It's more like putting a TV in your window, turning it on, and getting upset when someone watches it.
No, it's more like having a bar's TV visible through a window, and having some non-customer with a matching remote control standing out on the street acting like it's his TV. It's not the same at all.
This is already true when all of the parties involved want it to be true. Plenty of large customers (corporate, government, etc) insist on just that sort of thing, depending on the size and nature of their purchases. Contracts for that sort of access are completely routine.
if we're going to have patents, there's got to be some way to spot violations, right?
The patent holder is just fine scoping around for obvious violations of their patents. Do you really want tax dollars tied up in a non-stop patrol for that sort of thing? Let the people with a vested interest spot the stuff, or join organizations (like trade associations, etc) that help them do that.
Then we give customers certain rights in the event of an emergency (security hole in the firewall software, data corrupting bug in the business-critical database, etc.) and in the event that the supplier becomes unable to sell more licenses (bankrupcy, etc.).
Again, this is completely routine in many licenses/contracts. But mandating it by law will do more to jack up prices than just about anything else you could do. Think of what it would cost to fund, during the growth period of a small start-up company, for example, some escrow service that would guarantee such access and support (post-bankruptcy) for potentially millions of users? When the stakes are truly that high for users, they already routinely have the habit of negotiating for such things, and all of the players understand it. Why mandate it (and the costs) for everyone, and get a giant new bureaucratic layer involved where it's only marginally, if at all, widely useful?
It's time that access to source code for device drivers was mandated by law: if hardware manufacturers will not supply the source code for their drivers, then they simply should not be allowed to sell the product
I don't buy it. First, do you really trust the legislative process to meaningfully define (for actual, real-world use in an industry moving 5000mph) terms like "device" and "driver?" It's bad enough when a judge decides to get involved in discussing what is, and is not part of an operating system, as if such things weren't ever going to change.
I'd rather let demonstrably crappy manufacturers get the reputation they deserve, and let the market sort it out. Don't buy hardware from people whose practices your don't like.
Further: what possible guarantee is there that drivers, having been open-sourced, will go out the door without any vulnerabilities? The concern here isn't whether the bug(s) will be fixed (it/they will), but whether everyone will patch. That concern would still be there even if the same open-source world that has produced all sorts of other buggy/vulnerable releases/products had access to drivers for something produced and shipped in a very short design/marketing life cycle. None of those risks go away, but in your scenario, you now have congress-creatures (egads!) talking about which hunks of code are, or are not "drivers." Now that is a vulnerability I can do without.
I don't think that coerced means what you think it means. The "lazy" part is far more accurate. When you're spending $40M (!!!) on a software project with a web front end, there's simply no excuse for making it platform dependent. If I were in your shoes, I'd be way, way more upset with whoever concocted/approved those requirements/specs than with a private, for-profit company that provides tools they hope will have more users continue to use the main product(s) they sell. I'd much rather hold spec-writers' feet to the fire (in the interests of platform independent designs) than get the government involved in defining what is, and what is not a component of an operating system - especially when things change as rapidly as they do.
One thing I personally feel is you don't develop a bond with your co-workers if you don't see them face to face
Well, the guy I report to (on the current day job) is hundreds of miles away, and I see him maybe twice a year. Once-a-week status calls, plenty of e-mail, and as-needed project chats... but essentially no normal "bonding" face-time. My closest co-worker/counterpart is a thousand miles away in the other direction, and while we work on the same issues and share lots of information and talk most weeks, we've never met in person, ever. None the less, we all get along fine and get work done.
My experience working in an office, physically near a lot of people, is that I get the opposite of a bond with many of them. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. Personal foibles, tics, and microwaved tuna-fish do more to UNDO productivity than remote working ever can, at least with people in my line of work.
Linux will support alot more hardware than a generic retail copy of Windows.
Come now, really. You should replace "will support" with "can be made to support, by very experienced people with a lot of time and a connection to Google that already works." You know perfectly well that all sorts of video and audio hardware (just as an example) can be a freakin' nightmare. Likewise for various odd-ball storage devices, network widgets, and other goodies that Windows just wakes up knowing what to do with. It's just not the same, especially for the average user.
As far as I'm concerned, IE is just a utility like Notepad. At this point, a web browser is as fundamental to making the computer a useful device as a text editor - and arguably moreso.
We're certainly on the same page, there. The slavish devotion to citing a court finding from years ago (when the industry, and the courts, certainly, had no idea how to really chew on this stuff) makes certain people's complaints about having a browser native to A CONVICTED, MONOPOLIZING, EVIL OS (followed by breathless screeching about MS in general, etc)... well, it's just getting kind of embarassing, really. Really.
If there wasn't a market advantage to be had by bundling IE, MS would neither expend the developer time to create it, nor risk exposing themselves to further litigation by bundling it.
Well, sure, there's a market advantage. It's the advantage of not disappearing from the market because something as fundamental as web browser isn't native to the operating system. It would be so conspicuous by its absence that they can only press their general OS marketing if they've got a system that can, natively, render HTML and understand XML, etc. I used to wonder why people don't get this, but now I realize that people (like the one I was responding to) DO understand it, but they're simply being religious freaks about it, and really have a lot invested in being able to shrilly refer to MS as a "convicted monopolist" at every opportunity.
Now you're just mocking me, aren't you? It's not my fault there's a new 10/22 that's been sitting in my trunk for three whole days and I still haven't had the chance to use it. I've been busy, you insensitive clod!
Actually, that sig is really, entirely, for my own benefit. As I type this, two lovely bird dogs are sleeping near my feet, wondering when the hell they'll get to go out in the field and be bird dogs again. Must... stop... posting. BTW, enjoy that 10/22. I haven't had mine out in a long time... I should just go get one of those little milk-cartons of 22LR and blast away for a while... it's about the most fun/dollar you can have.
So, what you're saying is that something as fundamental as browsing software should not be provided by a company that is providing the fundamentals (an OS) to users? I imagine that Apple users would be frustrated to find that Safari was missing. Who cares if once upon a time a browser was considered an interesting, and separate piece of software? So were all sorts of other things that are now considered fundamental parts of operating systems (even in OS-X and most Linux distros). The ability to render HTML to the screen is not some luxury, or some hobby item that some buyers will want to consider. It's fundamental to the OS (in MS's case) because they (wisely, I think) even considered a browser-ish presentation of the local file system to be a more familiar and pleasant approach for the current generation of users.
Windows is Microsoft's product. Theirs. You can be a seller of it, or not. You can bundle some Linux distro with your hardware, or you can be Apple, or you can be a part of MS's distribution chain. But if you want to make money off of selling computers that have MS's software installed, you can do it according to their terms... or, sell something else for a living. There is no "force" involved. Their browser is part of the OS. If you want to sell their OS, you're selling an OS that has that feature... but which also allows you to go ahead and use another browser all you want.
