That's the most idiotic thing I've ever read about UNIX, ever, hands-down. No one has switched to Linux because of its init system. Are you really that stupid?
(That's my complaint with systemd anyway - it violates the Unix principle of being portable and compatible).
How is that a problem with systemd? Which other UNIX system still uses sysvinit anyway? Solaris moved to SMF ages ago, OSX certainly doesn't use it, the BSDs don't use it (since they're not related to System V UNIX to begin with), etc.
Has anyone tried porting SMF to Linux? If not, then that isn't exactly portable either.
If you like FF that much more than Chrome, why bother with Chrome at all?
The main use I've found for Chrome these days is for watching Netflix on my laptop; I simply can't do that with FF, but with Chrome it works out-of-the-box on Linux. It's also good for keeping around just in case I run into some site that doesn't seem to work right with FF, just to see if it's a FF issue or a problem with the site.
I *am* an American, you moron. Sorry if you don't like that. I never claimed it was the greatest place in the world anyway, I just live here. And "cellphone" is much shorter and faster to say (and type) than "mobile phone". And if you drop the "phone" part, you end up with "mobile", which is a toy you hang over babies' cribs.
I really don't give a shit about a watch lasting 10 years on a battery. Why is that important? It's not like I'm going to be stuck somewhere away from civilization for 10 years. For portability, phones are portable enough, and I never leave home without mine since they're so critically important now. For convenience, the same applies: I always have my phone. Maybe it takes slightly longer to see the time, but it's not like I need to look at the time that often, and my internal timekeeping is good enough I usually know what time it is anyway, within 15 minutes or so. For durability, again I take my phone everywhere, and it seems to be durable enough. If it gets smashed, I have much bigger concerns than not seeing exactly what time it is.
No, they don't. There've been a bunch of studies where they take a bunch of people's faces, merge them all together in an image editor, then show the various faces plus the merged face to a group of people, and the merged person (who the participants don't know isn't a real person) is consistently rated most attractive.
It's not necessarily to match "what is currently fashionable"": lots of studies have found that there is an objective measure of beauty in humans, and that's symmetry. Humans who look more symmetrical are perceived as more attractive; it's hard-wired into our brains as a measure of reproductive fitness. So any plastic surgery to make you look more symmetrical (such as removing moles or other facial blemishes) isn't a matter of fashion, it's a matter of beautification according to our biological preferences.
Now, something like a nose job to make your nose smaller or pointer is definitely a fashion thing, as a preference for big clown noses vs. small pointy noses is likely either a matter of fashion, or of culture.
My cellphone is more accurate than any of these watches, since it syncs to the towers. And it doesn't cost me a dime, since I already pay for it for communications use; the timekeeping feature is just a bonus. Plus, I don't have to have some annoying thing strapped to my wrist.
Nope. Only brown eyes are caused directly by pigments. Blue eyes and green eyes actually don't exist per se: there is no blue or green pigment. Blue eyes look blue for the same reason the sky looks blue: Rayleigh scattering. Green eyes, much more rare, are in-between, and don't even look green in certain lights or certain angles.
Firefox opens much faster than chrome because it only loads the active tab initially.
Yeah, what's with this anyway? This is the most brain-dead thing I've seen in Chrome. The Firefox way is smart because it recalls all your tabs, but doesn't slow your computer to a crawl for a minute or two by trying to load everything at once.
I will say I haven't seen FF crash in quite a while now; I'm using 36 on Linux. A couple years or so ago, it was pretty bad, but lately I haven't had any trouble at all, though I do have to restart it every other week like you say.
Yes, you're right; Firefox OS is supposed to be a smartphone OS to my knowledge. Still, I want a browser, not a new phone OS. If they can come up with a phone OS that I can easily load on commonly-available phones (and I don't need to buy some shitty, overpriced, under-featured phone like the Ubuntu phone), then great, but I'd prefer they focused on their browser first. At this point, I really fail to see the appeal of a different phone OS, since the apps are so important and a different OS probably can't use existing apps unless they make it Android-compatible somehow (which would be difficult since Google controls access to the Play store). I'm much more interested in alternative Android-based ROMs than a completely different phone OS.
