You are being statistically inane. For any given band, there are going to be people who hate them, and people who will let us all know how much they hate them. No one is surprised by your post, no one is going to think your opinion means 1/8192th of anything, you're not communicating anything more than an arbitrary preference, so why bother?
No, for the record I haven't listened yet. And yes, replying to your wankery is equally wanktastic.
There are many in the corporate world who will not use open source software because of personalities like RMS and others.
I don't view this as a problem at all (other than an unfortunate situation for the shareholders). I doubt very much that any organization that would be potentially contributing to or improving GCC for the rest of us would reject it solely on the basis RMS' personality, so what have we lost here exactly? Some profit for a superstitious company? I'm as happy as anyone to hear about OSS spreading, but I'm not disappointed when someone decides not to use it (well, maybe disappointed in them, a little).
A coder who is sloppy in their public image could very well be sloppy when programming.
And a coder who is sloppy in their public image could very well be the next hit soap opera star. In neither case does one necessarily follow from the other.
Many CTOs and other such executives will not take that risk when making decisions that could have massive financial ramifications.
Again, my assertion is that anyone making the connection you're making here doesn't understand what they're dealing with, and the KDE people shouldn't have to waste their time appeasing superstitious CTOs. It's a market, right? The smart guys will catch on anyway.
Principles are more important than popularity. If someone feels you're acting like an idiot and calls you on it, that could very well be a principled thing to do, regardless of how professional the conduct may seem to you. I for one feel that you needed calling out on that thread. No, he didn't need to call you an idiot, and I probably wouldn't have in that situation, but I can certainly understand why he did.
Ultimately, your perception of the damage this could cause to KDE's reputation seems greatly exaggerated to me. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, which means essentially, that they've been illegally milking their position in the industry at the expense of the user. I don't see too many CTOs worried about the unprofessional behavior (I assume doing anything illegal in public is by definition not professional) of that particular company. Furthermore, a company behaving badly is far, far worse for the public image of the product involved than when some code-jockey does it.
Anyway, as long as they keep improving their software, I could care less how the business world reacts to the personalities in question. I suppose if your hopes are invested in seeing KOffice spread as far as possible, then any action by any developer that could possibly offend a potential user should be condemned.
Any more thoughts, or have we used up all the content of this discussion?
If the KOffice team wishes for their product to become more widely used, then they cannot have rogue developers going around insulting users.
Actually, I think their idea is to write a kickass office suite and let the software speak for itself. Isn't that the idea here? Richard Stallman isn't very aligned with your concepts of "professionalism", but does that stop corporations from using GCC? Show some perspective, this is about you, and about how some smart-ass dev hurt your feelings.
If he is unable to show basic professional courtesy, then perhaps he should not be working on a project such as KOffice which strives to be used in an environment where professionalism is the norm.
No, I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. If some jackass CTO was posturing like he had a clue and criticizing the project that I volunteer for unfairly, I would not hesitate to be rude. There are lots of CTOs out there, and alienating one possible user because he's irritating is not the end of KOffice. In fact, hell, why would I care if a CTO stupid enough to think that what a programmer says in an offhand/. comment has any real bearing on the product at hand uses my product or not?
You seem to think the onus on the volunteer developer to bend over backwards and accomodate inane, pointless criticism. Maybe that's how things have to work when you're wage-slaving, but the audience of the product seems pretty orthogonal to the behavioral requirements of the devs in this case.
If I woke up one day to realize someone had just popped into my house overnight, without my knowing, I would go fix whatever weak spot they used to get in. Then I would buy weapons. Then I wouldn't sleep at night.
So what you're essentially saying is that ignorance is bliss. Fair enough, but not a popular meme around these parts.
Nobody got hurt!
Are you facetiously implying that those who forcefully visit knowledge upon you are disrupting your bliss, and are therefore "hurting" you? (An honest question, I couldn't read the intent of your last sentence).
I basically have to agree with the GP here. Burger-flippers have to be polite to people that don't deserve it, because it's their ass on the line. Ditto all the way up the corporate chain.
Please, please explain to me why a KOffice developer has any incentive to lick the boots of the un/misinformed (which, to put it as "professionally" as possible, you were clearly a member of in the linked thread). It's not like you pay his salary.
You can whine and moan all you like that this guy doesn't behave within the choking confines of corporate norms, but that doesn't mean his behavior is at all out of line. I think you need to re-examine the way you expect to be treated. It seems pretty apparent that your first reaction wasn't, "Why did I piss this guy off so much?" but "Oh my god! This guy is pissed off at me! That's not supposed to happen!"