Microsoft's abuse of it's OS Monopoly status lies in it's focible inclusion of IE on every Windows computer, thus requiring by default, that everyone who uses their Monopoly OS, is presented with their Web Browser.
What's it like, living back in the 1990's? Web-flavored presentation of information (about the local file system, or of most any reachable URL that responds to an HTTP request) is part of the operating system. MS doesn't "force" anyone to "bundle" it as some required app... it is part and parcel of Windows. You're making a false compartmentalization that's no longer meaningful, even though anybody can use any browser they want, any time they want, on top of their OS as they see fit. Is MS "abusive" when they include Notepad, instead of a shortcut to Vi?
If they dont like a specific thing that is being done by a competitor, they could lock out that feature for a future version.
Nonsense. If some non-standard behavior in IE prevents people from using a really compelling resource on the web, and people are hearing about that really compelling resource from people that say, "oh, and use Firefox - it's better for this," that's all it takes. How do you think certain IM clients become popular? Because some of the do something a little differently than the next one, and social pressure drives users to the one that feels right. It's a shame that Apple is still playing catch-up from their years of only deploying Apple-ness on too-expensive proprietary hardware, but the same sort of social pressure (say, a perception of ease of use for grandmothers, etc) ran headlong into the brick wall of a couple thousand dollars' difference between a decent Mac and a well-packaged Wintel machine with support from Dell, etc.
But money's not the object here, so it's all about content. And have you really seen MS's slow-to-evolve browser preventing some serious business iniative online? That hasn't been nearly the issue that lack of broadband has been. And now that more people have broadband, they're also learning that either: they're fine surfing to MySpace with MSIE, so who cares, or... gee, I can download Firefox in five minutes and my kid will show me how to use it. Still not seeing any "abuse" in that scenario. Probably all the more so because I rarely use MS's browser, and neither do my family, or co-workers, or many acquaintences... none of us are feeling "abused."
I can't really decide if you are a troll/astroturfer or just clueless.
None of the above.
I just don't find it "abusive" for MS to include their browser with their own O/S any more than I find it "abusive" for Apple to include Safari. It is so utterly painless to fetch your own copy of Firefox, and doctor it up to suit your tastes, that the notion of MS somehow abusively preventing that is laughable.
Even if no money changes hands for using a web browser other than IE, it still weakens MS's stranglehold on the desktop.
What stranglehold? You're confusing correlation with causation. We can split hairs all day about browser inclusion, etc., but that doesn't change the poor decisions made by companies like Apple that boxed them into minority status during some very formative years of personal computer adoption, especially for businesses. Microsoft doesn't (and didn't) have to be perfect to be wildly successful, they just had to be convenient. Apple wasn't (proprietary hardware?), Unix requires (for most user) a priesthood layer to make it go, and Linux is still way too fussy about hardware and too entirely inscrutible for even a lot of professional IT people to actually put to work for users. In the meantime, you've got MS continuing to sell (and support, for millions of people) their evolving pile of software in an era when... the internet suddenly matters. Why wouldn't they want to provide that basic, fundamental, essential tool (a web browser) as a piece of their collection of other basic, fundamental tools (meaning, "operating system")?
They're not running a charity for other start-ups, and folks like Google aren't obliged to give MS any sort of slack, either.
The more market share other web browsers have, the more likely websites will not be IE only
So, your real complaint is with the authors of the content who simply don't care about a certain percentage of their potential visitors? I run sites that see as low as 70% MS browsers. I can't possibly afford to alienate the Safari, Firefox, and even antique Netscape browsers that come along. To say nothing of the cell phones. I'm not blaming MS for having work to do, any more than I'm blaming Netscape for the fact that there are still leftover trainwrecks of theirs that I still have to cater to.
because IE7 comes with the OS, its easy to use, and it is adequate for most people
How horrible!
microsoft really has abused its monopoly in all this
Yup, they're really raking in the dough by selling their browser... wait. I mean, they're really squashing Mozilla and preventing them from selling their browser... er, hold on. Ah... I get it... you're secretly arguing about who makes money off of the ads in search engines, MSN or Google, right? So MS's "monopoly" is crushing poor Google. Not! They've got a bigger share of search than MS does of desktops. Maybe you were making some other point entirely? Where's the abuse, exactly?
But that's exactly what's wrong with so many news-ish web sites. I don't want to have to wade through an unqualified conversation about facts and events, I simply want the facts. At least on slashdot there is a moderation system, and a pretty good understanding of the prevailing local culture - that means that when I want a "conversation" about the news, I can come and get one. Or go elsewhere. For a hoot, I could go to Drudge as a springboard to all sorts of spun conversations.
But a first rate "news" source (like the front page of the WP) shouldn't require me to wonder who is conversing with whom, that particular day. The Washington Post is my "local" paper, here in suburban Maryland. My gut sense, having read the paper for over 30 years, is that the web-based conversation they are now hosting has been eroding their editorial spine. Ironically, I've traditionally disliked their editorial positions - but they were consistent, and I had a sense of how that was going to shape their coverage decisions. Now, they seem to be thrashing around quite a bit.
Cheap flights into Elbonia often connect through the Amorphous, Carbonia international airport. Unfortunately the town's not very stable when it's warm out.
Although... they did choose to do registration business with a US company, and somehow I'm betting these aren't all.RU domains, right? They want the.COM-iness (heh!) of a US-sounding address, but not US thoughts on the matter.
Since air is precious to me - I can't live without it, after all - it is not value-neutral to me.
The point is that the presence of air for you to breath, and your own presence as a species that evolved to breath it, is of no moral (value-based) significance. It just is. Like gravity. People who find, with each breath, that they're being "blessed" by some vague paternal entity are still operating in Santa-Clause-Is-Real-Mode. That's actually not a bad analogy. When you're a child (assuming that wide cultural backgound that treats it that way, of course), the meaning of Christmas (at least, the overwhelmingly obvious one), is all the fanfare and the gifts, and presumptive agent of that delivery: Ol' St. Nick. Once you get older, you realize that the only thing that makes the day meaningful is what you put into it, or into the cultivated relationships (with family) that are actually being celebrated by those gift-giving rituals. Never mind the history (Pagan solstice on up through Christian time-shifted birthday recognition) of the day - the degree to which it has any meaning depends entirely on what the practictioners, themselves, bring to the table.
One is welcome to assign some mystical significance to breathing, or attach some moral weight to it, but the air really doesn't care one way or the other, and its existence isn't dependent on your estimation of it. No, I'm not talking about whether you value it enough to not pollute it by smoking, etc... that's a sidebar discussion about whether you value yourself.