No. Even if it was discovered that this was the case, they wouldn't care as long as it's shiny. Very few people really care about privacy or have any concern that having too much info out there about them could be a problem. Just look at all the people who use Facebook.
I've been a Firefox user pretty much since it was released, but last year I switched to Chrome. It's not much better, but at least Chrome has less propensity to grow to gigantic memory proportions and slow down to a crawl and/or crash for no apparent reason.
That's weird, that's exactly the reason I switched back to Firefox, because that's exactly how Chrome behaved. Firefox isn't nearly as much of a memory hog.
I used to use Chromium (the open-source version) because for a while Firefox was really crashy, but I finally switched because Chrome is such a memory hog and Firefox seems to be working quite well these days.
This article seems to basically be saying "if you aren't continuously growing, you're dying". It's hogwash. That's like saying that the bash shell is "dying" because it isn't adding tons of new functionality, including a built-in text editor and a web browser. Notice that one of the complaints is slow development of Firefox OS. Who cares? I use Firefox because I want a solid web browser; I don't need a new OS. Web browsers are a fairly mature product these days, thanks to HTML5 and modern Javascript engines. Where else is there for them to go? And for Firefox's supposed absence on mobile devices, it seems to work great on my Android phone, so I have no idea what they're talking about there.
Geography certainly has had a huge effect on societal development: the Hawaiian islands' warm (year-round) climate, fertile volcanic soil, and remote location free from competition from outside cultures (until Captain Cook) enabled their culture to develop this way, no doubt.
However, the point is that we can look at societies like this, especially isolated ones, and see that human behavior does not have to conform to a certain pattern seen in other (typically western) societies, and instead we can see some extremely different dynamics. This proves that what we think of as "natural" may not be natural at all, just a product of our geography and society.
I'm not even going to bother looking at some bullshit from the Christian Broadcasting Network. You're talking about a business run by a man who's a con artist, blames 9/11 on gay people, and uses his riches (from all those tithes he insists people owe to him) to finance business interests in Africa with the likes of Robert Mugabe. You're a fool if you think anything to do with him has any veracity at all.
a) Go back far enough in time, and the Hawaiians "stole" it from someone.
This is quite likely false. All the available evidence points towards Polynesians being the first settlers on the various Pacific islands. Unless you want to argue that they stole it from whatever native land animals lived there (boars? I don't think Hawaii ever had a lot of fauna).
I have to disagree about women fighting over the alpha males. Not all women are that attractive, so in a free-for-all society, the most desirable people of both sexes are probably going to want to spend their time with each other. Why would the alpha males want to run around banging every homely chick who asks? So those women will be forced to start looking at alternatives unless they want to be celibate.
It is also an excellent way to enforce the equality that is so important to large ant like societies. To sustain a large ant like society we need ways to turn individuals into cogs, I would hazard that marriage does this.
Well given that monogamous marriage has mostly failed these days for various reasons, do you have any thoughts about how future society needs to develop?
I guess we'll see on that. If these expansionist cultures make the Earth's surface uninhabitable somehow in a century or two (whether from pollution/climate change or nuclear war), then I think that would prove that the expansionist cultures were actually a failure.
I am not trying to argue that monogamy is good, but why it came about and for what reasons.
Sorry, I guess I read some implications in there that you didn't intend.
Also, historically divorce rates were at 0%. Does this prove that monogamy is good? No, it is just a single unrelated fact.
It's not unrelated, but it is debatable how it affects things. My contention is that divorce rates were 0% (or very low, after that) because women in previous centuries and generations were second-class citizens and couldn't leave bad marriages (and the same also went for men, but to a lesser degree; society frowned so much on divorce that it just wasn't done). The rates are much higher now because women have equal rights, and are able to have their own careers, so they don't need men to be meal tickets any more, so people don't stay in unhappy marriages like they used to. All this points to the idea that monogamy and life-long marriages are simply a bad and unworkable idea for most people. In fact, in centuries past, love wasn't even a factor in marriages, only convenience and politics.
the proven method of living like animals in small tribal units.
