[extropy-chat] Transhumanism == militant fascism (apparently)

[Rik van Riel]

On Mon, 4 Jul 2005, Dan Clemmensen wrote:

> Mike, this is a preposterous assertion.

Yeah, just when you think Mike couldn't possibly make any
more of a fool out of himself, he manages to amaze us once
again.  

Impressive as it is, it makes me sad to think that Mike
might be putting others off transhumanist ideas with this
writing style ;(

> Many posts on Slashdot refer to Stallman as a nut-case. Slashdot does 
> does not support Stallman. It supports Nerds. Many (Most?) Slashdot 
> readers prefer the more pragmatic "Open Source" approach to Stalmans's 
> "free software" concept, and Stallman's insistence on the "GNU/Linux" 
> nomenclature is clearly very irritating to a large portion of the 
> Slashdot community.

The vast majority of open source developers are also not 
free software fanatics.  Yes, people care about others not
infringing on their copyright (eg. GPL), but that's about
it.

Pragmatism is the dominant factor in open source development,
which shows in the fact that many developers work on multiple
pieces of software, some GPL, some BSD, some Artistic and
sometimes other licenses too.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan