scotchmi_st

I don't think we do. There are lots of chemical reactions in the world, happening all the time. ~99.999% of them don't then beget further reactions. The rest are the ones we refer to as 'life'. I'm not sure if anyone would ever need a more complex idea for life than that.

This argument really irritates me. Apart from all of the excellent reasons that other commenters have given as to why this is false, the fact that programs such as Instagram are as popular as they are, /that do nothing other than remove everything but the text from a page/, shows this is false.

The fact that images pre-date anything vaguely similar to what we call civilisation shows that the two are not causally linked. Words /are/ causally linked with civilisation.

Absolutely. Godwin's Law is the sort of thing Hitler would have invented.

You could probably also help (2) by stop using livestock in agriculture, since rainforest and jungle are often cleared for animal grazing land, which then lead to flash flooding and drought as the soil can no longer hold the water.

Which is a shame, as from my non-agricultural engineering background, getting people to stop eating meat and livestock-related produce seems like the hardest one to solve, both culturally and nutritionally.

Yeah I would certainly say that building a messaging system of any type with the features of XMPP /from scratch/ would be hard. Then again, just compare the config files of sendmail and exim to prosody or ejabberd. Given that tools for working with xmpp already exist, it does seem a shame to me that it hasn't seen wider adoption. Wasn't Google Wave based on it?

Really? So there are no large-scale implementations of push-notification systems? Is there some detail I'm missing here?

Sorry if this is slightly off-topic, but I was wondering if anyone could explain the technical reasons why, with minimal modification, we couldn't just replace all electronic messaging systems from SMS to email with xmpp, and forevermore live in a magical fantasy world where email headers, text fees and security concerns don't exist? I mean, it has these things going for it-

1. SSL/TLS embedded in the standard.

2. Easy to set up OTR encryption, (as well as any other standard I imagine).

3. Messages are "pushed" to clients, rather than "pulled".

4. The standard is simple, and servers like Prosody are super-easy to implement (unlike Exim).

5. There are plenty of clients already available. Admittedly it's not something I've researched much, but I doubt it'd take all that much to get Adium or whatever to work like a simple email client, (but with xmpp).

I'm aware of all of the social reasons why such a thing may not work, but I'd be interested to know if it were just a question of getting people to adopt it, were it to exist.

The UK managed the switch from imperial to metric okay. It's really not that hard.