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Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

blog.mozilla.org

291–300 of 311 posts

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LGBT youth are twice as likely as hetero students to attempt suicide. http://www.cdc.gov/lgbthealth/youth.htm Members of the LGBT community are about 150% as likely as heteros to smoke. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/groups/lgbt.html Without access to marriage and the rights it brings, children of same-sex couples had to go through legal ordeals, facing orphanage, if their biological parent dies despite ano…

Way to mix up unrelated issues there! I agree on empirical suicide risks for people outside various norms. Prop 8 and marriage as regulated by law had ~zero to do with that. Canada and The Netherlands provide a decade+ data showing how little correlation. Look into it before spouting off to me. Other marriage benefits, indeed all the ones also granted by the state of California to Domestic Partners, are not material.…

> How am I harmed? The pretext for my leaving Mozilla was the outrage/status-display campaign, even if that can't possibly explain all the facts. In your view, I was harmed, and justly so -- but people disagree on justice, so in general, by your own rubriks, I was harmed.

Wait, what? You lost your job because of your homophobia. I demonstrated how homosexual individuals were harmed by lacking the right to marry. I asked how you were harmed by SSM becoming legal.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to mix up unrelated issues there! I agree on empirical suicide risks for people outside various norms. Prop 8 and marriage as regulated by law had ~zero to do with that. Canada and The Netherlands provide a decade+ data showing how little correlation. Look into it before spouting off to me. Other marriage benefits, indeed all the ones also granted by the state of California to Domestic Partners, are not material.…

> How am I harmed? The pretext for my leaving Mozilla was the outrage/status-display campaign, even if that can't possibly explain all the facts. In your view, I was harmed, and justly so -- but people disagree on justice, so in general, by your own rubriks, I was harmed. Wait, what? You lost your job because of your homophobia. I demonstrated how homosexual individuals were harmed by lacking the right to marry. I as…

You asked how I was harmed in general. My "homophobia" (the Greek roots make no sense) justifies nothing in what you think was the just-desserts outcome at Mozilla, even if your school-child Marxoid morality tale version of that event were accurate (and it's not).

Beyond that, your cropped reply chopped everything I wrote about bakers, florists, printers, schools, parents. Respond to that, if you can.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#293
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you fix WebSQL? Writing a from-scratch implementation of SQLite seems like the only option, and I don't think Mozilla had the resources for that at the time. I agree the situation sucks, but I'm not sure how to fix it even today.

One thing I never understood is why there needed to be a second implementation of WebSQL. SQLite is public domain, any browser vendor can choose to embed it in what they ship.

More succinctly: SQLite version whatever is specified only by its C source code, and C is woefully underspecified. Lots of Undefind Behavior on top of the memory-unsafe codebase itself. This is not a specification from which two independently implemented interoperable implementations could be written. Ergo, not a standard.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's because I was upgrading from 8 you were upgrading from 7? I recall some changes to how defaults were handled between them. Nope, upgraded from Windows 8.1. Not sure why I had a difference experience than you. I even went through the customize screens.

Which edition do you have? Windows 8, Pro, Enterprise, or RT? I did the upgrade with Win 8.1 Pro and the choice to reset default program options was pretty clear.

Windows 8.1...home? I forget what they called non-pro.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#295
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair if your attacker is the NSA you're fucked no matter what MS does. Most people need better security to protect them from the US companies slurping all their data.

If the NSA is a targeted attacker, then yes, the James Mickens "Mossad / Not Mossad Duality" applies. To paraphrase, "either your attacker is or is not the Mossad. If your attacker is not the Mossad, you can use strong passwords and avoid shady websites and you should be okay. If your attacker is the Mossad, there's nothing you can do and you are definitely going to die". However, the average citizen is not a target…

>However, the average citizen is not a target of the NSA.

The average citizen is exactly the target of the NSA. Their goal is to own everybody and then figure out what to do afterwards.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#296
post #237
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they can't legally do any of the negative things you've listed, and they aren't an organization with a history of criminal action against customers. This brings the OS in line with the behavior of many applications (Chrome for example) in keeping things always up-to-date & secured, and it's done because most users are incredibly lazy and ignorant.

