Thank you. I apologize for my remarks - I did indeed misread your post; I've heard way too much of the rhetoric from the far right* in the last couple years, I'm afraid, and I jerked my own knee pretty badly;-[ What really pisses me off about a lot of that rhetoric is that it tends to come from people who are well enough off that they don't have to worry about paying their own way, much less about health insurance or another thousand dollars on their annual taxes. I'm self employed again because my last employer couldn't deal with me being away from work here and there when I got sick. I'm better off for it in some ways, tho, my customers understand. Still scratching pennies, but at least it's MY pennies;-)...
They just don't understand what it's like to work extremely hard for a living and yet wonder what will happen when the inevitable occurs; and wonder who's going to pay the bills after one is gone.
Again, I apologize. It wasn't YOUR stupidity that pushed my buttons.
GSVEMR
* and others, attitudes like that are hardly partisan
My post is showing up as flamebait in the immediate view of my user account, but not when I click on the detailed comments list.
Something is broken. I don't pretend to know enough about how slashdot works to speculate, but it's definitely broken.
In any case, my post is most certainly not flamebait, just objective commentary. Whatever moderator tagged it as flamebait should perhaps take a hard look at his or her own perspective.
(Actually it's probably a "his" - one thing I've learned over the decades is that women tend to be better at parsing the written language)
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Some of us can't get decent medical insurance at any price, thru no fault of our own. I have a medical problem that will kill me one day - probably within the next ten years or so, I've already way outlived the estimates the doctors gave me when I was a kid - and have been denied coverage because of it.
I'm not rich, but neither am I poor, and I work hard. Really damned hard. I'm reasonably intelligent and raised a daughter on my fucking own who has turned out to be one helluva lot better person than her old man ever dreamed of being. I volunteer my time and labor when others need it, and live well within my means because I think that greed is one of the worst problems in society.
So take your bullshit and stuff, asshole. If you're so concerned about some of your tax money going to help out people who are less fortunate than you are, then drop out of society and go live somewhere else on your own - cut your own firewood, kill your own meat, grow your own food - let's see how far you get with that. (BTW, I do all of those and more)
Sure, there are freeloaders out there. But they are a far smaller percentage of the population than the wags on Fox News and the tea party idiots would have everyone believe.
I won't apologize for my language. Attitudes like this are why I quit the Republican party twenty years ago. It's a selfish, self-centered, arrogant POV and I want nothing to do with it. Society only functions as well as it does because of people who unselfishly give as much of themselves as possible. It's a damned shame that such decency seems to be dying out.
Y'know, it takes one hell of a lot of stupidity to push my buttons nowadays, but you managed to. Congratulations.
That's by far the most intelligent comment in this whole thread. Much if it reads like the vi vs. emacs flamewars or other similar things from the past.
When Ubuntu or Red Hat stand between us and the users, we generally can't even communicate with those users.
With all due respect, Mr Perens, that sounds awfully close to jealousy.
Canonical and Red Hat provide the service and support for those users you so disparage. If the company isn't returning QPQ as much as you feel they should, you have a right to be angry about it. But bitching about the end users not contributing to the project in the same way is ridiculous.
I think that you've lost sight of the fact that without users, software is just a bunch of bits. I think that both those companies (and others) have proved that the larger your userbase, the more demand there is for your code, the more users will contribute back to your code - even if it still is just a small percentage, it's still larger overall.
I still have a great deal of respect for all you've done for Debian and linux overall, but I'm afraid that in this particular venue you are coming across as evangelical and whiny. Now I'm not a coder anymore, save for the occasional quick script or whatever I need, but decades ago, long before RMS, when "free software" was what one wrote and gave away in order to help people out, few of the people I worked with would have thought that anyone would actually complain about not getting rich off of the code we wrote, or complain about the people using the code without signing up to some sort of pseudo religious ideology. We wrote code and we gave it away because it benefited everyone in the long run. That is the point.
