BBEdit is great for writing PERL or just about any code you can think of. Yes, BBEdit supports line-numbering.
Of course, whether you're working in UltraEdit or BBEdit or NotePad or SimpleText, when you're debugging PERL it's PERL and not your editor that will be telling you what's working and what's not.
I agree that disrespect for bad and/or unethical business practice might encourage unethical and/or illegal behavior on the part of the consumer, but it does not excuse it. For example, the RIAA and the Big 5 have been convicted for price-fixing. Because CD prices still have not appreciably come down, some consumers may feel justified in violating copyright, but that does not make such violations ethical nor legal.
I also take intense issue with your allegtion that 50% of "rappers are convicts". Even if such were true, violating copyright of their recorded works is not justified by that fact alone.
Finally, Pharmboy, you insinuate that you have illegally copied all of Metallica's mp3s, though it is allowable you may in fact not have. (Whether you actually "love" Metallica is also debatable since everything they cut after 1991 is complete trash.) Are you saying you did so because you perceived Metallica as ex-cons or schmucks? Basically, your argument boils down to: if someone is stupid or has been convicted of a crime, that person does not deserve equal protection under the law (i.e. with regard to copyright law.)
Though you seem (your argument seems) particularly schmucky and criminal-minded to me, I don't think it is OK to steal from you. Besides, your mp3 library has a bunch of crappy Metallica tracks.
(I am not an opponent of file-sharing or fair-use rights. I just don't like muddle-headed justifications for illegal behavior.)
(I'm assuming your requirement of transferring files "without the net" means "without the Internet".)
If you like floppies to transfer files between machines chances are that those machines don't have ethernet cards. Here's a hint: get ethernet cards.
It's a trivial matter to share files between ethernet-equipped computers. Beats floppies that's for damn sure. I'm very sorry if you are forced to work on machines that do not/cannot have ethernet cards.
I'm in agreement with z_gringo, but in a sorta oblique way.
The description of the software indicates that threedegrees is a P2P app with a desktop interface. Groups are represented by icons that live on your desktop. Dragging files onto an icon causes members of that group receive copies of those files. This is slick.
Imagine having several groups--Thursday night bowling tourney, monthly staff colloquim, ad hoc governance committee, family, extended family, in-laws, etc.--all of whom could receive some set or subset of different files you choose. You send the files and then chat about what you've received. This is a low-fi version of virtual reality conferencing.
Popular chat clients do have a feature like this, but one of the most popular--AOL Insant Messenger--requires you to invite people 1 by 1. Seems to me threedegress admirably leverages P2P communications technology by means of a GUI.
I am anti-Microsoft as they come: their history makes me so. But threedegrees seems to be a significant application of a GUI to P2P technology. I also think the idea of musicmix is *very* interesting, given that it seems to preserve fair use without infringing on copyright (original owner must be online in order for threedegreed files to be heard).
I'll withhold final judgement until I can test a threedegree client on my Mac. Until then, threedegrees sounds pretty cool, so I'm game. (ugly EULAs and software hiccups notwithstanding)
Why don't you try reading my post? I said nothing about the porousness of abolitionist sentiment. Yes, some Unionists did own slaves.
But to address your pointless cavil, after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery would have been abolished with a Union victory. And so it was. That, my Southern apologist friend, is history.
/. user tonyhill (above) gets it exactly right, but lest his argument go ignored by the muddle-headed . . .
Slavery was an economic system that had at its center the oppression of a group of people based on birthright. It was a system of production that deprived people of their most fundamental rights to self-determination.
Copyrights do not deprive anyone of their most fundamental rights to self-determination except in those cases where persons are prosecuted for copyright violation and jailed. Even then, this is not a determination made at birth. Copyright law is not really about morality and human self-determination in the same way that slavery as property right was.
As for your suggestion that the war on terrorism can be compared to the Civil War, let me suggest you read some history, pronto. The Civil War threatened to sunder the political integrity of a nation-state because factions on one of two sides disagreed whether slavery was an economic or a moral problem (turns out it was both).
The war on terrorism is not in response to copyright law and, furthermore, is really cover for executive saving face (can't find Osama) and inflating oil prices (wartime scarcity).
Oh, and by the way, may I have a hit of what you've been smoking 'cause that shit must be good.