You are confusing BIOS and application levels.
Contradictions can't exist, per se. what I'm really talking about is below the BIOS level. At some level, our basic functioning depends on things being what they actually are, not two tings at once, or magically something different depending on what you believe them to be. And no, we're not talking about quantum behavior, either. If reality flopped around in unpredictable, contradictory ways, our basic framework as an organism couldn't have evolved into anything like our sentient selves. We come from a consistent, non-magical reality, and everything about us is built around dealing with just that. But we can still carry on (breathing, etc) while choosing to ignore mental contradictions we've built for ourselves - and that leads to all sorts of messes. Popishness, included.
It is somewhat illogical to dismiss religion as a "comforting myth" when you are demonstrating such faith in assertions you can't possibly know, much less prove, that you consider them facts.
I have absolutely no need of "faith" in my position, as it's self-evident. It's that way whether I want to believe it or not. Conversely, religions expressly deny the quest for creating meaning, and simply assign a dogmatic meaning to which you must subscribe... without any discussion of how that position was derived (other than, essentially, "God says so, and I have someone's handed-down recollection of some stone tablets to prove it. Also, women are less important than men. And, we'll need ten percent of your income to finance the fancy clothes we're wearing while we tell you what to think.").
Now, what makes more sense: the universe simply is, and if we want our brief existence in it to be fulfilling, we need to make that existence meaningful... or, the meaning of it all has been magically handed down by a super-powered deity that loves us, despite his occasionally allowing children to die in house fires or whole villages to be raped for having the wrong flavor of DNA, etc. Occam's Razor, indeed.
Dick Cheney repeatedly asserted that Saddam was connected to 9/11, and clearly implied that invading Iraq was legitimate retaliation for the attacks of 9/11.
Nope, sorry. He repeatedly pointed out that there were indications of a connection between Al Queda and Saddam's intelligence apparatus (being shown more and more each day to be exactly true), and very reasonably pointed out the need for a more stable, democratic middle east in the wake of 9/11. "Retaliation" is your choice of words. His description was simply that it was important/essential. Which, of course, it was and still is.
Let's see... that would be the lie that Saddam's own weapons people were telling him. Or weren't you paying attention to those details? Certainly the intel agencies across the globe thought they were still there. You know, the ones that we saw giant piles of on multiple inspections, and which his regime refused to explain away, in terms of where they all went (not counting the truck caravans going into Syria, of course).
2. Saddam was responsible for 9/11.
The only people spouting that one are the people trying to say it often enough to make people believe that the US government actually said that... the better to make political points against the same. In other words, you are the one saying that, so that you can point out how not true it is. In the meantime, the people actually dealing with the problem went to Afghanistan, where the people who did it were actually being sheltered. Of course, the Taliban and A-Q did have regular contact with Saddam's intel people, but that was just on matters of routine cash, weapons, and operating territory. But getting rid of him was every bit as important as denying Taliban shelter to A-Q. Especially since he had things like "annex neighboring countries" and "lob SCUDs at Israel" on his regular to-do list. Oh, and publicly making large payments to the families of terrorist bombers, gassing whole villages, bulldozing mass graves, that sort of thing. You do actually comprehend this stuff, right? I mean, you're just pretending you don't know it, to score shallow rhetorical points, right?
3. Profit! (for big business, at least)
And which large companies, employing hundreds of thousands of people and providing services that small businesses cannot provide, would you like to see operating at a loss? How would you replace them when they fail? Would you have small mom-and-pop antibiotic manufacturers? Neighborhood hybrid car factories run by families with 10 employees? Motherboards made by hand with soldering irons? Aircraft made by the great grandchildren of the Wright brothers in the same bicycle shop? Natural gas pumped and transported a few gallons at a time in backpacks? Oh... you're the type that would rather the government did all of that. Well, just come out and say it, then. That's so much more straight forward than hoping that people will see your BS is just a callow, sarcastic charade.
Enter the precaution principle, which basically states that if you have a reasonably likely possibility of really bad future outcomes, you should try to do something about it, even if it's possible those outcomes don't come to pass. To me, global warming fits this scenario.
To me, the typical proposals that are bandied about also fit that scenario. To wit, proposing that the western economies/cultures most able to continue their existing work in making more efficient use of energy "fix" the problem by crippling the very economic engines that produce the largesse that funds that sort of R&D... while leaving 50% of the world's energy consumers to merrily (and with vastly, vastly more polluting inefficiencies) keep growing and burning as if they were still some small village... that's the perfect scenario in which to apply a princple of caution. That India, and most of Asia (including, of course, the wildly exploding, fuel-burning China) are exempt from most people's prescriptions for a cure: total nonsense. No treaty set up in that way is reasonable, and more importantly, is of essentially no consequence (even if we DO assume that tiny changes in emmissions can compete with the influence of solar cycles, etc).
Let the 1-st world economies continue to work on new technologies, and focus the preventative-hand-wringing urges instead on deforestation in Africa, Asia, and South America. Or, buy some Brazilian village a new bus, since the one they've been using since 1970 spits out more sloppy hydrocarbons than 200 late-model SUVs hauling kids to the movies at the mall (where the screen is lit up with electricity powered largely by coal... how about some more nukes? much better). But all of this requires waiving off of any political correctness, and oh no, we can't have that in our discussions with corrupt, embattled developing governments.
Science explains how, what, where, and when. Religion explains who and why.
Well, not really. Religion specializes in the perpetuation of generation-spanning myths designed to make people more comfortable with the fact that there is no 'why' unless you get off your butt and produce some of your own. Since that's more work than most people are willing to put in, and lots of people die miserably before coming to terms with the there-ain't-no-built-in-why, the cozy crutch of mythology and meaning-from-books-published-in-heaven gets a lot of regular use.
Even the whole "searching for meaning" canard is itself a crutch, since it implies that meaning is lying around someplace, or that the search for the unfindable is the meaning (if you live long enough, that particular pursuit will have you asking the question, "What is the sound of one hand smacking me on the head?"). Too many presupposed things in those scenarios, but the orientation around searching for and expecting to find pre-fab answers is usually comfortable because when we're kids, we have parents who always do seem to have an explanation for pretty much everything we ask about. But you've got to synthesize your own meaning based on reality, and live your life in a way consistent with that framework... otherwise, our BIOS-level intolerance for contradictions starts to throw errors that we can only tolerate by deciding to embrace mixed premises and conflicts. And if you grow up in the grip of (or even celebrating, at church!) such things, you wind up producing a culture where nerds and scientists all hang out in back-alley discussion boards and geeky forums like this. Damn, reality is a cruel, cruel bitch. Or, she would be, if she actually had a personality. Come on people! De-anthropomorphize, and breath in all that fresh, clean, value-neutral air.
