I know a lot of people are going to be upset, I think they're wrong to be.
A lot of people have been wondering if Mozilla has turned on their users, if a historic FOSS project has been totally corrupted.
I think Mozilla is awesome to include advertising like this - I mean think about it, they're getting paid to advertise for alternatives and forks to Firefox.
Plus now we all know for damned sure that Mozilla is a sinking ship and we need to hop on the nearest life raft.
The only sincere actions are the ones that align with your own political views. Everything else is just virtue signalling. Nobody does anything nice or altruistic, it's all purely to show off.
Of course, complaining about virtue signalling in every single story about anything virtuous is definitely not virtue signalling. You are doing a public service, calling out wrong-doers, not showing off your cynical anti-do-gooder credentials.
I do nice things all the time, frequently without anybody knowing (so it can't possibly be virtue signalling).
Wouldn't be simpler to make your own browser? You can show everyone how it should be done and, because your browser is so good, you'll quickly gain the majority of browser market share. You'll rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in search engine deals. All other browser makers will fear you. Also, chicks will dig you.
So why not do that?
Hah, your sarcasm actually proves the OP's point: building and maintaining a browser is a fantastic amount of work, and the current stewards of the Mozilla codebase are not currently acting in the best interests of their users, the institution, the platform, or the community. They have a responsibility to do well by many people and they're failing miserably.
Beyond being attractive, which is more important in many households than you'd believe, they are pure tech porn when you open them up. They are so well laid out and so well fabricated. Perhaps that is why they have such a high resale value. Go check eBay for yourself. It is amazing what a 5 year old MacBook goes for.
Are you on crack? If not, you may want to seek medical attention.
Macbooks in particular are notoriously poorly-made. They use adhesives for everything rather than fasteners "because reasons."
Copyright is fundamentally different from patent law in that it is not there to encourage innovation but to allow the creator to profit from his or her own work.
Seriously, are you high? From the US Constitution:
Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
I point you to the very first part of that sentence, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Just a quick FYI, the largest body counts were all in non-Muslim countries and did not involve Islam at all. In fact, most did not involve religion at all. You have to go down the list a long way before you get anywhere near a Muslim country.
Sorry to interject with facts, I hope I didn't spoil your day:(
Actually the second-worst war on that list was apparently religious in large part, from the Taiping Rebellion Wikipedia page:
The Taiping Rebellion or the Taiping Civil War was a massive rebellion or civil war in China that lasted from 1850 to 1864 and was fought between the established Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the millenarian movement of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace.
Equating Islam and Christianity is a dangerous lie. You are willfully ignorant of vital differences in theology, and ignore the wildly different societies that spring forth as a consequence.
I think it's you who miss the point. Both Christianity and Islam teach their followers to believe without question, to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to believe despite all rational logic and reason. It's that blind faith which is dangerous, not what they have faith in.
Also, you're just plain old crazy if you don't think Christianity can be every bit as bloody and brutal as modern-day Islam. We don't have to go back far to find atrocities. (Hell I'm in Canada, and we had horrible, shocking, disgusting Christian atrocities as recently as the 1970s.) Sure, Christianity in general might be "nicer" at the moment, but that can change in a hurry due to the blind faith they inculcate into their followers.
So relax; breath. Trust in yourself and find the opportunities presented. You, and society, will be fine, I promise.
There is no natural law that says that all societies will last forever - history in fact demonstrates quite the opposite. And societies don't usually collapse because of one gigantic catastrophe - they collapse because of millions or trillions of small "well whatever" failures. It's apparent in the US and some other cultures that the proportion of people who don't give a shit is growing, and once they reach critical mass we'll be living in a shithole where the only way to live let alone succeed will be through avarice and meanness. There are any number of cultures in the world where this is already the case. (I'm looking at you, Africa.)
If you think the US or the West is different, it's only because there's a critical mass of people who'll give a shit and who'll fight for what's best and right.
So fuck you for telling people to relax and just get theirs.
your child starts crying, throwing a tantrum, demanding everyone goes home, is agitated or aggressive
Quelling this behavior is parenting 101. This is never allowed to fly from day one from any of my children. I have 8, and have been a parent for 24 years with the same wife. I think I am qualified when I call bullshit.
