Having installed both systems, and actively maintained my LFS system, I can tell you right now that Gentoo's gotta be about 5 steps away at the very least.
I consider that opinion to be pretty authoritative. My real point was that Gentoo is a LOT closer to the underside of the system than something like Mandrake is. I probably could have made that point without using an invalid comparison.
No checking source code for errors, no manual patch application, no having to write your own initscripts, no having to tweak your/dev entries, the list goes on.
Well, I've had to do 3 of the 4 things you listed. It could be that Gentoo doesn't force you to manage the system at that level, but simply the fact that it allows you to. If you go messing with/dev entries on a RH box, you'll offend six integrity checking programs that will change what you did without telling you, and break 14 system management utilities that run at least 8 nested levels of scripting to do things. As soon as I had a system I could manage at the lower level, I proceeded to do so. Perhaps I took for granted that the average user would follow that progression.
You don't actually provide a valid reason why it's not a "*really* good to have many more people" use Gentoo.
Yes, actually, he did:
I mean that gentoo isn't an easy to handle distro, you have to spend time to understand it and able to use it.
Because installing Gentoo currently is about 2 steps away from installing LFS, you simply cannot do it without learning a LOT about GNU/Linux at a very low level. If you want to install Gentoo, you MUST invest the time to learn how everything works. This frankly provides an idiot barrier to the support community. The only people who can ask questions about Gentoo are those who have made it through the installation. As of right now, you can ask a question on the Gentoo forum and get a useful answer usually within minutes. If you ask a question on the Mandrake forum, it disappears into a black hole of untold thousands of forever unanswered posts. Once the number of utterly clueless users exceeds the ability of the community to disseminate knowledge, support goes underground - with answers only trading hands among people who've made contact with the gurus by some means beyond simply showing up and asking questions.
Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:
How partition and disk structure works
How GCC actually functions
How the kernel is installed and configured
At least something about runlevels and init scripts
I don't think it is unreasonable for this to be minimum knowledge to access support.
That's not what I said. Read my post again. Someone hunting to feed his family is an example of responsible hunting that I gave in support of your comment that 'there are some for whom hunting is a positive, fulfilling, responsible activity, and there are some for whom hunting is childish barbarity' is a logically sound argument. You offered a reasonable argument. I agreed, and now you attack the argument as unreasonable. Make up your mind.
Balls of steel. Never have I seen bullshit so artfully woven. I have to commend you. That is a masterpiece. Seriously, I am not being sarcastic. That really is impressive. However this argument goes, you get cool points for that. The only reason I am keeping this going is to see what you say next. Let's summarize where we stand so far in a shorthand example:
Me: I think my kids should go to school.
You: I think school is reasonable for those who cannot provide any other means of care or education for their children. Therefore...
Me: Hold on a second. School may be a good thing even if other choices are available.
You: My statement was in support of your argument. You are therefore responsible for it. Make up your mind about where you stand!
Classic.
the inverse of 'hunters are either responsible or barbaric' is 'hunters are neither responsible nor barbaric'.
Technically correct. I should have said "opposing view".
You use the words 'inverse', 'counterexample', 'proof', 'premise', 'straw man', 'equivocation', 'argument' and 'logically sound' withoput understanding their formal meanings. You have had no academic training in the field of logic. True or false?
I have had sufficient training to recognize ad hominem when I see it, and to know that such attacks are always launched from a position of weakness.
Moreover, I have sufficient experience with human behavior to identify patterns. Your core retort depended upon my assumption of responsibility for your words, or to put it simply, attributing statements to me which I did not in fact say. Your ad hominem rider cited instances of my use of certain terms, including 'equivocation', which I did not in fact use. I advise, therefore, that you refrain from taking the argument out of the arena of logic by questioning each other's motives, character, or qualifications. You wouldn't want the discussion to descend into an evaluation of your reading comprehension skills.
I'm sure there's someone living in a remote area hunting responsibly for the sole purpose of feeding his family, but I'm equally sure that that person is in the tiny minority.
The claim your premise presumes, that hunting is only reasonable if necessary to maintain human life, is not proved. You reconstructed a new argument based on that premise, and attacked its inverse (those not hunting out of direct need for food are unreasonable). Ergo, straw man, again. Sigh indeed.
