There may be a decade of linux on the desktop but there will never be a year of linux on the desktop. Linux has steadily gained ground on the desktop for the past several years and will continue to gain ground into the future.
It's not a commercial product, it has all the time it needs to succeed and will never run the in red.
no only does that no begin to qualify as a low end machine but that would give good to great performance in any game on the market and will continue to do so for a few years.
The baseline for smooth operating system performance should be a 4 year old stock dell value consumer desktop.
Think 1+ghz celeron/duron, with 256mb ram, 64mb of which is dedicated to run the onboard intel video chipset. Probably an 80gb drive, a dvd-rom, 10/100 nic with cheap chipset.
Why would you scan paper ballots and perform optical recognition on them instead of counting electronic votes. Either way you are trusting the output of the electronic system. Why bother with a middle man that adds no accountability that saving human readable printouts doesn't give you and introduces complexity and errors?
'The fact that we're being asked to swallow electronic voting is disgusting. Some things electronics simply don't do well, and one such thing is accountability.'
Paper and electronic systems are equally accountable. The solution is transparency and to combine the two. Count the votes electronically, in real time, on a large publically visible display with a serial number attached to the ballot. You watch your vote be added to the tally. Then you take the human readable, optically scannable printout, again with serial number on it and drop it into a seperate box that scans it and keeps a second tally.
You have no proof of your serial number to show someone who wants to buy your vote. Both tallies must match. You watch your vote counted publically and if counted wrong then can raise issue right there. It doesn't matter that you have no proof you are n576898 because there will be a discrepency in the database record for n576898 and the human readable printout. And the pollsters can watch from start to finish to assure that the number of voters matches the number of votes.
'In addition, my experience is that is many cases people who think they can bullshit their way through a report and look good are often detected doing that'
Then again, nobody would know if you're wrong eh?
Sort of like the police always catching the bad guys in crime when they are lucky to catch one in a thousand.
I remember about a year ago hearing that the chinese were attacking our virtual infrastructure. Afterward we suddenly started discovering lead in toy paints. I suspect that closer scrutiny on imports was how we retaliated.
Honestly, if a nation attacks our computers I don't think we should hack back. A military or government attack is an attack, it doesn't matter whether it was a bomb or a cyber attack. We should strike and move to eliminate their infrastructure immediately.
The war on terror and war on drugs are both ridiculous and impossible wars without end. I don't believe in vague or unending wars. I don't believe war should ever be used offensively or pre-emptively unless war is inevitable. I do however believe that the right time to fight another nation is when they are actively attacking us.
'1. What, Posix, OpenGL, and such aren't standardized?'
Yes. But that is several API's short of a complete standardized development platform.
'2. I imagine this is the fault of the Xfree86 guys. They we not very open to other's submissions, so many improvements never happened. This is one of the major reasons everyone switched to Xorg. '
That was what, four or five years ago?
'It is also important to have good cli/ncuses tools in case X isn't working.'
Hence the reason for the already existing tools that fill this need. The existence of good cli tools doesn't justify the lack of standardized GUI tools.
'Also, going with the "fixing grandma's computer" theme: the cli works better over ssh with a slow or high latency connection than with X11.'
Sure when I can remote in. Of course remote access shouldn't be enabled on grandma's computer in the first place for security reasons. But one I'd like grandma to someday catch the gist of what she's doing so she stops calling me. Two, someone else might be helping her (like dell support) and they don't need to be able to read grandma's files.
What about network problems? What about the sort of graphical problems grandma is going to have? You didn't think grandma is going to have an obscure driver issue did you? Grandma can't find her Firefox icon. Or moved a toolbar or menu accidentally.
Linux is a great platform. It scales up to supercomputers and down to wristwatches. It sits well on a tech's desktop or a server performing most tasks. In most roles it performs as well as systems designed primarily to do any one of those things.
Linux is not yet the end all be all system. Work is needed to gain desktop/workstation marketshare.
Microsoft stepped in a pile of golden shit and that pile is responsible for most of their success. But one thing Microsoft did right and continues to do right is to make a highly developer friendly platform and tools. Linux has none of the comprehensive developer goodies from IDE to gaming API's that are present in windows. That's very sad too, since with all the open code floating around for *nix it would blow windows development away if comparable tools were available.
If you want lots of applications and developer support then you make it easy to develop for your platform.
No but this isn't an academic journal and I don't need to cite sources.;)
However, if YOU want to expend time and effort researching this particular topic I will give you a hint to lead you in the right direction. DNA analysis revealed genes related to speech that are believed to be a strong indication of exchange between Neandertals and modern humans.
