Yeah, what's wrong with a pride in not so much species, but in consciousness itself? Caring about your species is just an extension of caring about other humans which is quite natural. You don't have to partake, but it is more fun to do so than to play the cynic.
My point of view is that there may or may not be other consciousness elsewhere in the universe, but that, in the end, its irrelevant. Just as, in the end, how long we survive as a species is irrelevant.
Irrelevant to whom? To us? To the expanding ball of gas that is the physical universe? The writer believes that from HIS POINT OF VIEW a universe with life and intelligence is more interesting than one with just lifeless matter. Therefore, he is saying, those who agree with him (which probably includes 95% of human beings) should work with him to ensure that life and matter endure as long as possible.
Dolphins and whales aren't primates, and they have brains larger than ours
You completely missed my point as you missed the point of the grandparent. I am talking about English language, not the brains of various species. Consider the sentence, "Toys, like dolls, are fun for children." Now if I were to apply your reading from several posts ago, I would respond to the person: "Dolls are not the only toys that are fun for children!!! Do not be so doll-centric." Dolls are an EXAMPLE of toys. Similarly human beings are an EXAMPLE of sentient life. Since we know of no other, we should preserve that life if we value it (which I do, and most people do).
What the universe wants (if it is understood to be an entirely physical object) is no more relevant than what a grain of sand on the beach wants. According to a materialistic definition of the universe that most slashdotters would use, it CANNOT WANT anything. I want the universe to be populated with life and intelligence because that sort of future is interesting TO ME. Since the article was written by human beings for human beings, it is the universe's non-existent opinion that is irrelevant, not ours.
It's time to get beyond philosophy 101 to philosophy 102: there is no external party that determines our worth according to some rule book. We define our own worth both individually and collectively. You can choose to live your life as if your life and Shakespeare's and Desmond Tutu's are all irrelevant. But why would you want to?
This is all a load of egocentric horseshit. Even a comedy writer like Doug Adams understood how unbelievable large the universe really is, and how unbelievably unimportant humans are in the scheme of things.
what does size have to do with importance?
We are far more dependent on the ecosystem of this planet than anyone seems to want to admit. That harebrained experiment with the "biosphere" a few years ago proved that one pregnant roach - or some other bug - can and will screw up the best laid plan.
Did biosphere use the best technology currently available? How does that technology compare to what will be available 100 or 1000 years from now?
All these pie in the sky engineering types should be forced to study cellular structure and function until they all realize that the most complex devices and processes they can design are tinkertoys compared to nature.
Is nature's engineering prowess increasing at a faster or slower pace than human prowess? What would be the long-term end result of such a trend?
All this talk of consiousness and meaning and the perception of beauty is irrelevant nonsense as we haven't the slightest idea of the true nature and function of the universe.
what makes you think that the universe has a function? What in particular is this nonsense irrelevant to?
Every time we crack one mystery we find its built upon another that's an order of magnitude more difficult to understand.
What would this have to do with an opinion about whether humanity should continue or not?
What really needs to happen is for people to start planning on the mundane. Go hold a door open for someone and the human universe will be better off.
Why is it important to do the right thing for individuals without consideration for the species as a whole?
"What no one seems to grasp are the fantastic amounts of time and energy it would take to reach the moon. All these arguments whether it is worthwhile to travel to the moon, yet no one is asking whether it is even physically possible. According to my calculation, it would take a catapult more than 10,000 times more powerful than the best catapult we have yet built to launch a man to space. Furthermore, once the man arrived, I have reason to believe that there will be no atmosphere on the moon. How will he breathe? Now surely there are some who will say that future research and technology will change our understanding of how we might travel into space. But I'd suggest that these people just sit down with an abacus and do the sums, because what we know now is all we will ever know."
Grandparent: "Conscious things like ourselves are the only way the universe can be concerned about anything."
Parent: Easily disproved. Conscious things NOT like ourselves also work. Mechanical intelligences, hive minds, and stuff that is so alien to us that we can't even begin to conceive it also work.
You are misunderstanding the grandparent's statement. He meant: "conscious things, of which we are the only known example, are the only way the universe can be concerned about anything." Compare to the statement: "Primates, like ourselves, are the only animals that do XXXX."
I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that this statement FTFA: "Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach"... is self-centered in the extreme.