While it's true that the RIAA and MPAA has some of Congress in its pockets, some legislators do operate on principles: witness the defection of six key Republican Senators (link is to an abstract; I don't work for the NYTimes. CNN article here) about drilling in the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
Yes, legislators like to get reelected and so are susceptible to campaign contributions. But many of them still have consciences which lead them to vote in the interests of the public rather than in the interests of business (not that the two are always opposed).
Legislators do somtimes listen to the dictates of public interest, though that all too rarely.
The upshot (for those of you who don't read articles outside of/.) is that "octothorpe" is a word that was invented (whimsically constituted) by Bell Labs research head Don MacPherson in the early 1960s.
The symbol #, chosen as one of two data input keys for computer access over phones, had not been named. MacPherson was giving presentations on the use of phones for computer access and decided to come up with a name. "Octo" comes from the fact that a # symbol has eight points, while "thorpe" derives from the name of Olympic medalist Jim Thorpe. MacPherson was on a committee attempting to have Thorpe's medals returned from Sweden.
___________
Oh, and regarding Microsoft's pantenting of.NET technologies. There's nothing necessarily good or bad about it, but given Microsoft's history we should be prepared for the worst. (Now who's saying "All your base?)
But if Microsoft are smart, they will realize that the best way to get and maintain market share (which is different than a monopoly) in an open source wolrd is to facilitate the distribution of the use and licensing of their patented technologies, with free beer if necessary.
You wrote: black asphalt products on their roofs (which does everything wrong, being hot in summer and cold in winter).
If you're talking about the ability of black asphalt to absorb light and retransmit that as heat, then doesn't it stand to reason black is the best color for your roof during the winter season?
Polished aluminum is a great way to reflect light but a terrible way to insulate.
It is appropriate that Daly's broadcasting presence is being termed a "simulacrum" becuase that is exactly the term P. K. Dick uses to describe the androids built to help colonize the moon in We Can Build You. The simulacra are originally built as a potential source of profit and though they are never produced in mass, the idea is that they would make perfect laborers (nannies). This idea is present also in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which gets represented in the form of replicants in the Hollywood translation, Bladerunner)
But this is all a long way of saying that simulacra will displace humans from their jobs. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (though it is in some respects). Just saying that labor issues are a main source of the controversy, in addition to the manufacturing of corporate-sponsored national taste disguised as authentic local style.
(Regarding regional inhabitants, New Yorkers are New Yorkers while people living in L. A. are Los Angelenos.)
You open the case, the CD logo is there. All is well in the world.
You open the case, no CD logo to be found. You go back to the store and return the CD because there's no chance you duped it. It's copy-protected, remember?
The astronauts on board Columbia gave their lives in the pursuit of science and the advancement of humankind, and the poem you quote helps us remember their accomplishments, even as we mourn their passing.
Thanks.
My prayers are with those astronauts and for their families. May they be forever at peace.
Doesn't the real world (meatspace) force us to use both eyes? (That is, those of us capable of binocular vision.) Last I checked, human depth perception largely depended on both eyes being, as you say, "forced" to work.
Maybe the headaches also had something to do with Virtual Boy's low-res, high-contrast graphics . . . that and its less-frequent-than-reality's refresh intervals.
You said, I certainly earned straight A's in humanities classes (literature and a lot of Asian history and language) with a fraction of the effort required to maintain a B average as a molecular biology major.
As a professor of English, my direct advice to you would have been to switch your major, though you probably would have flunked out if you tried to study English beyond the undergraduate level.
The Tempest was being performed in 1611. It was printed in the First Folio in 1623. In 1580 Mongaigne wrote "Of the Cannibals" about the Brazilian Indians, and this essay is the source of Gonzalo's speech. Colonial Britain was well under way by the early 1600s. Indeed, any casual reader of The Norton Shakespeare will find the following:
The issues raised by Montaigne, and more generally by New World voyages, may have been particularly interesting to The Tempests's early audiences as news reached London of the extraordinary adventures of the Virginia Company's colony at Jamestown. Shakespeare seems to have read a detailed account of these adventures in a letter written by the colony's secretary, William Strachey; though the letter was not printed until 1625, it was evidently circulating in manuscript in 1610. (Quoted from The Norton Shakespeare. 1997 edition, pp. 3051-3052)
If you had asserted that imperial England did not begin until the 19th century (do you even know what was happening in Georgian England during the 18th century?) you would have gotten an F in my class, especially if you used it as a means to debunk postcolonial readings of The Tempest.
