That's why the US military is afforded Geneva Rights conventions and Al Qaieda in Iraq, for example, isn't.
After a tribunal has actually determined that someone is, in fact, a member of such a group, sure. The official policy has been directly opposed to that for a long time, however.
And exactly under which Army or Country do these militants fall so as to be extended Genevea Convention rights again?
Exactly how were any of them actually determined to be 'militants' again?
That's the entire damn point. That taxi driver was killed because a real militant turned him in for reward money and to curry favor with U.S. troops, and those U.S. troops assumed - just like you - that if he was in custody, he must therefore be guilty.
The whole point of citing that section of the Geneva Convention is to illustrate that people like you are flat wrong. It specifically says that you have to extend protections first, and then, if a competent tribunal determines that they don't apply, you can stop. That's to prevent things like taxi drivers getting beaten to death for no reason.
Let's assume that 99.9% of these detainees are scum of the Earth. (They're not, and if you read any of the links I pointed to, you'd know that. But just for the sake of the argument...) They are detained. They are not going to be shooting at anyone or blowing anyone up. We do have the time to examine them and make sure we actually have a 'person of interest' before we start with the clubbings, just to make sure we don't kill some poor guy who was turned in for the reward money.
Oh, wait. Unless your goal really is to just terrify the populace. In which case I take it back, how are we better than Saddam Hussein again?
The rights written in the Bill of Rights apply to all humans
It's also worth pointing out that those rights aren't there to protect the guilty, they are there to protect the innocent. And there's good reason to believe that there are innocent people detained in these camps:
We know that innocent people have been detained and then killed by U.S. forces. If you're not familiar with the case of Dilawar the taxi driver, you need to read this. This guy was captured by an Iraqi warlord trying to deflect suspicion from himself for an attack on U.S. troops. Then, because they thought he screamed funny, a bunch of United States soldiers "pulped" (the words of the doctor who performed the autopsy) his legs. The other four guys were shipped to Gitmo and held for a year or so before they finally decided they posed no threat.
The soldiers there "know" these are bad guys, and treat them that way, regardless of who they are. You ask how I know that? So, a U.S. soldier at Guantanamo is asked to impersonate an unruly detainee for a drill. Unfortunately, the soldiers sent in to subdue him aren't told it's a drill. He ends up with brain damage and seizures.
Detaining 'enemy combatants' makes sense, to an extent. But they are still entitled to a tribunal under the Geneva Convention to determine if they actually are 'enemy combatants'. Go ahead, read Convention III, Article 5 for yourself. Signatories (like the U.S.) are supposed to extend protection preemptively, until and unless a tribunal has determined that the Geneva protections don't apply.
Sure, the U.S. is better than a Soviet gulag or Saddam Hussein's torture rooms. So what? That's not much to brag about. We ought to be an example to the world of the rule of law, like when we advocated and won trial against the Nazis in WWII. The Soviets and the British were all for summary executions... how far we've fallen.
However, when you flip to the User Privileges tab in the application, you can see that Desktop Users can do everything except log in with sudo, which still seems unacceptably broad for security.
Linux, like most Unixes, has a long history of separating things that users can do safely from the things that only privileged users should be able to do. The corners are worn smooth by this point. Windows grew from a single-tasking system with no memory protection (sure, the NT kernel has good, finegrained security, but for backward compatibility they've only finally started insisting on it with Vista) and so applications constantly assume they can muck with things that are none of their business.
On Linux, a regular 'Desktop' user can do all kinds of things, because the apps are written not to need privileges unless they have to have them. The only difference needed between 'Administrator' and 'Desktop' is the ability to sudo.
I wouldn't run Ubuntu on a server... but that's not what it's aimed for.
Can SDL decode MP3 or AAC samples and use them as sound effects in a game? What about decoding video and making it available as a texture?
Sure, with extensions (not unlike OpenGL's mechanism, really): SDL_ffmpeg/ handles practically any audio and/or video format, or there's SDL_sound for just multiple sound formats. These are distributable if necessary, though most distros include the major ones, e.g. SDL_sound.
Voice chat for players with almost no code?
Ya got me there. I haven't looked into it, and a quick Google doesn't turn up much.
DirectX gives you the whole lot in one single API designed to work as a whole.
The libraries I mentioned are specifically designed to work within the SDL framework, too.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like some specifics. I've been working on a gamelike program for a while now and I haven't run into any serious SDL limitations, and maybe two minor ones. Can you give some examples of things SDL lacks relative to DirectX? (This is an honest question, not a belligerent one.)