Like they expect evolution to stop with us? Does ANYONE believe that humans will look the same a couple of million years from now, if we still exist? Look at what we were like 2 million years ago... oops homo sapiens sapiens didn't exist then... neanderthals were still walking about between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.
You aren't making any sense. The article is saying that humanity should strive to continue to exist to spread consciousness. You're saying that we could evolve into another form of consciousness. But we can't evolve into another form of consciousness if we cease to exist before we do so. So your point of view is exactly as homo-centric as the articles.
I am very aware of what a convenient argument global warming makes to radical-leftist elements (read: damned hippies) who already have a beef with capitalism and Western civilization in general. People absolutely have suffered and died every time those elements have gotten their way. There has to be a way to separate the political considerations from the scientific ones, so that truly-rational decisions can be made about the extent of anthropogenic climate change and what, if anything, should be done about it. But I'm not convinced we're able to make that call yet.
How do you figure that the radical leftist elements have gotten ahold of the scientific consensus? A vast left-wing conspiracy involving brainwashing of academics? Did all of the environmentalists decide to abandon ecology studies and go into climatology en masse fifteen years ago? I find this whole line of argument baffling. Scientists have as much or more to lose than the average American if we get draconian about carbon emissions.
The other conspiracy theory you hear is that the scientists benefit from the funding that a crisis provides. But this still does not explain the scientific consensus which sweeps up a vast number of people who have more to lose than gain.
When a person admits a fact that will cost them directly in their pocketbook, they are much more credible than someone who can find a way to protect his or her pocketbook, as the climate change deniers would do. If climate change is a myth, 95% of everyone would be happy and relieved. It is disingenuous to blame the whole scare on the remaining 5%. Personally, my heart breaks to think that "gratuitous" air travel will probably be as frowned upon in ten years as public defecation is now. I'm sure most people who DO believe in climate change (especially scientists) feel the same way.
How many people here would get on an airplane if only about 90% of the principles behind aerodynamic science were understood? Or if the designers were only 85% sure it would fly?
Well, why are you so gung-ho about rewiring the Western world's economy based on degrees of consensus and confidence that aren't even that good?
The analogy is terrible and you selected it because it is terrible. The better analogy is that we are in a plane that we are 90% sure has a computer and communications system malfunction. The pilot can either ask the passangers to buckle their seatbelts and send the computer programmers and electrical engineers to the front of the plane to see if they can help before everyone dies, or we can hope for the 10% chance that there is no problem, or that the problem won't cause a crash. After all, the people in the plane are having a WONDERFUL time and it would be premature to interrupt them with news of their potential imminent doom until we are 100% sure.
The way you wrote the analogy, it would be a great argument against nanotech or gentically modified foods or large-scale industrialization. If you reject the applicability of it to those situations then why are you using it (badly) when it comes to global climate change?
On a more amusing note, the people that complain about global warming would be crying if we had an ice age.....
I'm trying to see the humour in that. "Honey, our daughter is complaining that her room is 100 degrees?" "That whiner! She'd be crying if it were 30 degrees."
If we presume that the logging machine is compromised then of course all bets are off. But that's not what the law is about. The point is that if the machine is function as it should then business users should not be able to change data retroactively. Nobody is talking about changing the basic laws of physics and computer science.
A hardware system would be more robust, but still vulnerable. I imagine the most likely attack vector would be Man in the Middle - Just take over the box that guards/drives the logger machine.
Why is SSL not sufficient to overcome a man in the middle attack?
If you didn't have a fear of falling you would have "climbed down" from the tree by dropping out. Why bother with the tedious climbing down if the drop won't hurt. But I'll bet that you knew (either through experience, training or genetics) not to do that. So you did have a rational (and likely genetic) fear of dropping.
So, though I may be going out on a limb here, I'm gonna say "no" for 2008. And those that think that Vista's awefulness has any sway must have not been around to see how the whole "Windows vs. MacOS" thing played out.
I also don't think that next year is going to be the "year of the Linux Desktop" but I think that a lot has changed since the "Windows vs. Mac OS" thing. It has become much easier and much more common to make cross-platform applications. Many consumers favourite "applications" are portable now: Firefox, iTunes, Hotmail, FaceBook, YouTube, WordPress, etc. Thanks to the dominance of web apps, most users can sit down at a Linux box and be productive in minutes (this is also a consequence of Linux desktops ripping off Windows keyboard and mouse conventions).