The rest of your discussion descended into a pedantic exploration of what is meant by generalization...
The clues you missed in my original post are equivocations like 'majority of' and 'in my experience'.
Okay, let's look for those in your conclusion:
I think it's just the 'grown up' version of pulling the wings off flies; an indulgence of the barbaric side of human nature.
Nope, none there. The pronoun "it" above has no clarifying antecedent. Your statement does nothing to deny that you mean "it" to mean hunting in general, for all people. You mentioned your own experience with hunters in your supporting statements, but you clearly made a leap from your experience to hunting in general when you got to the conclusion. Therefore, no such clues to the scope of your conclusion are evident.
I would be interested to hear why my statements (pertaining to a subset of hunters) require a rigorous logical argument but the original post (defining hunting for everyone) does not.
The OP set out to prove exception to the case of the parent post:
Logically sound - There are some for whom hunting is a positive, fulfilling, responsible activity, and there are some for whom hunting is childish barbarity.
Logically unsound - No, all hunters are childish barbarians.
Another poster has since pointed out that the hunters I have described may not represent most or even many hunters. This is true but does not invalidate my counterexample.
You did point out a counterexample to the suggestion that hunting is a positive and enriching activity (yourself). The problem is that your argument (that hunters are childish barbarians) requires more than simple proof of exception. It would be possible, given the available evidence, to make a value judgement about you personally, but you haven't supported an argument that would reasonably extend that judgement to hunters in general.
See this comment for my boilerplate reply...For example, you haven't met the majority of heroin addicts, but I imagine you would apply generalisation based on your experience plus secondary sources, and decide not to lend a random junkie your guitar.
Straw man. Lending guitars != hunters are childish barbarians.
the majority of hunters I encounter seem to be pissed idiots, blasting away at roadsigns and leaving beer cans and rubbish everywhere
So you are, what, appealing to stereotype? I don't think I've ever seen that attempted before. Usually the stereotype is the part of the discussion that requires argumentative support, but for you, stereotype=authority.
And yes, I grew up on a farm and have killed things and eaten them. But I was young and stupid then.
That you fit your own stereotype is humorous, but does nothing for your argument.
What your statement would look like if turned to describe other stereotypes (computer geeks, nerds, programmers, etc.), I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
McHenry's thoughts are compelling and interesting. Discussion questions for the class:
McHenry's analysis is based largely on an appeal to authority. By what means is that authority currently established in the world of print media? Was that authority always so well established throughout its history?
McHenry cites a problem with fact consistency in a sample article he selected to discuss. What was the greatest failure you experienced in attempting to use print encyclopedias to research a subject? Was the problem limited to factual errors, or did you come across hopelessly outdated or biased information?
McHenry bemoans the quality of writing in Wikipedia, likening it to mediocre high school grade writing. How many times have you ever used a print encyclopedia to research a paper written at any level higher than middle school for which the encyclopedia served any purpose beyond providing a starting bibliography?
According to Gladstone, the audience does not notice the scanning progress. "The impulses are only 20 ms in length. Neurons in the brain need about 40 ms to recognize the light source. And the head normally will turn after 200 ms.
Is that anything like the horrible brown dots we're not supposed to be able to see? I stopped going to movies when they started doing that. I can't imagine how distracting a strobe light flashing in your face might be.
I was well into my retail career (which thankfully ended) right about the time Best Buy starting making serious inroads to the dominant consumer electronics player at the time - Circuit City.
Circuit City used to be a value-add kind of place. Generally nice stuff, very well trained and informative salespeople - definately not in the category of your local specialty A/V or computer builder store, but for the early 90's they were reasonably high-end. Then Best Buy happened. Best Buy was all about cost. They launched a full-scale attack on Circuit City on price alone. The invented the idea of the bloody loss leader war. They even ran ads against the concept of commissioned salespeople. In the end, people like price. BB gained market share and CC lost it.
I think it's immensely hilarious that Best Buy is now stewing in its low price retailer hell while simultaneously trying to compete against Wal Mart and Dell. They've figured out that they can't be a bottom-feeder in that marketplace, and have begun to learn that while you can take your store down the scale of value-add vs. price-at-all-costs, you can't go back up. That's why the serious names in electronics are so protective of their name brands and enforce minimum advertised pricing so ardently. Most people who are going to buy home theater equipment from a place that has viewing rooms know better than to try to do it at a place like Best Buy. And so it goes.