Just a reply to all the replies I've seen thus far to the parent. Your comparisons are poor for a few reasons.
Murder and bank robbery always negatively affect someone. Removal of life and removal of property and all that. Hacking/cracking/whatever-you-want-to-call-it sometimes involves property damage of a sort, if the hacker actually does do any real damage.
A much better comparison would be "people that break into your house". If real life reflected cyberspace, there would still be essentially murderers and thieves trying to break into places, and there would also be people hopping through your window at night to leave a sticky-note on your coffee table that reads, "Window latch is broken, you really oughta fix that." People that, for fun, are trying to circumvent the security of others, simply for the thrill and opportunity to improve said security.
So, let's come around to, "if nobody hacked, we wouldn't have this problem!" Seriously. In reality, there will always be an incentive to break into stuff, to steal, to cause various sorts of trouble. This incentive will create a certain type of hacker; it's not as if all the "bad" hackers were once "good" and then realized all the harm they could be doing. The bad apples were created in exactly the same way most criminals are created. Some guy with a passion for computer security is a differed breed of "hacker" than an organized crime syndicate. Don't confuse the former with the latter, and don't act like they're part of the problem.
I think you're reducing this to a semantic issue when it's really not. Evolution might not have a purpose, but it does seemingly have a direction: complexity. There are exceptions, but is there any question that the life-forms that exist today are more complex than those that existed 200 million years ago? By that metric (which is of course still arbitrary, but at least has a rationale), and assuming genome size is a good indicator of complexity, wouldn't humans take top spot (serious question, IANA biologist) as the "largest" self-replicating collection of biological information?
This isn't Summer of Code, it's CodeJam. CodeJam is an algorithmic competition, it's much more akin to a track meet than a barn-raising. So there were no "winning projects", only winning solutions. You can read the final round problems, if you'd like.
I've noticed a tendency for people to write off programming contests because it's not "really about programming", in so many words. I'd like to point out that these aren't "software development" contests: TopCoder does run those, and they are very different from the algorithm competition (the name the more popular contest goes by).
Do you know why companies are looking to hire the winners of these contests? Is it so they can put tomek or SnapDragon to work chugging out applications? Hardly. Have you ever seen some of the harder problems they have to solve? They are incredibly agile when it comes to algorithm hacking. I've seen these people write probabalistic solutions that passed all the tests by some smart pruning and faith in statistics. That was after solving two other problems, all within a 75-minute time limit. Speed isn't everything, but there is definitely something to be said for someone who can crunch abstractions that quickly.
The simple fact is that a lot of companies would love to have a "brain guy" of that magnitude around, because being able to solve complex algorithmic problems quickly is actually sometimes a desirable trait.
What I find interesting is that one of us made an opinion based off research and one of us is parroting the beliefs or facts as reported from a single partisan source.
I'd like to point out with my powers of hindsight that one of the sources of this information is the Louisiana government.
If some of my sources or views do not agree with what mainstream "Republicans" are saying, than so be it. I am more comfortable drawing an opinion from a wide collection of sources and thought than from a single party line or source....I'll leave off the Winston Churchill quote
Is it smug in here, or is it you? If you gather information from a "wide collection of sources" and they're not all in agreement, do you just throw your hands up in the air and moan "who's to say", or do you use that 3-pound lump of blood and tissue in your skull to connect that information, look for patterns, draw your own conclusions? If you were honestly drawing an opinion from a wide collection of sources, and you were interested in relevant action instead of saving face, you'd be blaming Bush too.
Why? Because maybe if enough people had blamed Bush and his administration of hacks back in 2001 instead of "uniting in the face of disaster", Bush would have learned that ignoring warnings and facts until they've generated a crisis for you isn't acceptable conduct for the president of the United States.
How do you lose interoperable file formats? You can use any file format you choose. Just use different applications. Microsoft surely doesn't force you or your job to use Office.
They don't use open specifications. This hurts interoperability. And don't give me "they have no obligation" crap. Of course they don't, that's why they do it. It doesn't mean it doesn't have a negative effect. When my boss sends me a document, he sends me a word doc. So I'm stuck either using Office or trying my luck with the latest stab at reverse-engineering the spec? Closed MS specs hurt everyone except MS.
