wombatmobile

In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction.

Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.

The soul is an emergent property of the mind and body interacting with the world.

… in the hope of avoiding shallow comments like this.

Shallow? It’s profound.

Have you tried to respond to the question, in the human context?

I know the code that I and my team contributed to Mozilla was only some trivial part of the whole beast, but for us it was drawn from years of work.

And that’s the whole point.

Mozilla has made a browser. So has google. Why make them out to be bad actors for providing something that is too big for mortals to even contemplate?

It’s your life, your money, and your choice.

Would your life be better if you spent $100 on junk food, alcohol, pot, gasoline or Netflix instead?

Soda is 98% water and 46% sugar.

> It's still significant because it speaks to people being more willing to admit to being part Native.

More people are proud to proclaim being First Nations people.

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

― Anaïs Nin

I’m a big fan of H2O.

The reason I’m posting that here is because for many years I don’t drink it. I was so used to hydrating from soda and other beverages advertised on TV I completely lost touch with plain old H2O.

Then one day I rediscovered its pure refreshing goodness. What a surprise! I savoured it and marvelled at the pureness of the way it quenched my thirst.

Water! Quenching thirst since before the dinosaurs.

Affordable. Convenient if you have a tap. Amazing on a hot day if you have a fridge and a pitcher.

You're not stuck in some evil country. You have Mozilla. If you want to improve it, you can submit code to it. Or start a new browser project by rounding up a dozen friends who feel the same way you do and going for it. If you're not a software engineer, you can be an evangelist who inspires software engineers. What is stopping you from working towards your own ideals?

> Why are we at the mercy of …

We aren’t at anyone’s mercy.

Nobody is forcing us to use browsers from google or Mozilla.

We are all free to implement our own UA. The specs are all open standards.

What stops us from writing browsers is the sheer volume of time and effort required - hundreds of thousands of hours of highly skilled work. That is all.

In the absence of such an effort, we would be left high and dry, with no way to experience the web.

Fortunately, that isn’t the case, because some others have done the work and allow us to use their browsers.

For that, we might feel grateful.

We might also be wary, and try to be aware of any adverse consequences of using someone else’s thing. That’s common sense, but it is still not a case of being at someone’s mercy. That situation loomed when one company sought to control the standards for the web as well as the implementation, but what we have today is different to that.

How about in amber then? How long might we expect DNA to remain intact perfectly encased in amber?