AFAIK there is not an overall consensus on the matter. There are two schools of thought. Those who believe this is evidence of interbreeding and those who do not.
Sorry for not linking for you but this isn't my field. Your information could well be more up to date than mine. And well... that the google search box is all the way at the top of the screen...
'1. Storing and parsing configuration from text files: please move away from this. How about XML config files? Perhaps even compile these to byte code/compressed XML? XML that compiles to fully indexed configuration DB that allows strongly typed data even? '
Text files are extremely easy to parse, manipulate programatically or manually, backup, etc. I find that often I don't bother to clone systems or do fancy tricks in the *nix world because a few files from/etc with a couple system specific edits allows me to move the configuration effort with me.
What you are saying about compression and byte-code makes sense technically but not practically. The compression would cost you resources rather than save, we are talking about files that are a few bytes, not megabytes. The strong typing makes sense but can easily be handled on the application side and in order to get it you would have to give up the benefits of text file configurations.
'2. Dependency on legacy command line interface directly from 1978 (not kidding).'
That's because there have only been minor improvements on the 1978 interface. Nobody has come up with anything better. If you are the type who needs a natural language interface then you would be happier with a gui anyway. Most people want a cli for speed and efficiency and natural language is the opposite of that. It's long, redundant, and pretty speech. The GUI does pretty on a level the cli will never match.
'3. Expunge the legacy UNIX file system. Gobolinux is a breath of fresh air. No non-unix/unix clone operating system optionally uses such a unfriendly file system layout. No other operating system needs a package manager.'
Every operating system uses a package manager. They just don't call it a package manager. Most just don't work as well. Ever try using the windows package management system to uninstall applications? It doesn't work.
The *nix file system could have a prettier naming scheme (that goes back to the shorter typing thing I think) but aside from that is pretty similar to what you find in other systems. Again, windows is the top contender out there so lets compare. (defaults of course, many of these can be made to differ by the stupid)
C:/home C:\Documents and Settings/lib C:\windows\ C:\windows\system/usr C:\Program Files
These are all roughly comparable. Linux defines ways to break up the binaries from the libraries and configuration files. Windows has directories to break up these things but no standard conventions for doing so, as a result most applications toss some things in windows\system and keep other libraries in their own program folder. Other things they'll toss into a different program folder altogether.
Windows has a standard location that programs are supposed to install into but then defines numerous outside locations for them to put files and settings into, like the registry. The days of everything being self-contained in a folder are gone. On Linux you see a few locations as well./usr/usr/local, etc. I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds the distinction between administrator and distro installed software to be pointless.
Linux has no standard package management but apt has pretty much become the de facto standard among those who prefer to stay sane. Apt will acurately track every file installed by a package and will remove a package completely and cleanly when instructed. Apt will also take care of dependency resolution, windows package management simply ignores the issue and leaves it up to the developer. Windows package management almost never cleanly uninstalls a package. There are registry entries, program folders, preference folders, libraries, etc that are left behind.
Now there are some real advantages in windows. Dependencies are less of a problem because there are relatively stable apis and libraries that most application developers can count on being there.
Linux as a platform does need some standardization. Right now Linux is one of the least developer friendly platforms to target when it should be the most developer friendly.
1. Some standardized interfaces that are disto/gui/hardware neutral would be great. There are interfaces out there but you can't tell me a community made up of mostly developers can't come up with interfaces that are more developer friendly than windows.
The first thing people do to justify the lacking in this area is cry out that proprietary vendors can live with it or say its possible to target Linux anyway see Loki. Just because you could fill your car by siphoning the gas from the tank in the ground instead of using a pump doesn't mean you want to. And some open developers might want to release distro neutral packages instead of tarballs and might not want to pray distro x decides to include their package.
2. I haven't dug into the internals of X so I won't say much about it but there is obviously a fundemental problem with the way hardware is handled by X. It can't support dynamic reconfiguration. Has a great deal of problems with handling secondary displays or the addition of displays without having to 'reboot' X. X auto-detection has improved over time but still needs work.
3. We have standard and reliable cli tools that can be used to configure a linux system without regard to distro or almost without regard to distro. What we need now are similar tools for the GUI. The cli is powerful, it is great and it should be kept that way. That doesn't mean we have to neglect the GUI either. There are great tools in a few user friendly distro's but its time for standardized gui tools that can used in all distros.
