Like many who have happily drunk the Kool-Aid, you seem to think that the conflict in Iraq is a war. It is not. The congressional resolution authorized military action, but made no formal declaration of war. Since 'securing' Iraq - i.e. toppling the Hussein government - US forces have been engaged overwhelmingly in peace-keeping and policing activities. Despite the tripe broadcast by the Bush administration, there is a neglible 'enemy' presence in Iraq; there is only internal strife, insurgency and rebellion to foreign occuption. That 2% of these people who resist the (illegal) US occupation happen to be categorized as 'Al Qaeda' by the US government itself is transparent evidence of what a sham the 'war on terror' there is.
There is no 'winning' a policing mission. There is no 'winning' an occupation. There IS NO FUCKING WAR TO WIN in Iraq. The people we're fighting ARE pathetic - they are desperately poor, half-starving and scarcely even literate.
The situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are little different than Vietnam: it is impossible to fully secure any sufficiently rugged terrain from geurilla adversaries. We killed three million Vietnamese - THREE MILLION - and still didn't manage to get anywhere fucking near 'Mission Accomplished' there - no, the last Americans fled from the roof of the US Embassy by helicopter.
You don't have to be smart to hide in the woods or the mountains of your own country and shoot a gun at any foreigner you see. But you DO have to be smart and educated to blow up airplanes and buildings in someone else's country. THAT is why we haven't been hit again. It also helps that the 'terror' part of terrorism has already been achieved by terrorists. They wouldn't have succeeded but for all the money that it helps the Bush administration and the media make to fan the flames of paranoia and fear in America.
When my ludicrously cowardly countrymen stop being afraid that terrorists are going to blow up their strip mall in Nowheresville North Dakota, THEN we'll have won the 'war on terror'.
I've posted before that the desktop GUI is becoming a lot like a utility. This is another example of why: everyone needs it, but it's too difficult to make a profit providing it, so this is why Ubuntu is stepping up strong.
While this software is interesting and would probably be useful as a general police tool, I think we're giving terrorists FAR too much credit in the brains department.
The truth is, "terrorists" - meaning radically extremist muslims - are overwhelmingly ignorant and stupid. 9/11 apparently used up all of the top talent, because we haven't gotten hit by anything since then and it certainly isn't thanks to the crack commandos of the TSA. If terrorists had any real brains, we'd have been hit a hundred times by now. Any random group of grad students from a top-tier university could perpetrate a more deadly attack than 9/11 with an afternoon's planning. We're safe largely because our enemy is so woefully stupid - which of course you more or less have to be if you're a religious fanatic.
I lived in the Gulf for several years in a quiet little country you seldom read about, and while it isn't a hotbed for terrorists it does have a small extremist sect. These geniuses decided they would blow up a local shopping festival, targeting not Americans or other foreigners in the country but rather their own countrymen who were being corrupted by sinful materialism, etc. We're talking families out shopping here, not military targets of course. So these guys pile a truck full of explosives and grenades and ammunition, all set to drive it right into the middle of the festival and set it off. But what happens? They crashed the truck on the way there - they drove too fast through roundabout and rolled the thing over because it was so heavy, so all their stuff just poured out on the road.
Again, we are safe only because it's brain surgeons like this who are "the terrorists". If there were actually criminal masterminds out there willing to conduct suicide missions, then we'd be in serious trouble.
Facebook alone is enough to put me in a rage. But I guess I must grudgingly accept the fact that I am apparently one of only four computer-literate people left in the English speaking world who doesn't live and die by their facebook page. Ridiculous. My unborn children will hate me for sure.
It is important to understand that exposure controls are all simulated on CCDs, both for still and video cameras, to mimic the behavior of film - but they do not function the same way at all. This mimicry is done in software by clever algorithms, but that technology is processor-intensive and has not been available in video for very long.
You are absolutely 100% correct, and anyone in the VFX field can tell you this is true. This is why motion blur is such a hugely effective way to improve visual quality in gaming with a very low performance cost. It is silly that 3D engines don't make better use of frame and motion blurring. As you pointed out, the human eye does not see motion as a series of static, focused snapsots; it sees motion as a slurry of blurred imagery. Conveniently, it is much easier to render blurs than pin-point accuracy.