The iPhone, is, ummm, a phone. I'm very skeptical that millions of people are going to download a different browser for their desktop in order to be compatible with their phone. Furthermore, the whole point of "the Web" (2.0 or otherwise) is that it is designed to be accessed from the user's choice of client platform. YouTube, Yahoo, eBay all need to ensure compatibility with a variety of browsers. Why would iPhone Web 2.0 developers be so short-sighted as to demand that their clients install a special browser on their desktops to access their apps. What makes you think that they will have that kind of market clout. Like the rest of us, they are likely to see multi-browser compatibility as a pre-requisite or at least a competitive imperative.
Even if Gogle were corporately very responsible (in that they never specifically directed their employees to do anythi
ng unethical), would you be willing to bet that all of the individuals with access to the servers are individually responsible? None of them work for the CIA or FSB, none of them have an axe to grind with an ex-girlfriend, none of them are sharing information with the mafia etc. I predict that the big privacy problems we'll find with these companies are where individuals ignore corporate policies -- are there technical systems in place to prevent that?
or, alternately, if these stupid offenses affect you, your religious faith is shallow
I am 100% against theocratic attacks on free speech. But at the same time, I don't think your argument makes any sense. Imagine a co-worker downloads a picture of one of your loved ones (especially a child or respected ancestor) and smears it in dung after drawing a Swastika and Hitler mustache on it. Would you say: "Oh, well that wouldn't offend me because my love for that person is so deep." It makes no sense: it is precisely the depth of your emotion that makes the offense so biting. And because your offense if predictable, it is also understandable that you would construe the action as an attack as opposed to a random work of arts and crafts. Does that imply you should kill the offender or burn them in effigy? Of course not. But are you well within your rights to take offense? Yes. Is taking offense understandable? Yes. Does your taking offense indicate that your love is shallow? Not at all.
... if it wasn't for DRM, I wouldn't be able to download TV shows from various TV networks online.
That's an assertion with no evidence backing it up.
If it *is* a sucky situation, surely the problem isn't DRM but the economic structures in place that requires DRM to be used.
What are these "economic structures?" Until HBO, people asserted that advertising was a necessary prerequisite to television. Until the new free newspapers, people thought that "economic structures" demanded that daily newspapers cost money. So-called "economic structures" are often illusory.
However, there are several good distributed VCS options to choose from now, and there is a good option available for just about any project.
Distributed SCMs have the classic problem of emergent technologies. SVN has a whole ecosystem of integrations built up around it. Distributed SCMs might make some things easier but if they don't integrate with issue tracking system, code review systems and IDEs then they will make other things harder. In addition, the SCM plugin APIs of IDEs etc. will tend to be biased towards the centralized model. The diversity of Distributed SCMs compounds this problem.
If the application is designed in a modular fashion and developers are assigned specific modules, than merging is rarely needed. Of course, many control freaks don't like this approach because it makes it harder for them to "correct" other developer's code.
Some call this "correction" of other people's code "code review" and "collaboration". If modules are fiefdoms then the project can be severely impacted when the lone developer of a module gets another job.
Don't get me wrong, if there were two versions of the submission on the firehose, and one explained what XBMC was and one didn't, the one that did would be likely to be the one I voted up. But if there weren't, I wouldn't have voted the one down, but instead up.
So why are we discussing this. If everyone agrees that it would have been better if XBMC were spelled out, then why did you contradict the original poster offering constructive criticism?
Ummmm...because a starving African schoolchild might prefer to get cash to feed themselves rather than to have an over-allowance of carbon credits that they can't use because they can't afford a car. On the other hand, the American truck driver might prefer to give some of his salary to the African because he can't make a living within his carbon budget. Why would you deprive these two people of their opportunity to trade for mutual advantage?
You cut out the context of your parent post. He discussed an "environmental tariff". That IS a form of regulation. He was saying that the market should be part of the solution, not the whole thing. I think he was saying that tariffs (regulations) should make carbon production expensive, but the market should determine HOW to reduce carbon: smaller vehicles versus better light bulbs versus reduced consumption versus clean energy etc. The government should not try to micromanage the transition because our rate of carbon management will be limited by the imaginations of politicians and the whims of lobbyists. To riff on the grandparent's (great-grandparent's?) idea, individual countries could impose a "carbon tax" on their own economies and "carbon tariffs" on other economies in inverse proportion to their own level of carbon taxation.
