Its starting.

[swestrup]

One of the early accelerators for the singularity is the ubiquitous presense of arbitrary fabrication systems, not just in the richest countries, but also in the poorest.

This is a first step, but a big one.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 21:22:00 EDT (-0400)

So I wonder if the USA and Western civilization creating the
singularity would induce you to unqualifiedly endorse Western
Civilization -- given your email sig. that appears in your messages
to me, which is:

"Use of the Internet by this poster is not to be construed as a tacit
endorsement of Western Technological Civilization or its appurtenances."

It looks like you have a different sig. for when you send to groups.
Do you only send the above-quoted sig. when you send a message to me?
-Jim

[swestrup]

I actually stole that .sig from someone many years ago. I've long since forgotten from who. Its now my default .sig for everything sent out via my pegasus mail client. Other clients (such as my LJ client) have different .sigs, when they have them at all.

And no, I'm not ever about to unqualifiedly endorse Western Civilization. Remember, a large chunk of it elected George Bush, and let him run things for the last 4 years. *shudder*

[(Anonymous)]

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:06:00 EDT (-0400)

Of course you had that as your sig. for a lot longer than George
W. Bush has been President.

Nothing is perfect, including Western Civilization, but the
latter is the first place where the idea that the sovereign
cannot be above the law was ever implemented (or at least where
it has ever stuck into modern times). This gives us such freedom
to criticize ourselves, that has never been allowed in
authoritarian regimes, where they typically lock people up and
throw away the key if they say things about their leader that
people in the USA routinely say about George W. Bush.

It seems to me it is high time to question authoritarianism in
*other* regimes (Comprehension exercise for the reader: *Why* is
this true, again?) and give some *balance* in our criticism of
our own system.

When I send email to my friend Neal Ford who is a huge religious
right-winger now, I don't append a sig. that says I may not like
religion, even though I think its basic thrust is pretty
horrible. I ask you to realize that it's not a lot of fun for me
to get email from you when every message is ended with an
unbalanced jab at something that has been pretty positive when
compared with the overall picture of history.

Although the USA is infected with a horrible cancer known as the
US federal government, its founding principles were highly
positive and considerably better than ours in many respects
(Unfortunately *those* are what a lot of people secretly actually
hate when they complain about the tyrannical behaviour of the
later US feds -- "Everybody has two reasons for what they say,
one that they think will sound good to the other person and
another, real reason that they won't come out with right away").

Too bad that the ideals of the USA have been pretty much
abandoned there. But most people now do not agree with them.

Few things produce more conflict than two neighbouring regimes
that *agree* on having big government.

-Jim

[swestrup]

I've been meaning to ask, why don't you pick up a free LJ account sometime. I know you keep your blog elsewhere but:

1) having an account would mean you would get e-mail notification of when I responded to one of your messages.

2) you can embed an LJ blog on another website, or you can just only use it for identification, like dcoombs or pphaneuf.

3) You may find it easier to maintain a blog. Yours doesn't seem to get updated very often, so I'm not in the habit of checking it. If you had a blog here, whenever you updated, I would notice.

[(Anonymous)]

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 15:09:00 EDT (-0400)

You could set up your remind program to check my blog
periodically, like once every two or three weeks. Why don't you
do that?

There used to be a free service called Netmind that would send
you email when websites changed. I used to just love that. It
changed to something called "Pumatech" after that, which worked
completely differently and which charged. Do you know of any
free service that does what Netmind used to do?

I'm still using a dial-up connection at home, so I don't think
*anything* will be very convenient.

Also, I'm concerned with spending my time wisely, and I don't
think that all this internet stuff is the most productive use of
my time.
-Jim

[swestrup]

As I posted earlier, my reminder program currently doesn't work. Besides, I know from experience that I'm likely to ignore events that happen every 2 or 3 weeks, if I have to do anything special to take notice of them.

As for the email .sig, I'm sorry if it bothers you, but its not intended as a slight of Western Technological Civilization. Its a cry to not become complacent just because we're currently the best.