So I'm not saying you're wrong (I'm not a parent and I haven't carefully considered how I would do so), but surely you must realize you're an (extreme) outlier and your experience doesn't necessarily apply to most people right? 8 kids over 24 years with the same wife is incredibly unusual, and I can think of several things off the top of my head that would apply to you and that situation that wouldn't apply to me.
Oh, get serious. The whole "superdelegate" apparatus exists only to thwart the will of the voters.
Does that really need to be said so negatively? As if the will of the voters were the only thing that mattered, and as if the voters' will was omnipotent, omniscient, and without error?
Even the "checks and balances" of the US acknowledges that there are huge swathes of life that shouldn't be routinely subject to the will of voters (namely law enforcement). And anybody who's watching this particular USian slow train wreck MUST acknowledge that in this instance the democratic will of the people was at best misguided.
Shouldn't the Russians be acting like the US was Belarus or Tajikistan instead, if the Dems were correct in portraying Trump as a vassal of Putin?
At least the sources I use aren't claiming that Trump is a vassal of Putin - they're claiming that Trump is Putin's pawn.
It's been apparent for years that Russia has been trying to pick a real fight with the US or the EU, the usual reason given being that Putin needs to distract a restless Russian population from local issues particularly corruption. Putin getting Trump elected is seemingly a big win if all these things are true - Trump certainly seems far more likely to get into a war with Russian than... pretty much any other 2016 presidential candidate.
To sum: Trump is Putin's pawn, not a vassal. Putin is now manipulating his pawn into starting an armed conflict (or at least another cold war) with Russia.
You can't pay the rent or eat with a free download. And your job is at risk - you not only can be replaced, it's pretty much certain you will be replaced. And with more people competing for jobs where humans haven't yet been replaced, do you really think you're immune? Nobody - not even politicians, judges, lawyers, cops, and soldiers - are immune.
Sorry to say you're missing an important part of reality/politics - politicians, rich people, leaders, etc., will in fact be immune. They have power, and even if they choose not to prevent change from happening, you can be damned sure they'll be insulated from any ill effects that change brings.
Some people (good people) will be working towards helping the rest of the population adapt to the changes, but they're getting drowned out by people yelling "everybody is bad! nobody can be trusted!" at the moment. (Gee, I wonder who benefits from that?)
Quality of life is better because you can get entertainment instantly? Wow, talk about pacifying the masses.
You know I've started having similar thoughts as I've watched our society evolve over the last 3.5 decades. (Disclaimer: I am a seriously hard-core socialist.) It seems like we're heading towards Roman bread and circuses, specifically with talk about basic income. We already have the circuses (there's more cheap/free entertainment than ever, it's really mind-boggling), and now we're demanding bread (basic income).
A lot of people think basic income is a great idea and I think on balance I do too, but what will happen when 90% of people just don't contribute economically? Why bother educating them? That's where we were for most of our history - entrenched aristocracies ruling over the ignorant masses, typically with shocking abuses. How badly you prospered or how badly you suffered was a question of whose vagina you were lucky enough to be born out of.
"Hawking warns...Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges..."
So, in other words, you must cure humanity of the pure unadulterated, narcissistic greed that has created the chasm between the elitists and the rest of the human race.
Fat fucking chance of that shit happening.
Defeatism will definitely prevent anything from happening!
That said: good people working hard can limit greed and its ill effects, though obviously not eliminate it.
Greed in particular is a fucking "mortal sin". How the hell did we go from "mortal sin" to cheerleading it? WTF?
The current "media narrative" stories are probably the single most important issue of the day, underpinning pretty much everything else. Without a functioning media (and everybody agrees it's dysfunctional), we collectively and individually lack the data necessary to make good decisions, and the people as a whole lack the focus to support good decisions and decry bad ones.
Good job Slashdot editors; GFY, konohitowa.
Hey did you use a site to get your numbers? If so, which? I've often worked out numbers like that myself, manually, to prove points - but it would be great if there was a more convenient option:)
So basically you're saying you're a gigantic gaping asshole? Gotcha:)
(The guy was just making a joke, and a reasonable one - Trump portrays himself as a braying donkey of doom. And the real frothing-at-the-mouth liberals are just trying to help make the world a better place and can't understand why such a large proportion of the population are dicks like you - of course they get worked up:)
The idea that "all politicians are terrible and useless and evil" is almost certainly being deliberately spread by the worst politicians - they don't want us to figure out which ones good so we can support them to the hilt.