Make it simple. Everyone...reduce your individual countries emissions by x% in y years. No breaks, no 'trading', no excuses. X%.
So you're saying that in a country where nobody has cars, nobody would be allowed to BUY cars, but in a country where everyone drives Hummers it would be sufficient for everyone to "downsize" to an Expedition.
Quite the opposite: the only fair thing is for every human being should have a "carbon budget" and they should either live within their budget or buy budget space from someone else.
You accuse environmentalists of being extreme, but from my position, here is how this thread has proceeded. It started with an interesting article about astrophysics that had nothing whatsoever to do with global climate change. Then you jump in with first, a chilling statement of apathy: "Everything ends so there is no need to worry about anything" and then a series of ad hominem attacks on environmentalists. So your logic is: "The UNIVERSE will end three trillion years ago and so people who worry about the PLANET our grandchildren live in are silly." You accused the environmentalists of being juvenile but frankly that strikes me as the kind of logic that a fourteen year old would present "Entropy increases inexorably. Therefore action is futile. Pass me the bong!"
At what point do we stop worrying and just accept that eventually everyone and everything that lives, dies?
...
It *is* important to be forward-looking and responsible about the future...
Those two sentences cannot be reconciled. Either one is wrong or irrelevant or the other is. Personally, I think that its the first one that's wrong or irrelevant. It implies that we should only attach value to things that are eternal, which implies that neither your life nor mine has any value.
...but those who make environmentalism into a sort of religious crusade are not doing themselves nor their descendants (assuming they ever bother to have any, given the catastrophe now! mentality) any favours.
That's simple ad hominem. You haven't given any criteria for what is "forward-looking and responsible" versus a "religious crusade". You just figure that where you've drawn that arbitrary line must be correct. But modern environmental standards would be consider "extreme" by our ancestors and may be considered mild and negligent by our descendants. I would ask you "what gives you the right to decide what's reasonable" versus a "religous crusade" but your post is not even content-bearing enough to define YOUR OPINION of that boundary, much less give a justification for the opinion.
Frankly, I can't think of any position more chilling than: "stop worrying and just accept that eventually everyone and everything that lives, dies". Sounds like a good argument for ignoring Darfur, global climate change, the Iraq war, the ozone layer, the religious right and really everything else outside of American Idol, Branjelina and the iGasm.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, what's wrong with a pride in not so much species, but in consciousness itself? Caring about your species is just an extension of caring about other humans which is quite natural. You don't have to partake, but it is more fun to do so than to play the cynic.
My point of view is that there may or may not be other consciousness elsewhere in the universe, but that, in the end, its irrelevant. Just as, in the end, how long we survive as a species is irrelevant.
Irrelevant to whom? To us? To the expanding ball of gas that is the physical universe? The writer believes that from HIS POINT OF VIEW a universe with life and intelligence is more interesting than one with just lifeless matter. Therefore, he is saying, those who agree with him (which probably includes 95% of human beings) should work with him to ensure that life and matter endure as long as possible.
Dolphins and whales aren't primates, and they have brains larger than ours
You completely missed my point as you missed the point of the grandparent. I am talking about English language, not the brains of various species. Consider the sentence, "Toys, like dolls, are fun for children." Now if I were to apply your reading from several posts ago, I would respond to the person: "Dolls are not the only toys that are fun for children!!! Do not be so doll-centric." Dolls are an EXAMPLE of toys. Similarly human beings are an EXAMPLE of sentient life. Since we know of no other, we should preserve that life if we value it (which I do, and most people do).
What the universe wants (if it is understood to be an entirely physical object) is no more relevant than what a grain of sand on the beach wants. According to a materialistic definition of the universe that most slashdotters would use, it CANNOT WANT anything. I want the universe to be populated with life and intelligence because that sort of future is interesting TO ME. Since the article was written by human beings for human beings, it is the universe's non-existent opinion that is irrelevant, not ours.
It's time to get beyond philosophy 101 to philosophy 102: there is no external party that determines our worth according to some rule book. We define our own worth both individually and collectively. You can choose to live your life as if your life and Shakespeare's and Desmond Tutu's are all irrelevant. But why would you want to?
This is all a load of egocentric horseshit. Even a comedy writer like Doug Adams understood how unbelievable large the universe really is, and how unbelievably unimportant humans are in the scheme of things.
what does size have to do with importance?