Well, literally it does care. "We" are the universe, or at least part of it. We are how the universe has currently arranged itself here. In that sense, any caring we do is caring that the universe does, in part.
You're right, of course. I tend to refer to the universe as not being some anthropomorphized entity in these conversations because some people are so anxious to mentally create the image of some "other" party that will or won't approve of how we carry on. We, indeed, are that other party, as you say... and we're certainly part of the universe!
There certainly is a lot of selfishness at the cultural level at this point in history, which seems to be in conflict with the more global view of selfishness.
Well, it all comes down to education. And some cultures have such disdain for education (about reality) on some subjects that it will be a long time before that all gets evened out. A long time. Especially when we've got so many backwards-leaning medieval-minded thugocracies still sitting (or trying to) on the energy reserves that we're still depending on.
You're trying to say that the inherent complexity in psychological processes - namely those involved in "complex circumstances" - lends purpose to them owing to the fact that they may not be directly related to instinct.
That's not what I'm trying to say, or actually saying. All emotional responses are complex in the sense that they involve a high-level processing of perception, comparison of the perceptions to a good/bad scorecard of sorts (built in part on lower-level threat/pack/relationship instincts, but expanded through experience as one grows and gains perspective and subtlety) and then the symphony of physiological signals that tend to get more intense as a function of the urgency of the circumstances. An emotional response to a well-written chapter of a good book is a pretty high-level thing. An emotional response to watching your child saved from falling out a window still requires lots of processing, but hits a more primitive piece of the brain.
The hopelessness of existensialism and similar lines of thought lies in the fact that you INSTINCTIVELY wish to survive, and so are trying to find reasons why that would be of some purpose...
Nope. One does not "find" meaning, one creates it. The difference is enormous.
And that is depressing, no?
And thus, no, it is not. The "brave" person (since you use that word) is the one that has the courage and clarity of thought to create meaning where there is none. The coward cannot find it in himself to do so (nor, perhaps, can someone with damaged or stunted cognitive skills), and either borrows it from someone else (and simply goes through the motions), or deals with the lack of meaning through irrational, and often self-destructive behavior.
I find your decision to use the word "agnostic," and your attempt to show me the ultimately unhappy consequences of living in a godless universe that doesn't paternally watch my actions and weigh them... to be, well, a pretty weak intro to some prostelatizing, methinks. Won't work!
What you're missing is that the "warm and fuzzy feeling" you refer to is no more than an instinctive emotion - an accumulation of millions of years of mutation upon arbitrary physiological mutation. There is absolutely no significance to this feeling to the intelligent agnostic.
Sure there is. Emotions, especially ones that are felt in reaction to complex circumstances (those beyond the average flight-or-fight type stuff) are low-level indicators of how something is registering against your personal values. Some of that stuff is BIOS-level, but most of it is learned. If you're raised in a culture that values something (of if you spend a lot of time contemplating what you value, if it means deducing those things logically), that thing's propogation, continuance, celebration, or very existence is a source of value - and thus triggers the response.
I find value in creating more of what I find to be valuable. I get emotional pleasure from establishing circumstances in which those things are reinforced (including things like helping younger people to see things the same way, etc). The emotional pleasure is a by-product of my value system - which is, as best as I can manage, derived entirely from the simple fact that I exist. Looking to the universe or an outside entity for some affirmation is certainly pointless. But that isn't depressing - it's simply value-neutral. Like gavity or the weather.
What part of my use of the phrase "self-destructive" were you not following?
The fact is, the universe does "care", in that it has created for us the perfect set of conditions by which we thrive.
Utter nonsense. The universe, and the fluctuating conditions in which we evolved, simply are. We (as a species, and as a wider ecosystem) have adapted to the conditions already present or to new conditions (since those have changed very, very radically many times in the past). Literally millions of species have failed to adapt and are long gone. Most of them long before we were ever even close to appearing. That wasn't our doing, and I'm sure that those dying species didn't find the conditions to be perfect for thriving (um... since they were busy dying off in a world that was too hostile for them).
My point, which apparently I need to spell out in simpler terms, is that there is no judgemental, ledger-sheet-wielding universal "personality" out there deciding if it's appropriate or not for us to survive, or taking some sort of pleasure or finding some sort of cosmic justice in one outcome or the other. That's entirely up to us. Whether we're smart enough to not piss in the drinking water outside the bear cave we take over (apparently, enough of our ancestors were), or whether we're smart enough to avoid other forms of damage that will either hurt us or simply reduce some of what's simply very enjoyable around us... depends on a lot of cultural things, and on science being put to work. It also depends enormously on things that are completely outside of our control. Just like it did for millions of extinct species that came and went before us, through periods of wild climactic shift, through big rocks falling out of the sky, and probably many rounds of fantastically viral pathogens.
The universe doesn't "care," either literally or figuratively. There's simply cause and effect, including some of our own efforts, and many things we're helpless to shape. I do know, though, that people who ignore the reality of multi-year hurricane cycles so they can score political points while endeavoring to "fix" the environment by crippling the only economies that are actually in a position to develop and deploy the technologies that might make a tiny difference in the weather they're so scared of... well, that craven bunch are beyond reach, philosophically. Yes, I like and wish to preserve polar bears. And yes, I'd like to see China and India just as thoughtful about it (and just as beholden to efficient technological pressures) as their more western, hand-wringing counterparts are.
But you could take every SUV in the US off the road and not put a dent in the carbon that's released by things like overseas refinery gas flaring. Why? Because those locales aren't, and wouldn't be, tied to the same political "solutions" that the west would be. Why? Because their cultures aren't up to it, and the west feels so guilty for being ahead of the game that they'd rather wreck their own ability (through economic largesse brough by enormous productivity and high standards of living) to deploy more efficient modes of economic horsepower than hold the rest of the world to the same standards.
That goes for virtually every form of bio-diversity conservation. We sure wouldn't want to actually say to African governments that they need to get their acts together so they can establish rule of law, encourage investment, run efficient agro-businesses, and thus reduce deforestation and the slaughter of endless tons of "bush meat" just to feed people. Because if we come right out and say that "your local religious/tribal spats and power plays are directly responsible for the decimation of habitat and species," well, that wouldn't be politically correct. Instead, we just ship cash and support, perpetuating the problems at the root of the environmental degredation (to say nothing of the human misery). It's true in Africa, South America, and throughout much of Asia.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more like putting a TV in your window, turning it on, and getting upset when someone watches it.