The problem here is this doesn't work so well with modern society. However, there are more and more people joining up into polyamorous groupings, which do resemble tribes, and have as one component resource-sharing. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future. It's not at all unlike Robert Heinlein's "line marriages". In generations past, people used to rely on their extended families a lot. These days, people are more mobile, and also frequently don't really like their extended families, but with polyamorous groupings, people only associate out of freewill and interest, not because of blood relations.
But beyond that, I would argue that the family unit incentives and protects the post-fertile woman more than the tribal sharing society of old did.
I disagree. Some people are luckier than others and have better or bigger families. I know lots of people whose families don't give a shit about them. Tribes don't have this problem so much.
The problem with old tribal societies, of course, is that they don't really work in larger societies that were enabled by the development of agriculture.
You seem to be rather refuting your own arguments here. Was agriculture capable of providing more food or was it less food?
I think it depends on what exactly you're comparing. If you compare early agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies in their peak, it's probably less. Think about it: why would you expend so much effort sowing seeds and tilling dirt when you can just run around and pick plentiful naturally-growing stuff? The problem is that, as human populations grew, there wasn't enough naturally-growing food (flora or fauna) to support those populations, so people invented agriculture. Modern agriculture, of course, can provide enormous amounts of food.
The other problem is that agriculture doesn't provide a very good diversity of food; that's why people lost a foot of height when they switched (there's archaeological studies about this). These days, however, we've made up for it thanks to large-scale trade and transportation, so obviously a modern grocery store has an enormous variety of foods from all over the world. But in 2000BCE this wasn't the case, and in fact it's only been recently that people have gotten tall again.
I would argue that agriculture was the worst thing to ever happened to humans and the entire planet but that is mostly a personal preference not a fact.
That's definitely personal preference. Today's large societies are also why we have computers, the internet, smartphones, space travel, etc. Small societies simply cannot develop these technologies, nor can they develop medical technologies and knowledge which allow people to routinely live to 100 and not die of common infections.
You seem to be arguing that monogamy is a good thing, which it is not. A 50+% divorce rate proves this.
In primitive communities, old women didn't need "one and only one man" to provide for her. The whole village provided for everyone. What you contend is an advantage is only so in Randian societies where people don't look out for each other, and everyone is out for himself.
Your comment also has a bit of very obvious misogyny in it.
Also, agriculture was a giant detriment to human societies at first. It didn't give people leisure time at all; they had to toil endlessly making crops grow. Before this, they just went into the wild and picked naturally-growing fruits and seeds and hunted animals. The only reason people stopped being hunter-gatherers was because their populations grew too large for their environment, and agriculture made it possible to sustain much larger populations. In addition, people lost a foot of height when they switched to agriculture, because hunter-gatherer lifestyles were far more healthy and nutritious. It took millennia for people to reach the average heights they had before the invention of agriculture.
Because Europeans were sexually frustrated and channeled their energy into conquering, while the Hawaiians sat around in a paradise (Hawaii is warm and fertile year-round, unlike Europe and most other places) having orgies and generally being happy and not feeling any need to go steal other peoples' land and resources?
Societies expect various things of adults that involve resisting animal instincts.
And how exactly do you know that these primitive societies are the ones expecting things which resist animal instincts, and that other societies (with men hoarding women and restricting their sexuality) are the ones which aren't? How do you know you don't have it backwards?
Or maybe both societies are resisting animal instincts: maybe the pro-sex societies are resisting mens' instincts, while the anti-sex, pro-monogamy societies are the ones resisting womens' instincts.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but Cindy Crawford used to be considered a raving beauty and she had a prominent mole.
That's the most idiotic thing I've ever read about UNIX, ever, hands-down. No one has switched to Linux because of its init system. Are you really that stupid?
