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Comment Re:Escape the Solar System, and Galaxy (Score 2) 265

This seems sadly necessary. All the social, political, religious and cultural baggage we've accumulated will continue to weigh us down until something terrible happens. We're not collectively going to grow out of it in time.

Also consider the fossil fuel problem - the 'easy' energy from fossil fuels is a technological leg-up, but once that's exhausted it will be much harder to research and manufacture the advanced materials and technologies needed to exploit alternative energy sources, unless said sources are already in place and paying their own way. We could quite plausibly end up trapped by our own (lack of) access to energy.

Comment Re:Why Drupal? (Score 1) 88

It's the usual trade-off between simplicity and control. I have found Wordpress is great for smaller, simpler sites - especially something blog-based. Drupal is more complex from the start, but it gives you more control if you're trying to do something fancy.

To put it another way, there's a certain point of complexity where Wordpress becomes much harder to work with than Drupal.

Horses for courses.

Comment Re:Do Not Want (Score 1) 219

No group of humans has ever had anything like what we are talking about here. We've seen various political and religious movements implode because they're in some way fundamentally contrary to human nature, but a hive mind would mean changing human nature itself. Ants and bees get shit done without corruption, choking bureaucracy, uninformed dissent...

Comment Re:Do Not Want (Score 1) 219

It's an alien concept for us apes, but there could be a bunch of species-level benefits to the loss of individualism. No more violent or dishonest crime, huge efficiencies in scientific research, decentralised planetary government... we might even stand a chance of getting off Earth before we render it uninhabitable.

I suspect it could be too large an adaption for humanity to make though. I'd bet on something along the lines of Alastair Reynolds' war between the 'conjoined' and the regular humans, wherein the regular humans realise the conjoiners have vastly superior and ever-improving technology, so try to stamp them out before it's too late.

Comment Re:A whole book just for themes? (Score 1) 65

Agreed - I found it quite simple to do away with many of Drupal's output snippets, eg hard-coding things like the site's logo image. If you're capable of making your own template you probably don't need that stuff dynamically generated. I think I needed only four or five small PHP snippets in my HTML template.

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