As another example, it took a long time for manufacturers of video cameras to figure out that a series of in-focus frames will look stuttery and fake compared to a series of semi-blurred frames. And so for more than a decade video - even hi-def video - looked like crap compared to film. By a stroke of good luck, celluloid film stock captures blurred imagery the way the human eye does, and so it looks beautiful and realistic, even when it contains far less per-pixel information. (This is also why older film, whether motion picture or still picture, looks wonderful: less information is often better, as it is more pleasing to the eye than microscopic clarity). This is finally being corrected in high-end video cameras, so that the lastest generation of HD video cameras have exposure controls to simulate these effects and make them appear more like film.
I could be wrong, but I think the thing that distinguishes public utilities from commodities is production. A commodity - oranges, bacon, sugar - is something that can be produced by anyone, and it doesn't matter who because the end product/service is uniform for all intents and purposes. A public utility is something that cannot be produced by just anyone (you can't produce water or roads as a small farmer), but that nevertheless results in a product/service that is uniform.
Production is what makes the difference. All water and electricity are the same. So why should one giant company get all the profit from it if they're not doing anything special other than being large? Even in our society we reject the idea that size is a meritorious attribute that deserves to be rewarded with profit. Other developed societies, such as those in Europe, feel much more strongly about this. The issue is solved by transforming a monolithic, uninnovative private monopoly into a public utility.
Getting back to OSs, the point is that not just anyone can produce an OS, so it isn't a commodity. But OSs are nevertheless becoming a uniform product/service. And hence, in our society there is rejection of this being owned by one giant monolithic monopoly whose only merit is the fact that they are big. The consequence of this rejection is a push toward open-source, of which Ubuntu is the highest-profile example at the moment.
Despite Microsoft's valiant efforts, the real problem is that PCs running a windows-ish GUI have become a ubiquitous utility in our society, just like water and roads and electricity and phones. This is not a good thing for a technology company. It was not good for Bell for phones to evolve from a cutting-edge innovative technology to a ubiquitous utility, or for Edison for electricity to do the same.
When a technology service becomes ubiquitous and homogenous and - importantly - ceases being innovative, it runs the risk of becoming a candidate for conversion into a public utility. To stave this off, either ongoing innovation is required or the illusion of innovation and change is required. Microsoft has done a bit of both with Windows. But it's a thin veneer. As a result, poopulist efforts to 'socialize' this technology into a public utility are surging; hence, Ubuntu et al.
I don't know the answers to all your questions off the top of my head, but I do know where to get them very quickly: just look at the countries around the world that provide broadband as a public utility rather than as a private service. I'm going to be lazy and guess rather than check, but I suspect Iceland, Finland, Sweden, Korea, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar all laid the infrastructure with public money, and most - if not all - provide service through a public/government telco rather than through a private company.
The question then becomes, which is the better way to go: public or private? Well, compare costs and quality. My guess is that the US and it's big boner for private industry over public utility will be bringing up the rear, while countries with public ISPs are watching streaming HD movies on their mobile phones.
It may perform like a brick, but if it's as tough as one maybe that'll make up for it. With most kids under 10 that I know, a laptop would last no more than five minutes.
True. Most live in countries where the $500 pricetag of this product represents more than the GDP per capita. Do note that the 'G' in GDP stands for 'gross', as in 'not net', as in 'the chance of us having $500 to spend on this is roughly equal to chance of us becoming astronauts'.
The company plans to have 50 million units available in the marketplace by 2011
They must have some massive orders lined up. Unless that number is wrong, no WAY do you talk about figures that large without clear knowledge of huge orders already in the pipeline. That'd basically be one for every schoolchild in the US by 2011.
Could they be in talks with, for example, the folks in charge of the education changes that will be coming with the changing of the guard from republican to democrat White House administrations? Or with foreign governments (in both developed and developing countries)?
It would definitely be nice if Creative died - or at least got some decent competition. It's a good example of a market totally dominated by one company that churns out crappy stuff. I know a fair bit about their EAX technology from personal experience, as I tried to patent a 3D positional audio technology in the mid 90s. Aureal beat me to it, but they folded. I think their IP ended up with another company called Sensaura. They're gone now too, and their site directs to... Creative.
Still no true 3D positional audio through EAX either, just some hackneyed binaural cues. It's a shame, but I guess that's just how the stone rolls.
I'm interested to know what census exploitations we're expecting here in the US. How will this be corrupted for political ends in the way that an election would be by fudging the electronic voting machines?