My advice to Best Buy? I recommend you follow your established market and continue to service them in the way they've come to expect. In other words, apply for a job at your local Wal-Mart.
True, but doesn't trust imply that information is being dispensed rather than shared? Most people who blog aren't necessarily interested in getting quality, authoritative news. They want to (gasp) share what they already know and (hopefully) discuss it.
I don't trust any information source. I read things and evaluate information, but the metric I use to determine whether to accept the information as truth is very complex. I look for independent corroboration, and I read between the lines to try to build what I think the actual facts were that gave rise to the story I am reading.
I think part of what big media thinks of as the blog problem is that people they think of as information consumers have become much more saavy with regard to what they accept as truth. It may be that blogging is not so much the problem as the symptom. If the rats are fleeing, there might be something wrong with the ship.
Space warfare was a long-standing feature of the cold war. The only nation to date which has fielded both an armed manned spacecraft and space station is the former USSR.
Why is this insightful? The movie industry could be losing money on movies that suck AND make movies people would want to "steal", and those two facts may have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Run to failure does not necessarily mean run to Kernel failure. It means run to application failure. The run involved ramping up the speed load until the application would no longer work, so how long the system continued to support the app was a direct reflection of its performance (speed).
Many of us are just as shocked and disappointed as you are. I and 55,124,615 of my closest friends did our best to elect a non-madman, but we ultimately failed to an administration that invaded a country without cause, "lost" $2 billion to Halliburton, and had enough political capital left over to win a second term on a campaign targeted exclusively at their own base.
Before 2000, I was a conservative Republican. I saw the need in that election to put the country ahead of my own party and voted Libertarian. This time, I voted for Kerry. I don't love the Democratic party, but the dangerous state of events in our country right now calls for any plausible opposition, even if it comes from people I disagree with on most issues.
What we've seen here is the final defeat in a long war of ideas that liberals have been steadily losing since 1988. We need to reinvent opposition to the current government along new lines of political thought. I plan on working with my Democrat friends to try to develop that opposition. It will take time, but please remember that there are many of us who aren't happy with the way things are over here and are doing everything we can to fix it.
Um, no: "Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race."
At no point did I suggest Gentoo was 30% faster. It works 30% better for my application in a very specific kind of test. About which you know nothing. You have no clue as to the format or size of the log files generated, how the tools to parse those log files into digestible information work, how big the output is, or what happens when you bring the output data into Excel to graph.
Even if I was in a position to divulge the details of my analysis results to someone outside the company, your inability to read and comprehend what I did say precludes meaningful discussion, so I wouldn't waste the time.
I am actually amazed. You just followed up on the most thorough bitch-slapping I've ever seen anyone receive with the most graceless, pedantic attempt at re-engagement ever attempted.
Let's apply some of your own logic, just for fun:
What becomes an issue is the way they are used, you see.
The only one associating the term "ricer" with Asian culture is you. The rest of us are referring to the origin phrase "rice burner", whose etymology the grandparent so witheringly pointed out to you. If, therefore, it is not the origin of the word, but its use that implies "a problem", then in the name of racial sensitivity, S...T...F...U.
In a real-world application it makes so little difference it's not worth recompiling anyway.
I am not a developer with my own optimization test code. I am a user with an extraordinary real-life requirement to perform a certain application as fast as I possibly can. It has been my job to come up with performance alternatives over the past few months, and I have professionally evaluated Windows, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Gentoo in a lab environment with code that actually does something. I have measured output performance to the millisecond and have more raw analysis data than I can back up to a DVD at the moment.
Gentoo (with -O3 and march=pentium4) significantly outperforms everything else. During run-to-failure testing, Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.
The difference between -O1 and -O3 may certainly be rice (but I was able to determine that by reading the gcc docs), but Gentoo itself most certainly is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, bad comparison on my part.
Having installed both systems, and actively maintained my LFS system, I can tell you right now that Gentoo's gotta be about 5 steps away at the very least.
/dev entries, the list goes on.