No, it's more like having a bar's TV visible through a window, and having some non-customer with a matching remote control standing out on the street acting like it's his TV. It's not the same at all.
Source must be provided for inspection
This is already true when all of the parties involved want it to be true. Plenty of large customers (corporate, government, etc) insist on just that sort of thing, depending on the size and nature of their purchases. Contracts for that sort of access are completely routine.
if we're going to have patents, there's got to be some way to spot violations, right?
The patent holder is just fine scoping around for obvious violations of their patents. Do you really want tax dollars tied up in a non-stop patrol for that sort of thing? Let the people with a vested interest spot the stuff, or join organizations (like trade associations, etc) that help them do that.
Then we give customers certain rights in the event of an emergency (security hole in the firewall software, data corrupting bug in the business-critical database, etc.) and in the event that the supplier becomes unable to sell more licenses (bankrupcy, etc.).
Again, this is completely routine in many licenses/contracts. But mandating it by law will do more to jack up prices than just about anything else you could do. Think of what it would cost to fund, during the growth period of a small start-up company, for example, some escrow service that would guarantee such access and support (post-bankruptcy) for potentially millions of users? When the stakes are truly that high for users, they already routinely have the habit of negotiating for such things, and all of the players understand it. Why mandate it (and the costs) for everyone, and get a giant new bureaucratic layer involved where it's only marginally, if at all, widely useful?
It's time that access to source code for device drivers was mandated by law: if hardware manufacturers will not supply the source code for their drivers, then they simply should not be allowed to sell the product
I don't buy it. First, do you really trust the legislative process to meaningfully define (for actual, real-world use in an industry moving 5000mph) terms like "device" and "driver?" It's bad enough when a judge decides to get involved in discussing what is, and is not part of an operating system, as if such things weren't ever going to change.
I'd rather let demonstrably crappy manufacturers get the reputation they deserve, and let the market sort it out. Don't buy hardware from people whose practices your don't like.
Further: what possible guarantee is there that drivers, having been open-sourced, will go out the door without any vulnerabilities? The concern here isn't whether the bug(s) will be fixed (it/they will), but whether everyone will patch. That concern would still be there even if the same open-source world that has produced all sorts of other buggy/vulnerable releases/products had access to drivers for something produced and shipped in a very short design/marketing life cycle. None of those risks go away, but in your scenario, you now have congress-creatures (egads!) talking about which hunks of code are, or are not "drivers." Now that is a vulnerability I can do without.
lazy developers are coerced
I don't think that coerced means what you think it means. The "lazy" part is far more accurate. When you're spending $40M (!!!) on a software project with a web front end, there's simply no excuse for making it platform dependent. If I were in your shoes, I'd be way, way more upset with whoever concocted/approved those requirements/specs than with a private, for-profit company that provides tools they hope will have more users continue to use the main product(s) they sell. I'd much rather hold spec-writers' feet to the fire (in the interests of platform independent designs) than get the government involved in defining what is, and what is not a component of an operating system - especially when things change as rapidly as they do.
One thing I personally feel is you don't develop a bond with your co-workers if you don't see them face to face
Well, the guy I report to (on the current day job) is hundreds of miles away, and I see him maybe twice a year. Once-a-week status calls, plenty of e-mail, and as-needed project chats... but essentially no normal "bonding" face-time. My closest co-worker/counterpart is a thousand miles away in the other direction, and while we work on the same issues and share lots of information and talk most weeks, we've never met in person, ever. None the less, we all get along fine and get work done.
My experience working in an office, physically near a lot of people, is that I get the opposite of a bond with many of them. Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say. Personal foibles, tics, and microwaved tuna-fish do more to UNDO productivity than remote working ever can, at least with people in my line of work.
Linux will support alot more hardware than a generic retail copy of Windows.
Come now, really. You should replace "will support" with "can be made to support, by very experienced people with a lot of time and a connection to Google that already works." You know perfectly well that all sorts of video and audio hardware (just as an example) can be a freakin' nightmare. Likewise for various odd-ball storage devices, network widgets, and other goodies that Windows just wakes up knowing what to do with. It's just not the same, especially for the average user.
As far as I'm concerned, IE is just a utility like Notepad. At this point, a web browser is as fundamental to making the computer a useful device as a text editor - and arguably moreso.
We're certainly on the same page, there. The slavish devotion to citing a court finding from years ago (when the industry, and the courts, certainly, had no idea how to really chew on this stuff) makes certain people's complaints about having a browser native to A CONVICTED, MONOPOLIZING, EVIL OS (followed by breathless screeching about MS in general, etc)... well, it's just getting kind of embarassing, really. Really.
If there wasn't a market advantage to be had by bundling IE, MS would neither expend the developer time to create it, nor risk exposing themselves to further litigation by bundling it.
Well, sure, there's a market advantage. It's the advantage of not disappearing from the market because something as fundamental as web browser isn't native to the operating system. It would be so conspicuous by its absence that they can only press their general OS marketing if they've got a system that can, natively, render HTML and understand XML, etc. I used to wonder why people don't get this, but now I realize that people (like the one I was responding to) DO understand it, but they're simply being religious freaks about it, and really have a lot invested in being able to shrilly refer to MS as a "convicted monopolist" at every opportunity.
Now you're just mocking me, aren't you? It's not my fault there's a new 10/22 that's been sitting in my trunk for three whole days and I still haven't had the chance to use it. I've been busy, you insensitive clod!
Actually, that sig is really, entirely, for my own benefit. As I type this, two lovely bird dogs are sleeping near my feet, wondering when the hell they'll get to go out in the field and be bird dogs again. Must... stop... posting. BTW, enjoy that 10/22. I haven't had mine out in a long time... I should just go get one of those little milk-cartons of 22LR and blast away for a while... it's about the most fun/dollar you can have.
So, what you're saying is that something as fundamental as browsing software should not be provided by a company that is providing the fundamentals (an OS) to users? I imagine that Apple users would be frustrated to find that Safari was missing. Who cares if once upon a time a browser was considered an interesting, and separate piece of software? So were all sorts of other things that are now considered fundamental parts of operating systems (even in OS-X and most Linux distros). The ability to render HTML to the screen is not some luxury, or some hobby item that some buyers will want to consider. It's fundamental to the OS (in MS's case) because they (wisely, I think) even considered a browser-ish presentation of the local file system to be a more familiar and pleasant approach for the current generation of users.
Windows is Microsoft's product. Theirs. You can be a seller of it, or not. You can bundle some Linux distro with your hardware, or you can be Apple, or you can be a part of MS's distribution chain. But if you want to make money off of selling computers that have MS's software installed, you can do it according to their terms... or, sell something else for a living. There is no "force" involved. Their browser is part of the OS. If you want to sell their OS, you're selling an OS that has that feature... but which also allows you to go ahead and use another browser all you want.