Shows what you learned at Yale. What a waste of money.
I'm not going to hunt this down, but I will point out that standard, easy-to-understand speech is about 150-200 wpm. That *handily* outstrips all but the most blindlingly fast of typists.
12 mph, made out of metal, and a head an an half taller than your average person, a Segway runnnig into a pedestrian walking at 3 miles per hour would have a relative velocity of 15 mph and that would hurt.
Try walking into a metal object moving a ZERO mph and tell me this is not a hazard.
I'm not saying Segways move dangerously fast, but I am saying they move quickly enough that comparing their top speed to the speed of other faster moving things doesn't mean a whole lot.
Treating computer processes and network connections as extensions of human being ignores the great complexity of computer systems and the irreducible nuances to responsibility, origin, and intent such machines introduce.
Translating your argument into the world of atoms, that would be like holding someone responsible for a vandal who goes into someone's unlocked car, releases the emergency brake, and lets the car go careering into a crowd of innocent bystanders. Just because computers seem to "act" does not mean that their actions are always the fault of their owners, secure systems or no.
The key is to hold those who crack systems accountable for their actions and to educate victims about how to better secure their systems. Those users unwilling or unable to secure their systems should pay third parties to secure their systems for them.
Even the best secured system is not uncrackable. Would you hold the best sysadmin in the world responsible for a script kiddie's lucky guess?
True, people had envisioned many of the post-noir themes in literature before Gibson. Even high-literary types like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow plays around with the idea of uploading consciousness into a machine.
But it took someone who could recognize exactly where in the network our culture was positioned to be able to coin a term that captured and shaped our collective sense of what was happening. That term is "cyberspace" and it was invented by William Gibson in Neuromancer. For all Brunner's prescience, he did not come up with the word that defines an entire era of human history. Gibson did.
First line of the novel:
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
That is just fucking brilliant writing. You won't find the same in Brunner.
Where it all started (beginning at the novel's 16th paragraph, page 4 of the Ace Books 1984 impression, i.e. the first):
The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that Memphis hotel.
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly.
Cultural history was made and, as a result, Gibson's name will be transmitted for hundreds of generations to come. Brunner's will be the work of literary historians.
OK, this might be a bit offtopic, but I started thinking, "Hell yes! Of course in order to journey into space we'd need big fat guns. There are aliens out there."
But then I thought about the technologies and laws of physics that would need to be discovered/manipulated in order to build such awesome technologies, stuff that would make the discovery that mass is equal to velocity times the speed of light squared look like high school algebra.
Then I thought about those benevolent alien cultures that are so far advanced because they really get it (whereas we hairless apes are still stuck on blowing up everything that doesn't look like us, including us!) and how they keep close tabs on threshold civilizations, cultures that may be on the verge of actually achieving extra-solar travel that might bring them into contact with other mathematically-capable species.
Wouldn't those aliens have entire philosophical and cultural systems to undermine the researches of such potentially dangerous cultures (e.g. homo sapiens)? They'd be watching us not too attentively until we, say, got to orbiting our own moon, automating travel to nearby planets, and at that point would determine that humans suck, wanting as we do to build Death Stars. So they'd simply inbuild viral memes and technologies to make our culture dumb.
To wit: Star Wars (as a military policy), Grand Theft Auto 3, undercutting of Clean Air Act, defunding NASA, squabbling over nuclear weapons technologies, polluting our gene pool (e.g. premature human cloning, recombinant DNA eugenics), heck, even Slashdot (fearsome productivity killer).
Granted, the above might just be Pynchon updated for the space age, but if I were on the other end of the human race's attempts to get into outer space, I sure as hell wouldn't let us get there. We're dangerous, hateful, and cancerous. We are not mature enough as a species to come into contact with other species capable of understanding abstract symbol systems, including our very own selves.
Slashdot Mirror
But, to top it off, I read ALL of the comments to this article so far. Not a single good one -- doesn't that hint at something?
Without scrutinizing timestamps, I've already read several good comments in the above.
Needless to say, your post is not one of them.