I lived in the Arabian Gulf several years ago and the country in which I was living did their 10-years census using handheld computers. The questionaires were running in MS Access, and syncing to folders at the project's datacenter via the country's GSM mobile phone network. In this instance, the country DID fudge the census numbers. Hugely. They GROSSLY underreported population figures in order to have their doctors-per-capita, hospital-per-capita, GDP-per-capita, etc and population growth figures all fall within the qualifying limits for acceptance into the WTO. It was total and complete BS, and everyone knew it. The figures showed a ludicrously low population growth from 1996-2006 of 15%. The ACTUAL figure was closer to 100% - there is a veritable population explosion going on there, thanks to zero birth control, an average of 7+ children per family, average mothering age of
Getting into the WTO is an understandable reason to fudge the census. What reasons would the United States have?
Can anyone elucidate the issues of fair usage and licensing as they apply to hardware? I'm assuming when you buy a piece of computer hardware you're not licensing it like you are with software, so you should be able to do with it whatever you please. But since it 'requires' software in order to run, then I can imagine how the issue gets a little murky. As an example, when I buy my car I expect to be able to use it however I please within the confines of the law - not how GM or Ford has licensed me to use it. And if I can find or write software that will control the car's hardware better and give me better performance, shouldn't I be able to use that software? Last I checked, there was no licensing/fair use law against overclocking, for example - even though overclocking is always done through software (bios).
So while I understand Creative's beef about messing with their software, the reason this is a firestorm issue is that since the software in question is a driver the hardware becomes an inseparable part of the equation.
And this leaves aside the whole other issue of crippling.
I participated in a psych lab as an undergrad about 10 years ago where the masters students were doing some project like this. We had to rank pictures of women's faces in order of most to least beautiful/attractive. Just faces, black and white against a black bakground, no other context - not even neck. What stood to me was that afterward, when they explained the results, they showed that some astounding percentage of participants - something like 97% - ranked the pictures in identical order. I think there were around 30 faces. There was a very high level of agreement among people over what is and isn't beautiful.
Also noteworthy was that none of the top faces were celebrities. Oh, and the top face was absolutely breathtaking. I mean impossibly beautiful. Several times over the years I've poked around on the internet trying to find it. I remember at the time suspecting it was photoshopped to be perfectly symmetrical, but it was more than that. This face was otherworldly - and to have such an astonishingly perfect face not belong to a celebrity? Weird. Could be some model I'm just unaware of though I guess.
This is indeed interesting, but I'd have to see a squid in the lab to be completely convinced there isn't a simpler explanation at work as well. The analogy of holding a razor blade with jello and using it to chop is cute, but it's only meaningful if the razor blade is sharp on both sides. Is the squid beak sharp both on the cutting edge AND where it is secured in the squid's soft tissue? Scissors (or pliers or chopsticks for that matter) don't slice open the soft pads our our fingertips not because we have bones in our hands but because - duh - scissors are only sharp on the cutting surface, and not on the surface where it is secured for leverage. And these examples only address the problem by applying direct resistance through the cutting axis of the blade. A cutting blade could also be secured with adhesion: by sticking 'tethers' to flat side. Ligaments and tendons connect hard material (bone) to soft tissue (muscle) quite well, in case you hadn't noticed.
I thought accuracy and stability of resonators depended on properly using the phase discriminators to align the resonators to within a 0.5% frequency variance of the warp core. Did I miss something?
The definition is of a free market is one in which prices are negotiated "without force or coercion." In other words, a free market is transparent and competitive. Unfortunately, transparency and competition are anathema to profit; they are mutually exclusive. Ironically, a highly profitable market is a failed market by definition.
Would this material make good radiation shileding? Seems like manned spaceflight could make use of a material that did double-duty as radiation shields and solar panels.
It may be true that social networks act as news filters, but that doesn't make them good news filters. How popular information propagates and the value of that information are two entirely separate issues. They seem muddied in the summary, and even in the article to a degree.
Traditional news broadcasters do a reasonable job of filtering information, but people tend to seek out filters that match their own interests, which is not only why news is broken up into sections on BBC's website, but why we have "News for Nerds" on slashdot, and news for surfers on surfline, etc.
but the factuality of that statement has been born out in godless societies, such as communism and atheistic liberalism.