Ok, what shitty country do you hail from? I'm sure I can come up with lots of generalizations about it. Germany = Nazis, French = cowards, etc.
(That's my complaint with systemd anyway - it violates the Unix principle of being portable and compatible).
How is that a problem with systemd? Which other UNIX system still uses sysvinit anyway? Solaris moved to SMF ages ago, OSX certainly doesn't use it, the BSDs don't use it (since they're not related to System V UNIX to begin with), etc.
Has anyone tried porting SMF to Linux? If not, then that isn't exactly portable either.
If you like FF that much more than Chrome, why bother with Chrome at all?
The main use I've found for Chrome these days is for watching Netflix on my laptop; I simply can't do that with FF, but with Chrome it works out-of-the-box on Linux. It's also good for keeping around just in case I run into some site that doesn't seem to work right with FF, just to see if it's a FF issue or a problem with the site.
I *am* an American, you moron. Sorry if you don't like that. I never claimed it was the greatest place in the world anyway, I just live here. And "cellphone" is much shorter and faster to say (and type) than "mobile phone". And if you drop the "phone" part, you end up with "mobile", which is a toy you hang over babies' cribs.
I really don't give a shit about a watch lasting 10 years on a battery. Why is that important? It's not like I'm going to be stuck somewhere away from civilization for 10 years. For portability, phones are portable enough, and I never leave home without mine since they're so critically important now. For convenience, the same applies: I always have my phone. Maybe it takes slightly longer to see the time, but it's not like I need to look at the time that often, and my internal timekeeping is good enough I usually know what time it is anyway, within 15 minutes or so. For durability, again I take my phone everywhere, and it seems to be durable enough. If it gets smashed, I have much bigger concerns than not seeing exactly what time it is.
Your comment here is entirely out-of-place. Look around: yours is only one of two which isn't a troll.
This site has really, completely gone down the tubes, and this article really shows it more than ever before.
No, they don't. There've been a bunch of studies where they take a bunch of people's faces, merge them all together in an image editor, then show the various faces plus the merged face to a group of people, and the merged person (who the participants don't know isn't a real person) is consistently rated most attractive.
It's not necessarily to match "what is currently fashionable"": lots of studies have found that there is an objective measure of beauty in humans, and that's symmetry. Humans who look more symmetrical are perceived as more attractive; it's hard-wired into our brains as a measure of reproductive fitness. So any plastic surgery to make you look more symmetrical (such as removing moles or other facial blemishes) isn't a matter of fashion, it's a matter of beautification according to our biological preferences.
Now, something like a nose job to make your nose smaller or pointer is definitely a fashion thing, as a preference for big clown noses vs. small pointy noses is likely either a matter of fashion, or of culture.
My cellphone is more accurate than any of these watches, since it syncs to the towers. And it doesn't cost me a dime, since I already pay for it for communications use; the timekeeping feature is just a bonus. Plus, I don't have to have some annoying thing strapped to my wrist.
Nope. Only brown eyes are caused directly by pigments. Blue eyes and green eyes actually don't exist per se: there is no blue or green pigment. Blue eyes look blue for the same reason the sky looks blue: Rayleigh scattering. Green eyes, much more rare, are in-between, and don't even look green in certain lights or certain angles.
Firefox opens much faster than chrome because it only loads the active tab initially.
Yeah, what's with this anyway? This is the most brain-dead thing I've seen in Chrome. The Firefox way is smart because it recalls all your tabs, but doesn't slow your computer to a crawl for a minute or two by trying to load everything at once.
I will say I haven't seen FF crash in quite a while now; I'm using 36 on Linux. A couple years or so ago, it was pretty bad, but lately I haven't had any trouble at all, though I do have to restart it every other week like you say.
Yes, you're right; Firefox OS is supposed to be a smartphone OS to my knowledge. Still, I want a browser, not a new phone OS. If they can come up with a phone OS that I can easily load on commonly-available phones (and I don't need to buy some shitty, overpriced, under-featured phone like the Ubuntu phone), then great, but I'd prefer they focused on their browser first. At this point, I really fail to see the appeal of a different phone OS, since the apps are so important and a different OS probably can't use existing apps unless they make it Android-compatible somehow (which would be difficult since Google controls access to the Play store). I'm much more interested in alternative Android-based ROMs than a completely different phone OS.
