Drop Dropbox • Hacker News Board

Re: Drop Dropbox

#161

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:40 PM UTC

EC1 wrote: post #152

TylerE wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is rapidly turning very ugly, and I can't stand it. Is being "anti-gay" or "pro-war" or even just "republican" the new Communism? The new witchcraft?

I hope so. We're moving into a phase where there you can grab information about anything, from nearly anywhere, at almost any time. There is little advantage to decision making based on cemented ideals anymore. This new era has exposed the good and bad in all facets of life. It's no longer about republicans, or communists, or this, or that, it's just about life. I prefer to remain non-partisan and instead look at thi…

[deleted]

Re: Drop Dropbox

#162

Post by xenophonf » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:40 PM UTC

grannyg00se wrote: post #58

I'm sure that bringing Brendan Eich's politics into question when he moved into CEO position has made this a more popular trend.

Business leaders' politics have always been an issue, and people arrange boycotts all the time because of them (left, right, and center). It's called political speech, and it's actually a good thing. Heck, it even cuts both ways - for example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has definitely changed my opinion of the Microsoft founder, and in a good way.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#163

Post by nikcub » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:41 PM UTC

dctoedt wrote: post #70

I'm as anti-war as the next guy; we military veterans tend to be more so than most, and I've gotten even more so as I've gotten older. Still, there are those who appreciate that: (A) political leaders aren't supermen and -women. Like all of us, they have to make the best decisions they can with the limited information available to them at the time; (A1) [ADDED:] the signal-to-noise ratio can be problematic; the avail…

> it was unclear to what extent Hussein had made any progress on building -- or buying -- nuclear weapons;

It was very clear that he hadn't, the US government (just like the chemical weapons) chose to ignore their own intelligence because it didn't suit their purpose.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/congress/2004_r...

> On March 1, 2002, INR published an intelligence assessment, Niger: Sale of Uranium to Iraq Is Unlikely.

The Senate did an entire hearing on pre-war intelligence, you really should read it:

http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=29877...

If you prefer something that you can sit and watch, see BBC Panorama's "The Spies who Fooled the World" - it is both interesting and frightening, especially the part where the single person who was the US source used in Powell's UN brief tells the interviewer he made everything up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3K9twuuU7g

Re: Drop Dropbox

#164

Post by sdegutis » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:41 PM UTC

sdegutis wrote: post #105

tomasien wrote: post #52

Dropping Mozilla because Eich is anti-gay-marriage made sense to me because Mozilla is the beacon of open source. Mozilla belongs to us in a very personal way, many of us have contributed code to Firefox personally. But Condi Rice joining a completely private Dropbox as a board member - this is a non-issue. I'm as strongly anti-Bush administration and anti-war in general (especially the Iraq War - good grief) as anyo…

Can't we just keep software and politics separate? Do we really need to divide ourselves in yet another area because of differences of opinion?

Disclaimer: I'm pretty orthodox Catholic and thus firmly disagree with most software programmers on topics that are often discussed here. But I don't boycott emacs just because the authors are atheists (I actually use emacs full time for work now). And I don't boycott software whose maintainers are pro-choice or whatever else. Boycotting software because of political or religious differences isn't going to help software, it's only going to further unnecessary dissension instead of fostering understanding and personal change.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#165

Post by bmj » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:41 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #137

netcan wrote: post #100

I'm not American, so this is a little removed for me. In truth I don't really see big enough (non cosmetic) differences between the parties or administrations to justify the partisanship you guys seem to have. What bother me here is not Condoleezza Rice specifically. Every ranking official of any country (or company) owns a big share of that country's sins and there are no "clean" administrations. Complicity is the p…

The bush administration asserted that it could detain anyone without a trial and torture them. This is not equivalent to any average administration as you implied.

And the current, Democratic, administration hasn't exactly rolled back many of these changes, right? My point isn't to criticize the Obama administration, but rather ask: if Hillary Clinton was asked to serve on the board of $your_favorite_service, would you consider dropping that service?

Re: Drop Dropbox

#166

Post by walls » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:41 PM UTC

chaosmonkey wrote: post #77

kyrra wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do use Google Drive some, but the overall usability of it is a bit painful. They have a lot of nice features for sharing folders/files with others, but the organization of it's web UI is just painful to use at times.

For some reason I actually like it. What do you find painful?

Personally, I've had endless sync issues with Google drive. It doesn't seem to have any sort of 'retry' feature if it can't sync a file other than restarting the service.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#167

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:41 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #82

rbanffy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Linux support.

Not everyone needs that, though. It's still a valid suggestion.

Adopting OneDrive would then prevent you from ever adopting Linux in the future without migrating all data to a different service. You may be confident you don't use Linux now, but are you confident you'll never need Linux support? How confident are you with adopting a tool that's not OS agnostic?

Re: Drop Dropbox

#168

Post by cruise02 » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:42 PM UTC

joshdance wrote: post #131

I was hoping this would be a site that would review and compare cloud storage alternatives.

That might be even more convincing! :)

Re: Drop Dropbox

#169

Post by davexunit » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:42 PM UTC

Finally people realize that Dropbox is unethical. They've been denying your computing freedom for years now, but it took hiring Condoleezza Rice for people to start to catch on.

Replace dropbox with ownCloud. http://owncloud.org/

Re: Drop Dropbox

#170

Post by dzink » Thu, Apr 10, 2014, 2:42 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #108

dzink wrote: post #81

A board member does not decide on features or dig into your account to look for your political preferences. I can think of a dozen reasons why they would have invited her and all of them would be good for the company and good for users: - advise on security matters and help keep the NSA out of my files. - get government business for Dropbox thus maybe reducing bureaucracy for citizens and small business owners alike…

>> advise on security matters and help keep the NSA out of my files What about her past makes you think she would have this position? I'd argue if the options are "Help protect your data from the NSA" or "Hand over your data to the NSA" that she would be much more in favor of giving your data to the NSA.

- Because by joining the board she has a fiduciary duty to protect the interests of the company, especially when those conflict with others including her personal interest.

- Because if CEO had to hire someone to help them do that, a former secretary of state would be one of the best choices (albeit Hillary might be a bit busy).