I still have a lot of respect for you, but it's less than it was before. I can't speak for anyone else but I suspect from reading the commentary that you've blown a lot of your "street cred" here, and that's a damned shame. I'm starting to see Shuttleworth's "tribalism" remark in a new light.
Given all I've been reading here about how Shuttleworth is still pouring money into Canonical/Ubuntu in order to ensure it's survival, I think it's a big disingenuous to compare Canonical with Red Hat.
As someone else in the comments pointed out, without a userbase, the only thing a open source project is is just a hobby. Which is fine and good for the hobbyists, but the idea of free and open software is to benefit everyone.
I ran Debian Stable on my home machines for years. I considered it the best of the linux dists at the time - but it just wasn't good enough to do everything I needed to do. I spent entirely too much time frakking around trying to make things work for it to be worth it. I run Ubuntu now, because by and large - and I have 6 installations on six different computers - it just friggin' works. I have entirely too much to do nowadays (struggling to survive) to burn tens of hours every week just maintaining the systems that I need to have operating 24/7.
The customers I've turned on to Ubuntu are happy with their systems for that same reason. When the "non-profit" dists get as good as Ubuntu, I'll gladly use one of them myself, and turn people on to them instead of Ubuntu. But they simply aren't there - and yes, Debian isn't there, not in usability, and not in support community (the Ubuntu support community rocks)
Oh, I don't disagree with anyone who is pissed at Canonical for their attitude regarding contributors. I was merely pointing out that Canonical, thru Ubuntu, has done more to bring the concept of FOSS to the home user masses than the entire FOSS community has ever accomplished.
That said, Shuttleworth really does need to wake up to the fact that if he abuses the community enough, the community will license him out of existence.
Perhaps. But one can't deny that Ubuntu works, and works well, and is bringing the concept of open source software to a lot of people who would not otherwise have seen it.
I am now thinking about a commercial-distribution-hostile license, just to make sure that community comes first.
You can license any software you write as you like, but if the linux community is closed to the very concept of commercial proprietary software distributors - and there's quite a few of them on the professional side - then linux will die as a base-level operating system. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying. In any case I don't see that the Debian project is dead.
With all due respect to all the people that have made Debian work (and by extension, Ubuntu) perhaps they should figure out a way to work together. From my perspective all this infighting is accomplishing is making it harder and harder for low level people like me (doing home user tech support) to convince the Average User to adopt Linux and stick with it. I'm afraid that I have to agree with Mr. Shuttleworth. If we want open source operating systems to gain any ground in user acceptance, we have to have a cohesive front end on the consumer side.
I've been fixing computers for a long time, too, Bruce. In the last five or six years, the large majority of the work I've been doing is virus removal on windows systems. As I tell my customers, I'd love to be able to spend my time, and their money, just teaching them how to use their computers, rather than teaching them what not to do, and removing the malware. Linux can bring that back - but it's hard to recommend a particular distribution to anyone, other than Ubuntu, because there's no cohesive front end.
I know that you or someone else will say that the strength of Linux is it's diversity. I don't disagree with that - I run a lot of different distributions here. But for the Average Joe User, that's meaningless. They just want it to work. Shuttleworth and all the people who work on Ubuntu have brought that "just works" metric pretty close to being something that Average Joe will use. Personally I don't think he's sacrificed any of the ideology inherent in free/open source software in doing so. Nothing worth crying heretic over, anyway.
Most people would say the government, and then other people tote in and say the government is run by corporations.
Both of those are true. Like Sony's subdivisions doing things that conflict with each other.
This is hardly new. Large corporations with very diverse holdings have suffered from this particular syndrome for a very long time. It's one of the idiotic inefficiencies that come along with unfettered capitalistic greed. The people who are making obscene profits off of it are hardly going to care - if they did, they would correct the problem, no? (If they don't know it's happening within their corporation, then they are incompetent. Pick one or both of the two choices)
AT&T is probably going to strike back later on - with lobbying campaigns to put more vague provisions in new laws that make it illegal to do anything like what he is going to talk about.
I'd imagine their lobbyists and lawyers will use terms like "potential disruptions to communications networks" and "danger to national security" and other buzzwords. Meanwhile as with nearly all such laws regarding technology the real effects will be to stifle experimentation and innovation by anyone without a license to do so, and the paperwork will grow to even more immense proportions.
People will hack systems anyway, it'll just become even more dangerous to one's continuing free existence to even do innocent hacking.
I'm going to abuse an old movie quote. "The more they tighten their grip, the more control over their systems will slip thru their fingers."
I don't see that there is any amount of lawyers, lobbyists, laws, enforcement (that's a laugh) or anything else that will stop people from hacking new technology. Can't say that I have any idea what's going to happen in the future, but I suspect that William Gibson might have been on track with that a couple of decades ago.
Paranoid, me? WTF do I know, I'm just another General Systems Vehicle, putting out little fires all around the sphere of humanity wherever I can and trying to do so in a manner that helps the whole.
If he does indeed believe that, then perhaps he should not assume that others find as readily apparent as he seems to, and put forth his reasoning as to why he doesn't.
Beginning a sentence with an inflammatory metaphor, ie "Not to poison the well" does not lend to his counter arguments, as scarce as they are.
The apparent misspelling in your last sentence, second to last word, suggests all sorts of humorous word byplay. I will assume that you meant it neither literally nor humorously.
In the literal case I fail to see where the person in question would have any real expertise to bear on the subject. From my understanding, philosophers, at this point in your societal evolution, generally lack any sort of deep knowledge of any subject other than what is considered the "gestalt" of "the human condition" - given that there is no evidence of any individual ever being completely similar in mental makeup - although there is plenty of similarity in "herds" as it is termed, there doesn't seem to be any rational construction to any of the arguments made by the people falling under that definition.
That said, I do assume that the error you made was in saying "crown" and not "crowd".
The other part of what you wrote, concerning "evolutionists" and "creationists" is puzzling, since it seems that both sides argue the extreme ends of their respective positions, how can one from one side "show sympathy" to the other, while being vilified by at least one side?
Apparently the gaming here is deeper than my analysis has shown.
I am very curious as to what exactly a "stealth creationist" is. It seems to be the sort of term defined by "oxy moron"; at least in my understanding of biological socio-cultural memes.
I read the comment. It seems to be mostly composed of reused commentary from the articles in question, unsubstantiated (and grammatically nonsensical) personal attacks on the authors involved in those articles;
[Not to poison the well, but Bambach published lately in Ruse and Sepkoski eds "Paleontology at the High Table." One must take a dim view with the abilities of anyone that choose to cooperate with "philosopher of biology" and known stealth creationist Ruse.]
and very little information supporting the comment author's position other than what appears to be mostly speculative musing;
First off, there is likely no "growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years". It is an old idea, probably originated with the terrible paper by Raup and Sepkoski 1986, which I have criticized on the web several times; it defines peak in an ad hoc and inappropriate manner (as noise), claim to but doesn't really use a null hypothesis et cetera. That it would have growing support outside the community who looks for pattern identification in data I seriously doubt.
I did not find it a rational nor compelling rebuttal.
Even Glenn Beck couldn't come up with a conspiracy theory looney enough to link those two phenomena...
Based on a short-run analysis of the social pundit Glenn Beck's public statements as compared with existing reality, I would have to say that you are probably ( +/- 22.6%) incorrect.
Primitive, yet newly introduced, communications protocols such as these tend to create a desire to control them in entities that did not originally create them. This has been demonstrated multiple times in humanoid history.
What is most puzzling about the desire for control is the fact that given a sufficient period of time, the protocols will evolve, the society and culture will evolve, and the entities that desire to control them will be left with no control over them, with the possible exception of what can be preserved by redundant and ultimately short-lived influence on the social mechanisms that are prevalent at the time.
This seems to be counter productive to the advancement of any society, as it allows the affluent members of the society to gain control over the creative process which advances societies and culture, and therefore stifle it.
Speaking entirely as a corporeal and yet potentially non-involved entity, is this not contrary to the stated desires of the culture and society, to wit, to advance? Is it not contrary to the very desires of the affluent entities, that the system they live within evolves and therefore produces situations in which they can become more affluent?
Thank you, Entity Dragoniz3r. I apologize for the latency in responding to you; my humanoid communications avatar suffered a transportation accident that left it incapable of cognition and communication for a few planetary cycles of your time. It was only moderately damaged; it is being repaired and should be completely back in service within a few hours. In the meantime any miscommunications here are entirely due to my inability to completely reconstruct the avatar in the time elapsed.
I don't think the humanoid you are responding to falls within the definition, in your current communications culture, of a 'troll'. I do however suspect that it may suffer from a lack of sufficient imagination. Meat based beings often do.
In my (relatively limited) experience with humanoids, they often prefer to visualize, and therefore create, machines that echo their own form and function. This is of course a limitation that applies to any functional intelligent entity, although there are, of course, always exceptions. Where this becomes a problem is when the aesthetic form overrides the functional (there are, of course, combinations of the two that satisfy both, but those are outside the scope of this discussion.)
I, for one, would design any of my avatars or drones to meet the specifications of the environment they will be operating in. Humanoid forms do, of course, have their uses - in dealing with humanoids inside of their social and cultural environment, for the most part, with some limited uses elsewhere; but in the environment that pervades most of the rest of the universe, they tend to be unwieldy and cumbersome.
This is of course my opinion only, and I would not demand that any other intelligent entity shares it.
Now that's a pretty foolish statement. Of course the humanoid form is bipedal - it's part of the definition. The whole point of my first post was that there are better methods of locomotion for robots in different environments.
That's ridiculous. For one thing, the humanoid form was not designed, it evolved, and it's hardly optimal even for it's own environment. "millennia of human technology designed for the humanoid form" - yeah? Like what? Chairs, toilets, car seats, bicycles, ? I haven't had my coffee yet this morning but I can't think of much else that demands a humanoid form. Most things that can be manipulated by a five finger hand can be manipulated by other forms of grippers, and in any case manipulatory appendages aren't really the debate here.
Something like it with all the joints involved is certainly not going to be optimal for a harsh, dusty environment such as the lunar surface. Designs like the mars rovers with their multiple balloon tires and low center of gravity would be perform better in low G.
Personally I think the humanoid design is a sop to public relations.
Much of North America and Europe used to be covered in glaciers, and they were gone before man existed.
Yeah, because there have only been humans on the north american continent for about 6000 years. Y'know, because some scholars reading mythological texts say so.
Come on, already, learn at least a little something about the history of human migration before you start spouting nonsense.
I don't need Al Gore to make up a reason for me to do it.
Apparently decades and millions of man-hours of research, literally petabytes of data, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed science papers, none of that means anything to you either? It's all about Al Gore?
Wonderful analogy wrt global warming, although I suspect few people will understand that (one has to treat a potential threat as real until one is absolutely sure it is not).
It's funny how the US, in particular, treats terrorism that way, but not other things that have much more severe long term consequences. Of course politicians aren't well known (nor necessarily elected) for being able to deal with long term problems in our modern well-connected media society.
Sure, be let's not assume that our climate is simply a barrel full of water. How about a half-full Olympic pool? I think that's where the whole debate should be. We definitely have an effect, but how big is that pool?