I also believe they deliberately promote the attitude that "all politicians are equally bad" because when they do ultimately get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, people will just shrug their shoulders and move on rather than holding the guilty parties responsible (because, after all, they're all equally bad:).
It's way too soon for this. We're just not there yet. Consider the example in the original post; Australia spends $3 billion on its "CentreLink welfare system" (which I assume is what they spend on welfare). That works out to $130 per person per year, if everything was just distributed out as basic income.
If we try it before when we're _obviously_ not ready for it, it'll just fail and it might even discredit the idea. (I wonder if that's a contributing factor to the really rather sudden appearance of these trials.)
Europe seems to fundamentally "not get" how democracy works. When confronted with something unpleasant, they try to ban it.
The only cure for unpleasant speech is more speech. Anything else ultimately makes it worse.
Or, maybe, Europe has had its fill of radical fascist ring-wing asshats and the problems they cause (read: death, destruction, war, poverty, etc.), and this is one of the tools they use to keep a lid on it.
I predict these views will be censored and modded to -1. For a community that supposedly favors the free and open exchange of ideas, Slashdot isn't very tolerant of opposing views. Voicing my opinion that AGW is a scam will result in my post being censored to -1. If AGW were real, there would be no need to censor dissenting views; the facts would prove the point far better than any moderation. The censorship is necessary because the facts aren't on the side of the AGW evangelists.
Some of us are tolerant of opposing opinions, when they're not outrageously harmful. Hopefully most of us are intolerant of misinformation and FUD, and I hope most of us aren't even tolerant of opposing opinions when they're both clearly wrong and actively harmful. At this point it's fairly apparent that anybody touting anti-global-warming "opposing views" are either pathologically misinformed, or astroturfing.
Slashdot Mirror
I know a lot of people are going to be upset, I think they're wrong to be. A lot of people have been wondering if Mozilla has turned on their users, if a historic FOSS project has been totally corrupted. I think Mozilla is awesome to include advertising like this - I mean think about it, they're getting paid to advertise for alternatives and forks to Firefox. Plus now we all know for damned sure that Mozilla is a sinking ship and we need to hop on the nearest life raft.
The only sincere actions are the ones that align with your own political views. Everything else is just virtue signalling. Nobody does anything nice or altruistic, it's all purely to show off.
Of course, complaining about virtue signalling in every single story about anything virtuous is definitely not virtue signalling. You are doing a public service, calling out wrong-doers, not showing off your cynical anti-do-gooder credentials.
I do nice things all the time, frequently without anybody knowing (so it can't possibly be virtue signalling).
You're just a giant asshole and/or troll :)
Hope that helps.
we need to stage a coup against Mozilla
Seems like a lot of effort.
Wouldn't be simpler to make your own browser? You can show everyone how it should be done and, because your browser is so good, you'll quickly gain the majority of browser market share. You'll rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in search engine deals. All other browser makers will fear you. Also, chicks will dig you.
So why not do that?
Hah, your sarcasm actually proves the OP's point: building and maintaining a browser is a fantastic amount of work, and the current stewards of the Mozilla codebase are not currently acting in the best interests of their users, the institution, the platform, or the community. They have a responsibility to do well by many people and they're failing miserably.
Beyond being attractive, which is more important in many households than you'd believe, they are pure tech porn when you open them up. They are so well laid out and so well fabricated. Perhaps that is why they have such a high resale value. Go check eBay for yourself. It is amazing what a 5 year old MacBook goes for.
Are you on crack? If not, you may want to seek medical attention.
Macbooks in particular are notoriously poorly-made. They use adhesives for everything rather than fasteners "because reasons."
For anybody too lazy to do the math, that works out to $4.16 million per permanent job, or $208k per year per permanent job for 20 years.
Copyright is fundamentally different from patent law in that it is not there to encourage innovation but to allow the creator to profit from his or her own work.
Seriously, are you high? From the US Constitution:
Article I Section 8 | Clause 8 – Patent and Copyright Clause of the Constitution. [The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
I point you to the very first part of that sentence, "to promote the progress of science and useful arts."
Jesus, come on.
Just a quick FYI, the largest body counts were all in non-Muslim countries and did not involve Islam at all. In fact, most did not involve religion at all. You have to go down the list a long way before you get anywhere near a Muslim country.