Ah, the strawman of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. With ignorant raving loons like yourself it is only a matter of time. Too bad the historical facts just don't support your nonsensical argument. Communism IS a religion: it replaces one set of irrational beliefs with another. Both are irrational ideologies. Atheism and science, on the other hand, are the antithesis of this; they are rational assertions based on evidence and are open to change and correction in the event that new evidence comes to light. Communism, naziism and fascism are all social systems that self-destructed as a result of irrational ideology. Show me a society that self-destructed because of too much logic and rational thought, and then we might have something to argue about. In the meantime, be sure to have a look at Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. They are the most developed countries in the world, with the highest standards of living, highest literacy rates, lowest crime rates, lowest teen-pregnancy rates, and highest economic and social equity rates. They are also the countries with the highest levels of atheism (80% in Sweden). Where's your argument now?
So yes, you do seek to destroy humanity in accordance with your religion
Wow. In your mind my assertion that all thinking and feeling creatures should be awarded rights and protections makes me "seek to destroy humanity." What a paragon of rationality and clear thinking you are.
I want to associate with people, and be led by people, that want humans to eat cows and not be eaten by bears. It's better for -our team-, the human team.
So even though we can "build skyscrapers and spaceships" it's still eat-or-be-eaten to you, hmm? There can be no peaceful co-existence? No harmony with nature? I may think that we are no more entitled to privilege than animals, but it's you who thinks humans are no different than animals and should therefore have no greater obligations or responsibilities. No, the truth has come out: it's you who doesn't care about our planet or the other creatures with whom we share it, because in your mind it's us against them. Your grotesque egocentrism and self-importance is both monstrous and pathetic. It is you, with your barbaric irrationality and wanton destructiveness, who are to be despised. And it is rational people like me - scientists and philosophers - who are left to clean up after your mess; it is up to me and others like me to do the heavy lifting of civilization: to abolish slavery despite its sanction in the Bible, to invent antibiotics and cure disease where the religious were sure it was all just 'possession by Satan', and to create real miracles and wonders like cell phones and computers, where you would be content with burning bushes.
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There is no 'winning' a policing mission. There is no 'winning' an occupation. There IS NO FUCKING WAR TO WIN in Iraq. The people we're fighting ARE pathetic - they are desperately poor, half-starving and scarcely even literate.
The situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are little different than Vietnam: it is impossible to fully secure any sufficiently rugged terrain from geurilla adversaries. We killed three million Vietnamese - THREE MILLION - and still didn't manage to get anywhere fucking near 'Mission Accomplished' there - no, the last Americans fled from the roof of the US Embassy by helicopter.
You don't have to be smart to hide in the woods or the mountains of your own country and shoot a gun at any foreigner you see. But you DO have to be smart and educated to blow up airplanes and buildings in someone else's country. THAT is why we haven't been hit again. It also helps that the 'terror' part of terrorism has already been achieved by terrorists. They wouldn't have succeeded but for all the money that it helps the Bush administration and the media make to fan the flames of paranoia and fear in America.
When my ludicrously cowardly countrymen stop being afraid that terrorists are going to blow up their strip mall in Nowheresville North Dakota, THEN we'll have won the 'war on terror'.
I've posted before that the desktop GUI is becoming a lot like a utility. This is another example of why: everyone needs it, but it's too difficult to make a profit providing it, so this is why Ubuntu is stepping up strong.
The truth is, "terrorists" - meaning radically extremist muslims - are overwhelmingly ignorant and stupid. 9/11 apparently used up all of the top talent, because we haven't gotten hit by anything since then and it certainly isn't thanks to the crack commandos of the TSA. If terrorists had any real brains, we'd have been hit a hundred times by now. Any random group of grad students from a top-tier university could perpetrate a more deadly attack than 9/11 with an afternoon's planning. We're safe largely because our enemy is so woefully stupid - which of course you more or less have to be if you're a religious fanatic.
I lived in the Gulf for several years in a quiet little country you seldom read about, and while it isn't a hotbed for terrorists it does have a small extremist sect. These geniuses decided they would blow up a local shopping festival, targeting not Americans or other foreigners in the country but rather their own countrymen who were being corrupted by sinful materialism, etc. We're talking families out shopping here, not military targets of course. So these guys pile a truck full of explosives and grenades and ammunition, all set to drive it right into the middle of the festival and set it off. But what happens? They crashed the truck on the way there - they drove too fast through roundabout and rolled the thing over because it was so heavy, so all their stuff just poured out on the road.