Software choice orthogonal to hardware choice? Kind of like how Apple has done it? Or how IBM did it in the past? No, no wait, like Commodore? How about Sun? No, no SGI? In fact of all these guess which major company did NOT own and push their own hardware line?
Fair enough.
Anyone can developer an application for any and all OSes. What prevents that? Nothing, except people want to target the market leading OS.
No, cross-platform tools and languages are quickly making that "targeting" crap meaningless. The only reason you ever need to target your app so specifically is if you're stuck with the tools MS has marketed down everyone's throats (big surprise they're not cross-platform). Marketing matters, partly because it's not all geeks making the decisions, partly because advertising always has an effect.
What if there were 10 OSes with 10% market share each? Well now you have to maintain 10 versions of your product to cover the market. I'd personally rather have one (and two at the most) OSes I had to support.
Well, if they were 10 POSIX-compatible OSes, developing for the lot of them is suddenly a lot easier. Also, reference previous paragraph.
You claim VB to be a poor solution. Do you know its market? It's for RAD development by people who aren't computer scientists.
Yes, I know it's market, I'm not a complete idiot. I also know there have been, and will continue to be, better solutions based on the same idea (solutions that happen to be something other than complete cul-de-sacs for a learning programmer, and cross-platform to boot).
It's ridiculously efficient...? and gets the job done...poorly, and generally speaking, heaven help the next guy it gets chucked over to (I've been in that boat, it's not pretty).
While I'm a C++ develooper I think VB is the single most important piece of software for development since C.
Well that is, of course, purely a matter of opinion. I disagree.
I'm not saying most of them are driven to it in any justifiable sense. I'm merely saying that poverty (which does exist in the U.S.) creates criminals at a faster rate, which hurts all of us. Each criminal is responsible, but that doesn't mean we've done our job once the criminal is in jail.
The complacency of the consumer and corporate media control go hand in hand. I would venture to say that the biggest problem we have is the institution known as the corporation. The influence a corporation can (and pretty much by definition, will) have on a government should be enough to concern any free society (and indeed, some were very concerned around the end of the 1800s).
As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations:
The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
Now consider this: For the last N (I can't remember exaclty how many, but it's been quite a few) presidential elections, the candidate who spent more money on campaigning won. Do you think the corporation-friendly candidate has something of a Darwinian advantage?
You can blame the public for this, as basically every problem in our society is technically their fault, but blaming something that generally behaves statistically seems a bit pointless to me. What about greedy motherfuckers like J. Rupert Murdoch who actually have the capacity to understand what's going on, and choose "Do more evil"? What about the mere 100 senators who sign bullshit like the copyright extension act, or the mere 9 justices that interpret "a limited time" to mean "any finite quantity of time"?
Our public can't do its job; our government isn't interested in empowering the public at all (look at what a joke third parties are... it's a problem that dems and reps don't give a flying fuck about), and is beholden to its corporate masters for funding (without which, some other candidate would have the funding to beat them). And our corporations? What outside influence is making them behave the way they do? Nothing. It's just pure, simple greed.
And the "just ignore the law" argument generally isn't a good long-term solution.
No, it's fantastic. You should try it some time. And unenforceable laws shouldn't exist in the first place. Oh, if only that was in the constitution... who's up for a new amendment that's not completely bat-shit crazy?
I could easily define the grand scheme of things to the machinations of human civilization. Then nothing that happened prior to the advent of our civilization is relevant.
Gates isn't, eh? Maybe it's just an urban geek legend, but isn't this the sames Gates that coded BASIC for a machine he didn't have in three days, and it ran properly on the first run?
In his novel Permutation City, Greg Egan depicted a near-future with something called the QIPS network (quadrillions of instructions per second), a massive, generic processing grid with a varying market rate for computing time. Ahh the clean lines of sci-fi software.
Thank you for that semantic contortion. Since the context here is "natural causes vs human causes", I think it's pretty easily inferred that "nature" refers to "non-human". This is why we have words like "artificial", remember? We like to distinguish our works from the universe around us.
The significance of humans in the "grand scheme of things" is entirely subjective.
Slashdot Mirror
You are being statistically inane. For any given band, there are going to be people who hate them, and people who will let us all know how much they hate them. No one is surprised by your post, no one is going to think your opinion means 1/8192th of anything, you're not communicating anything more than an arbitrary preference, so why bother?
No, for the record I haven't listened yet. And yes, replying to your wankery is equally wanktastic.