Here are the stats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
Sorry to interject with facts, I hope I didn't spoil your day :(
Actually the second-worst war on that list was apparently religious in large part, from the Taiping Rebellion Wikipedia page:
The Taiping Rebellion or the Taiping Civil War was a massive rebellion or civil war in China that lasted from 1850 to 1864 and was fought between the established Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the millenarian movement of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace.
What vendor did you end up going with? (I ask because I like the sound of that for my own laptop, and I'm not shy about paying for it.)
Equating Islam and Christianity is a dangerous lie. You are willfully ignorant of vital differences in theology, and ignore the wildly different societies that spring forth as a consequence.
I think it's you who miss the point. Both Christianity and Islam teach their followers to believe without question, to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, to believe despite all rational logic and reason. It's that blind faith which is dangerous, not what they have faith in.
Also, you're just plain old crazy if you don't think Christianity can be every bit as bloody and brutal as modern-day Islam. We don't have to go back far to find atrocities. (Hell I'm in Canada, and we had horrible, shocking, disgusting Christian atrocities as recently as the 1970s.) Sure, Christianity in general might be "nicer" at the moment, but that can change in a hurry due to the blind faith they inculcate into their followers.
There is no natural law that says that all societies will last forever - history in fact demonstrates quite the opposite. And societies don't usually collapse because of one gigantic catastrophe - they collapse because of millions or trillions of small "well whatever" failures. It's apparent in the US and some other cultures that the proportion of people who don't give a shit is growing, and once they reach critical mass we'll be living in a shithole where the only way to live let alone succeed will be through avarice and meanness. There are any number of cultures in the world where this is already the case. (I'm looking at you, Africa.)
If you think the US or the West is different, it's only because there's a critical mass of people who'll give a shit and who'll fight for what's best and right.
So fuck you for telling people to relax and just get theirs.
your child starts crying, throwing a tantrum, demanding everyone goes home, is agitated or aggressive
Quelling this behavior is parenting 101. This is never allowed to fly from day one from any of my children. I have 8, and have been a parent for 24 years with the same wife. I think I am qualified when I call bullshit.
So I'm not saying you're wrong (I'm not a parent and I haven't carefully considered how I would do so), but surely you must realize you're an (extreme) outlier and your experience doesn't necessarily apply to most people right? 8 kids over 24 years with the same wife is incredibly unusual, and I can think of several things off the top of my head that would apply to you and that situation that wouldn't apply to me.
there is ZERO proof the DNC "rigged" anything.
Oh, get serious. The whole "superdelegate" apparatus exists only to thwart the will of the voters.
Does that really need to be said so negatively? As if the will of the voters were the only thing that mattered, and as if the voters' will was omnipotent, omniscient, and without error?
Even the "checks and balances" of the US acknowledges that there are huge swathes of life that shouldn't be routinely subject to the will of voters (namely law enforcement). And anybody who's watching this particular USian slow train wreck MUST acknowledge that in this instance the democratic will of the people was at best misguided.
Shouldn't the Russians be acting like the US was Belarus or Tajikistan instead, if the Dems were correct in portraying Trump as a vassal of Putin?
At least the sources I use aren't claiming that Trump is a vassal of Putin - they're claiming that Trump is Putin's pawn.
It's been apparent for years that Russia has been trying to pick a real fight with the US or the EU, the usual reason given being that Putin needs to distract a restless Russian population from local issues particularly corruption. Putin getting Trump elected is seemingly a big win if all these things are true - Trump certainly seems far more likely to get into a war with Russian than ... pretty much any other 2016 presidential candidate.
To sum: Trump is Putin's pawn, not a vassal. Putin is now manipulating his pawn into starting an armed conflict (or at least another cold war) with Russia.
You can't pay the rent or eat with a free download. And your job is at risk - you not only can be replaced, it's pretty much certain you will be replaced. And with more people competing for jobs where humans haven't yet been replaced, do you really think you're immune? Nobody - not even politicians, judges, lawyers, cops, and soldiers - are immune.
Sorry to say you're missing an important part of reality/politics - politicians, rich people, leaders, etc., will in fact be immune. They have power, and even if they choose not to prevent change from happening, you can be damned sure they'll be insulated from any ill effects that change brings.