Again, we are safe only because it's brain surgeons like this who are "the terrorists". If there were actually criminal masterminds out there willing to conduct suicide missions, then we'd be in serious trouble.
Facebook alone is enough to put me in a rage. But I guess I must grudgingly accept the fact that I am apparently one of only four computer-literate people left in the English speaking world who doesn't live and die by their facebook page. Ridiculous. My unborn children will hate me for sure.
It is important to understand that exposure controls are all simulated on CCDs, both for still and video cameras, to mimic the behavior of film - but they do not function the same way at all. This mimicry is done in software by clever algorithms, but that technology is processor-intensive and has not been available in video for very long.
As another example, it took a long time for manufacturers of video cameras to figure out that a series of in-focus frames will look stuttery and fake compared to a series of semi-blurred frames. And so for more than a decade video - even hi-def video - looked like crap compared to film. By a stroke of good luck, celluloid film stock captures blurred imagery the way the human eye does, and so it looks beautiful and realistic, even when it contains far less per-pixel information. (This is also why older film, whether motion picture or still picture, looks wonderful: less information is often better, as it is more pleasing to the eye than microscopic clarity). This is finally being corrected in high-end video cameras, so that the lastest generation of HD video cameras have exposure controls to simulate these effects and make them appear more like film.
Production is what makes the difference. All water and electricity are the same. So why should one giant company get all the profit from it if they're not doing anything special other than being large? Even in our society we reject the idea that size is a meritorious attribute that deserves to be rewarded with profit. Other developed societies, such as those in Europe, feel much more strongly about this. The issue is solved by transforming a monolithic, uninnovative private monopoly into a public utility.
Getting back to OSs, the point is that not just anyone can produce an OS, so it isn't a commodity. But OSs are nevertheless becoming a uniform product/service. And hence, in our society there is rejection of this being owned by one giant monolithic monopoly whose only merit is the fact that they are big. The consequence of this rejection is a push toward open-source, of which Ubuntu is the highest-profile example at the moment.
When a technology service becomes ubiquitous and homogenous and - importantly - ceases being innovative, it runs the risk of becoming a candidate for conversion into a public utility. To stave this off, either ongoing innovation is required or the illusion of innovation and change is required. Microsoft has done a bit of both with Windows. But it's a thin veneer. As a result, poopulist efforts to 'socialize' this technology into a public utility are surging; hence, Ubuntu et al.
The question then becomes, which is the better way to go: public or private? Well, compare costs and quality. My guess is that the US and it's big boner for private industry over public utility will be bringing up the rear, while countries with public ISPs are watching streaming HD movies on their mobile phones.
It may perform like a brick, but if it's as tough as one maybe that'll make up for it. With most kids under 10 that I know, a laptop would last no more than five minutes.
True. Most live in countries where the $500 pricetag of this product represents more than the GDP per capita. Do note that the 'G' in GDP stands for 'gross', as in 'not net', as in 'the chance of us having $500 to spend on this is roughly equal to chance of us becoming astronauts'.
They must have some massive orders lined up. Unless that number is wrong, no WAY do you talk about figures that large without clear knowledge of huge orders already in the pipeline. That'd basically be one for every schoolchild in the US by 2011.
Could they be in talks with, for example, the folks in charge of the education changes that will be coming with the changing of the guard from republican to democrat White House administrations? Or with foreign governments (in both developed and developing countries)?
Still no true 3D positional audio through EAX either, just some hackneyed binaural cues. It's a shame, but I guess that's just how the stone rolls.
I lived in the Arabian Gulf several years ago and the country in which I was living did their 10-years census using handheld computers. The questionaires were running in MS Access, and syncing to folders at the project's datacenter via the country's GSM mobile phone network. In this instance, the country DID fudge the census numbers. Hugely. They GROSSLY underreported population figures in order to have their doctors-per-capita, hospital-per-capita, GDP-per-capita, etc and population growth figures all fall within the qualifying limits for acceptance into the WTO. It was total and complete BS, and everyone knew it. The figures showed a ludicrously low population growth from 1996-2006 of 15%. The ACTUAL figure was closer to 100% - there is a veritable population explosion going on there, thanks to zero birth control, an average of 7+ children per family, average mothering age of
Getting into the WTO is an understandable reason to fudge the census. What reasons would the United States have?
How long until this black hole of 3.6 solar masses evaporates down to the Chandrasaker limit? Are we talking thousands of years, or quintillions?