There are many in the corporate world who will not use open source software because of personalities like RMS and others.
I don't view this as a problem at all (other than an unfortunate situation for the shareholders). I doubt very much that any organization that would be potentially contributing to or improving GCC for the rest of us would reject it solely on the basis RMS' personality, so what have we lost here exactly? Some profit for a superstitious company? I'm as happy as anyone to hear about OSS spreading, but I'm not disappointed when someone decides not to use it (well, maybe disappointed in them, a little).
A coder who is sloppy in their public image could very well be sloppy when programming.
And a coder who is sloppy in their public image could very well be the next hit soap opera star. In neither case does one necessarily follow from the other.
Many CTOs and other such executives will not take that risk when making decisions that could have massive financial ramifications.
Again, my assertion is that anyone making the connection you're making here doesn't understand what they're dealing with, and the KDE people shouldn't have to waste their time appeasing superstitious CTOs. It's a market, right? The smart guys will catch on anyway.
Principles are more important than popularity. If someone feels you're acting like an idiot and calls you on it, that could very well be a principled thing to do, regardless of how professional the conduct may seem to you. I for one feel that you needed calling out on that thread. No, he didn't need to call you an idiot, and I probably wouldn't have in that situation, but I can certainly understand why he did.
Ultimately, your perception of the damage this could cause to KDE's reputation seems greatly exaggerated to me. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, which means essentially, that they've been illegally milking their position in the industry at the expense of the user. I don't see too many CTOs worried about the unprofessional behavior (I assume doing anything illegal in public is by definition not professional) of that particular company. Furthermore, a company behaving badly is far, far worse for the public image of the product involved than when some code-jockey does it.
Anyway, as long as they keep improving their software, I could care less how the business world reacts to the personalities in question. I suppose if your hopes are invested in seeing KOffice spread as far as possible, then any action by any developer that could possibly offend a potential user should be condemned.
Any more thoughts, or have we used up all the content of this discussion?
If the KOffice team wishes for their product to become more widely used, then they cannot have rogue developers going around insulting users.
/. comment has any real bearing on the product at hand uses my product or not?
Actually, I think their idea is to write a kickass office suite and let the software speak for itself. Isn't that the idea here? Richard Stallman isn't very aligned with your concepts of "professionalism", but does that stop corporations from using GCC? Show some perspective, this is about you, and about how some smart-ass dev hurt your feelings.
If he is unable to show basic professional courtesy, then perhaps he should not be working on a project such as KOffice which strives to be used in an environment where professionalism is the norm.
No, I'm sorry, this is ridiculous. If some jackass CTO was posturing like he had a clue and criticizing the project that I volunteer for unfairly, I would not hesitate to be rude. There are lots of CTOs out there, and alienating one possible user because he's irritating is not the end of KOffice. In fact, hell, why would I care if a CTO stupid enough to think that what a programmer says in an offhand
You seem to think the onus on the volunteer developer to bend over backwards and accomodate inane, pointless criticism. Maybe that's how things have to work when you're wage-slaving, but the audience of the product seems pretty orthogonal to the behavioral requirements of the devs in this case.
If I woke up one day to realize someone had just popped into my house overnight, without my knowing, I would go fix whatever weak spot they used to get in. Then I would buy weapons. Then I wouldn't sleep at night.
So what you're essentially saying is that ignorance is bliss. Fair enough, but not a popular meme around these parts.
Nobody got hurt!
Are you facetiously implying that those who forcefully visit knowledge upon you are disrupting your bliss, and are therefore "hurting" you? (An honest question, I couldn't read the intent of your last sentence).
I basically have to agree with the GP here. Burger-flippers have to be polite to people that don't deserve it, because it's their ass on the line. Ditto all the way up the corporate chain.
Please, please explain to me why a KOffice developer has any incentive to lick the boots of the un/misinformed (which, to put it as "professionally" as possible, you were clearly a member of in the linked thread). It's not like you pay his salary.
You can whine and moan all you like that this guy doesn't behave within the choking confines of corporate norms, but that doesn't mean his behavior is at all out of line. I think you need to re-examine the way you expect to be treated. It seems pretty apparent that your first reaction wasn't, "Why did I piss this guy off so much?" but "Oh my god! This guy is pissed off at me! That's not supposed to happen!"
Just a reply to all the replies I've seen thus far to the parent. Your comparisons are poor for a few reasons.
