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Re: Drop Dropbox

#761

Post by panarky »

slapshot wrote: post #742
panarky wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's growth. Exactly right. Everything we build has a political dimension. Every dollar or euro we spend is a vote. We have the knowledge, we have the skills, we have the power. But as long as we compartmentalize life and work, others use our talents for evil. The HN community has always held strong beliefs about political issues, but what did we do about it? It's time to exercise our power and ensure our money a…

> The HN community has always held strong beliefs about political issues, but what did we do about it? The problem is that "the HN community" doesn't have unified beliefs about nearly anything. There are people who are violently for and against: higher taxes, lower taxes, affirmative action, race-neutrality, abortion choice, life, fracking, nuclear power, wind power, birds, etc. If we declared that we couldn't work t…

> "the HN community" doesn't have unified beliefs about nearly anything

We don't need unanimity. We don't have to agree on every issue.

But we do have incredible power, because we're the ones who know how to build things and make them work. Those who would do evil depend on us to do our part.

I won't participate. I will deploy my talents and money against wars of choice, the police state and institutional theft.

We may not all agree, but the HN community is disproportionately interested in these issues, and has the ability to do something about them.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#762

Post by clarky07 »

janj wrote: post #732
stingraycharles wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I really hate so say this, but this has hardly been the first time the US has gone into an unnecessary war. While you have also entered necessary wars, for which we, the other western countries, are truly grateful, you simply cannot say that with the Bush administration this is the first time something like this happens. For me, an anonymous person living in the Netherlands, it feels like these things happen when…

Besides the civil war what others have the US started?

Whether we started them or not is mostly irrelevant. We've joined and extended plenty of wars, and given 9/11 I'd say we didn't "start" Iraq and Afghanistan out of the blue. We just didn't know exactly who we were supposed to be fighting.

According to this [1] the US has been in ~117 wars (if I counted right) in 238 years.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Unit...

Re: Drop Dropbox

#763

Post by zurn »

Sammi wrote: post #735
zurn wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every ranking official of any country (or company) owns a big share of that country's sins and there are no "clean" administrations. This sounds a lot like apogolism. These war crimes are VERY far removed from the standards of contemporary western civilized countries. Obama administration continuing many of the evil policies doesn't make it any more acceptable, taking this as "the new normal" would be apathy border…

He said every politician is guilty, and you're interpreting that as him saying they're all ok? I think you're reading what you want to read, not what he actually wrote.

I'm saying very few high level politicians in western countries are guilty of things of comparable badness.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#764

Post by clarky07 »

nilved wrote: post #758
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am proud to have always been vocally against the war, torture and the Patriot Act. I will continue to oppose the people who led these efforts and oppose anything they are involved with, staying true to my own personal values requires this. I hope this extends to opposing the Obama administration, which has continued and extended war, torture, and the patriot act. If the tech community dumps anyone from any party…

> I hope this extends to opposing the Obama administration, which has continued and extended war, torture, and the patriot act. Of course it does. That's the logical conclusion. Why wouldn't it? There isn't any informed person in 2014 who is unable to realize Obama has been worse than Bush as far as torture and war go.

And yet Bush is universally hated and Obama was elected to a second term. I think we are in agreement as to our feelings about this, but your snark is subtle if we are :-)

Re: Drop Dropbox

#765

Post by frik »

Wow the HN anti flamewar algo (as someone mentioned)...

As Dropbox is a YC alumi it puts also a bad light on HN.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#766

Post by EdiX »

mcv wrote: post #103
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…

It's not about partisanship, it's about whether your data is safe. Of course maybe data can never be safe in the hands of a US company, but I put significantly less trust in a company that hires someone who supported all the violations by various secret services, than in one that fights those violations.

Before this I could at least pretend they didn't play ball with the NSA, I knew it was self deception but I'm also very lazy. Now they might as well hang a "Friend of NSA" sign in front of their building. I downgraded my Pro account.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#767

Post by buckbova »

mantrax4 wrote: post #234

Internet outrage - one the most promising resources of the 21st century. It's cheap, it's renewable, and the Internet is producing more of it than we can handle. If we could figure out how to power engines with Internet outrage, we'd solve all of our world's problems. Right now it's mostly producing angry tweets and protest pages, but I'm sure if we work together we'll figure it out, eventually. Until then, keep the…

The internet outrage machine is highly inefficient and produces considerable less energy than put into it.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#768

Post by belovedeagle »

Karunamon wrote: post #731
humanrebar wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are saying exactly that about Eich, Prop 8, and Mozilla though. Saying that it's a category error to equate Eich and Rice is fair. Saying that "no one is saying..." is a bit off.

Eich's documented actions, not his private views, are the primary thing that got him drummed out of Mozilla. While on a whole different level than being a participant in one of the greatest losses of life in human history, let's call it what it is. Eich's defenders have been quick to spin this as an ideological thing, when at its core, it really isn't.

This is exactly what top parent comment was talking about.

If someone from ideological group A dislikes something from group B and calls that out, then it's "discrimination against private views", and wrong and evil and "an ideological thing".

But if someone from group B calls out group A, then it's "documented actions" which are the cause and suddenly it's absolutely okay to lock group A out of polite society on those grounds.

Lucky for group B they have this absolutely objective, unquestionable standard for discrimination and intolerance, be it "documented actions", or whatever else is convenient at the moment. Groups A' and B' over a different issue can disagree all they want, and both of those views are acceptable in polite society, but if you're in group A then, by god, that's just not okay; that's objectively wrong!

It starts simple. "Racism is objectively wrong, and holding racist views absolutely means you should be locked out of polite society." Ohkaaay.... I can't disagree with that per se (which just goes to show how deep this problem goes). Then "sexism is objectively wrong, and holding sexist views means no CEO position for you!" Well.... I suppose that's a good thing, right? "Believing in God is objectively unacceptable." Uh, guys? "Voting Republican just shouldn't be allowed." And there you go.

I'm not saying it's a slippery slope we should never step on, because I've been brainwashed by society to absolutely agree with the first step—I've been raised to think racism is objectively wrong. Society is wearing away at my views on the second position; eventually I'll have to agree with that or go the way of the dinosaurs, and I know I will go with society, because that's what people do, whether we want it or not. But this is exactly how things like "Jews just aren't human" get started. Sure, it doesn't look like that now; surely discrimination against LGBT is something we should get rid of any way we can, right?

No. Intolerance will never achieve tolerance; discrimination will never achieve non-discrimination; punishing thoughtcrime will never achieve freethinking. To think otherwise is just, well... objectively wrong.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#769

Post by MatthiasP »

sparkie wrote: post #623
ionised wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wuala or SpiderOak. I'd say Wuala, as SpiderOak's mobile application wasn't great last time I checked. It only had read capability.

Note that there are potential privacy concerns with Wuala and similar services, as they use de-duplication techniques, meaning if somebody makes a file public, and you have the same copy in storage, they can see these files in your account. It's not a serious privacy violation, as it only identifies what are otherwise public files anyway - but if you want complete privacy, including being able to hide what you are up…

They stopped using de-duplication some time ago.

Re: Drop Dropbox

#770

Post by sebastialonso »

spindritf wrote: post #207
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…

Dropping Mozilla because Eich is anti-gay-marriage made sense to me because Mozilla is the beacon of open source. The leap from open source to pro-gay sounds like a complete non sequitur to me. What is the reasoning there? I like the way Torvalds put it. For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world…

Thanks for that Tordvalds' gem.

As I can see now here in HN, a lot of people idealize the idea of Open Source to mean the stereotype of the current zeitgeist good side, when it does not.

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