Some people (good people) will be working towards helping the rest of the population adapt to the changes, but they're getting drowned out by people yelling "everybody is bad! nobody can be trusted!" at the moment. (Gee, I wonder who benefits from that?)
Quality of life is better because you can get entertainment instantly? Wow, talk about pacifying the masses.
You know I've started having similar thoughts as I've watched our society evolve over the last 3.5 decades. (Disclaimer: I am a seriously hard-core socialist.) It seems like we're heading towards Roman bread and circuses, specifically with talk about basic income. We already have the circuses (there's more cheap/free entertainment than ever, it's really mind-boggling), and now we're demanding bread (basic income).
A lot of people think basic income is a great idea and I think on balance I do too, but what will happen when 90% of people just don't contribute economically? Why bother educating them? That's where we were for most of our history - entrenched aristocracies ruling over the ignorant masses, typically with shocking abuses. How badly you prospered or how badly you suffered was a question of whose vagina you were lucky enough to be born out of.
We should be careful of what we wish for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
Dick.
"Hawking warns...Humanity must come together if we are to overcome these challenges..."
So, in other words, you must cure humanity of the pure unadulterated, narcissistic greed that has created the chasm between the elitists and the rest of the human race.
Fat fucking chance of that shit happening.
Defeatism will definitely prevent anything from happening!
That said: good people working hard can limit greed and its ill effects, though obviously not eliminate it.
Greed in particular is a fucking "mortal sin". How the hell did we go from "mortal sin" to cheerleading it? WTF?
The current "media narrative" stories are probably the single most important issue of the day, underpinning pretty much everything else. Without a functioning media (and everybody agrees it's dysfunctional), we collectively and individually lack the data necessary to make good decisions, and the people as a whole lack the focus to support good decisions and decry bad ones. Good job Slashdot editors; GFY, konohitowa.
Hey did you use a site to get your numbers? If so, which? I've often worked out numbers like that myself, manually, to prove points - but it would be great if there was a more convenient option :)
So basically you're saying you're a gigantic gaping asshole? Gotcha :)
(The guy was just making a joke, and a reasonable one - Trump portrays himself as a braying donkey of doom. And the real frothing-at-the-mouth liberals are just trying to help make the world a better place and can't understand why such a large proportion of the population are dicks like you - of course they get worked up :)
The idea that "all politicians are terrible and useless and evil" is almost certainly being deliberately spread by the worst politicians - they don't want us to figure out which ones good so we can support them to the hilt. I also believe they deliberately promote the attitude that "all politicians are equally bad" because when they do ultimately get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, people will just shrug their shoulders and move on rather than holding the guilty parties responsible (because, after all, they're all equally bad :).
It's way too soon for this. We're just not there yet. Consider the example in the original post; Australia spends $3 billion on its "CentreLink welfare system" (which I assume is what they spend on welfare). That works out to $130 per person per year, if everything was just distributed out as basic income. If we try it before when we're _obviously_ not ready for it, it'll just fail and it might even discredit the idea. (I wonder if that's a contributing factor to the really rather sudden appearance of these trials.)
Europe seems to fundamentally "not get" how democracy works. When confronted with something unpleasant, they try to ban it.
The only cure for unpleasant speech is more speech. Anything else ultimately makes it worse.
Or, maybe, Europe has had its fill of radical fascist ring-wing asshats and the problems they cause (read: death, destruction, war, poverty, etc.), and this is one of the tools they use to keep a lid on it.
I predict these views will be censored and modded to -1. For a community that supposedly favors the free and open exchange of ideas, Slashdot isn't very tolerant of opposing views. Voicing my opinion that AGW is a scam will result in my post being censored to -1. If AGW were real, there would be no need to censor dissenting views; the facts would prove the point far better than any moderation. The censorship is necessary because the facts aren't on the side of the AGW evangelists.
Some of us are tolerant of opposing opinions, when they're not outrageously harmful. Hopefully most of us are intolerant of misinformation and FUD, and I hope most of us aren't even tolerant of opposing opinions when they're both clearly wrong and actively harmful. At this point it's fairly apparent that anybody touting anti-global-warming "opposing views" are either pathologically misinformed, or astroturfing.
This kind of thing is why Slashdot can be awesome. (All credit to the author of course :)