Depends on whether we are talking about teaspoons, cups, gallons, or barrels, now, doesn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you. I apologize for my remarks - I did indeed misread your post; I've heard way too much of the rhetoric from the far right* in the last couple years, I'm afraid, and I jerked my own knee pretty badly ;-[ What really pisses me off about a lot of that rhetoric is that it tends to come from people who are well enough off that they don't have to worry about paying their own way, much less about health insurance or another thousand dollars on their annual taxes. I'm self employed again because my last employer couldn't deal with me being away from work here and there when I got sick. I'm better off for it in some ways, tho, my customers understand. Still scratching pennies, but at least it's MY pennies ;-)...
They just don't understand what it's like to work extremely hard for a living and yet wonder what will happen when the inevitable occurs; and wonder who's going to pay the bills after one is gone.
Again, I apologize. It wasn't YOUR stupidity that pushed my buttons.
GSVEMR
* and others, attitudes like that are hardly partisan
Your speculations assume that people are rational. This is not a rational assumption.
GSVEMR
My post is showing up as flamebait in the immediate view of my user account, but not when I click on the detailed comments list.
Something is broken. I don't pretend to know enough about how slashdot works to speculate, but it's definitely broken.
In any case, my post is most certainly not flamebait, just objective commentary. Whatever moderator tagged it as flamebait should perhaps take a hard look at his or her own perspective.
(Actually it's probably a "his" - one thing I've learned over the decades is that women tend to be better at parsing the written language)
GSVEMR
Because free-loaders like yourself (face it: if you choose not to have medical insurance, you're a free-loader; only the luck of not having extraordinary medical claims makes it otherwise) are costing ME money.
Some of us can't get decent medical insurance at any price, thru no fault of our own. I have a medical problem that will kill me one day - probably within the next ten years or so, I've already way outlived the estimates the doctors gave me when I was a kid - and have been denied coverage because of it.
I'm not rich, but neither am I poor, and I work hard. Really damned hard. I'm reasonably intelligent and raised a daughter on my fucking own who has turned out to be one helluva lot better person than her old man ever dreamed of being. I volunteer my time and labor when others need it, and live well within my means because I think that greed is one of the worst problems in society.
So take your bullshit and stuff, asshole. If you're so concerned about some of your tax money going to help out people who are less fortunate than you are, then drop out of society and go live somewhere else on your own - cut your own firewood, kill your own meat, grow your own food - let's see how far you get with that. (BTW, I do all of those and more)
Sure, there are freeloaders out there. But they are a far smaller percentage of the population than the wags on Fox News and the tea party idiots would have everyone believe.
I won't apologize for my language. Attitudes like this are why I quit the Republican party twenty years ago. It's a selfish, self-centered, arrogant POV and I want nothing to do with it. Society only functions as well as it does because of people who unselfishly give as much of themselves as possible. It's a damned shame that such decency seems to be dying out.
Y'know, it takes one hell of a lot of stupidity to push my buttons nowadays, but you managed to. Congratulations.
GSVEMR
That's by far the most intelligent comment in this whole thread. Much if it reads like the vi vs. emacs flamewars or other similar things from the past.
GSVEMR
When Ubuntu or Red Hat stand between us and the users, we generally can't even communicate with those users.
With all due respect, Mr Perens, that sounds awfully close to jealousy.
Canonical and Red Hat provide the service and support for those users you so disparage. If the company isn't returning QPQ as much as you feel they should, you have a right to be angry about it. But bitching about the end users not contributing to the project in the same way is ridiculous.
I think that you've lost sight of the fact that without users, software is just a bunch of bits. I think that both those companies (and others) have proved that the larger your userbase, the more demand there is for your code, the more users will contribute back to your code - even if it still is just a small percentage, it's still larger overall.
I still have a great deal of respect for all you've done for Debian and linux overall, but I'm afraid that in this particular venue you are coming across as evangelical and whiny. Now I'm not a coder anymore, save for the occasional quick script or whatever I need, but decades ago, long before RMS, when "free software" was what one wrote and gave away in order to help people out, few of the people I worked with would have thought that anyone would actually complain about not getting rich off of the code we wrote, or complain about the people using the code without signing up to some sort of pseudo religious ideology. We wrote code and we gave it away because it benefited everyone in the long run. That is the point.