Microsoft's abuse of it's OS Monopoly status lies in it's focible inclusion of IE on every Windows computer, thus requiring by default, that everyone who uses their Monopoly OS, is presented with their Web Browser.
What's it like, living back in the 1990's? Web-flavored presentation of information (about the local file system, or of most any reachable URL that responds to an HTTP request) is part of the operating system. MS doesn't "force" anyone to "bundle" it as some required app... it is part and parcel of Windows. You're making a false compartmentalization that's no longer meaningful, even though anybody can use any browser they want, any time they want, on top of their OS as they see fit. Is MS "abusive" when they include Notepad, instead of a shortcut to Vi?
If they dont like a specific thing that is being done by a competitor, they could lock out that feature for a future version.
Nonsense. If some non-standard behavior in IE prevents people from using a really compelling resource on the web, and people are hearing about that really compelling resource from people that say, "oh, and use Firefox - it's better for this," that's all it takes. How do you think certain IM clients become popular? Because some of the do something a little differently than the next one, and social pressure drives users to the one that feels right. It's a shame that Apple is still playing catch-up from their years of only deploying Apple-ness on too-expensive proprietary hardware, but the same sort of social pressure (say, a perception of ease of use for grandmothers, etc) ran headlong into the brick wall of a couple thousand dollars' difference between a decent Mac and a well-packaged Wintel machine with support from Dell, etc.
But money's not the object here, so it's all about content. And have you really seen MS's slow-to-evolve browser preventing some serious business iniative online? That hasn't been nearly the issue that lack of broadband has been. And now that more people have broadband, they're also learning that either: they're fine surfing to MySpace with MSIE, so who cares, or... gee, I can download Firefox in five minutes and my kid will show me how to use it. Still not seeing any "abuse" in that scenario. Probably all the more so because I rarely use MS's browser, and neither do my family, or co-workers, or many acquaintences... none of us are feeling "abused."
I can't really decide if you are a troll/astroturfer or just clueless.
None of the above.
I just don't find it "abusive" for MS to include their browser with their own O/S any more than I find it "abusive" for Apple to include Safari. It is so utterly painless to fetch your own copy of Firefox, and doctor it up to suit your tastes, that the notion of MS somehow abusively preventing that is laughable.
Even if no money changes hands for using a web browser other than IE, it still weakens MS's stranglehold on the desktop.
What stranglehold? You're confusing correlation with causation. We can split hairs all day about browser inclusion, etc., but that doesn't change the poor decisions made by companies like Apple that boxed them into minority status during some very formative years of personal computer adoption, especially for businesses. Microsoft doesn't (and didn't) have to be perfect to be wildly successful, they just had to be convenient. Apple wasn't (proprietary hardware?), Unix requires (for most user) a priesthood layer to make it go, and Linux is still way too fussy about hardware and too entirely inscrutible for even a lot of professional IT people to actually put to work for users. In the meantime, you've got MS continuing to sell (and support, for millions of people) their evolving pile of software in an era when... the internet suddenly matters. Why wouldn't they want to provide that basic, fundamental, essential tool (a web browser) as a piece of their collection of other basic, fundamental tools (meaning, "operating system")?
They're not running a charity for other start-ups, and folks like Google aren't obliged to give MS any sort of slack, either.
The more market share other web browsers have, the more likely websites will not be IE only
So, your real complaint is with the authors of the content who simply don't care about a certain percentage of their potential visitors? I run sites that see as low as 70% MS browsers. I can't possibly afford to alienate the Safari, Firefox, and even antique Netscape browsers that come along. To say nothing of the cell phones. I'm not blaming MS for having work to do, any more than I'm blaming Netscape for the fact that there are still leftover trainwrecks of theirs that I still have to cater to.
because IE7 comes with the OS, its easy to use, and it is adequate for most people
How horrible!
microsoft really has abused its monopoly in all this
Yup, they're really raking in the dough by selling their browser... wait. I mean, they're really squashing Mozilla and preventing them from selling their browser... er, hold on. Ah... I get it... you're secretly arguing about who makes money off of the ads in search engines, MSN or Google, right? So MS's "monopoly" is crushing poor Google. Not! They've got a bigger share of search than MS does of desktops. Maybe you were making some other point entirely? Where's the abuse, exactly?
But that's exactly what's wrong with so many news-ish web sites. I don't want to have to wade through an unqualified conversation about facts and events, I simply want the facts. At least on slashdot there is a moderation system, and a pretty good understanding of the prevailing local culture - that means that when I want a "conversation" about the news, I can come and get one. Or go elsewhere. For a hoot, I could go to Drudge as a springboard to all sorts of spun conversations.
But a first rate "news" source (like the front page of the WP) shouldn't require me to wonder who is conversing with whom, that particular day. The Washington Post is my "local" paper, here in suburban Maryland. My gut sense, having read the paper for over 30 years, is that the web-based conversation they are now hosting has been eroding their editorial spine. Ironically, I've traditionally disliked their editorial positions - but they were consistent, and I had a sense of how that was going to shape their coverage decisions. Now, they seem to be thrashing around quite a bit.
Cheap flights into Elbonia often connect through the Amorphous, Carbonia international airport. Unfortunately the town's not very stable when it's warm out.
we cannot enforce our views on them
.RU domains, right? They want the .COM-iness (heh!) of a US-sounding address, but not US thoughts on the matter.
Although... they did choose to do registration business with a US company, and somehow I'm betting these aren't all
Will either our need or our troops produce a stable, democratic Middle East?
Yes.
Since air is precious to me - I can't live without it, after all - it is not value-neutral to me.
The point is that the presence of air for you to breath, and your own presence as a species that evolved to breath it, is of no moral (value-based) significance. It just is. Like gravity. People who find, with each breath, that they're being "blessed" by some vague paternal entity are still operating in Santa-Clause-Is-Real-Mode. That's actually not a bad analogy. When you're a child (assuming that wide cultural backgound that treats it that way, of course), the meaning of Christmas (at least, the overwhelmingly obvious one), is all the fanfare and the gifts, and presumptive agent of that delivery: Ol' St. Nick. Once you get older, you realize that the only thing that makes the day meaningful is what you put into it, or into the cultivated relationships (with family) that are actually being celebrated by those gift-giving rituals. Never mind the history (Pagan solstice on up through Christian time-shifted birthday recognition) of the day - the degree to which it has any meaning depends entirely on what the practictioners, themselves, bring to the table.