> it's done because most users are incredibly lazy and ignorant. I don't know why it's acceptable for software to treat all of its users as lazy and ignorant, even if most actually are. All that's going to do is encourage them to find ever new and amazing ways to be even more lazy and ignorant. Sure, botnets suck, but it's not worth giving up control over our desktops to stop them.

> All that's going to do is encourage them to find ever new and amazing ways to be even more lazy and ignorant.

A lazy person won't do anything more difficult or time consuming than the easiest choice available, and an ignorant person might not even realize there are other choices. So make the easiest and default choice do the thing that is "best" for everyone.

> Sure, botnets suck, but it's not worth giving up control over our desktops to stop them.

I used to agree, but am no longer convinced of this, at least personally. I use Windows and OSX daily, and feel a hell of a lot more secure about my OSX machine. I'd give up some control of my Windows machine to not always assume everything is or will likely be infected at some point, by a known or unknown cause, detected or not detected.

Not to say that OSX cannot be attacked, it definitely can, but overall.. there's little comparison. the relative ease of updates & upgrades, high adoption rates, a very nice app store full of sandboxed apps; it's just a much safer place.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#297
post #237
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they can't legally do any of the negative things you've listed, and they aren't an organization with a history of criminal action against customers. This brings the OS in line with the behavior of many applications (Chrome for example) in keeping things always up-to-date & secured, and it's done because most users are incredibly lazy and ignorant.

> it's done because most users are incredibly lazy and ignorant. I don't know why it's acceptable for software to treat all of its users as lazy and ignorant, even if most actually are. All that's going to do is encourage them to find ever new and amazing ways to be even more lazy and ignorant. Sure, botnets suck, but it's not worth giving up control over our desktops to stop them.

[deleted]

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the Java VM run in a browser but the Dart VM is too hard?

Please read anything I've written on the topic over the years. Java runs as a plugin, like Flash. It has no deep DOM integration. Both Java and Flash have become security problems, so they're in various penalty boxes, beyond the plugin prison. Back in 1995, when I did JS in the shadow of Java, as a sidekick Robin-the-boy-hostage language, I did the primordial DOM too. Java was in only applets then -- pretty much the…

What aspersions? I've noted your opposition to Dart. You've explained that it has to do with memory management difficulties that seem intractable. I now understand this better, so I thank you. The world has moved on and now transpilers are coming into their own, so we do have real choice in the language we use in the browser, which as a programmer is all I want.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your circular argument did not move my LGBT supporters at Mozilla, or negate my record of good conduct and relations over the years with all non-Jacobins. And of course Mozilla did not fire me because of anything like your bigoted imputation of "hate". Such noise amounted to a non-issue. Being in an echo chamber is not good for one's hearing. Step outside and listen.

(If you are Eich, I apologize for the awkward third-person conversation. I don't have any proof of your identity and I don't want to attribute anything said here to him without it.) A non-issue? Literally every article I can find about the resignation is backed by a discussion about Eich's anti-gay stance. The position at CEO lasted roughly a week before the resignation. OKCupid put up a big anti-Mozilla notice as a…

As has been mentioned elsewhere, only about 10 or so people in entire Mozilla organisation opposed Eich. He was near-universally supported. Nobody on the Mozilla board cited Eich's politics as an issue. (This didn't stop false news stories about how board members had stepped down in protest of Eich's politics.)

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How am I harmed? The pretext for my leaving Mozilla was the outrage/status-display campaign, even if that can't possibly explain all the facts. In your view, I was harmed, and justly so -- but people disagree on justice, so in general, by your own rubriks, I was harmed. Wait, what? You lost your job because of your homophobia. I demonstrated how homosexual individuals were harmed by lacking the right to marry. I as…

You asked how I was harmed in general. My "homophobia" (the Greek roots make no sense) justifies nothing in what you think was the just-desserts outcome at Mozilla, even if your school-child Marxoid morality tale version of that event were accurate (and it's not). Beyond that, your cropped reply chopped everything I wrote about bakers, florists, printers, schools, parents. Respond to that, if you can.

Nah. The point I was making when this thread started was that your ousting was justified. I don't think you've said anything to convince me otherwise.
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