Future solution: either using virtualization or crafty API emulation, make Linux be able to transparently run Windows games and software.
Nope, that's a trap. OS/2 was essentially 100% Windows 3.1 compatible, and what happened? Developers thought, "Why bother writing an OS/2 native app when I can just write a Windows app and be compatible?" So OS/2 never got any apps to speak of.
Linux needs a better, cross-platform gaming API. Fortunately, it has one.
However, if you really have your heart set on compatibility, check out WINE. I'm running a few older Windows games (Alice, Freedom Force, Tomb Raider III) flawlessly with that. Many of 'em don't work, but I'm surprised how many are playable.
plus, using DirectX give you an almost automatic ticked to the XBox platform
And you need OpenGL to work on the PS3. So the big commercial games are doing the multiple render paths anyway.
Re:Linux is the biggest Linux gaming obstacle
on
Is id Abandoning Linux?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Until there's a more standardized desktop environment such that developers can target one one platform and know that they'll have broad Linux market reach, why would any company bother?
Um... there already is. OpenGL + SDL covers basically everything DirectX does (yes, DirectInput and all that). If you need environmental audio, you can use OpenAL, or roll your own as I gather Id did for Doom3 (and not just on Linux, on Windows as well - you need a patch for hardware audio). As a bonus, SDL apps run on Windows and OSX (along with several other platforms) as well.
Games don't care about the desktop, except for installing a menu item and/or an icon to run the game. And, well, there's a standard for that, too. Once they're running, they take over the screen anyway.
The issues with Linux gaming is entirely a chicken-egg market-share problem. There is just not any kind of technical barrier. Anyone doing a PS3 version is already doing an OpenGL version anyway, so a Linux port is actually quite easy at that point.
You can talk about whatever you want. Vista's hardware support is pretty rotten at this point, which is why sales are relatively low. XP is still the gold standard for consumer desktop OS's.
How many people remember when IBM was pushing their PS/2 systems, with "Micro Channel" that was going to take over everything? It was better than ISA, self-configuring, etc. - but totally controlled by IBM. People had started buying a lot more clones and not "genuine IBM" PCs. IBM wanted to wrest control of the PC market back from the cloners. So they fenced in Micro Channel with all kinds of licenses and patents and expected PC manufacturers to beat a path to their door. They didn't. They worked with EISA and VLB and such until PCI came around, and by then
IBM was very much an also-ran in the PC market.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities. I think MS's reach is exceeding its grasp here. It happened to IBM (which owned computing) and it's starting to happen to MS. Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped
at all - years late).
XP will hold on for a while, but MS won't - can't - put a lot more effort into it. So it'll become less and less viable as an option as time goes on. Particularly since the malware types are unrelenting in attacking it. I'm really not convinced Vista can step up. Linux and Macs aren't sitting still, though, like XP now is. I'm not guaranteeing a Linux victory or anything, but I like the trends. The "ecological niche" currently occupied by XP will change, but XP can't change anymore - it can't do the product equivalent of "habitat tracking".
They did it with their C compiler in the past. When they detected anything but an Intel processor they didn't use the SMD instructions even when the processor indicated full support for SMD *IN THE INTEL DOCUMENTED WAY* You can Google for the details.
DirectX is HEAVEN for game devs, because in theory it means we can write to a single standard for the windows platform, and have our games work on any card.
For your purposes, it sounds like OpenGL+SDL would be heaven, too; possibly even a better one.:-> You can write to a single standard and have your games work on any card, too - but on lots of platforms. Not just Windows, but also Mac and Linux, plus quite a few others. The book "Programming Linux Games" is only a little out of date (basically in the audio section) but is available for free download and covers the ground well. I've been using it for a project and it really is quite straightforward but complete.
Okay, you'd have to rewrite engine code, I grant that. But I'm pretty sure you'd only need to do it once forevermore. And if DX7 really is going away, you'll have to do it eventually anyway.
To date, no direct ancestral chains have been established. That is, where one species can be definitively proven to have descended from another.
Well, actually, as has been pointed out, we have actually seen new species arise. But there's another remarkable fact - the hierarchical arrangement of living things - Animals, Chordates, Vertebrates, Mammals, each containing traits diagnostic of their type. But why? Why no lizards with nipples? Why no insects with fur, or feathers? Why does it form a tree, rather than a bush, or a bunch of straight lines, or a random order?