/dev entries on a RH box, you'll offend six integrity checking programs that will change what you did without telling you, and break 14 system management utilities that run at least 8 nested levels of scripting to do things. As soon as I had a system I could manage at the lower level, I proceeded to do so. Perhaps I took for granted that the average user would follow that progression.
I consider that opinion to be pretty authoritative. My real point was that Gentoo is a LOT closer to the underside of the system than something like Mandrake is. I probably could have made that point without using an invalid comparison.
No checking source code for errors, no manual patch application, no having to write your own initscripts, no having to tweak your
Well, I've had to do 3 of the 4 things you listed. It could be that Gentoo doesn't force you to manage the system at that level, but simply the fact that it allows you to. If you go messing with
Yes, actually, he did:
I mean that gentoo isn't an easy to handle distro, you have to spend time to understand it and able to use it.
Because installing Gentoo currently is about 2 steps away from installing LFS, you simply cannot do it without learning a LOT about GNU/Linux at a very low level. If you want to install Gentoo, you MUST invest the time to learn how everything works. This frankly provides an idiot barrier to the support community. The only people who can ask questions about Gentoo are those who have made it through the installation. As of right now, you can ask a question on the Gentoo forum and get a useful answer usually within minutes. If you ask a question on the Mandrake forum, it disappears into a black hole of untold thousands of forever unanswered posts. Once the number of utterly clueless users exceeds the ability of the community to disseminate knowledge, support goes underground - with answers only trading hands among people who've made contact with the gurus by some means beyond simply showing up and asking questions.
Gentoo's current installation process makes it impossible to have a functioning system without knowing the following:
- How partition and disk structure works
- How GCC actually functions
- How the kernel is installed and configured
- At least something about runlevels and init scripts
I don't think it is unreasonable for this to be minimum knowledge to access support.Balls of steel. Never have I seen bullshit so artfully woven. I have to commend you. That is a masterpiece. Seriously, I am not being sarcastic. That really is impressive. However this argument goes, you get cool points for that. The only reason I am keeping this going is to see what you say next. Let's summarize where we stand so far in a shorthand example:
- Me: I think my kids should go to school.
- You: I think school is reasonable for those who cannot provide any other means of care or education for their children. Therefore...
- Me: Hold on a second. School may be a good thing even if other choices are available.
- You: My statement was in support of your argument. You are therefore responsible for it. Make up your mind about where you stand!
Classic.the inverse of 'hunters are either responsible or barbaric' is 'hunters are neither responsible nor barbaric'.
Technically correct. I should have said "opposing view".
You use the words 'inverse', 'counterexample', 'proof', 'premise', 'straw man', 'equivocation', 'argument' and 'logically sound' withoput understanding their formal meanings. You have had no academic training in the field of logic. True or false?
I have had sufficient training to recognize ad hominem when I see it, and to know that such attacks are always launched from a position of weakness.
Moreover, I have sufficient experience with human behavior to identify patterns. Your core retort depended upon my assumption of responsibility for your words, or to put it simply, attributing statements to me which I did not in fact say. Your ad hominem rider cited instances of my use of certain terms, including 'equivocation', which I did not in fact use. I advise, therefore, that you refrain from taking the argument out of the arena of logic by questioning each other's motives, character, or qualifications. You wouldn't want the discussion to descend into an evaluation of your reading comprehension skills.
I'm sure there's someone living in a remote area hunting responsibly for the sole purpose of feeding his family, but I'm equally sure that that person is in the tiny minority.
The claim your premise presumes, that hunting is only reasonable if necessary to maintain human life, is not proved. You reconstructed a new argument based on that premise, and attacked its inverse (those not hunting out of direct need for food are unreasonable). Ergo, straw man, again. Sigh indeed.
The rest of your discussion descended into a pedantic exploration of what is meant by generalization...
The clues you missed in my original post are equivocations like 'majority of' and 'in my experience'.
Okay, let's look for those in your conclusion:
I think it's just the 'grown up' version of pulling the wings off flies; an indulgence of the barbaric side of human nature.
Nope, none there. The pronoun "it" above has no clarifying antecedent. Your statement does nothing to deny that you mean "it" to mean hunting in general, for all people. You mentioned your own experience with hunters in your supporting statements, but you clearly made a leap from your experience to hunting in general when you got to the conclusion. Therefore, no such clues to the scope of your conclusion are evident.