So while I understand Creative's beef about messing with their software, the reason this is a firestorm issue is that since the software in question is a driver the hardware becomes an inseparable part of the equation.
And this leaves aside the whole other issue of crippling.
Also noteworthy was that none of the top faces were celebrities. Oh, and the top face was absolutely breathtaking. I mean impossibly beautiful. Several times over the years I've poked around on the internet trying to find it. I remember at the time suspecting it was photoshopped to be perfectly symmetrical, but it was more than that. This face was otherworldly - and to have such an astonishingly perfect face not belong to a celebrity? Weird. Could be some model I'm just unaware of though I guess.
This is indeed interesting, but I'd have to see a squid in the lab to be completely convinced there isn't a simpler explanation at work as well. The analogy of holding a razor blade with jello and using it to chop is cute, but it's only meaningful if the razor blade is sharp on both sides. Is the squid beak sharp both on the cutting edge AND where it is secured in the squid's soft tissue? Scissors (or pliers or chopsticks for that matter) don't slice open the soft pads our our fingertips not because we have bones in our hands but because - duh - scissors are only sharp on the cutting surface, and not on the surface where it is secured for leverage. And these examples only address the problem by applying direct resistance through the cutting axis of the blade. A cutting blade could also be secured with adhesion: by sticking 'tethers' to flat side. Ligaments and tendons connect hard material (bone) to soft tissue (muscle) quite well, in case you hadn't noticed.
I thought accuracy and stability of resonators depended on properly using the phase discriminators to align the resonators to within a 0.5% frequency variance of the warp core. Did I miss something?
The definition is of a free market is one in which prices are negotiated "without force or coercion." In other words, a free market is transparent and competitive. Unfortunately, transparency and competition are anathema to profit; they are mutually exclusive. Ironically, a highly profitable market is a failed market by definition.
Would this material make good radiation shileding? Seems like manned spaceflight could make use of a material that did double-duty as radiation shields and solar panels.
Traditional news broadcasters do a reasonable job of filtering information, but people tend to seek out filters that match their own interests, which is not only why news is broken up into sections on BBC's website, but why we have "News for Nerds" on slashdot, and news for surfers on surfline, etc.
Someone in another recent thread mention the TRIPS architecture. It's quite interesting reading.
Bah. This comparison is just Apples to - wait a minute...
Ah, the strawman of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. With ignorant raving loons like yourself it is only a matter of time. Too bad the historical facts just don't support your nonsensical argument. Communism IS a religion: it replaces one set of irrational beliefs with another. Both are irrational ideologies. Atheism and science, on the other hand, are the antithesis of this; they are rational assertions based on evidence and are open to change and correction in the event that new evidence comes to light. Communism, naziism and fascism are all social systems that self-destructed as a result of irrational ideology. Show me a society that self-destructed because of too much logic and rational thought, and then we might have something to argue about. In the meantime, be sure to have a look at Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark. They are the most developed countries in the world, with the highest standards of living, highest literacy rates, lowest crime rates, lowest teen-pregnancy rates, and highest economic and social equity rates. They are also the countries with the highest levels of atheism (80% in Sweden). Where's your argument now?
So yes, you do seek to destroy humanity in accordance with your religion
Wow. In your mind my assertion that all thinking and feeling creatures should be awarded rights and protections makes me "seek to destroy humanity." What a paragon of rationality and clear thinking you are.
I want to associate with people, and be led by people, that want humans to eat cows and not be eaten by bears. It's better for -our team-, the human team.
So even though we can "build skyscrapers and spaceships" it's still eat-or-be-eaten to you, hmm? There can be no peaceful co-existence? No harmony with nature? I may think that we are no more entitled to privilege than animals, but it's you who thinks humans are no different than animals and should therefore have no greater obligations or responsibilities. No, the truth has come out: it's you who doesn't care about our planet or the other creatures with whom we share it, because in your mind it's us against them. Your grotesque egocentrism and self-importance is both monstrous and pathetic. It is you, with your barbaric irrationality and wanton destructiveness, who are to be despised. And it is rational people like me - scientists and philosophers - who are left to clean up after your mess; it is up to me and others like me to do the heavy lifting of civilization: to abolish slavery despite its sanction in the Bible, to invent antibiotics and cure disease where the religious were sure it was all just 'possession by Satan', and to create real miracles and wonders like cell phones and computers, where you would be content with burning bushes.