And then, a century after that remarkable fact had been noticed, there was another tree - one formed from examining DNA. And it is, with almost no surprises, the same tree as found by morphology. It didn't have to be - mouse Cytochrome C and wheat Cytochrome C are slightly different, but genetically-engineered wheat with the mouse version of Cytochrome C grows and lives just fine. So why does the DNA tree look just like the hierarchical pattern of inheritance we'd constructed from morphology?
He made a direct, verbal assault against close-source software with his "except for all the usual reasons about source code being a prerequisite for software freedom"
Oh, come on. Software freedom, as used by the purists, does require access to the source code. Now, whether you value that (or how much you value that) is a separate question. So far as I can see, you appear to be the one waving the huge brush around, where a simple statement somehow manages to proclaim everything that's ever been said by any free-software devotee. It's not like you asked for a clarification or anything...
The guy's allowed to express an opinion. You don't have to agree with it, but just expressing the opinion isn't morally evil or something. Oy.
The very vocal purists seem to paint the picture of the entire community... it wasn't hard for him to show outrageous comments on message boards that appeared with no context in a vein[sic] attempt to prove his point.
"There is no cause so noble it will not attract some kooks." - Larry Niven
You're kind of reinforcing my point there. Quoting irrational message board comments is not an argument. I defy you to name a platform that doesn't have its irrational fanboys. The guy you're talking about had a negative attitude about Linux for other reasons. At most, extremists users were an excuse or rationalization.
If we address the real reasons that people form negative preconceptions about Linux, the whackjobs (and note: I'm not saying the 'free software purists' are 'whackjobs') won't matter.
And just who are you to demand that anyone grant "freedom" to the software that they - not you - spent countless hours coding?
Um... he didn't "demand" that. He just pointed out that some people value 'software freedom' highly, and that value may (for such people) outweigh the utility of closed software, no matter how many hours were spent coding it. The fact that someone doesn't share your tastes or priorities is not prima facie evidence that they are wrong. De gustibus and all that.
Sure, Linux has 'free-software purists' among its users. How could it possibly be otherwise? If they were using Windows or Macs, they would not, ipso facto, be free-software purists.
You seem to be implying that any free-software purism among any Linux users will scare off companies. Perhaps that's even true (though I doubt it, and I'll need more than a couple of anecdotes to convince me of that) but I have to ask why companies are that timid? Don't they know that there are also plenty of pragmatic, 'impure' Linux users, too?
Use nuclear rockets, e.g. this one (the good tech stuff starts in section 7). With that, we can lift a thousand tons into orbit in a completely reusable and non-polluting craft that even eliminates not only its own nuclear waste but also waste generated on Earth.
Yes, I said non-polluting, because the exhaust is non-radioactive hydrogen. (Read the article before denouncing, please.) For in-system work, we could use Orion or variants, or even the nuclear salt-water rocket. Those do have radioactive exhaust, but out in space that's not exactly a major problem. With that level of specific impulse along with high thrust, the costs of developing space resources are drastically reduced.
Colonies on other planets may or may not be a good idea (though with a big enough space economy a moonbase becomes attractive). But mining asteroids and putting dangerous industries in space is a very nice idea once we're not bogged down with just chemical propellants.
Sometimes it's fun to play with trolls. Like training at altitude, when you get back to sea level you can really fly.
Proposition 1: You are a human being.
Proposition 2: It takes a minimum of several years for humans to learn sufficient communication skills to post on Slashdot.
Proposition 3: You are posting on Slashdot.
Proposition 4: Humans must consume other living things to remain alive for several years.
From 1, 2, and 3, we can conclude that you are a human being who is at least several years old. From 4, we can conclude that you've been eating at least plants, probably animals, and certainly many kinds of bacteria and amoebas. Please explain to me how you arranged for their consent to be eaten.
Or, alternatively, please explain which of the above propositions is incorrect. I'll assume #3 is correct. Are you not a human being? Are you still living off breast milk? Are you just really really hungry? Are you so spiritually advanced you don't need food? If either of the latter, why are you wasting time on Slashdot when you could be saving literally millions of lives by disseminating your knowledge about how to live without food?
Or... you're just a schmuck playing word games. Lack of evidence is indeed not proof of a negative, but the real world doesn't have much to do with "proof". Everything is a matter of probabilities, and everything we've seen so far indicates that sentience involves a fairly complex information-processing system. There is zero evidence of such a system in oceans, stars, and mountains. There's some evidence of information-processing capabilities in plants and ameobas, but not at a high level of complexity.