We are far more dependent on the ecosystem of this planet than anyone seems to want to admit. That harebrained experiment with the "biosphere" a few years ago proved that one pregnant roach - or some other bug - can and will screw up the best laid plan.
Did biosphere use the best technology currently available? How does that technology compare to what will be available 100 or 1000 years from now?
All these pie in the sky engineering types should be forced to study cellular structure and function until they all realize that the most complex devices and processes they can design are tinkertoys compared to nature.
Is nature's engineering prowess increasing at a faster or slower pace than human prowess? What would be the long-term end result of such a trend?
All this talk of consiousness and meaning and the perception of beauty is irrelevant nonsense as we haven't the slightest idea of the true nature and function of the universe.
what makes you think that the universe has a function? What in particular is this nonsense irrelevant to?
Every time we crack one mystery we find its built upon another that's an order of magnitude more difficult to understand.
What would this have to do with an opinion about whether humanity should continue or not?
What really needs to happen is for people to start planning on the mundane. Go hold a door open for someone and the human universe will be better off.
Why is it important to do the right thing for individuals without consideration for the species as a whole?
"What no one seems to grasp are the fantastic amounts of time and energy it would take to reach the moon. All these arguments whether it is worthwhile to travel to the moon, yet no one is asking whether it is even physically possible. According to my calculation, it would take a catapult more than 10,000 times more powerful than the best catapult we have yet built to launch a man to space. Furthermore, once the man arrived, I have reason to believe that there will be no atmosphere on the moon. How will he breathe? Now surely there are some who will say that future research and technology will change our understanding of how we might travel into space. But I'd suggest that these people just sit down with an abacus and do the sums, because what we know now is all we will ever know."
Grandparent: "Conscious things like ourselves are the only way the universe can be concerned about anything."
Parent: Easily disproved. Conscious things NOT like ourselves also work. Mechanical intelligences, hive minds, and stuff that is so alien to us that we can't even begin to conceive it also work.
You are misunderstanding the grandparent's statement. He meant: "conscious things, of which we are the only known example, are the only way the universe can be concerned about anything." Compare to the statement: "Primates, like ourselves, are the only animals that do XXXX."
I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that this statement FTFA: "Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach" ... is self-centered in the extreme.
Like they expect evolution to stop with us? Does ANYONE believe that humans will look the same a couple of million years from now, if we still exist? Look at what we were like 2 million years ago ... oops homo sapiens sapiens didn't exist then ... neanderthals were still walking about between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.
You aren't making any sense. The article is saying that humanity should strive to continue to exist to spread consciousness. You're saying that we could evolve into another form of consciousness. But we can't evolve into another form of consciousness if we cease to exist before we do so. So your point of view is exactly as homo-centric as the articles.
I am very aware of what a convenient argument global warming makes to radical-leftist elements (read: damned hippies) who already have a beef with capitalism and Western civilization in general. People absolutely have suffered and died every time those elements have gotten their way. There has to be a way to separate the political considerations from the scientific ones, so that truly-rational decisions can be made about the extent of anthropogenic climate change and what, if anything, should be done about it. But I'm not convinced we're able to make that call yet.
How do you figure that the radical leftist elements have gotten ahold of the scientific consensus? A vast left-wing conspiracy involving brainwashing of academics? Did all of the environmentalists decide to abandon ecology studies and go into climatology en masse fifteen years ago? I find this whole line of argument baffling. Scientists have as much or more to lose than the average American if we get draconian about carbon emissions.
The other conspiracy theory you hear is that the scientists benefit from the funding that a crisis provides. But this still does not explain the scientific consensus which sweeps up a vast number of people who have more to lose than gain.
When a person admits a fact that will cost them directly in their pocketbook, they are much more credible than someone who can find a way to protect his or her pocketbook, as the climate change deniers would do. If climate change is a myth, 95% of everyone would be happy and relieved. It is disingenuous to blame the whole scare on the remaining 5%. Personally, my heart breaks to think that "gratuitous" air travel will probably be as frowned upon in ten years as public defecation is now. I'm sure most people who DO believe in climate change (especially scientists) feel the same way.
How many people here would get on an airplane if only about 90% of the principles behind aerodynamic science were understood? Or if the designers were only 85% sure it would fly?
Well, why are you so gung-ho about rewiring the Western world's economy based on degrees of consensus and confidence that aren't even that good?