Murder and bank robbery always negatively affect someone. Removal of life and removal of property and all that. Hacking/cracking/whatever-you-want-to-call-it sometimes involves property damage of a sort, if the hacker actually does do any real damage.
A much better comparison would be "people that break into your house". If real life reflected cyberspace, there would still be essentially murderers and thieves trying to break into places, and there would also be people hopping through your window at night to leave a sticky-note on your coffee table that reads, "Window latch is broken, you really oughta fix that." People that, for fun, are trying to circumvent the security of others, simply for the thrill and opportunity to improve said security.
So, let's come around to, "if nobody hacked, we wouldn't have this problem!" Seriously. In reality, there will always be an incentive to break into stuff, to steal, to cause various sorts of trouble. This incentive will create a certain type of hacker; it's not as if all the "bad" hackers were once "good" and then realized all the harm they could be doing. The bad apples were created in exactly the same way most criminals are created. Some guy with a passion for computer security is a differed breed of "hacker" than an organized crime syndicate. Don't confuse the former with the latter, and don't act like they're part of the problem.
They're not.
I think you're reducing this to a semantic issue when it's really not. Evolution might not have a purpose, but it does seemingly have a direction: complexity. There are exceptions, but is there any question that the life-forms that exist today are more complex than those that existed 200 million years ago? By that metric (which is of course still arbitrary, but at least has a rationale), and assuming genome size is a good indicator of complexity, wouldn't humans take top spot (serious question, IANA biologist) as the "largest" self-replicating collection of biological information?
This isn't Summer of Code, it's CodeJam. CodeJam is an algorithmic competition, it's much more akin to a track meet than a barn-raising. So there were no "winning projects", only winning solutions. You can read the final round problems, if you'd like.
I should point out that the third-tier upper-division problems (the highest-valued problems) are generally much more involved.
I've noticed a tendency for people to write off programming contests because it's not "really about programming", in so many words. I'd like to point out that these aren't "software development" contests: TopCoder does run those, and they are very different from the algorithm competition (the name the more popular contest goes by).
Do you know why companies are looking to hire the winners of these contests? Is it so they can put tomek or SnapDragon to work chugging out applications? Hardly. Have you ever seen some of the harder problems they have to solve? They are incredibly agile when it comes to algorithm hacking. I've seen these people write probabalistic solutions that passed all the tests by some smart pruning and faith in statistics. That was after solving two other problems, all within a 75-minute time limit. Speed isn't everything, but there is definitely something to be said for someone who can crunch abstractions that quickly.
The simple fact is that a lot of companies would love to have a "brain guy" of that magnitude around, because being able to solve complex algorithmic problems quickly is actually sometimes a desirable trait.
What I find interesting is that one of us made an opinion based off research and one of us is parroting the beliefs or facts as reported from a single partisan source.
...I'll leave off the Winston Churchill quote
I'd like to point out with my powers of hindsight that one of the sources of this information is the Louisiana government.
If some of my sources or views do not agree with what mainstream "Republicans" are saying, than so be it. I am more comfortable drawing an opinion from a wide collection of sources and thought than from a single party line or source.
Is it smug in here, or is it you? If you gather information from a "wide collection of sources" and they're not all in agreement, do you just throw your hands up in the air and moan "who's to say", or do you use that 3-pound lump of blood and tissue in your skull to connect that information, look for patterns, draw your own conclusions? If you were honestly drawing an opinion from a wide collection of sources, and you were interested in relevant action instead of saving face, you'd be blaming Bush too.
Why? Because maybe if enough people had blamed Bush and his administration of hacks back in 2001 instead of "uniting in the face of disaster", Bush would have learned that ignoring warnings and facts until they've generated a crisis for you isn't acceptable conduct for the president of the United States.
How do you lose interoperable file formats? You can use any file format you choose. Just use different applications. Microsoft surely doesn't force you or your job to use Office.
...? ...poorly, and generally speaking, heaven help the next guy it gets chucked over to (I've been in that boat, it's not pretty).
They don't use open specifications. This hurts interoperability. And don't give me "they have no obligation" crap. Of course they don't, that's why they do it. It doesn't mean it doesn't have a negative effect. When my boss sends me a document, he sends me a word doc. So I'm stuck either using Office or trying my luck with the latest stab at reverse-engineering the spec? Closed MS specs hurt everyone except MS.