If you've got actual evidence of such things... present it. So far all you've said is that 'if you take enough time' you can talk to an ocean. What do they say? If they are much, much smarter than humans, can I give you a 4096-bit number for them to factor? That's easy to check, but Very Hard to do. Show that, and you'd get lots of attention, not just from me but from many others.
Okay, you're either a troll or else you're actually that clueless, since I pointed out a test in the very message you're replying to. Either way, I strongly doubt that you qualify as sentient in my book.:->
Since it's vastly more likely that you are a troll, I'd appreciate it if you could email me and tell me what possible benefit you get from that. I've never understood your kind.
You do you assume lack of consent is the same as tacit consent?
Uh... no. Are you a troll or something? I assume that 'consent' is only relevant when dealing with something that's actually sentient and therefore capable of giving or denying consent. Mountains et al don't qualify.
I'll be happy to revise my opinion the very instant you introduce me to an ocean that can converse with me. Get back to me when you've got one, I'll be fascinated.
The start of the Half-Life mod They Hunger is like that. Your car goes off the road and you spend quite a while walking through a large deserted graveyard. You think to yourself, "Man, I'd hate to have to fight my way out through all this." And then corpses start animating, and you realize... you actually do.
Slashdot Mirror
After a tribunal has actually determined that someone is, in fact, a member of such a group, sure. The official policy has been directly opposed to that for a long time, however.
Exactly how were any of them actually determined to be 'militants' again?
That's the entire damn point. That taxi driver was killed because a real militant turned him in for reward money and to curry favor with U.S. troops, and those U.S. troops assumed - just like you - that if he was in custody, he must therefore be guilty.
The whole point of citing that section of the Geneva Convention is to illustrate that people like you are flat wrong. It specifically says that you have to extend protections first, and then, if a competent tribunal determines that they don't apply, you can stop. That's to prevent things like taxi drivers getting beaten to death for no reason.
Let's assume that 99.9% of these detainees are scum of the Earth. (They're not, and if you read any of the links I pointed to, you'd know that. But just for the sake of the argument...) They are detained. They are not going to be shooting at anyone or blowing anyone up. We do have the time to examine them and make sure we actually have a 'person of interest' before we start with the clubbings, just to make sure we don't kill some poor guy who was turned in for the reward money.
Oh, wait. Unless your goal really is to just terrify the populace. In which case I take it back, how are we better than Saddam Hussein again?
It's also worth pointing out that those rights aren't there to protect the guilty, they are there to protect the innocent. And there's good reason to believe that there are innocent people detained in these camps:
Detaining 'enemy combatants' makes sense, to an extent. But they are still entitled to a tribunal under the Geneva Convention to determine if they actually are 'enemy combatants'. Go ahead, read Convention III, Article 5 for yourself. Signatories (like the U.S.) are supposed to extend protection preemptively, until and unless a tribunal has determined that the Geneva protections don't apply.
Sure, the U.S. is better than a Soviet gulag or Saddam Hussein's torture rooms. So what? That's not much to brag about. We ought to be an example to the world of the rule of law, like when we advocated and won trial against the Nazis in WWII. The Soviets and the British were all for summary executions... how far we've fallen.
Linux, like most Unixes, has a long history of separating things that users can do safely from the things that only privileged users should be able to do. The corners are worn smooth by this point. Windows grew from a single-tasking system with no memory protection (sure, the NT kernel has good, finegrained security, but for backward compatibility they've only finally started insisting on it with Vista) and so applications constantly assume they can muck with things that are none of their business.
On Linux, a regular 'Desktop' user can do all kinds of things, because the apps are written not to need privileges unless they have to have them. The only difference needed between 'Administrator' and 'Desktop' is the ability to sudo.
I wouldn't run Ubuntu on a server... but that's not what it's aimed for.
Sure, with extensions (not unlike OpenGL's mechanism, really): SDL_ffmpeg/ handles practically any audio and/or video format, or there's SDL_sound for just multiple sound formats. These are distributable if necessary, though most distros include the major ones, e.g. SDL_sound.
Ya got me there. I haven't looked into it, and a quick Google doesn't turn up much.
The libraries I mentioned are specifically designed to work within the SDL framework, too.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd like some specifics. I've been working on a gamelike program for a while now and I haven't run into any serious SDL limitations, and maybe two minor ones. Can you give some examples of things SDL lacks relative to DirectX? (This is an honest question, not a belligerent one.)