The analogy is terrible and you selected it because it is terrible. The better analogy is that we are in a plane that we are 90% sure has a computer and communications system malfunction. The pilot can either ask the passangers to buckle their seatbelts and send the computer programmers and electrical engineers to the front of the plane to see if they can help before everyone dies, or we can hope for the 10% chance that there is no problem, or that the problem won't cause a crash. After all, the people in the plane are having a WONDERFUL time and it would be premature to interrupt them with news of their potential imminent doom until we are 100% sure.
The way you wrote the analogy, it would be a great argument against nanotech or gentically modified foods or large-scale industrialization. If you reject the applicability of it to those situations then why are you using it (badly) when it comes to global climate change?
On a more amusing note, the people that complain about global warming would be crying if we had an ice age.....
I'm trying to see the humour in that. "Honey, our daughter is complaining that her room is 100 degrees?" "That whiner! She'd be crying if it were 30 degrees."
Haha! Funny!
If we presume that the logging machine is compromised then of course all bets are off. But that's not what the law is about. The point is that if the machine is function as it should then business users should not be able to change data retroactively. Nobody is talking about changing the basic laws of physics and computer science.
A hardware system would be more robust, but still vulnerable. I imagine the most likely attack vector would be Man in the Middle - Just take over the box that guards/drives the logger machine.
Why is SSL not sufficient to overcome a man in the middle attack?
If you didn't have a fear of falling you would have "climbed down" from the tree by dropping out. Why bother with the tedious climbing down if the drop won't hurt. But I'll bet that you knew (either through experience, training or genetics) not to do that. So you did have a rational (and likely genetic) fear of dropping.
So, though I may be going out on a limb here, I'm gonna say "no" for 2008. And those that think that Vista's awefulness has any sway must have not been around to see how the whole "Windows vs. MacOS" thing played out.
I also don't think that next year is going to be the "year of the Linux Desktop" but I think that a lot has changed since the "Windows vs. Mac OS" thing. It has become much easier and much more common to make cross-platform applications. Many consumers favourite "applications" are portable now: Firefox, iTunes, Hotmail, FaceBook, YouTube, WordPress, etc. Thanks to the dominance of web apps, most users can sit down at a Linux box and be productive in minutes (this is also a consequence of Linux desktops ripping off Windows keyboard and mouse conventions).
The iPhone, is, ummm, a phone. I'm very skeptical that millions of people are going to download a different browser for their desktop in order to be compatible with their phone. Furthermore, the whole point of "the Web" (2.0 or otherwise) is that it is designed to be accessed from the user's choice of client platform. YouTube, Yahoo, eBay all need to ensure compatibility with a variety of browsers. Why would iPhone Web 2.0 developers be so short-sighted as to demand that their clients install a special browser on their desktops to access their apps. What makes you think that they will have that kind of market clout. Like the rest of us, they are likely to see multi-browser compatibility as a pre-requisite or at least a competitive imperative.
Even if Gogle were corporately very responsible (in that they never specifically directed their employees to do anythi ng unethical), would you be willing to bet that all of the individuals with access to the servers are individually responsible? None of them work for the CIA or FSB, none of them have an axe to grind with an ex-girlfriend, none of them are sharing information with the mafia etc. I predict that the big privacy problems we'll find with these companies are where individuals ignore corporate policies -- are there technical systems in place to prevent that?
or, alternately, if these stupid offenses affect you, your religious faith is shallow
I am 100% against theocratic attacks on free speech. But at the same time, I don't think your argument makes any sense. Imagine a co-worker downloads a picture of one of your loved ones (especially a child or respected ancestor) and smears it in dung after drawing a Swastika and Hitler mustache on it. Would you say: "Oh, well that wouldn't offend me because my love for that person is so deep." It makes no sense: it is precisely the depth of your emotion that makes the offense so biting. And because your offense if predictable, it is also understandable that you would construe the action as an attack as opposed to a random work of arts and crafts. Does that imply you should kill the offender or burn them in effigy? Of course not. But are you well within your rights to take offense? Yes. Is taking offense understandable? Yes. Does your taking offense indicate that your love is shallow? Not at all.
That's an assertion with no evidence backing it up.
If it *is* a sucky situation, surely the problem isn't DRM but the economic structures in place that requires DRM to be used.
What are these "economic structures?" Until HBO, people asserted that advertising was a necessary prerequisite to television. Until the new free newspapers, people thought that "economic structures" demanded that daily newspapers cost money. So-called "economic structures" are often illusory.
