In reply to this comment by TheFreak:
Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.


My life is better for having read that comment.

In reply to this comment by A10anis:
>> ^ChaosEngine:

>> ^spoco2:
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/A10anis" title="member since May 27th, 2009" class="profilelink">A10anis : It's all relative until you're spending more than the mean house price in your country ON A CAR.
@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/ChaosEngine" title="member since November 9th, 2009" class="profilelink">ChaosEngine : See previous statement.

What difference does that make? If you can afford it, and you're not screwing people over to do so, buy whatever the fuck you want.
Or does this anti-luxury item only extend to cars? What about a boat? or art? I guess whoever paid eleventy squillion for a painting (it doesn't even do anything! you can look at a copy of it on the web) must be a complete ass.

I am in total agreement with you (Read my posts). Spoco2, having lost the argument, has attributed HIS comment to me, which is pretty desperate of him.

I realise that. I was replying to spoco2's comment which included your tag.

Thanks man! You guys rule. I was going mental knowing that people were being wrong on the sift without the benefit of my wisdom

In reply to this comment by lucky760:
I've updated this account to your #2 account's email address. Please recover your password (via the login/register form) and you'll be able to login normally.

Let us know if you have any more trouble!

In reply to this comment by xxovercastxx:
I'm curious what the go-to languages are these days, in your opinion. I have a programming background (high school and the local community college) but have spent the last 15 years in networking and servers. I've done some scripting in Perl and really enjoyed it. I've got Python on my todo list. What else do you think might be worth a look?

>> ^ChaosEngine:

Honestly, outside of embedded programming, if you sit down and start writing new code in C these days, you need your head examined.


I guess it depends on what you want to create. For windows apps, it's hard to go past C# for front or back end. For web based stuff, Ruby or php. Python is really useful and if you want something to really change the way you look at programming, Haskell or LISP. Java is still quite popular, but I personally never warmed to it.

And then, of course there's objective-c for iOS.

No, it's actually a reference to an old video game. I just always liked the name.

In reply to this comment by EmptyFriend:
hey just saw you post on something. question though, is your username in reference to the old Pinback song? i've seen them probably like 8 or so times now, i'm a big fan.

have a good one.

Agreed, but calling him out made me feel a bit better

In reply to this comment by Januari:
If you look at a few other post from this wonderful sifter you start to get a pretty clear indication that VERY little he says isn't utter BS and they are more interested in getting reactions out of folks... just my opinion anyway...

In reply to this comment by ChaosEngine:
>> ^cito:

I hate pigs, I have a friend of mine who became a cop out of highschool, he was in there about 2 years but he quit and turned whistleblower for GBI. The local cops were hitting up drug dealers, would threaten them with arrest unless they turned over their drugs and money. If they refused or ran they got beat. The cops would then smoke the pot, and sell the rest. Then use the dealers money to augment their own salaries.
My friend was actually shown how he could get 2 or 3 dealers of his own, and run the racket to give himself a pay raise by using threats of arrest to take all the money of the dealers for himself.
anyhow he turned whistleblower and they fired 32 police and the sheriff in town. Since we are a smaller town there was no chief, the sheriff ran it all.
Anyhow I could write a book on corrupt pigs from all the stories I was told from the inside.
people seriously need to rise up and drag these pigs into centers of streets and beat them until they can only crawl home. And do it on a mass scale across the country.


"Pigs"? Seriously? Grow the fuck up. Idiot.