Nope, that's a trap. OS/2 was essentially 100% Windows 3.1 compatible, and what happened? Developers thought, "Why bother writing an OS/2 native app when I can just write a Windows app and be compatible?" So OS/2 never got any apps to speak of.
Linux needs a better, cross-platform gaming API. Fortunately, it has one.
However, if you really have your heart set on compatibility, check out WINE. I'm running a few older Windows games (Alice, Freedom Force, Tomb Raider III) flawlessly with that. Many of 'em don't work, but I'm surprised how many are playable.
That's why there's the Simple DirectMedia Layer.
And you need OpenGL to work on the PS3. So the big commercial games are doing the multiple render paths anyway.
Um... there already is. OpenGL + SDL covers basically everything DirectX does (yes, DirectInput and all that). If you need environmental audio, you can use OpenAL, or roll your own as I gather Id did for Doom3 (and not just on Linux, on Windows as well - you need a patch for hardware audio). As a bonus, SDL apps run on Windows and OSX (along with several other platforms) as well.
Games don't care about the desktop, except for installing a menu item and/or an icon to run the game. And, well, there's a standard for that, too. Once they're running, they take over the screen anyway.
The issues with Linux gaming is entirely a chicken-egg market-share problem. There is just not any kind of technical barrier. Anyone doing a PS3 version is already doing an OpenGL version anyway, so a Linux port is actually quite easy at that point.
I commented about this yesterday.
How many people remember when IBM was pushing their PS/2 systems, with "Micro Channel" that was going to take over everything? It was better than ISA, self-configuring, etc. - but totally controlled by IBM. People had started buying a lot more clones and not "genuine IBM" PCs. IBM wanted to wrest control of the PC market back from the cloners. So they fenced in Micro Channel with all kinds of licenses and patents and expected PC manufacturers to beat a path to their door. They didn't. They worked with EISA and VLB and such until PCI came around, and by then IBM was very much an also-ran in the PC market.
I have to say... Vista brings up strong echoes in my mind. It's not an exact parallel but there are a lot of similarities. I think MS's reach is exceeding its grasp here. It happened to IBM (which owned computing) and it's starting to happen to MS. Not just the DRM stuff (which is bad enough) but their fixation on (harmful) backward compatibility and their development model being simply not sufficient for managing a codebase of 50+ million lines (they had to throw out features and start over to get Vista shipped at all - years late).
XP will hold on for a while, but MS won't - can't - put a lot more effort into it. So it'll become less and less viable as an option as time goes on. Particularly since the malware types are unrelenting in attacking it. I'm really not convinced Vista can step up. Linux and Macs aren't sitting still, though, like XP now is. I'm not guaranteeing a Linux victory or anything, but I like the trends. The "ecological niche" currently occupied by XP will change, but XP can't change anymore - it can't do the product equivalent of "habitat tracking".
Or you can clicke here.
For your purposes, it sounds like OpenGL+SDL would be heaven, too; possibly even a better one. :-> You can write to a single standard and have your games work on any card, too - but on lots of platforms. Not just Windows, but also Mac and Linux, plus quite a few others. The book "Programming Linux Games" is only a little out of date (basically in the audio section) but is available for free download and covers the ground well. I've been using it for a project and it really is quite straightforward but complete.
Okay, you'd have to rewrite engine code, I grant that. But I'm pretty sure you'd only need to do it once forevermore. And if DX7 really is going away, you'll have to do it eventually anyway.
Well, actually, as has been pointed out, we have actually seen new species arise. But there's another remarkable fact - the hierarchical arrangement of living things - Animals, Chordates, Vertebrates, Mammals, each containing traits diagnostic of their type. But why? Why no lizards with nipples? Why no insects with fur, or feathers? Why does it form a tree, rather than a bush, or a bunch of straight lines, or a random order?
And then, a century after that remarkable fact had been noticed, there was another tree - one formed from examining DNA. And it is, with almost no surprises, the same tree as found by morphology. It didn't have to be - mouse Cytochrome C and wheat Cytochrome C are slightly different, but genetically-engineered wheat with the mouse version of Cytochrome C grows and lives just fine. So why does the DNA tree look just like the hierarchical pattern of inheritance we'd constructed from morphology?
There are a lot of other things that point to common descent, too.
Oh, come on. Software freedom, as used by the purists, does require access to the source code. Now, whether you value that (or how much you value that) is a separate question. So far as I can see, you appear to be the one waving the huge brush around, where a simple statement somehow manages to proclaim everything that's ever been said by any free-software devotee. It's not like you asked for a clarification or anything...