Hey, just to throw in a wacky idea. If we are talking about standard gui configuration tools. How about we standardize their identity based on the graphical icon instead of based on the name. Like in the old days of tech support you would direct the moro... err customer double click the big blue E or the N rather than the name because the vendor could have relabeled the shortcut.
These are things that would make Linux more developer friendly overall regardless of what sort of license the developer has in mind.
These changes would make the system user friendly without compromises in terms of power and flexibility. And they would make the system easier to support. If all I have to do is find the configuration tools menu with grandma and then have her open the blue monitor or the two blinking computers without regard to her specific distro and then guide her through a standard tool then sudden it becomes possible to support linux remotely.
'Well, you're right--we disagree about the cloning issue, not to mention your predatory view on life! I look at cloning humans from a moral point of view. I'm more about the famous line in Jurassic Park, "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."'
Predatory. That is probably a better choice of word than you know. I do not believe in a deity or any sort of innate morality. My 'right' and 'wrong' therefore stem from practical things like self-interest, family/friend/pet interest, and the interests of my species. The home teams if you will. I believe that ultimately, knowledge benefits myself, my family, and my species and there are few things I think aren't justified to gain it.
The knowledge we gain from studying the Neanderthal could still be benefiting our species in another 10,000 years. There are billions of humans and trillions of lifeforms on this planet. Millions of them are suffering and dying senselessly at any given moment. The few lifeforms that suffer in some capacity or die for a sensible reason are among the least tragic of them in my opinion. That doesn't make their suffering less or that we shouldn't avoid causing it. But we do what we need to do, the knowledge is more important than individuals.
'And why do you think a cloned Neanderthal will receive, "finest education, free healthcare, the finest meals, and pretty much any electronics toys he likes"?'
I'll answer this with another part of your quote.
'We don't know'
We don't know, so the finest minds in the world will be custom crafting his education so that we can determine the potential of an Neaderthal. He will be a precious one of a kind object so he will have the finest medical care we can give him. Everything including his tastes, habits, and hobbies is a mystery that mankind wants to know so we will provide him with most anything that will interest him. As for going out in public, yes it will be limited, but again that is no different than life for the president or a celebrity.
'He be stuck in a lab, poked and prodded'
That really goes hand-in-hand with having the finest healthcare we can provide. In terms of literal pokes and prods probably not so much. We would take some blood for examination and of course monitor his health but why poke after that? The metaphoric pokes and prods would probably more likely take the form of observation and psychological tests of various sorts. That isn't going to hurt anyone.
Whether his intellect justifies a Harvard level of education or 20 years teaching him to grunt in order to acknowledge that two different objects are both trucks he will have all his needs cared for and never have to worry a day in his(her/its) life.
If you want a moral issue it would be that he was not able to choose. This life, both the benefits and obligations would be thrust upon him. But really, how much different is that than the rest of us? How much sympathy do we have for those who are born royalty?
Yes but the bear is the wrong comparison. We didn't fight Neanderthals, we fucked them. Our winning had to do with our females or the mixed females being more attractive than their females.
A different kind of fight, and it still had nothing to do with their mental capacity;)
I agree with you until the end. I think the qualms about cloning a human are ridiculous and Neanderthal even more ridiculous.
Of course he is just an animal, just as we are nothing but self-inflated animals. It is fair to make him an exhibit or lab rat for our benefit in the same manner it is fair for a wolf to eat a rabbit. Sucks for the rabbit but that is life.
On the other hand, a cloned Neanderthal will likely enjoy a better and easier life than you or I have ever been a party to. He will receive the finest education, free healthcare, the finest meals, and pretty much any electronics toys he likes. He will have millions of dollars worth of resources at this disposal and absolutely no responsibilities whatsoever. Are you really calling giving a being the life of a celebrity an act of cruelty? Basically, he's a movie star without having to make the movies.
My understanding is actually that the most recent DNA analysis strongly indicates that Neanderthal did indeed mate with humans and that we carry their DNA still.
Slashdot Mirror
There may be a decade of linux on the desktop but there will never be a year of linux on the desktop. Linux has steadily gained ground on the desktop for the past several years and will continue to gain ground into the future.
It's not a commercial product, it has all the time it needs to succeed and will never run the in red.
Considering Microsoft was writing vista 7yrs ago, 10yr old programs not working on it is actually kinda sad.
It is if the system is delayed flushing that cached crap to disk when me (meaning whatever I am doing) requires it to be available.
No it won't, it will swap. In fact, that one gig isn't even counting the 8gigs of useless swap vista is already using at that point.
