn't speak English, and then classify them as morons. (I don't think that was Lindberg. That was Binet...the Binet of Stanford-Binet.) But Lindberg's science was no better.
It's worse than that, religion isn't necessary. It's worse than that, fundamentalism isn't necessary.
Any ideology that becomes sufficiently powerful relative to competitors in an area becomes intolerant of any threat to that power. Religion is one area where that happens. Politics is another. School discipline is another. Etc.
Please consider carefully the case of schoold discipline. Being intolerant of competiors to power is not inherently bad. The ways in which the intolerance is expressed are equally a consideration. Also the motives for expressing the power. But motives are not supject to objective test.
Which is the worst offender? Sorry, I believe you think that I should conclude that its Islam, but to me it still seems that Christianity has the edge. Islam hasn't yet tried to bring on the end of the world, as some powerful Christian groups have. The tools they have used were political, and they haven't been successful, but they have tried, are still trying, and some are near the centers of power.
How about "all of the above, and a few more"? This is one of the virtues of having a wider readership that engages in commentary. Follow the threads that interest you and ignore the others.
To call a pre-industrial and pre-corporate ideology fascist is to misunderstand both. Calling it tyranny would be closer, but still wrong. It's clearly a fanaticism, but that's too broad. I hope that stupidity is, but this clearly depends on their goals and the government's reaction.
You are correct when you assert that Islam is generally opposed to freedom of expression, but that is not a characteristic unique to Islam, but is rather a characteristic that seems to appear with every ideology that acquires sufficient power in even a small area. (Just consider the reaction of male gamers to some statements by female bloggers that they considered politically inappropriate. If that seems unfair to you, then reverse it and consider the statements of female bloggers to social communication largely between male gamers.)
Exactly what kind of backlash would be absurd? Demanding that they tread pig blood on an image of the prophet before entering the country? The analogous didn't work out so well for Japan, but that doesn't make it inherently absurd.
It appears (I'm not certain on this point) that Muslims don't consider their word to be sufficient to bind them to follow the laws of the country in which they live. What I'm not certain is that they made any such promise. (If we're talking about religious motivations and matters of honor and faith, then practical matters like prospect of physical punishment shouldn't signify.)
It would be interesting to know whether the perpetrators were French citizens or not. The most radical Muslims I've encountered were native US citizens who had converted.
It was quite impolite of you to change my text and write it as if it were a quote. You are doing much worse than arguing against a strawman, you are lying about what I said, and then arguing against that lie. I do not respect the integrity of people who do that.
Speak for your own tastes.
I find cocoa powder + non-fat powered milk + hot water delicious. Also cocoa powder + coffee. My wife also likes the first, but not the second. OTOH, she likes to take unflavored non-fat yoghurt and mix it with cocoa powder.
Please note that these are just our most common ways to enjoy cocoa powder. There are many others that work quite well, and none of them require sugar.
That's why he said you had to give him the tunnel. But it's not a straight line, it's a catenary.
Not a price that most people can afford, a price that enough people can afford, and which delivers enough value over alternatives that enough of that group will choose to afford it.
Sometimes after it's been developed for that group then further development makes it cheap enough that a larger number of folk can choose it, and this can be a positive feedback loop, as happened with transistors. But sometimes there are inherent costs that mean it can never be developed for a wide group. He is arguing that sub-orbital flights have so many inherent costs and so little value over the alternatives that it will never really be developed. I'm not sure he's right, but he's quite likely WRT straight-forwards development. If it happens, it's likely to do like transistors, and come out of left field. No development of vacuum tubes could have given us personal computers...well, it don't think they could. I think that filament burn-out is inherent in vacuum tubes. But transistors came from an entirely different line of development. And were first used in large computers, and first miniturized in space sattelites. And their original importance was because they *didn't* burn out the way vacuum tubes do, which made more complex circuits feasible.
FWIW, and WRT the Egyptian Pyramids. Contrary to myth the pay records seem to show that the people building the pyramids were highly paid skilled stone workers. They don't say how they did it, but a couple of plausible ways have been proposed. One of them depends on there being a large amount of sand nearby, and involves huge ramps that would largely blow away when construction was finished.
