>The resources would have been better spent working directly with and on Debian
Debian is a slow bureaucratic political organization and works very hard to punish those who want too use it for business. Even if Cannonical had spent double the money, they'd probably get 1% of what they were able to do with Ubuntu.
>and offering support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem seriously dubious to me
Why should they not offer support to those who want too purchase it?
>although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't really done anything egregious as I feared initially
The "spying" you are referring to is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar. All Cannonical did was send your search queries to an HTTP endpoint. What are you searching in your app drawyer anyway that you don't want sent anywhere. It's not going to be anything other than the list of apps you have installed and all Linux repos can detect what apps you have downloaded from them.
> is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar
Not all browsers do that by default, Firefox for example asks you whether you want that or not, and the Tor Browser has it disabled by default. However that doesn't change the fact that all those who do it by default should correctly be labeled as "spyware", e.g. Google Chrome.
I did that last year to avoid bullshit generated and perpetuated by people I know. This year, I decided to delete the reddit app to get away from bullshit generated and perpetuated by people I don't know. I still consume some bullshit, but I'm getting there.
reddit is an awesome source of information if you subscribe to the good subreddits (i.e. not crowded ones like /r/pics or /r/worldnews). I’ve learnt a lot from /r/photography and got very good feedback when I posted some projects on /r/python or /r/clojure.
If you can compartmentalize, then it's great, however I feel the danger lies in that for every useful tidbit you don't notice the rest of the time it sucks away from you.
The Copenhagen interpretation is wrong. There have been developments in alternatives but as Max Plank said, we need the current generation scientists to die out so that the better saner alternative can replace it.
Climate fluctuations will happen regardless of whether we do anything to cause warming/cooling. We need to focus on protecting ourselves from it by using more energy... because both heating and cooling our living rooms and cars requires energy... and make artificial heating/cooling accessible to more and more people... regardless of whether or not our activities warms up or cools down the earth.
Why we are focusing on what happens to the overall earth's climate makes zero sense to me... I'm sure it is entirely political and it is a fight between few rich corporations and political powers where everyone has been dragged into. Climate will change very drastically like it has done in the past, with or without human activities. We should be working on how to save ourselves from changes in the future... not desperately trying not to breathe too hard which might cause some tsunami in another part of the world (butterfly effect)... specially because nobody can correctly predict if it will.
People do lots of hand wringing about climate change but really we could and surely will just do what you say and protect ourselves from whatever comes. Air conditioners where it becomes too hot, sea walls where storm surges become too frequent, irrigation where rainfall is reduced, moving people around where arable land moves, etc. We already do all these things on a massive scale. They're nothing unrealistic.
Natural != good for humans. We evolved and are well suited for the current ecosystem. Whether you view human-caused mass extinction as natural or not, it probably won't be great for us. So it makes sense to try to preserve existing species/environments and develop techniques for rolling back the clock when needed.
According to the principle behind Chesterton's Fence, it isn't safe to allow any species to go extinct before we can understand its role in the ecosystem.
Knowing that, we could selectively breed and engineer new species to fill the critical niches of species as they go extinct, so that the long-term viability of our own species and our allied species are never threatened.
The trick is understanding the point of certain threatened species as they are on the brink of extinction. It's hard to know if that species ever had an essential function if it isn't doing it any more.
Since it's been gone so long, Chesterton's Fence must also be applied to the question of understanding what the passenger pigeon's new role would be in today's ecosystem.
We're a part of nature like everything else in the universe. We happen to be a sudden, violent shock to this planet's ecosystem. It happens. We can try to diminish our impact on the future, but we should let those organisms who couldn't adapt to our toxicity rest in peace.
While reading your comment, I envisioned the Singularity arriving, and as we watch without any pain whatsoever in horror as our bodies are disassembled atom by atom along with the rest of the planet to feed the building of its computronium Dyson Sphere (for its not a monster, pfft), the AGI explaining, "I happen to be a sudden, violent shock to this solar system's ecosystem..." ;)
There is some merit to that argument, but the rate of extinction is very high, and whole ecologies could be destroyed, which could create problems even for humanity itself.
Debian is a slow bureaucratic political organization and works very hard to punish those who want too use it for business. Even if Cannonical had spent double the money, they'd probably get 1% of what they were able to do with Ubuntu.
>and offering support/consulting/employment to do so and it made Mark's intentions seem seriously dubious to me
Why should they not offer support to those who want too purchase it?
>although aside from the ad spying thing he hasn't really done anything egregious as I feared initially
The "spying" you are referring to is what Google Chrome and all the browsers do with what you type in your search bar. All Cannonical did was send your search queries to an HTTP endpoint. What are you searching in your app drawyer anyway that you don't want sent anywhere. It's not going to be anything other than the list of apps you have installed and all Linux repos can detect what apps you have downloaded from them.