The UI isn't better performing or less cluttered. It's prettier. How do you quantify prettier?
no only does that no begin to qualify as a low end machine but that would give good to great performance in any game on the market and will continue to do so for a few years.
The baseline for smooth operating system performance should be a 4 year old stock dell value consumer desktop.
Think 1+ghz celeron/duron, with 256mb ram, 64mb of which is dedicated to run the onboard intel video chipset. Probably an 80gb drive, a dvd-rom, 10/100 nic with cheap chipset.
That doesn't even begin to qualify as a low end machine.
No, you need windows wireless drivers.
No, actually they charge more for the Ubuntu models. You fail.
'If you read the article, they were Not pressing buttons. This was a paper-and-pen method followed by a scanning machine.'
That is part of what is disgusting to swallow.
Why would you scan paper ballots and perform optical recognition on them instead of counting electronic votes. Either way you are trusting the output of the electronic system. Why bother with a middle man that adds no accountability that saving human readable printouts doesn't give you and introduces complexity and errors?
'The fact that we're being asked to swallow electronic voting is disgusting. Some things electronics simply don't do well, and one such thing is accountability.'
Paper and electronic systems are equally accountable. The solution is transparency and to combine the two. Count the votes electronically, in real time, on a large publically visible display with a serial number attached to the ballot. You watch your vote be added to the tally. Then you take the human readable, optically scannable printout, again with serial number on it and drop it into a seperate box that scans it and keeps a second tally.
You have no proof of your serial number to show someone who wants to buy your vote. Both tallies must match. You watch your vote counted publically and if counted wrong then can raise issue right there. It doesn't matter that you have no proof you are n576898 because there will be a discrepency in the database record for n576898 and the human readable printout. And the pollsters can watch from start to finish to assure that the number of voters matches the number of votes.
The DMCA explicitly excludes circumvention for the purpose of fair use.
Someone with 30 minutes of quickbasic experience can write an application that accurately counts button presses.
The fact that we are being asked to swallow this is disgusting.
'In addition, my experience is that is many cases people who think they can bullshit their way through a report and look good are often detected doing that'
Then again, nobody would know if you're wrong eh?
Sort of like the police always catching the bad guys in crime when they are lucky to catch one in a thousand.
I remember about a year ago hearing that the chinese were attacking our virtual infrastructure. Afterward we suddenly started discovering lead in toy paints. I suspect that closer scrutiny on imports was how we retaliated.
Honestly, if a nation attacks our computers I don't think we should hack back. A military or government attack is an attack, it doesn't matter whether it was a bomb or a cyber attack. We should strike and move to eliminate their infrastructure immediately.
The war on terror and war on drugs are both ridiculous and impossible wars without end. I don't believe in vague or unending wars. I don't believe war should ever be used offensively or pre-emptively unless war is inevitable. I do however believe that the right time to fight another nation is when they are actively attacking us.
'1. What, Posix, OpenGL, and such aren't standardized?'
Yes. But that is several API's short of a complete standardized development platform.
'2. I imagine this is the fault of the Xfree86 guys. They we not very open to other's submissions, so many improvements never happened. This is one of the major reasons everyone switched to Xorg. '
That was what, four or five years ago?
'It is also important to have good cli/ncuses tools in case X isn't working.'
Hence the reason for the already existing tools that fill this need. The existence of good cli tools doesn't justify the lack of standardized GUI tools.
'Also, going with the "fixing grandma's computer" theme: the cli works better over ssh with a slow or high latency connection than with X11.'
Sure when I can remote in. Of course remote access shouldn't be enabled on grandma's computer in the first place for security reasons. But one I'd like grandma to someday catch the gist of what she's doing so she stops calling me. Two, someone else might be helping her (like dell support) and they don't need to be able to read grandma's files.
What about network problems? What about the sort of graphical problems grandma is going to have? You didn't think grandma is going to have an obscure driver issue did you? Grandma can't find her Firefox icon. Or moved a toolbar or menu accidentally.
Linux is a great platform. It scales up to supercomputers and down to wristwatches. It sits well on a tech's desktop or a server performing most tasks. In most roles it performs as well as systems designed primarily to do any one of those things.
Linux is not yet the end all be all system. Work is needed to gain desktop/workstation marketshare.
Microsoft stepped in a pile of golden shit and that pile is responsible for most of their success. But one thing Microsoft did right and continues to do right is to make a highly developer friendly platform and tools. Linux has none of the comprehensive developer goodies from IDE to gaming API's that are present in windows. That's very sad too, since with all the open code floating around for *nix it would blow windows development away if comparable tools were available.
