Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 03:56:37 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com> Cc: hoek@hwcn.org, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Memory leak in getservbyXXX? Message-ID: <5080.874580197@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 18 Sep 1997 00:06:38 MDT." <199709180606.AAA02765@obie.softweyr.ml.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Yeah, but who cares if the doofs survive? Would you want to be the last > intelligent person on a planet populated soley with sales dweebs, > marketroids, and multi-level-marketeers? Ah, a segue into my favorite subject: The progressively increasing interference in proper evolution by western society! Consider your standard evolutionary scenario: An organism lives in a semi-hostile environment and, in fending off various natural hazards, not only prunes the weaker percentage of its gene pool but also evolves to cope more effectively with those hazards, through this process often gaining new abilities (and I do realize that other abilities might also be lost in the process, I'm simply saying that the organism's growth is kept dynamic). Now you have us humans, populating the earth in ever increasing numbers and let's face it: even though few are willing to say it in so many words just yet, unless our population growth declines extremely rapidly and RSN, a heck of a lot of somebodies are going to have to go at some point! What do we do about this, however? We work steadily on making it easier to raise even more kids through better health care and food distribution and, once those kids are adults, keep them alive by progressively eliminating all potential hazards until the only significant remaining hazard is ourselves (*gulp* uh oh!). I say sod that, it's time for a little more self-imposed genetic discipline. Instead of working so damn hard to dumb-down each and every single product, legislating heavily against any form of activity which might be even remotely dangerous and nurturing a complex system of liability laws which allow the stupid to collect rich rewards on their unique ability to injure themselves, screw it, I say we throw that whole approach out. We give up this silly crusade to file the sharp edges off of everything in life and, instead, we leave the edges alone and enhance our educational system with more "how to avoid getting cut on the sharp edges of life" classes. Those students who pay attention to the lessons and retain this knowledge survive and those who hide in the boy's room smoking cigarettes and lack any natural cunning in recompense, don't. No big loss at all. In fact, in addition to tearing off all the warning labels and throwing out the laws which say you can't freely purchase and play with high explosives if you really want to (though blowing up others without their consent would still, of course, be a seriously punishable offense), you'd maybe even go one step further. Every year, by law, a small but significant percentage of truly *dangerous* products would be made and released in the "thrill seeker" category. Only a small logo would identify the product as dangerous, no other clue giving any indication of exactly *how* it was dangerous - that would be up to the user to figure out. If you were injured or killed while using a thrill seeker product, federal liability law would require everyone to laugh at you for some period afterwards, but that'd be about the extent of its coverage. If you sought legal remedy, of course the courts would laugh even harder. I figure this would replace the lions and tigers and other useful natural hazards which we used to have but have long since eradicated. It would also, IMHO, make life a lot more interesting than it is now. ;-) Jordan
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?5080.874580197>