The OP set out to prove exception to the case of the parent post:
- Logically sound - There are some for whom hunting is a positive, fulfilling, responsible activity, and there are some for whom hunting is childish barbarity.
- Logically unsound - No, all hunters are childish barbarians.
Another poster has since pointed out that the hunters I have described may not represent most or even many hunters. This is true but does not invalidate my counterexample.You did point out a counterexample to the suggestion that hunting is a positive and enriching activity (yourself). The problem is that your argument (that hunters are childish barbarians) requires more than simple proof of exception. It would be possible, given the available evidence, to make a value judgement about you personally, but you haven't supported an argument that would reasonably extend that judgement to hunters in general.
See this comment for my boilerplate reply...For example, you haven't met the majority of heroin addicts, but I imagine you would apply generalisation based on your experience plus secondary sources, and decide not to lend a random junkie your guitar.
Straw man. Lending guitars != hunters are childish barbarians.
the majority of hunters I encounter seem to be pissed idiots, blasting away at roadsigns and leaving beer cans and rubbish everywhere
So you are, what, appealing to stereotype? I don't think I've ever seen that attempted before. Usually the stereotype is the part of the discussion that requires argumentative support, but for you, stereotype=authority.
And yes, I grew up on a farm and have killed things and eaten them. But I was young and stupid then.
That you fit your own stereotype is humorous, but does nothing for your argument.
What your statement would look like if turned to describe other stereotypes (computer geeks, nerds, programmers, etc.), I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
McHenry's thoughts are compelling and interesting. Discussion questions for the class:
McHenry's analysis is based largely on an appeal to authority. By what means is that authority currently established in the world of print media? Was that authority always so well established throughout its history?
McHenry cites a problem with fact consistency in a sample article he selected to discuss. What was the greatest failure you experienced in attempting to use print encyclopedias to research a subject? Was the problem limited to factual errors, or did you come across hopelessly outdated or biased information?
McHenry bemoans the quality of writing in Wikipedia, likening it to mediocre high school grade writing. How many times have you ever used a print encyclopedia to research a paper written at any level higher than middle school for which the encyclopedia served any purpose beyond providing a starting bibliography?
"I..." BOOM!
(head asplode)
then one sees first only letter salad - clear, is also a sound file.
Letter salad. Yup, I'm filing that one away.
Oh come on, what is there to worry about?
I don't know. Is the skin of the minivan made out of rocket fuel?
-- a truly free people keep no secrets.
Your sig betrays you.
According to Gladstone, the audience does not notice the scanning progress. "The impulses are only 20 ms in length. Neurons in the brain need about 40 ms to recognize the light source. And the head normally will turn after 200 ms.
Is that anything like the horrible brown dots we're not supposed to be able to see? I stopped going to movies when they started doing that. I can't imagine how distracting a strobe light flashing in your face might be.
I was well into my retail career (which thankfully ended) right about the time Best Buy starting making serious inroads to the dominant consumer electronics player at the time - Circuit City.
Circuit City used to be a value-add kind of place. Generally nice stuff, very well trained and informative salespeople - definately not in the category of your local specialty A/V or computer builder store, but for the early 90's they were reasonably high-end. Then Best Buy happened. Best Buy was all about cost. They launched a full-scale attack on Circuit City on price alone. The invented the idea of the bloody loss leader war. They even ran ads against the concept of commissioned salespeople. In the end, people like price. BB gained market share and CC lost it.
I think it's immensely hilarious that Best Buy is now stewing in its low price retailer hell while simultaneously trying to compete against Wal Mart and Dell. They've figured out that they can't be a bottom-feeder in that marketplace, and have begun to learn that while you can take your store down the scale of value-add vs. price-at-all-costs, you can't go back up. That's why the serious names in electronics are so protective of their name brands and enforce minimum advertised pricing so ardently. Most people who are going to buy home theater equipment from a place that has viewing rooms know better than to try to do it at a place like Best Buy. And so it goes.
My advice to Best Buy? I recommend you follow your established market and continue to service them in the way they've come to expect. In other words, apply for a job at your local Wal-Mart.
