Well, thank you for ruining pulled pork for me asshole.

"At some point, we will chew up enough resources that the planet will not recover."

What does that even mean? Not recover? It's "recovered" for worldwide fires and volcanoes and the entire planet being basically a frozen over the top. Tectonic plates shift against one another and consume and excrete land. In a billion years I doubt you'll have much of an idea that our species was even here.

"When we have fished the oceans to empty sea, and the land will no longer sustain crops, only then will we discover how foolish we've been."

And in our starvation the planet will recover. The people that survive (if any) will probably change their ways or... repeat the process but it will take a long time before it matters.

The worst we can do is make this place a nasty place for the existing species. Almost all of said species were doomed to disappear over a long enough timeline anyway. Frankly, I don't think our species is gonna get any wiser about our own impact until something horrific happens so, in a weird way, I'm kind of rooting for it.

"do not mess with complex systems you don't fully understand."

Yeah, that's gonna make for some scientific progress right there.

"And more importantly, it belongs to every single living thing growing on it."

Says who? In our cold and ultimately absurd universe, that's not really how it works. Volcanoes and hurricanes don't respect existing habitats or life, why should humans? Polar bears have no "right" to exist or to continue existing and neither do humans.

Understand that I agree with your sentiment in some regards and am certainly not a card carrying member of the Pave the Earth Society. However, the idea that there is some inherent moral obligation to give a shit about the environment is, more or less, a religious sentiment. The universe itself doesn't dictate that we care and itself doesn't have any particular care or concern about life or plastic or toxic waste. It all just is.

Besides, if there's one thing industrialized nations have made clear: they don't give a shit about future generations in political, social or economic matters (see Social Security and Medicare in the USA) so why should we, as a society that's been conditioned not to give a fuck about the future, give a fuck?

"What happens if bees stop pollinating altogether tomorrow? What about hurricanes and tornadoes all over the planet?"

Evolution will weed out the unfit and replace them with new species able to deal with the changes, the way it always has. That's how life operates.

"That's not such a hard concept, is it?"

It's hard because if I'm not religious, I have no reason to care beyond self interest and most of the really nasty "long term" environmental consequences will be playing themselves out when I'm dead or near death. Why should I care?

None of which has anything to do with college. Understanding computer science generically requires... studying computer science. Holy shit. What a fucking concept.

If you treat your profession as a trade, you'll learn trade skills. If you treat it as an art or a science you'll learn more. If you are intellectually curious you'll study outside of your bubble.

College can certainly help with those things, but it's not the one and only true path.

Unless, of course, you're trying to justify the six figures you spent on the university and have little to show for it—or hell, you have something to show for it and need to stuff your opinion down all our fucking throats.

Most people who drone on and on about "anti-intellectualism" are just trying to label their opponents and put themselves on some kind of fucking pedestal. Information and education will evolve tremendously in the next decades and hopefully for the better. The cost of college is going to hit its own bubble soon because, right now, it's out of control.

How is it we managed to have universities 50 years ago without people going 5 - 10 years worth of salary into debt just for the privilege of going?

Fuck you people. Seriously. The only anti-intellectualism going on around here are the assholes that think college is knowledge or learning or anything. It's college. That's all it is. Some people need it. Some people don't. Some people can't afford it. Some people ARE better off without it, regardless of what the degree-bearing pompous fucks think.

Look, just because half you assholes are still trying to justify the gigantic amount of money you probably flushed down the toilet doesn't mean you have to push your religion on the rest of us.

(And I say this as someone who DOES NOT think college is necessarily something to avoid, but I also don't think it's the be all, end all.)

I'm a big fan of passphrases rather than passwords. If you use punctuation, it's even better. I'll drop in "&" in place of "and" and try to include meaningful numbers in there too. They're pretty easy to remember and really, really strong by comparison.

I really do not understand the point of huge library references in books anymore, particularly if the language is a VERY web centric language. Who in the hell is programming JS without an internet connection? I mean really, does ANYONE use a book for reference like that anymore?