If you want lots of applications and developer support then you make it easy to develop for your platform.
No but this isn't an academic journal and I don't need to cite sources. ;)
However, if YOU want to expend time and effort researching this particular topic I will give you a hint to lead you in the right direction. DNA analysis revealed genes related to speech that are believed to be a strong indication of exchange between Neandertals and modern humans.
AFAIK there is not an overall consensus on the matter. There are two schools of thought. Those who believe this is evidence of interbreeding and those who do not.
Sorry for not linking for you but this isn't my field. Your information could well be more up to date than mine. And well... that the google search box is all the way at the top of the screen...
'1. Storing and parsing configuration from text files: please move away from this. How about XML config files? Perhaps even compile these to byte code/compressed XML? XML that compiles to fully indexed configuration DB that allows strongly typed data even?
'
Text files are extremely easy to parse, manipulate programatically or manually, backup, etc. I find that often I don't bother to clone systems or do fancy tricks in the *nix world because a few files from /etc with a couple system specific edits allows me to move the configuration effort with me.
What you are saying about compression and byte-code makes sense technically but not practically. The compression would cost you resources rather than save, we are talking about files that are a few bytes, not megabytes. The strong typing makes sense but can easily be handled on the application side and in order to get it you would have to give up the benefits of text file configurations.
'2. Dependency on legacy command line interface directly from 1978 (not kidding).'
That's because there have only been minor improvements on the 1978 interface. Nobody has come up with anything better. If you are the type who needs a natural language interface then you would be happier with a gui anyway. Most people want a cli for speed and efficiency and natural language is the opposite of that. It's long, redundant, and pretty speech. The GUI does pretty on a level the cli will never match.
'3. Expunge the legacy UNIX file system. Gobolinux is a breath of fresh air. No non-unix/unix clone operating system optionally uses such a unfriendly file system layout. No other operating system needs a package manager.'
Every operating system uses a package manager. They just don't call it a package manager. Most just don't work as well. Ever try using the windows package management system to uninstall applications? It doesn't work.
The *nix file system could have a prettier naming scheme (that goes back to the shorter typing thing I think) but aside from that is pretty similar to what you find in other systems. Again, windows is the top contender out there so lets compare. (defaults of course, many of these can be made to differ by the stupid)
C: /home /lib /usr
C:\Documents and Settings
C:\windows\ C:\windows\system
C:\Program Files
These are all roughly comparable. Linux defines ways to break up the binaries from the libraries and configuration files. Windows has directories to break up these things but no standard conventions for doing so, as a result most applications toss some things in windows\system and keep other libraries in their own program folder. Other things they'll toss into a different program folder altogether.
Windows has a standard location that programs are supposed to install into but then defines numerous outside locations for them to put files and settings into, like the registry. The days of everything being self-contained in a folder are gone. On Linux you see a few locations as well. /usr /usr/local, etc. I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds the distinction between administrator and distro installed software to be pointless.
Linux has no standard package management but apt has pretty much become the de facto standard among those who prefer to stay sane. Apt will acurately track every file installed by a package and will remove a package completely and cleanly when instructed. Apt will also take care of dependency resolution, windows package management simply ignores the issue and leaves it up to the developer. Windows package management almost never cleanly uninstalls a package. There are registry entries, program folders, preference folders, libraries, etc that are left behind.
Now there are some real advantages in windows. Dependencies are less of a problem because there are relatively stable apis and libraries that most application developers can count on being there.
A
Linux as a platform does need some standardization. Right now Linux is one of the least developer friendly platforms to target when it should be the most developer friendly.
1. Some standardized interfaces that are disto/gui/hardware neutral would be great. There are interfaces out there but you can't tell me a community made up of mostly developers can't come up with interfaces that are more developer friendly than windows.
The first thing people do to justify the lacking in this area is cry out that proprietary vendors can live with it or say its possible to target Linux anyway see Loki. Just because you could fill your car by siphoning the gas from the tank in the ground instead of using a pump doesn't mean you want to. And some open developers might want to release distro neutral packages instead of tarballs and might not want to pray distro x decides to include their package.
2. I haven't dug into the internals of X so I won't say much about it but there is obviously a fundemental problem with the way hardware is handled by X. It can't support dynamic reconfiguration. Has a great deal of problems with handling secondary displays or the addition of displays without having to 'reboot' X. X auto-detection has improved over time but still needs work.