No. Even if it was discovered that this was the case, they wouldn't care as long as it's shiny. Very few people really care about privacy or have any concern that having too much info out there about them could be a problem. Just look at all the people who use Facebook.
I've been a Firefox user pretty much since it was released, but last year I switched to Chrome. It's not much better, but at least Chrome has less propensity to grow to gigantic memory proportions and slow down to a crawl and/or crash for no apparent reason.
That's weird, that's exactly the reason I switched back to Firefox, because that's exactly how Chrome behaved. Firefox isn't nearly as much of a memory hog.
The standard answer is Chrome.
I used to use Chromium (the open-source version) because for a while Firefox was really crashy, but I finally switched because Chrome is such a memory hog and Firefox seems to be working quite well these days.
This article seems to basically be saying "if you aren't continuously growing, you're dying". It's hogwash. That's like saying that the bash shell is "dying" because it isn't adding tons of new functionality, including a built-in text editor and a web browser. Notice that one of the complaints is slow development of Firefox OS. Who cares? I use Firefox because I want a solid web browser; I don't need a new OS. Web browsers are a fairly mature product these days, thanks to HTML5 and modern Javascript engines. Where else is there for them to go? And for Firefox's supposed absence on mobile devices, it seems to work great on my Android phone, so I have no idea what they're talking about there.
In summary, this article is bullshit.
Geography certainly has had a huge effect on societal development: the Hawaiian islands' warm (year-round) climate, fertile volcanic soil, and remote location free from competition from outside cultures (until Captain Cook) enabled their culture to develop this way, no doubt.
However, the point is that we can look at societies like this, especially isolated ones, and see that human behavior does not have to conform to a certain pattern seen in other (typically western) societies, and instead we can see some extremely different dynamics. This proves that what we think of as "natural" may not be natural at all, just a product of our geography and society.
I'm not even going to bother looking at some bullshit from the Christian Broadcasting Network. You're talking about a business run by a man who's a con artist, blames 9/11 on gay people, and uses his riches (from all those tithes he insists people owe to him) to finance business interests in Africa with the likes of Robert Mugabe. You're a fool if you think anything to do with him has any veracity at all.
a) Go back far enough in time, and the Hawaiians "stole" it from someone.
This is quite likely false. All the available evidence points towards Polynesians being the first settlers on the various Pacific islands. Unless you want to argue that they stole it from whatever native land animals lived there (boars? I don't think Hawaii ever had a lot of fauna).
I have to disagree about women fighting over the alpha males. Not all women are that attractive, so in a free-for-all society, the most desirable people of both sexes are probably going to want to spend their time with each other. Why would the alpha males want to run around banging every homely chick who asks? So those women will be forced to start looking at alternatives unless they want to be celibate.
It is also an excellent way to enforce the equality that is so important to large ant like societies. To sustain a large ant like society we need ways to turn individuals into cogs, I would hazard that marriage does this.
Well given that monogamous marriage has mostly failed these days for various reasons, do you have any thoughts about how future society needs to develop?
I guess we'll see on that. If these expansionist cultures make the Earth's surface uninhabitable somehow in a century or two (whether from pollution/climate change or nuclear war), then I think that would prove that the expansionist cultures were actually a failure.
I am not trying to argue that monogamy is good, but why it came about and for what reasons.
Sorry, I guess I read some implications in there that you didn't intend.
Also, historically divorce rates were at 0%. Does this prove that monogamy is good? No, it is just a single unrelated fact.