The Ruby book you reference, I presume is "The Ruby Programming Language" and yeah, it's very good.

That's a nice thought. I've never really seen it play out in practice, but a nice thought nonetheless.

I'm well aware of what the concept of a right is. I'm also aware of the fact that it's an idea that's totally fictional.

http://youtu.be/hWiBt-pqp0E?t=4m19s

I'll never understand how a place so full of atheists are so willing to cling to other meaningless fictions. Rights work as a fiction so long as governments actually care about them. Whether you have them or they're being "infringed" it's all the same when government goons have locked you up or shot you in the head.

"People have undeniable human rights/liberties."

Says who, exactly? No one with any real enforcement power seems to agree.

I know people find this amazing... but SOMEHOW I've managed to continue doing that. I don't know how I manage with all this humanity-eroding technology, but somehow I still find the time to call my friends (or, heretically, create an event on Facebook or whatever) and meet for pizza and tell the same stupid stories again, reflect on the same memories and complain about work. It's all good. If anything, modern tech (you know, like phones and cars and roads) has made it EASIER to meet face-to-face.

Of course, with Facebook, IM and email I can also keep up with people I can't normally have a face-to-face conversation with. I can have those interactions at times when a phone call is too distracting. But hey, remember the days where, if I had a friend overseas, it would take months for my letters to arrive? Wasn't that great. I wish I could go back to being forced to carry on my relationships like that! Or how about when it was oppressively expensive to talk to people even in the next state over. That was excellent too. Man, I miss the old days. Remember when a two-day trip by horseback to the closest neighbor's ranch was our Facebook?

I could argue that telephones and, dare I say, letters have eroded the face-to-face, look-a-person-in-the-eye, give-a-firm-honest-all-American-hand-shake lifestyle you crave. In fact, language itself is responsible for this modern civilization that has crushed the very nature of humanity. We should be doing something IN REAL LIFE like grunting and hunting together while we make the women folk go gather nuts and berries or something. Remember when eating raw wild game together was our Facebook?

I agree. ICQ is what most of the people I knew (tech and non-tech alike) were using. Ironically, it was basically used to see who was around and get them into IRC!

Of course people here keep parroting "the tech-savvy were using IRC..." which, while true, isn't the whole truth. While I used IRC for tech talk and for hanging around with geeks, I also did a lot of casual chatting and fantasy role-playing there too and in due course met A LOT of non-techs (a few of which I still talk to even now).

Solzhenitsyn? Shakespeare? Niemöller? 1984? I seen all of this and more in this discussion.

We're talking about a PRIVATE business deciding that it doesn't want to sell something that is generally smut. And I'm not even saying "smut" is bad nor am I making a moral judgement but can we PLEASE stop trying to elevate said smut to something it isn't.

There are still places to buy this stuff. This is like being up in arms because fucking Wal-Mart decides not to sell something. Who the fuck cares? Stop doing business with them or whatever if this offends you or conjures images of a dark future where a Hilter-like dictator tells you that you can't read The Gulag Archipelago.

I don't even care that Amazon is selling dildos and Danielle Steele novels or that Newt Gingrich reviews a ton of books om their site. I don't care if banning Yaoi is "hypocritical." Amazon isn't obligated in any way to be anything but arbitrary. It is a gigantic corporation interested in one thing: the bottom line. That's it. It has no agenda beyond that. It has no particular moral stance beyond that.

The SANE people around here will buy our smut elsewhere (and the intelligent of us know that paying for smut in the age of the internet is a waste of money anyway).

Talk about a bunch of self-important pricks trying to make something about a non-issue. I mean holy fuck. Solzhenitsyn? In a fucking discussion about Yaoi? Fuck you people. For real. Get a fucking life.

Yes, it's growing, but it's not DISPLACING Apple.

Not that this is worth even replying to since anyone with a brain who's participated in this discussion knows that the TFA was just ridiculous.