How do you know they didn't need coal? Coal is a fantastic starting material for plastics, dyes, and many other products.
OTOH, if you expect Science Fiction to be prediction, you're looking in the wrong place. That's not what it's about. What it's about is saying "If you had these changed circumstances, how would responses be different?" There are a lot of sub-generes that look at specific kinds of responses, so whether the mining of coal was a significant plot element, significant enough that it needed to be justified, depends on details. (FWIW, I'm ignorant about Hunger Games in particular, and movies tend to be really bad at science fiction, so your criticism is plausible, but as phrased I take exception to it. I see no reason to believe that an advanced technology, even to the point of mastering generation of power via total annihilation of matter, wouldn't need coal for other purposes, or at least find it very convenient.)
Thanks. Maybe then when she's gone for awhile I'll update here flash...of course that probably means I'll need to upgrade her entire install of Ubuntu, but I've got permission to do that as long as I do good backups, and a hard copy of here e-mail addresses first.
The thing is, the name may be new, but the ploy is old. All they did was add "on the internet".
I actually think that "very mature, well-oiled capitalist machine" except for the comment about oil. It's not new, but rather old, so mature fits. It involves individuals (or at least non-state actors) creating a need and offering to fill it, so capitalist sounds correct. Machine is a bit dubious, but the metaphoric use of machine has a long history, so that's reasonable usage. I think you just don't like thinking of criminals as capitalists, but they usually are. Often quite poor ones, admittedly, but these folk seem to not be incompetent.
How about refusing to allow money to be transferred over the internet. That would quickly sink all this stuff back to the "give me a cookie" level. Of course, for many people money is all the internet is about. Oops.
FWIW, my wife insists on having Adobe Flash installed, even though I warn her that its dangerous. Actually, its worse than dangerous, as Adobe doesn't keep the Linux version up to date. And they are (or were) pushing some advanced version that there just isn't a Linux version for. I may end up losing her to Apple because of this. (That will be unpleasant. I've read the Apple EULA [well, not this decade] and that was why I originally switched to Linux. I won't agree to their EULAs, but she can't install software and dislikes keeping her system up to date, because they keep breaking something.)
I don't actually hate proprietary software in principle, but I do hate the EULAs they inflict on everyone, and I hate the way they manage their software. Reading an Apple EULA before every security upgrade was shear torture, and not having that problem was one of the really nice things about switching to Linux. There are also details about the implementation (of proprietary) that I really hate. Copy protected disks with no backup is high on the list, but not even having the originals to reinstall with is much worse.
How would you go about observing this? For that matter, how could you tell how fast the universe was spinning (and in which dimensions)?
Perhaps the universe is spinning in n dimensions around some axis in the n+1th dimension. That would seem to mean that there would be a force seeking to expand the universe acting perpendicular to the axis in every dimension less than n. Unfortunately, it would also seem to mean that the force acting along different dimensions could well be uncorrelated in magnitude, so this is probably a bad model.
If you mean FTL, that's probably impossible. If it weren't I'd expect that someone would have shown up around here.
If you mean a generation ship, well, sort of. The problem is that by the time people get to the destination they won't be interested in living planetside.
The reasonable alternative is a "colony ship", where the ship itself is the colony. You don't need, or want, high speed, since your desire is to be moving just slightly differently than the "free planets" around. You depend on encountering them occasionally for resources. This probably requires controlled fusion reactors, but might possibly be doable with fission. And you'll need a fairly large colony, because it needs to be a self sufficient population capable of maintaining a civilization. (If they lose it they're probably dead.) They aren't planning on a destination. They only "land" in case of severe problems that aren't too bad for them to reach a "habitable" planet (where habitable may include using extensive technology). What star systems are usually good for is reproducing. (Think of this colony as a form of MacroLife. Thank you George Zebrowski.)
FWIW, I generally envision these colonies evolving out of mining colonies out in the Oort clouds getting into some kind of disagreement with the folk back home, and just leaving. That lets all the pieces be checked out ahead of time. I'm sure, however, that there are other possibilities, with religious differences being near the top.