The guy's allowed to express an opinion. You don't have to agree with it, but just expressing the opinion isn't morally evil or something. Oy.
"There is no cause so noble it will not attract some kooks." - Larry Niven
You're kind of reinforcing my point there. Quoting irrational message board comments is not an argument. I defy you to name a platform that doesn't have its irrational fanboys. The guy you're talking about had a negative attitude about Linux for other reasons. At most, extremists users were an excuse or rationalization.
If we address the real reasons that people form negative preconceptions about Linux, the whackjobs (and note: I'm not saying the 'free software purists' are 'whackjobs') won't matter.
Um... he didn't "demand" that. He just pointed out that some people value 'software freedom' highly, and that value may (for such people) outweigh the utility of closed software, no matter how many hours were spent coding it. The fact that someone doesn't share your tastes or priorities is not prima facie evidence that they are wrong. De gustibus and all that.
Sure, Linux has 'free-software purists' among its users. How could it possibly be otherwise? If they were using Windows or Macs, they would not, ipso facto, be free-software purists.
You seem to be implying that any free-software purism among any Linux users will scare off companies. Perhaps that's even true (though I doubt it, and I'll need more than a couple of anecdotes to convince me of that) but I have to ask why companies are that timid? Don't they know that there are also plenty of pragmatic, 'impure' Linux users, too?
I got yer "high cost of launch" solution right here.
...speaking as someone named Ray Ingles.
Yes, I said non-polluting, because the exhaust is non-radioactive hydrogen. (Read the article before denouncing, please.) For in-system work, we could use Orion or variants, or even the nuclear salt-water rocket. Those do have radioactive exhaust, but out in space that's not exactly a major problem. With that level of specific impulse along with high thrust, the costs of developing space resources are drastically reduced.
Colonies on other planets may or may not be a good idea (though with a big enough space economy a moonbase becomes attractive). But mining asteroids and putting dangerous industries in space is a very nice idea once we're not bogged down with just chemical propellants.
Proposition 1: You are a human being.
Proposition 2: It takes a minimum of several years for humans to learn sufficient communication skills to post on Slashdot.
Proposition 3: You are posting on Slashdot.
Proposition 4: Humans must consume other living things to remain alive for several years.
From 1, 2, and 3, we can conclude that you are a human being who is at least several years old. From 4, we can conclude that you've been eating at least plants, probably animals, and certainly many kinds of bacteria and amoebas. Please explain to me how you arranged for their consent to be eaten.
Or, alternatively, please explain which of the above propositions is incorrect. I'll assume #3 is correct. Are you not a human being? Are you still living off breast milk? Are you just really really hungry? Are you so spiritually advanced you don't need food? If either of the latter, why are you wasting time on Slashdot when you could be saving literally millions of lives by disseminating your knowledge about how to live without food?
Or... you're just a schmuck playing word games. Lack of evidence is indeed not proof of a negative, but the real world doesn't have much to do with "proof". Everything is a matter of probabilities, and everything we've seen so far indicates that sentience involves a fairly complex information-processing system. There is zero evidence of such a system in oceans, stars, and mountains. There's some evidence of information-processing capabilities in plants and ameobas, but not at a high level of complexity.
If you've got actual evidence of such things... present it. So far all you've said is that 'if you take enough time' you can talk to an ocean. What do they say? If they are much, much smarter than humans, can I give you a 4096-bit number for them to factor? That's easy to check, but Very Hard to do. Show that, and you'd get lots of attention, not just from me but from many others.
Okay, you're either a troll or else you're actually that clueless, since I pointed out a test in the very message you're replying to. Either way, I strongly doubt that you qualify as sentient in my book. :->
Since it's vastly more likely that you are a troll, I'd appreciate it if you could email me and tell me what possible benefit you get from that. I've never understood your kind.
Uh... no. Are you a troll or something? I assume that 'consent' is only relevant when dealing with something that's actually sentient and therefore capable of giving or denying consent. Mountains et al don't qualify.
I'll be happy to revise my opinion the very instant you introduce me to an ocean that can converse with me. Get back to me when you've got one, I'll be fascinated.
They'll stop as soon as the sun, stars, mountains, or oceans lodge an objection.
The start of the Half-Life mod They Hunger is like that. Your car goes off the road and you spend quite a while walking through a large deserted graveyard. You think to yourself, "Man, I'd hate to have to fight my way out through all this." And then corpses start animating, and you realize... you actually do.