I still have a lot of respect for you, but it's less than it was before. I can't speak for anyone else but I suspect from reading the commentary that you've blown a lot of your "street cred" here, and that's a damned shame. I'm starting to see Shuttleworth's "tribalism" remark in a new light.
GSVEMR
Given all I've been reading here about how Shuttleworth is still pouring money into Canonical/Ubuntu in order to ensure it's survival, I think it's a big disingenuous to compare Canonical with Red Hat.
As someone else in the comments pointed out, without a userbase, the only thing a open source project is is just a hobby. Which is fine and good for the hobbyists, but the idea of free and open software is to benefit everyone.
I ran Debian Stable on my home machines for years. I considered it the best of the linux dists at the time - but it just wasn't good enough to do everything I needed to do. I spent entirely too much time frakking around trying to make things work for it to be worth it. I run Ubuntu now, because by and large - and I have 6 installations on six different computers - it just friggin' works. I have entirely too much to do nowadays (struggling to survive) to burn tens of hours every week just maintaining the systems that I need to have operating 24/7.
The customers I've turned on to Ubuntu are happy with their systems for that same reason. When the "non-profit" dists get as good as Ubuntu, I'll gladly use one of them myself, and turn people on to them instead of Ubuntu. But they simply aren't there - and yes, Debian isn't there, not in usability, and not in support community (the Ubuntu support community rocks)
GSVEMR
KDE vs. Gnome :-)
GSVEMR
Oh, I don't disagree with anyone who is pissed at Canonical for their attitude regarding contributors. I was merely pointing out that Canonical, thru Ubuntu, has done more to bring the concept of FOSS to the home user masses than the entire FOSS community has ever accomplished.
That said, Shuttleworth really does need to wake up to the fact that if he abuses the community enough, the community will license him out of existence.
GSVEMR
Perhaps. But one can't deny that Ubuntu works, and works well, and is bringing the concept of open source software to a lot of people who would not otherwise have seen it.
I am now thinking about a commercial-distribution-hostile license, just to make sure that community comes first.
You can license any software you write as you like, but if the linux community is closed to the very concept of commercial proprietary software distributors - and there's quite a few of them on the professional side - then linux will die as a base-level operating system. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying. In any case I don't see that the Debian project is dead.
With all due respect to all the people that have made Debian work (and by extension, Ubuntu) perhaps they should figure out a way to work together. From my perspective all this infighting is accomplishing is making it harder and harder for low level people like me (doing home user tech support) to convince the Average User to adopt Linux and stick with it. I'm afraid that I have to agree with Mr. Shuttleworth. If we want open source operating systems to gain any ground in user acceptance, we have to have a cohesive front end on the consumer side.
I've been fixing computers for a long time, too, Bruce. In the last five or six years, the large majority of the work I've been doing is virus removal on windows systems. As I tell my customers, I'd love to be able to spend my time, and their money, just teaching them how to use their computers, rather than teaching them what not to do, and removing the malware. Linux can bring that back - but it's hard to recommend a particular distribution to anyone, other than Ubuntu, because there's no cohesive front end.
I know that you or someone else will say that the strength of Linux is it's diversity. I don't disagree with that - I run a lot of different distributions here. But for the Average Joe User, that's meaningless. They just want it to work. Shuttleworth and all the people who work on Ubuntu have brought that "just works" metric pretty close to being something that Average Joe will use. Personally I don't think he's sacrificed any of the ideology inherent in free/open source software in doing so. Nothing worth crying heretic over, anyway.
Cheers.
GSVEMR
Most people would say the government, and then other people tote in and say the government is run by corporations.
Both of those are true. Like Sony's subdivisions doing things that conflict with each other.