BBEdit is great for writing PERL or just about any code you can think of. Yes, BBEdit supports line-numbering.
Of course, whether you're working in UltraEdit or BBEdit or NotePad or SimpleText, when you're debugging PERL it's PERL and not your editor that will be telling you what's working and what's not.
I agree that disrespect for bad and/or unethical business practice might encourage unethical and/or illegal behavior on the part of the consumer, but it does not excuse it. For example, the RIAA and the Big 5 have been convicted for price-fixing. Because CD prices still have not appreciably come down, some consumers may feel justified in violating copyright, but that does not make such violations ethical nor legal.
I also take intense issue with your allegtion that 50% of "rappers are convicts". Even if such were true, violating copyright of their recorded works is not justified by that fact alone.
Finally, Pharmboy, you insinuate that you have illegally copied all of Metallica's mp3s, though it is allowable you may in fact not have. (Whether you actually "love" Metallica is also debatable since everything they cut after 1991 is complete trash.) Are you saying you did so because you perceived Metallica as ex-cons or schmucks? Basically, your argument boils down to: if someone is stupid or has been convicted of a crime, that person does not deserve equal protection under the law (i.e. with regard to copyright law.)
Though you seem (your argument seems) particularly schmucky and criminal-minded to me, I don't think it is OK to steal from you. Besides, your mp3 library has a bunch of crappy Metallica tracks.
(I am not an opponent of file-sharing or fair-use rights. I just don't like muddle-headed justifications for illegal behavior.)
(I'm assuming your requirement of transferring files "without the net" means "without the Internet".)
If you like floppies to transfer files between machines chances are that those machines don't have ethernet cards. Here's a hint: get ethernet cards.
It's a trivial matter to share files between ethernet-equipped computers. Beats floppies that's for damn sure. I'm very sorry if you are forced to work on machines that do not/cannot have ethernet cards.
I'm in agreement with z_gringo, but in a sorta oblique way.
The description of the software indicates that threedegrees is a P2P app with a desktop interface. Groups are represented by icons that live on your desktop. Dragging files onto an icon causes members of that group receive copies of those files. This is slick.
Imagine having several groups--Thursday night bowling tourney, monthly staff colloquim, ad hoc governance committee, family, extended family, in-laws, etc.--all of whom could receive some set or subset of different files you choose. You send the files and then chat about what you've received. This is a low-fi version of virtual reality conferencing.
Popular chat clients do have a feature like this, but one of the most popular--AOL Insant Messenger--requires you to invite people 1 by 1. Seems to me threedegress admirably leverages P2P communications technology by means of a GUI.
I am anti-Microsoft as they come: their history makes me so. But threedegrees seems to be a significant application of a GUI to P2P technology. I also think the idea of musicmix is *very* interesting, given that it seems to preserve fair use without infringing on copyright (original owner must be online in order for threedegreed files to be heard).
I'll withhold final judgement until I can test a threedegree client on my Mac. Until then, threedegrees sounds pretty cool, so I'm game. (ugly EULAs and software hiccups notwithstanding)
I went to the Intuit site and asked them if they were aware about what was going on here:
I also suggested that it might be a good thing if a head or three rolled . . .
Why don't you try reading my post? I said nothing about the porousness of abolitionist sentiment. Yes, some Unionists did own slaves.
But to address your pointless cavil, after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery would have been abolished with a Union victory. And so it was. That, my Southern apologist friend, is history.
/. user tonyhill (above) gets it exactly right, but lest his argument go ignored by the muddle-headed . . .
Slavery was an economic system that had at its center the oppression of a group of people based on birthright. It was a system of production that deprived people of their most fundamental rights to self-determination.
Copyrights do not deprive anyone of their most fundamental rights to self-determination except in those cases where persons are prosecuted for copyright violation and jailed. Even then, this is not a determination made at birth. Copyright law is not really about morality and human self-determination in the same way that slavery as property right was.
As for your suggestion that the war on terrorism can be compared to the Civil War, let me suggest you read some history, pronto. The Civil War threatened to sunder the political integrity of a nation-state because factions on one of two sides disagreed whether slavery was an economic or a moral problem (turns out it was both).
The war on terrorism is not in response to copyright law and, furthermore, is really cover for executive saving face (can't find Osama) and inflating oil prices (wartime scarcity).