One is welcome to assign some mystical significance to breathing, or attach some moral weight to it, but the air really doesn't care one way or the other, and its existence isn't dependent on your estimation of it. No, I'm not talking about whether you value it enough to not pollute it by smoking, etc... that's a sidebar discussion about whether you value yourself.
You are confusing BIOS and application levels.
Contradictions can't exist, per se. what I'm really talking about is below the BIOS level. At some level, our basic functioning depends on things being what they actually are, not two tings at once, or magically something different depending on what you believe them to be. And no, we're not talking about quantum behavior, either. If reality flopped around in unpredictable, contradictory ways, our basic framework as an organism couldn't have evolved into anything like our sentient selves. We come from a consistent, non-magical reality, and everything about us is built around dealing with just that. But we can still carry on (breathing, etc) while choosing to ignore mental contradictions we've built for ourselves - and that leads to all sorts of messes. Popishness, included.
It is somewhat illogical to dismiss religion as a "comforting myth" when you are demonstrating such faith in assertions you can't possibly know, much less prove, that you consider them facts.
I have absolutely no need of "faith" in my position, as it's self-evident. It's that way whether I want to believe it or not. Conversely, religions expressly deny the quest for creating meaning, and simply assign a dogmatic meaning to which you must subscribe... without any discussion of how that position was derived (other than, essentially, "God says so, and I have someone's handed-down recollection of some stone tablets to prove it. Also, women are less important than men. And, we'll need ten percent of your income to finance the fancy clothes we're wearing while we tell you what to think.").
Now, what makes more sense: the universe simply is, and if we want our brief existence in it to be fulfilling, we need to make that existence meaningful... or, the meaning of it all has been magically handed down by a super-powered deity that loves us, despite his occasionally allowing children to die in house fires or whole villages to be raped for having the wrong flavor of DNA, etc. Occam's Razor, indeed.
Dick Cheney repeatedly asserted that Saddam was connected to 9/11, and clearly implied that invading Iraq was legitimate retaliation for the attacks of 9/11.
Nope, sorry. He repeatedly pointed out that there were indications of a connection between Al Queda and Saddam's intelligence apparatus (being shown more and more each day to be exactly true), and very reasonably pointed out the need for a more stable, democratic middle east in the wake of 9/11. "Retaliation" is your choice of words. His description was simply that it was important/essential. Which, of course, it was and still is.
1 .Iraq has WMD.
Let's see... that would be the lie that Saddam's own weapons people were telling him. Or weren't you paying attention to those details? Certainly the intel agencies across the globe thought they were still there. You know, the ones that we saw giant piles of on multiple inspections, and which his regime refused to explain away, in terms of where they all went (not counting the truck caravans going into Syria, of course).
2. Saddam was responsible for 9/11.
The only people spouting that one are the people trying to say it often enough to make people believe that the US government actually said that... the better to make political points against the same. In other words, you are the one saying that, so that you can point out how not true it is. In the meantime, the people actually dealing with the problem went to Afghanistan, where the people who did it were actually being sheltered. Of course, the Taliban and A-Q did have regular contact with Saddam's intel people, but that was just on matters of routine cash, weapons, and operating territory. But getting rid of him was every bit as important as denying Taliban shelter to A-Q. Especially since he had things like "annex neighboring countries" and "lob SCUDs at Israel" on his regular to-do list. Oh, and publicly making large payments to the families of terrorist bombers, gassing whole villages, bulldozing mass graves, that sort of thing. You do actually comprehend this stuff, right? I mean, you're just pretending you don't know it, to score shallow rhetorical points, right?
3. Profit! (for big business, at least)
And which large companies, employing hundreds of thousands of people and providing services that small businesses cannot provide, would you like to see operating at a loss? How would you replace them when they fail? Would you have small mom-and-pop antibiotic manufacturers? Neighborhood hybrid car factories run by families with 10 employees? Motherboards made by hand with soldering irons? Aircraft made by the great grandchildren of the Wright brothers in the same bicycle shop? Natural gas pumped and transported a few gallons at a time in backpacks? Oh... you're the type that would rather the government did all of that. Well, just come out and say it, then. That's so much more straight forward than hoping that people will see your BS is just a callow, sarcastic charade.
Enter the precaution principle, which basically states that if you have a reasonably likely possibility of really bad future outcomes, you should try to do something about it, even if it's possible those outcomes don't come to pass. To me, global warming fits this scenario.
To me, the typical proposals that are bandied about also fit that scenario. To wit, proposing that the western economies/cultures most able to continue their existing work in making more efficient use of energy "fix" the problem by crippling the very economic engines that produce the largesse that funds that sort of R&D... while leaving 50% of the world's energy consumers to merrily (and with vastly, vastly more polluting inefficiencies) keep growing and burning as if they were still some small village... that's the perfect scenario in which to apply a princple of caution. That India, and most of Asia (including, of course, the wildly exploding, fuel-burning China) are exempt from most people's prescriptions for a cure: total nonsense. No treaty set up in that way is reasonable, and more importantly, is of essentially no consequence (even if we DO assume that tiny changes in emmissions can compete with the influence of solar cycles, etc).
Let the 1-st world economies continue to work on new technologies, and focus the preventative-hand-wringing urges instead on deforestation in Africa, Asia, and South America. Or, buy some Brazilian village a new bus, since the one they've been using since 1970 spits out more sloppy hydrocarbons than 200 late-model SUVs hauling kids to the movies at the mall (where the screen is lit up with electricity powered largely by coal... how about some more nukes? much better). But all of this requires waiving off of any political correctness, and oh no, we can't have that in our discussions with corrupt, embattled developing governments.
Science explains how, what, where, and when. Religion explains who and why.
Well, not really. Religion specializes in the perpetuation of generation-spanning myths designed to make people more comfortable with the fact that there is no 'why' unless you get off your butt and produce some of your own. Since that's more work than most people are willing to put in, and lots of people die miserably before coming to terms with the there-ain't-no-built-in-why, the cozy crutch of mythology and meaning-from-books-published-in-heaven gets a lot of regular use.
Even the whole "searching for meaning" canard is itself a crutch, since it implies that meaning is lying around someplace, or that the search for the unfindable is the meaning (if you live long enough, that particular pursuit will have you asking the question, "What is the sound of one hand smacking me on the head?"). Too many presupposed things in those scenarios, but the orientation around searching for and expecting to find pre-fab answers is usually comfortable because when we're kids, we have parents who always do seem to have an explanation for pretty much everything we ask about. But you've got to synthesize your own meaning based on reality, and live your life in a way consistent with that framework... otherwise, our BIOS-level intolerance for contradictions starts to throw errors that we can only tolerate by deciding to embrace mixed premises and conflicts. And if you grow up in the grip of (or even celebrating, at church!) such things, you wind up producing a culture where nerds and scientists all hang out in back-alley discussion boards and geeky forums like this. Damn, reality is a cruel, cruel bitch. Or, she would be, if she actually had a personality. Come on people! De-anthropomorphize, and breath in all that fresh, clean, value-neutral air.