This is hardly new. Large corporations with very diverse holdings have suffered from this particular syndrome for a very long time. It's one of the idiotic inefficiencies that come along with unfettered capitalistic greed. The people who are making obscene profits off of it are hardly going to care - if they did, they would correct the problem, no? (If they don't know it's happening within their corporation, then they are incompetent. Pick one or both of the two choices)
AT&T is probably going to strike back later on - with lobbying campaigns to put more vague provisions in new laws that make it illegal to do anything like what he is going to talk about.
I'd imagine their lobbyists and lawyers will use terms like "potential disruptions to communications networks" and "danger to national security" and other buzzwords. Meanwhile as with nearly all such laws regarding technology the real effects will be to stifle experimentation and innovation by anyone without a license to do so, and the paperwork will grow to even more immense proportions.
People will hack systems anyway, it'll just become even more dangerous to one's continuing free existence to even do innocent hacking.
I'm going to abuse an old movie quote. "The more they tighten their grip, the more control over their systems will slip thru their fingers."
I don't see that there is any amount of lawyers, lobbyists, laws, enforcement (that's a laugh) or anything else that will stop people from hacking new technology. Can't say that I have any idea what's going to happen in the future, but I suspect that William Gibson might have been on track with that a couple of decades ago.
Paranoid, me? WTF do I know, I'm just another General Systems Vehicle, putting out little fires all around the sphere of humanity wherever I can and trying to do so in a manner that helps the whole.
If he does indeed believe that, then perhaps he should not assume that others find as readily apparent as he seems to, and put forth his reasoning as to why he doesn't.
Beginning a sentence with an inflammatory metaphor, ie "Not to poison the well" does not lend to his counter arguments, as scarce as they are.
The apparent misspelling in your last sentence, second to last word, suggests all sorts of humorous word byplay. I will assume that you meant it neither literally nor humorously.
In the literal case I fail to see where the person in question would have any real expertise to bear on the subject. From my understanding, philosophers, at this point in your societal evolution, generally lack any sort of deep knowledge of any subject other than what is considered the "gestalt" of "the human condition" - given that there is no evidence of any individual ever being completely similar in mental makeup - although there is plenty of similarity in "herds" as it is termed, there doesn't seem to be any rational construction to any of the arguments made by the people falling under that definition.
That said, I do assume that the error you made was in saying "crown" and not "crowd".
The other part of what you wrote, concerning "evolutionists" and "creationists" is puzzling, since it seems that both sides argue the extreme ends of their respective positions, how can one from one side "show sympathy" to the other, while being vilified by at least one side?
Apparently the gaming here is deeper than my analysis has shown.
I am very curious as to what exactly a "stealth creationist" is. It seems to be the sort of term defined by "oxy moron"; at least in my understanding of biological socio-cultural memes.
I read the comment. It seems to be mostly composed of reused commentary from the articles in question, unsubstantiated (and grammatically nonsensical) personal attacks on the authors involved in those articles;
[Not to poison the well, but Bambach published lately in Ruse and Sepkoski eds "Paleontology at the High Table." One must take a dim view with the abilities of anyone that choose to cooperate with "philosopher of biology" and known stealth creationist Ruse.]
and very little information supporting the comment author's position other than what appears to be mostly speculative musing;
First off, there is likely no "growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years". It is an old idea, probably originated with the terrible paper by Raup and Sepkoski 1986, which I have criticized on the web several times; it defines peak in an ad hoc and inappropriate manner (as noise), claim to but doesn't really use a null hypothesis et cetera. That it would have growing support outside the community who looks for pattern identification in data I seriously doubt.
I did not find it a rational nor compelling rebuttal.
Even Glenn Beck couldn't come up with a conspiracy theory looney enough to link those two phenomena...
Based on a short-run analysis of the social pundit Glenn Beck's public statements as compared with existing reality, I would have to say that you are probably ( +/- 22.6%) incorrect.
Primitive, yet newly introduced, communications protocols such as these tend to create a desire to control them in entities that did not originally create them. This has been demonstrated multiple times in humanoid history.