However, there are several good distributed VCS options to choose from now, and there is a good option available for just about any project.
Distributed SCMs have the classic problem of emergent technologies. SVN has a whole ecosystem of integrations built up around it. Distributed SCMs might make some things easier but if they don't integrate with issue tracking system, code review systems and IDEs then they will make other things harder. In addition, the SCM plugin APIs of IDEs etc. will tend to be biased towards the centralized model. The diversity of Distributed SCMs compounds this problem.If the application is designed in a modular fashion and developers are assigned specific modules, than merging is rarely needed. Of course, many control freaks don't like this approach because it makes it harder for them to "correct" other developer's code.
Some call this "correction" of other people's code "code review" and "collaboration". If modules are fiefdoms then the project can be severely impacted when the lone developer of a module gets another job.
Don't get me wrong, if there were two versions of the submission on the firehose, and one explained what XBMC was and one didn't, the one that did would be likely to be the one I voted up. But if there weren't, I wouldn't have voted the one down, but instead up.
So why are we discussing this. If everyone agrees that it would have been better if XBMC were spelled out, then why did you contradict the original poster offering constructive criticism?
Question 1: what do you think that the role of a "summary" is? Question 2: how does a block of text become a good summary?
Ummmm...because a starving African schoolchild might prefer to get cash to feed themselves rather than to have an over-allowance of carbon credits that they can't use because they can't afford a car. On the other hand, the American truck driver might prefer to give some of his salary to the African because he can't make a living within his carbon budget. Why would you deprive these two people of their opportunity to trade for mutual advantage?
You cut out the context of your parent post. He discussed an "environmental tariff". That IS a form of regulation. He was saying that the market should be part of the solution, not the whole thing. I think he was saying that tariffs (regulations) should make carbon production expensive, but the market should determine HOW to reduce carbon: smaller vehicles versus better light bulbs versus reduced consumption versus clean energy etc. The government should not try to micromanage the transition because our rate of carbon management will be limited by the imaginations of politicians and the whims of lobbyists. To riff on the grandparent's (great-grandparent's?) idea, individual countries could impose a "carbon tax" on their own economies and "carbon tariffs" on other economies in inverse proportion to their own level of carbon taxation.
Make it simple. Everyone...reduce your individual countries emissions by x% in y years. No breaks, no 'trading', no excuses. X%.
So you're saying that in a country where nobody has cars, nobody would be allowed to BUY cars, but in a country where everyone drives Hummers it would be sufficient for everyone to "downsize" to an Expedition.
Quite the opposite: the only fair thing is for every human being should have a "carbon budget" and they should either live within their budget or buy budget space from someone else.
You accuse environmentalists of being extreme, but from my position, here is how this thread has proceeded. It started with an interesting article about astrophysics that had nothing whatsoever to do with global climate change. Then you jump in with first, a chilling statement of apathy: "Everything ends so there is no need to worry about anything" and then a series of ad hominem attacks on environmentalists. So your logic is: "The UNIVERSE will end three trillion years ago and so people who worry about the PLANET our grandchildren live in are silly." You accused the environmentalists of being juvenile but frankly that strikes me as the kind of logic that a fourteen year old would present "Entropy increases inexorably. Therefore action is futile. Pass me the bong!"
At what point do we stop worrying and just accept that eventually everyone and everything that lives, dies?
It *is* important to be forward-looking and responsible about the future...
Those two sentences cannot be reconciled. Either one is wrong or irrelevant or the other is. Personally, I think that its the first one that's wrong or irrelevant. It implies that we should only attach value to things that are eternal, which implies that neither your life nor mine has any value.
That's simple ad hominem. You haven't given any criteria for what is "forward-looking and responsible" versus a "religious crusade". You just figure that where you've drawn that arbitrary line must be correct. But modern environmental standards would be consider "extreme" by our ancestors and may be considered mild and negligent by our descendants. I would ask you "what gives you the right to decide what's reasonable" versus a "religous crusade" but your post is not even content-bearing enough to define YOUR OPINION of that boundary, much less give a justification for the opinion.
Frankly, I can't think of any position more chilling than: "stop worrying and just accept that eventually everyone and everything that lives, dies". Sounds like a good argument for ignoring Darfur, global climate change, the Iraq war, the ozone layer, the religious right and really everything else outside of American Idol, Branjelina and the iGasm.