Software choice orthogonal to hardware choice? Kind of like how Apple has done it? Or how IBM did it in the past? No, no wait, like Commodore? How about Sun? No, no SGI? In fact of all these guess which major company did NOT own and push their own hardware line?
Fair enough.
Anyone can developer an application for any and all OSes. What prevents that? Nothing, except people want to target the market leading OS.
No, cross-platform tools and languages are quickly making that "targeting" crap meaningless. The only reason you ever need to target your app so specifically is if you're stuck with the tools MS has marketed down everyone's throats (big surprise they're not cross-platform). Marketing matters, partly because it's not all geeks making the decisions, partly because advertising always has an effect.
What if there were 10 OSes with 10% market share each? Well now you have to maintain 10 versions of your product to cover the market. I'd personally rather have one (and two at the most) OSes I had to support.
Well, if they were 10 POSIX-compatible OSes, developing for the lot of them is suddenly a lot easier. Also, reference previous paragraph.
You claim VB to be a poor solution. Do you know its market? It's for RAD development by people who aren't computer scientists.
Yes, I know it's market, I'm not a complete idiot. I also know there have been, and will continue to be, better solutions based on the same idea (solutions that happen to be something other than complete cul-de-sacs for a learning programmer, and cross-platform to boot).
It's ridiculously efficient
and gets the job done
While I'm a C++ develooper I think VB is the single most important piece of software for development since C.
Well that is, of course, purely a matter of opinion. I disagree.
I'm not saying most of them are driven to it in any justifiable sense. I'm merely saying that poverty (which does exist in the U.S.) creates criminals at a faster rate, which hurts all of us. Each criminal is responsible, but that doesn't mean we've done our job once the criminal is in jail.
Wow. Seriously.
The hitman is to blame for the murder. So is the guy that hired him.
A poor criminal is to blame for his crimes. So should people who act consistently to make the poor poorer.
- Interoperable file formats
- Software choice orthogonal to hardware choice
- Application choice more orthogonal to OS choice
We lose:- Shitty, "easily marketable" solutions like VB that waste the resources of everyone who touches them.
- An army of insecure boxen sitting on the net, waiting for the next stupid worm or email virus to run them over.
I'm sure the 84% ofAs Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations: Now consider this: For the last N (I can't remember exaclty how many, but it's been quite a few) presidential elections, the candidate who spent more money on campaigning won. Do you think the corporation-friendly candidate has something of a Darwinian advantage?
You can blame the public for this, as basically every problem in our society is technically their fault, but blaming something that generally behaves statistically seems a bit pointless to me. What about greedy motherfuckers like J. Rupert Murdoch who actually have the capacity to understand what's going on, and choose "Do more evil"? What about the mere 100 senators who sign bullshit like the copyright extension act, or the mere 9 justices that interpret "a limited time" to mean "any finite quantity of time"?
Our public can't do its job; our government isn't interested in empowering the public at all (look at what a joke third parties are... it's a problem that dems and reps don't give a flying fuck about), and is beholden to its corporate masters for funding (without which, some other candidate would have the funding to beat them). And our corporations? What outside influence is making them behave the way they do? Nothing. It's just pure, simple greed.
That's why I blame the corporation.
Whoa. I think that permanetly put me off musical theater.
/., help!
I can't think of a good enough gay joke here.
And the "just ignore the law" argument generally isn't a good long-term solution.
No, it's fantastic. You should try it some time. And unenforceable laws shouldn't exist in the first place. Oh, if only that was in the constitution... who's up for a new amendment that's not completely bat-shit crazy?
I could easily define the grand scheme of things to the machinations of human civilization. Then nothing that happened prior to the advent of our civilization is relevant.
Gates isn't, eh? Maybe it's just an urban geek legend, but isn't this the sames Gates that coded BASIC for a machine he didn't have in three days, and it ran properly on the first run?
In his novel Permutation City, Greg Egan depicted a near-future with something called the QIPS network (quadrillions of instructions per second), a massive, generic processing grid with a varying market rate for computing time. Ahh the clean lines of sci-fi software.
The deal gets a bit sweeter if you're splitting your power bill with roommates.
The baconated grapefruit.
Yeah, that's "nature's" fault.
Thank you for that semantic contortion. Since the context here is "natural causes vs human causes", I think it's pretty easily inferred that "nature" refers to "non-human". This is why we have words like "artificial", remember? We like to distinguish our works from the universe around us.
The significance of humans in the "grand scheme of things" is entirely subjective.