SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
An Indian site, YourStory, has an unusually broad ranging interview with Richard Stallman. While much of the background and goals will already be familiar to SN readers, the interview is interesting not only for its scope but also that India is starting to take an interest in these matters.
To know Richard Stallman is to know the true meaning of freedom. He's the man behind the GNU project and the free software movement, and the subject of our Techie Tuesdays this week.
This is not a usual story. After multiple attempts to get in touch for an interaction with Richard Stallman, I got a response which prepared me well for what's coming next. I'm sharing the same with you to prepare you for what's coming next.
I'm willing to do the interview — if you can put yourself into philosophical and political mindset that is totally different from the one that the other articles are rooted in.
The general mindset of your articles is to admire success. Both business success, and engineering success. My values disagree fundamentally with that. In my view, proprietary software is an injustice; it is wrongdoing. People should be _ashamed_ of making proprietary software, _especially_ if it is successful. (If nobody uses the proprietary program, at least it has not really wronged anyone.) Thus, most of the projects you consider good, I consider bad.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 31 2017, @04:50AM (1 child)
So you're saying DDT is causing people to not procreate or not get pregnant, rather than massively increasing miscarriages which would be very noticeable? Except you're really not saying anything at all because you're putting it in a list that could have hundreds of items, including many manmade chemicals [ecowatch.com] that didn't exist 100 years ago that can now be found in the urine of 99% of the population.
Even effects on pregnancy rate should be noticeable in studies. You bonk 15-20 times [menstrual-cycle-calculator.com] at random times of the month, and a pregnancy is likely to occur.
I think it's widely accepted that economic and social factors are to blame for the falling pregnancy rates. As people in the third world move up into the middle class, their pregnancy rates will also decline.
I imagine that you are just goddamn unlikely to be a poor person on mankind's first Martian colony. If Musk gets his way, the ticket costs $100,000 a person. That's likely just travel expenses and doesn't count the cost of building living space. And it's a very optimistic estimate based on as many as a thousand reusable spaceships shuttling in between Earth and Mars. Once you get there, basic needs are going to have to be met using indoor greenhouses and water production + aggressive recycling. So it will be very planned out so that nobody is starving, since food + water distribution will be airtight. It's unclear that you will need to pay for food and water.
Also, no human has ever given birth beyond Earth (that we know of, insert your ancient alien/Stargate fantasy here). Conditions on Mars could lead to more miscarriages, weird births, and people shunning sex or unprotected sex. We'll have to see if there is a population explosion problem on Mars. It might become a problem they want to have.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 01 2017, @06:05PM
Actually I think there is more evidence that TV has affected the reproductive rate of humans than that DDT has...but DDT and it's functional equivalents have affected the reproduction of so many species that I don't just assume that chemical pollution hasn't affected human reproduction. They don't do testing for effects that are difficult to see when multiple different pollutants interact. And many of the people who do the testing have a positive incentive to not find any problems. So I'm not going to exonerate pollution without better evidence. Certainly we've got a lot of chemical pollution in chemicals that are called "estrogen mimics", and to presume that that has NO affect on reproduction is something that needs proof, even though I agree that proving it would be horrendously difficult.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.