Oh, and by the way, may I have a hit of what you've been smoking 'cause that shit must be good.
While it's true that the RIAA and MPAA has some of Congress in its pockets, some legislators do operate on principles: witness the defection of six key Republican Senators (link is to an abstract; I don't work for the NYTimes. CNN article here ) about drilling in the National Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
Yes, legislators like to get reelected and so are susceptible to campaign contributions. But many of them still have consciences which lead them to vote in the interests of the public rather than in the interests of business (not that the two are always opposed).
Legislators do somtimes listen to the dictates of public interest, though that all too rarely.
a little off topic, but as long as we're talking about the octothorpe
The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary does not list "octothorpe" as an existing word. However, google knows more than the OED ever could, and a search for the string "octothorpe" yields the origin of the word "octothorpe" as its third hit.
The upshot (for those of you who don't read articles outside of /.) is that "octothorpe" is a word that was invented (whimsically constituted) by Bell Labs research head Don MacPherson in the early 1960s.
The symbol #, chosen as one of two data input keys for computer access over phones, had not been named. MacPherson was giving presentations on the use of phones for computer access and decided to come up with a name. "Octo" comes from the fact that a # symbol has eight points, while "thorpe" derives from the name of Olympic medalist Jim Thorpe. MacPherson was on a committee attempting to have Thorpe's medals returned from Sweden.
___________
Oh, and regarding Microsoft's pantenting of .NET technologies. There's nothing necessarily good or bad about it, but given Microsoft's history we should be prepared for the worst. (Now who's saying "All your base?)
But if Microsoft are smart, they will realize that the best way to get and maintain market share (which is different than a monopoly) in an open source wolrd is to facilitate the distribution of the use and licensing of their patented technologies, with free beer if necessary.
This guy brews 30 liters every six weeks, and is quoted as saying "A priest without alcohol, that's the wrong combination."
No doubt about it: this is a man of God!
You wrote: black asphalt products on their roofs (which does everything wrong, being hot in summer and cold in winter).
If you're talking about the ability of black asphalt to absorb light and retransmit that as heat, then doesn't it stand to reason black is the best color for your roof during the winter season?
Polished aluminum is a great way to reflect light but a terrible way to insulate.
Right on head, as a matter of fact.
It is appropriate that Daly's broadcasting presence is being termed a "simulacrum" becuase that is exactly the term P. K. Dick uses to describe the androids built to help colonize the moon in We Can Build You. The simulacra are originally built as a potential source of profit and though they are never produced in mass, the idea is that they would make perfect laborers (nannies). This idea is present also in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which gets represented in the form of replicants in the Hollywood translation, Bladerunner)
But this is all a long way of saying that simulacra will displace humans from their jobs. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (though it is in some respects). Just saying that labor issues are a main source of the controversy, in addition to the manufacturing of corporate-sponsored national taste disguised as authentic local style.
(Regarding regional inhabitants, New Yorkers are New Yorkers while people living in L. A. are Los Angelenos.)
You open the case, the CD logo is there. All is well in the world.
You open the case, no CD logo to be found. You go back to the store and return the CD because there's no chance you duped it. It's copy-protected, remember?
It's a way of signalling one's humility and mortality in the face of something really big and scary, something you seem not to have a clue about.
The astronauts on board Columbia gave their lives in the pursuit of science and the advancement of humankind, and the poem you quote helps us remember their accomplishments, even as we mourn their passing.
Thanks.
My prayers are with those astronauts and for their families. May they be forever at peace.
I'm all about humor, but your insensitivity is astonishing. Furthemore, your joke isn't even funny and some lame-brained mod gives you "Interesting"?
Hey, SexKellkyOsbourne? Fuck you. I hope you remember this moment when one of your own eats shit.
<skeptic's query>
</skeptic's query>
You said, I certainly earned straight A's in humanities classes (literature and a lot of Asian history and language) with a fraction of the effort required to maintain a B average as a molecular biology major.
As a professor of English, my direct advice to you would have been to switch your major, though you probably would have flunked out if you tried to study English beyond the undergraduate level.
The Tempest was being performed in 1611. It was printed in the First Folio in 1623. In 1580 Mongaigne wrote "Of the Cannibals" about the Brazilian Indians, and this essay is the source of Gonzalo's speech. Colonial Britain was well under way by the early 1600s. Indeed, any casual reader of The Norton Shakespeare will find the following:
If you had asserted that imperial England did not begin until the 19th century (do you even know what was happening in Georgian England during the 18th century?) you would have gotten an F in my class, especially if you used it as a means to debunk postcolonial readings of The Tempest.
Shows what you learned at Yale. What a waste of money.
1. Copy the link location from the article being considered for posting to the front page.
2. Paste that URL into the search field.
3. Post story if and only if no result pops up.
No need for keywords, no extraneous results.
I'm not going to hunt this down, but I will point out that standard, easy-to-understand speech is about 150-200 wpm. That *handily* outstrips all but the most blindlingly fast of typists.
12 mph, made out of metal, and a head an an half taller than your average person, a Segway runnnig into a pedestrian walking at 3 miles per hour would have a relative velocity of 15 mph and that would hurt.
Try walking into a metal object moving a ZERO mph and tell me this is not a hazard.
I'm not saying Segways move dangerously fast, but I am saying they move quickly enough that comparing their top speed to the speed of other faster moving things doesn't mean a whole lot.
Treating computer processes and network connections as extensions of human being ignores the great complexity of computer systems and the irreducible nuances to responsibility, origin, and intent such machines introduce.
Translating your argument into the world of atoms, that would be like holding someone responsible for a vandal who goes into someone's unlocked car, releases the emergency brake, and lets the car go careering into a crowd of innocent bystanders. Just because computers seem to "act" does not mean that their actions are always the fault of their owners, secure systems or no.
The key is to hold those who crack systems accountable for their actions and to educate victims about how to better secure their systems. Those users unwilling or unable to secure their systems should pay third parties to secure their systems for them.
Even the best secured system is not uncrackable. Would you hold the best sysadmin in the world responsible for a script kiddie's lucky guess?
Your post says you would.
True, people had envisioned many of the post-noir themes in literature before Gibson. Even high-literary types like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow plays around with the idea of uploading consciousness into a machine.
But it took someone who could recognize exactly where in the network our culture was positioned to be able to coin a term that captured and shaped our collective sense of what was happening. That term is "cyberspace" and it was invented by William Gibson in Neuromancer. For all Brunner's prescience, he did not come up with the word that defines an entire era of human history. Gibson did.
First line of the novel:
That is just fucking brilliant writing. You won't find the same in Brunner.Where it all started (beginning at the novel's 16th paragraph, page 4 of the Ace Books 1984 impression, i.e. the first):
Cultural history was made and, as a result, Gibson's name will be transmitted for hundreds of generations to come. Brunner's will be the work of literary historians.
OK, this might be a bit offtopic, but I started thinking, "Hell yes! Of course in order to journey into space we'd need big fat guns. There are aliens out there."
But then I thought about the technologies and laws of physics that would need to be discovered/manipulated in order to build such awesome technologies, stuff that would make the discovery that mass is equal to velocity times the speed of light squared look like high school algebra.
Then I thought about those benevolent alien cultures that are so far advanced because they really get it (whereas we hairless apes are still stuck on blowing up everything that doesn't look like us, including us!) and how they keep close tabs on threshold civilizations, cultures that may be on the verge of actually achieving extra-solar travel that might bring them into contact with other mathematically-capable species.
Wouldn't those aliens have entire philosophical and cultural systems to undermine the researches of such potentially dangerous cultures (e.g. homo sapiens)? They'd be watching us not too attentively until we, say, got to orbiting our own moon, automating travel to nearby planets, and at that point would determine that humans suck, wanting as we do to build Death Stars. So they'd simply inbuild viral memes and technologies to make our culture dumb.
To wit: Star Wars (as a military policy), Grand Theft Auto 3, undercutting of Clean Air Act, defunding NASA, squabbling over nuclear weapons technologies, polluting our gene pool (e.g. premature human cloning, recombinant DNA eugenics), heck, even Slashdot (fearsome productivity killer).
Granted, the above might just be Pynchon updated for the space age, but if I were on the other end of the human race's attempts to get into outer space, I sure as hell wouldn't let us get there. We're dangerous, hateful, and cancerous. We are not mature enough as a species to come into contact with other species capable of understanding abstract symbol systems, including our very own selves.