He has to decide who to trust.
True, but doesn't trust imply that information is being dispensed rather than shared? Most people who blog aren't necessarily interested in getting quality, authoritative news. They want to (gasp) share what they already know and (hopefully) discuss it.
I don't trust any information source. I read things and evaluate information, but the metric I use to determine whether to accept the information as truth is very complex. I look for independent corroboration, and I read between the lines to try to build what I think the actual facts were that gave rise to the story I am reading.
I think part of what big media thinks of as the blog problem is that people they think of as information consumers have become much more saavy with regard to what they accept as truth. It may be that blogging is not so much the problem as the symptom. If the rats are fleeing, there might be something wrong with the ship.
Space warfare was a long-standing feature of the cold war. The only nation to date which has fielded both an armed manned spacecraft and space station is the former USSR.
- Lack of journalistic professionalism.
- Willfully distorting facts to support a political agenda.
What's your poison?Why is this insightful? The movie industry could be losing money on movies that suck AND make movies people would want to "steal", and those two facts may have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
Run to failure does not necessarily mean run to Kernel failure. It means run to application failure. The run involved ramping up the speed load until the application would no longer work, so how long the system continued to support the app was a direct reflection of its performance (speed).
Many of us are just as shocked and disappointed as you are. I and 55,124,615 of my closest friends did our best to elect a non-madman, but we ultimately failed to an administration that invaded a country without cause, "lost" $2 billion to Halliburton, and had enough political capital left over to win a second term on a campaign targeted exclusively at their own base.
Before 2000, I was a conservative Republican. I saw the need in that election to put the country ahead of my own party and voted Libertarian. This time, I voted for Kerry. I don't love the Democratic party, but the dangerous state of events in our country right now calls for any plausible opposition, even if it comes from people I disagree with on most issues.
What we've seen here is the final defeat in a long war of ideas that liberals have been steadily losing since 1988. We need to reinvent opposition to the current government along new lines of political thought. I plan on working with my Democrat friends to try to develop that opposition. It will take time, but please remember that there are many of us who aren't happy with the way things are over here and are doing everything we can to fix it.
The only statistic you mention is "30% faster".
Um, no: "Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race."
At no point did I suggest Gentoo was 30% faster. It works 30% better for my application in a very specific kind of test. About which you know nothing. You have no clue as to the format or size of the log files generated, how the tools to parse those log files into digestible information work, how big the output is, or what happens when you bring the output data into Excel to graph.
Even if I was in a position to divulge the details of my analysis results to someone outside the company, your inability to read and comprehend what I did say precludes meaningful discussion, so I wouldn't waste the time.
I am actually amazed. You just followed up on the most thorough bitch-slapping I've ever seen anyone receive with the most graceless, pedantic attempt at re-engagement ever attempted.
Let's apply some of your own logic, just for fun:
What becomes an issue is the way they are used, you see.
The only one associating the term "ricer" with Asian culture is you. The rest of us are referring to the origin phrase "rice burner", whose etymology the grandparent so witheringly pointed out to you. If, therefore, it is not the origin of the word, but its use that implies "a problem", then in the name of racial sensitivity, S...T...F...U.
In a real-world application it makes so little difference it's not worth recompiling anyway.
I am not a developer with my own optimization test code. I am a user with an extraordinary real-life requirement to perform a certain application as fast as I possibly can. It has been my job to come up with performance alternatives over the past few months, and I have professionally evaluated Windows, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Gentoo in a lab environment with code that actually does something. I have measured output performance to the millisecond and have more raw analysis data than I can back up to a DVD at the moment.
Gentoo (with -O3 and march=pentium4) significantly outperforms everything else. During run-to-failure testing, Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.
The difference between -O1 and -O3 may certainly be rice (but I was able to determine that by reading the gcc docs), but Gentoo itself most certainly is not.
What I find even more creepy, is that some people actually spend any time at all thinking about cheesy SF shows.
You know, you're right. I would have never known I was steeped in hopeless nerdom if it wasn't for you. I only wish I could be as cool as you are.
Should I start by posting insults on Slashdot about how nerdy someone else is, or do I have to work up to that?
Of all the ways I've thought of how a race like the Borg might get started, this is by far the creepiest.