> I'm personally unconvinced that there weren't ancient civilisations with advanced technologies, yet undiscovered, which moved mountains for their own purposes.
This idea is so old it's like beating a dead horse by now.
Just the idea that we are not capable of these incredible things just goes to show how little you understand or respect human ingenuity.
> Heck, even the Pentagon admits it doesn't know it all about UFO's, c'mon ..
This didn't happen... ?
Rather, a ex-pentagon guy was recruited by an ex-pop singer guy's nonsense organization, with some nonsense claims.
You say tomato, I say 'contemporary hubris for/against ancient, misunderstood cultures'. I do, indeed, have a great deal of respect for human ingenuity, or I wouldn't be having this conversation with you, presumably a human, in the first place.
>PR stunt
I would say that we've been talking about PR stunts all along, no? I mean, what else could cave-paintings be?
> And even if it encodes the sounds of a language, if that language utterly died out and is unknown to scholars today, then even if we know what the sounds were, we probably wouldn’t be able to determine much of their meaning.
I feel this conclusion rather weak.
As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed [1]. Another one is the hieroglyphs.
Re-constructing how mayan words sounded is still on-going [2].
Also, this type of work is not really possible to "crack with computers" as some have suggested (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail).
> As an counter example, consider how the decipherment of the mayan written language was performed
That is no counterexample. The Mayan written language was related to a number of surviving languages, making decipherment easier.
> Another one is the hieroglyphs.
The Egyptian hieroglyphs could not be deciphered until the discovery of the Rosetta stone, where the hieroglyphic text was accompanied by translations into Demotic Egyptian and Greek. Before that, there had been attempts for many centuries to decipher the hieroglyphs but they proved fruitless.
That happens sometimes, and other times it doesn't. Not many people know the word gadget is from the builder of the statue of liberty, but the word hasn't dropped out of usage. There are plenty of lingering names from people and ethnic groups that have been forgotten by most.
You weren't banned, but your comments were caught by a software filter. Sorry—new accounts are subjected to extra filters because of past abuses by trolls. We've marked your account legit so this won't happen again.
All: it's much better to email issues like this to hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It's pretty random what we do and don't see on the site, but we see all the emails.
How would a open www.change.org petition be any indicator of the current state of things?
Or even indication of the 2013 state of things?
For christ's sake, anyone can start a petition about anything.
Obviously the petitioner is also clueless, or else how could they write "We feel that Radeon hardware is vastly superior to competition", when their hardware in 2013 was nowhere near NVIDIA. (See the review the petition links to for an example...).
You sir are a typical phoronix reader. Uninformed, biased and thick.
> git.cypherpunks.ru uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because it was signed using a signature algorithm that was disabled because that algorithm is not secure. Error code: SEC_ERROR_CERT_SIGNATURE_ALGORITHM_DISABLED
stargrave: Please look into this. If you want to push crypto on new users, a broken SSL cert is not looking good.
You think? I bought the normal Pixelmator for a few dollars years ago and still receive updates and features. I don't mind them branching out and trying something new, the normal pixelmator is still top notch
This idea is so old it's like beating a dead horse by now. Just the idea that we are not capable of these incredible things just goes to show how little you understand or respect human ingenuity.
> Heck, even the Pentagon admits it doesn't know it all about UFO's, c'mon ..
This didn't happen... ?
Rather, a ex-pentagon guy was recruited by an ex-pop singer guy's nonsense organization, with some nonsense claims.
This is called a PR stunt.