It's not unrelated, but it is debatable how it affects things. My contention is that divorce rates were 0% (or very low, after that) because women in previous centuries and generations were second-class citizens and couldn't leave bad marriages (and the same also went for men, but to a lesser degree; society frowned so much on divorce that it just wasn't done). The rates are much higher now because women have equal rights, and are able to have their own careers, so they don't need men to be meal tickets any more, so people don't stay in unhappy marriages like they used to. All this points to the idea that monogamy and life-long marriages are simply a bad and unworkable idea for most people. In fact, in centuries past, love wasn't even a factor in marriages, only convenience and politics.
the proven method of living like animals in small tribal units.
The problem here is this doesn't work so well with modern society. However, there are more and more people joining up into polyamorous groupings, which do resemble tribes, and have as one component resource-sharing. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future. It's not at all unlike Robert Heinlein's "line marriages". In generations past, people used to rely on their extended families a lot. These days, people are more mobile, and also frequently don't really like their extended families, but with polyamorous groupings, people only associate out of freewill and interest, not because of blood relations.
But beyond that, I would argue that the family unit incentives and protects the post-fertile woman more than the tribal sharing society of old did.
I disagree. Some people are luckier than others and have better or bigger families. I know lots of people whose families don't give a shit about them. Tribes don't have this problem so much.
The problem with old tribal societies, of course, is that they don't really work in larger societies that were enabled by the development of agriculture.
You seem to be rather refuting your own arguments here. Was agriculture capable of providing more food or was it less food?
I think it depends on what exactly you're comparing. If you compare early agriculture to hunter-gatherer societies in their peak, it's probably less. Think about it: why would you expend so much effort sowing seeds and tilling dirt when you can just run around and pick plentiful naturally-growing stuff? The problem is that, as human populations grew, there wasn't enough naturally-growing food (flora or fauna) to support those populations, so people invented agriculture. Modern agriculture, of course, can provide enormous amounts of food.
The other problem is that agriculture doesn't provide a very good diversity of food; that's why people lost a foot of height when they switched (there's archaeological studies about this). These days, however, we've made up for it thanks to large-scale trade and transportation, so obviously a modern grocery store has an enormous variety of foods from all over the world. But in 2000BCE this wasn't the case, and in fact it's only been recently that people have gotten tall again.
I would argue that agriculture was the worst thing to ever happened to humans and the entire planet but that is mostly a personal preference not a fact.
That's definitely personal preference. Today's large societies are also why we have computers, the internet, smartphones, space travel, etc. Small societies simply cannot develop these technologies, nor can they develop medical technologies and knowledge which allow people to routinely live to 100 and not die of common infections.
I do agree we have a population problem at pres
You seem to be arguing that monogamy is a good thing, which it is not. A 50+% divorce rate proves this.
In primitive communities, old women didn't need "one and only one man" to provide for her. The whole village provided for everyone. What you contend is an advantage is only so in Randian societies where people don't look out for each other, and everyone is out for himself.
Your comment also has a bit of very obvious misogyny in it.
Also, agriculture was a giant detriment to human societies at first. It didn't give people leisure time at all; they had to toil endlessly making crops grow. Before this, they just went into the wild and picked naturally-growing fruits and seeds and hunted animals. The only reason people stopped being hunter-gatherers was because their populations grew too large for their environment, and agriculture made it possible to sustain much larger populations. In addition, people lost a foot of height when they switched to agriculture, because hunter-gatherer lifestyles were far more healthy and nutritious. It took millennia for people to reach the average heights they had before the invention of agriculture.
Because Europeans were sexually frustrated and channeled their energy into conquering, while the Hawaiians sat around in a paradise (Hawaii is warm and fertile year-round, unlike Europe and most other places) having orgies and generally being happy and not feeling any need to go steal other peoples' land and resources?
Societies expect various things of adults that involve resisting animal instincts.
And how exactly do you know that these primitive societies are the ones expecting things which resist animal instincts, and that other societies (with men hoarding women and restricting their sexuality) are the ones which aren't? How do you know you don't have it backwards?
Or maybe both societies are resisting animal instincts: maybe the pro-sex societies are resisting mens' instincts, while the anti-sex, pro-monogamy societies are the ones resisting womens' instincts.