3. We have standard and reliable cli tools that can be used to configure a linux system without regard to distro or almost without regard to distro. What we need now are similar tools for the GUI. The cli is powerful, it is great and it should be kept that way. That doesn't mean we have to neglect the GUI either. There are great tools in a few user friendly distro's but its time for standardized gui tools that can used in all distros.
Hey, just to throw in a wacky idea. If we are talking about standard gui configuration tools. How about we standardize their identity based on the graphical icon instead of based on the name. Like in the old days of tech support you would direct the moro... err customer double click the big blue E or the N rather than the name because the vendor could have relabeled the shortcut.
These are things that would make Linux more developer friendly overall regardless of what sort of license the developer has in mind.
These changes would make the system user friendly without compromises in terms of power and flexibility. And they would make the system easier to support. If all I have to do is find the configuration tools menu with grandma and then have her open the blue monitor or the two blinking computers without regard to her specific distro and then guide her through a standard tool then sudden it becomes possible to support linux remotely.
'Well, you're right--we disagree about the cloning issue, not to mention your predatory view on life! I look at cloning humans from a moral point of view. I'm more about the famous line in Jurassic Park, "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."'
Predatory. That is probably a better choice of word than you know. I do not believe in a deity or any sort of innate morality. My 'right' and 'wrong' therefore stem from practical things like self-interest, family/friend/pet interest, and the interests of my species. The home teams if you will. I believe that ultimately, knowledge benefits myself, my family, and my species and there are few things I think aren't justified to gain it.
The knowledge we gain from studying the Neanderthal could still be benefiting our species in another 10,000 years. There are billions of humans and trillions of lifeforms on this planet. Millions of them are suffering and dying senselessly at any given moment. The few lifeforms that suffer in some capacity or die for a sensible reason are among the least tragic of them in my opinion. That doesn't make their suffering less or that we shouldn't avoid causing it. But we do what we need to do, the knowledge is more important than individuals.
'And why do you think a cloned Neanderthal will receive, "finest education, free healthcare, the finest meals, and pretty much any electronics toys he likes"?'
I'll answer this with another part of your quote.
'We don't know'
We don't know, so the finest minds in the world will be custom crafting his education so that we can determine the potential of an Neaderthal. He will be a precious one of a kind object so he will have the finest medical care we can give him. Everything including his tastes, habits, and hobbies is a mystery that mankind wants to know so we will provide him with most anything that will interest him. As for going out in public, yes it will be limited, but again that is no different than life for the president or a celebrity.
'He be stuck in a lab, poked and prodded'
That really goes hand-in-hand with having the finest healthcare we can provide. In terms of literal pokes and prods probably not so much. We would take some blood for examination and of course monitor his health but why poke after that? The metaphoric pokes and prods would probably more likely take the form of observation and psychological tests of various sorts. That isn't going to hurt anyone.
Whether his intellect justifies a Harvard level of education or 20 years teaching him to grunt in order to acknowledge that two different objects are both trucks he will have all his needs cared for and never have to worry a day in his(her/its) life.
If you want a moral issue it would be that he was not able to choose. This life, both the benefits and obligations would be thrust upon him. But really, how much different is that than the rest of us? How much sympathy do we have for those who are born royalty?
Yes but the bear is the wrong comparison. We didn't fight Neanderthals, we fucked them. Our winning had to do with our females or the mixed females being more attractive than their females.
A different kind of fight, and it still had nothing to do with their mental capacity ;)
My idea of hot really doesn't have much to do with the face or head... give me a nice rack and sweet ass tyvm.
I agree with you until the end. I think the qualms about cloning a human are ridiculous and Neanderthal even more ridiculous.
Of course he is just an animal, just as we are nothing but self-inflated animals. It is fair to make him an exhibit or lab rat for our benefit in the same manner it is fair for a wolf to eat a rabbit. Sucks for the rabbit but that is life.
On the other hand, a cloned Neanderthal will likely enjoy a better and easier life than you or I have ever been a party to. He will receive the finest education, free healthcare, the finest meals, and pretty much any electronics toys he likes. He will have millions of dollars worth of resources at this disposal and absolutely no responsibilities whatsoever. Are you really calling giving a being the life of a celebrity an act of cruelty? Basically, he's a movie star without having to make the movies.
My understanding is actually that the most recent DNA analysis strongly indicates that Neanderthal did indeed mate with humans and that we carry their DNA still.
So obviously, the result is not sterile.