What is most puzzling about the desire for control is the fact that given a sufficient period of time, the protocols will evolve, the society and culture will evolve, and the entities that desire to control them will be left with no control over them, with the possible exception of what can be preserved by redundant and ultimately short-lived influence on the social mechanisms that are prevalent at the time.
This seems to be counter productive to the advancement of any society, as it allows the affluent members of the society to gain control over the creative process which advances societies and culture, and therefore stifle it.
Speaking entirely as a corporeal and yet potentially non-involved entity, is this not contrary to the stated desires of the culture and society, to wit, to advance? Is it not contrary to the very desires of the affluent entities, that the system they live within evolves and therefore produces situations in which they can become more affluent?
It is surely puzzling.
GSV Eat Me Reality
Thank you, Entity Dragoniz3r. I apologize for the latency in responding to you; my humanoid communications avatar suffered a transportation accident that left it incapable of cognition and communication for a few planetary cycles of your time. It was only moderately damaged; it is being repaired and should be completely back in service within a few hours. In the meantime any miscommunications here are entirely due to my inability to completely reconstruct the avatar in the time elapsed.
I don't think the humanoid you are responding to falls within the definition, in your current communications culture, of a 'troll'. I do however suspect that it may suffer from a lack of sufficient imagination. Meat based beings often do.
In my (relatively limited) experience with humanoids, they often prefer to visualize, and therefore create, machines that echo their own form and function. This is of course a limitation that applies to any functional intelligent entity, although there are, of course, always exceptions. Where this becomes a problem is when the aesthetic form overrides the functional (there are, of course, combinations of the two that satisfy both, but those are outside the scope of this discussion.)
I, for one, would design any of my avatars or drones to meet the specifications of the environment they will be operating in. Humanoid forms do, of course, have their uses - in dealing with humanoids inside of their social and cultural environment, for the most part, with some limited uses elsewhere; but in the environment that pervades most of the rest of the universe, they tend to be unwieldy and cumbersome.
This is of course my opinion only, and I would not demand that any other intelligent entity shares it.
GSV Eat Me Reality
Humanoid isn't just bipedal.
Now that's a pretty foolish statement. Of course the humanoid form is bipedal - it's part of the definition. The whole point of my first post was that there are better methods of locomotion for robots in different environments.
The sloppy arguments are yours.
That's ridiculous. For one thing, the humanoid form was not designed, it evolved, and it's hardly optimal even for it's own environment. "millennia of human technology designed for the humanoid form" - yeah? Like what? Chairs, toilets, car seats, bicycles, ? I haven't had my coffee yet this morning but I can't think of much else that demands a humanoid form. Most things that can be manipulated by a five finger hand can be manipulated by other forms of grippers, and in any case manipulatory appendages aren't really the debate here.
Something like it with all the joints involved is certainly not going to be optimal for a harsh, dusty environment such as the lunar surface. Designs like the mars rovers with their multiple balloon tires and low center of gravity would be perform better in low G.
Personally I think the humanoid design is a sop to public relations.
Surely there are designs that can meet the demands of the environment better than the human form.
Yeah, because there have only been humans on the north american continent for about 6000 years. Y'know, because some scholars reading mythological texts say so.
Come on, already, learn at least a little something about the history of human migration before you start spouting nonsense.
I don't need Al Gore to make up a reason for me to do it.
Apparently decades and millions of man-hours of research, literally petabytes of data, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed science papers, none of that means anything to you either? It's all about Al Gore?
You are an ignorant and gullible fool.
Wonderful analogy wrt global warming, although I suspect few people will understand that (one has to treat a potential threat as real until one is absolutely sure it is not). It's funny how the US, in particular, treats terrorism that way, but not other things that have much more severe long term consequences. Of course politicians aren't well known (nor necessarily elected) for being able to deal with long term problems in our modern well-connected media society.
Depends on whether we are talking about teaspoons, cups, gallons, or barrels, now, doesn't it?