Well, literally it does care. "We" are the universe, or at least part of it. We are how the universe has currently arranged itself here. In that sense, any caring we do is caring that the universe does, in part.
You're right, of course. I tend to refer to the universe as not being some anthropomorphized entity in these conversations because some people are so anxious to mentally create the image of some "other" party that will or won't approve of how we carry on. We, indeed, are that other party, as you say... and we're certainly part of the universe!
There certainly is a lot of selfishness at the cultural level at this point in history, which seems to be in conflict with the more global view of selfishness.
Well, it all comes down to education. And some cultures have such disdain for education (about reality) on some subjects that it will be a long time before that all gets evened out. A long time. Especially when we've got so many backwards-leaning medieval-minded thugocracies still sitting (or trying to) on the energy reserves that we're still depending on.
You're trying to say that the inherent complexity in psychological processes - namely those involved in "complex circumstances" - lends purpose to them owing to the fact that they may not be directly related to instinct.
That's not what I'm trying to say, or actually saying. All emotional responses are complex in the sense that they involve a high-level processing of perception, comparison of the perceptions to a good/bad scorecard of sorts (built in part on lower-level threat/pack/relationship instincts, but expanded through experience as one grows and gains perspective and subtlety) and then the symphony of physiological signals that tend to get more intense as a function of the urgency of the circumstances. An emotional response to a well-written chapter of a good book is a pretty high-level thing. An emotional response to watching your child saved from falling out a window still requires lots of processing, but hits a more primitive piece of the brain.
The hopelessness of existensialism and similar lines of thought lies in the fact that you INSTINCTIVELY wish to survive, and so are trying to find reasons why that would be of some purpose...
Nope. One does not "find" meaning, one creates it. The difference is enormous.
And that is depressing, no?
And thus, no, it is not. The "brave" person (since you use that word) is the one that has the courage and clarity of thought to create meaning where there is none. The coward cannot find it in himself to do so (nor, perhaps, can someone with damaged or stunted cognitive skills), and either borrows it from someone else (and simply goes through the motions), or deals with the lack of meaning through irrational, and often self-destructive behavior.
I find your decision to use the word "agnostic," and your attempt to show me the ultimately unhappy consequences of living in a godless universe that doesn't paternally watch my actions and weigh them... to be, well, a pretty weak intro to some prostelatizing, methinks. Won't work!
What you're missing is that the "warm and fuzzy feeling" you refer to is no more than an instinctive emotion - an accumulation of millions of years of mutation upon arbitrary physiological mutation. There is absolutely no significance to this feeling to the intelligent agnostic.
Sure there is. Emotions, especially ones that are felt in reaction to complex circumstances (those beyond the average flight-or-fight type stuff) are low-level indicators of how something is registering against your personal values. Some of that stuff is BIOS-level, but most of it is learned. If you're raised in a culture that values something (of if you spend a lot of time contemplating what you value, if it means deducing those things logically), that thing's propogation, continuance, celebration, or very existence is a source of value - and thus triggers the response.
I find value in creating more of what I find to be valuable. I get emotional pleasure from establishing circumstances in which those things are reinforced (including things like helping younger people to see things the same way, etc). The emotional pleasure is a by-product of my value system - which is, as best as I can manage, derived entirely from the simple fact that I exist. Looking to the universe or an outside entity for some affirmation is certainly pointless. But that isn't depressing - it's simply value-neutral. Like gavity or the weather.
What part of my use of the phrase "self-destructive" were you not following?
The fact is, the universe does "care", in that it has created for us the perfect set of conditions by which we thrive.
Utter nonsense. The universe, and the fluctuating conditions in which we evolved, simply are. We (as a species, and as a wider ecosystem) have adapted to the conditions already present or to new conditions (since those have changed very, very radically many times in the past). Literally millions of species have failed to adapt and are long gone. Most of them long before we were ever even close to appearing. That wasn't our doing, and I'm sure that those dying species didn't find the conditions to be perfect for thriving (um... since they were busy dying off in a world that was too hostile for them).
My point, which apparently I need to spell out in simpler terms, is that there is no judgemental, ledger-sheet-wielding universal "personality" out there deciding if it's appropriate or not for us to survive, or taking some sort of pleasure or finding some sort of cosmic justice in one outcome or the other. That's entirely up to us. Whether we're smart enough to not piss in the drinking water outside the bear cave we take over (apparently, enough of our ancestors were), or whether we're smart enough to avoid other forms of damage that will either hurt us or simply reduce some of what's simply very enjoyable around us... depends on a lot of cultural things, and on science being put to work. It also depends enormously on things that are completely outside of our control. Just like it did for millions of extinct species that came and went before us, through periods of wild climactic shift, through big rocks falling out of the sky, and probably many rounds of fantastically viral pathogens.
The universe doesn't "care," either literally or figuratively. There's simply cause and effect, including some of our own efforts, and many things we're helpless to shape. I do know, though, that people who ignore the reality of multi-year hurricane cycles so they can score political points while endeavoring to "fix" the environment by crippling the only economies that are actually in a position to develop and deploy the technologies that might make a tiny difference in the weather they're so scared of... well, that craven bunch are beyond reach, philosophically. Yes, I like and wish to preserve polar bears. And yes, I'd like to see China and India just as thoughtful about it (and just as beholden to efficient technological pressures) as their more western, hand-wringing counterparts are.
But you could take every SUV in the US off the road and not put a dent in the carbon that's released by things like overseas refinery gas flaring. Why? Because those locales aren't, and wouldn't be, tied to the same political "solutions" that the west would be. Why? Because their cultures aren't up to it, and the west feels so guilty for being ahead of the game that they'd rather wreck their own ability (through economic largesse brough by enormous productivity and high standards of living) to deploy more efficient modes of economic horsepower than hold the rest of the world to the same standards.
That goes for virtually every form of bio-diversity conservation. We sure wouldn't want to actually say to African governments that they need to get their acts together so they can establish rule of law, encourage investment, run efficient agro-businesses, and thus reduce deforestation and the slaughter of endless tons of "bush meat" just to feed people. Because if we come right out and say that "your local religious/tribal spats and power plays are directly responsible for the decimation of habitat and species," well, that wouldn't be politically correct. Instead, we just ship cash and support, perpetuating the problems at the root of the environmental degredation (to say nothing of the human misery). It's true in Africa, South America, and throughout much of Asia.