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Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

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Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#131

Post by frou_dh »

shmerl wrote: post #127

> almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation Stopped reading since there, since it sounds like a usual blind rant and not anything to do with reality or reason. The moment conflict in Israel kicks in, many otherwise reasonable people lose common sense (it can go in either direction about the sides of the conflict IMHO). Not sure why it's so really. Otherwise valid criticism is discredited…

No one cares about "stopped reading" pronouncements. Spare us and tell your goldfish instead.

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#132

Post by rasur »

shmerl wrote: post #127

> almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation Stopped reading since there, since it sounds like a usual blind rant and not anything to do with reality or reason. The moment conflict in Israel kicks in, many otherwise reasonable people lose common sense (it can go in either direction about the sides of the conflict IMHO). Not sure why it's so really. Otherwise valid criticism is discredited…

>Not sure why it's so really.

FWIW I think it's because the debate over the occupation of Palestine usually devolves into name-calling and accusations of anti-semitism etc within the space of.. well minutes at best, usually. Many people flip their "froth at the mouth" bit pretty quickly under those circumstances, be they reasonable people or not.. and so we see little reasoned debate on the subject.

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#133

Post by gress »

res0nat0r wrote: post #23
dmix wrote: post #13

Amazon is building a $600 million datacenter for the CIA. The CIA did all of the bad things listed in Dropbox article as directed by Bush and Condoleezza, and they are still actively trying to cover up torture. I've never heard anyone here not using EC2 over it? The tech scenes pitchfork mobs are wildly inconsistent. I have a feeling this one hit a nerve because Condoleezza Rice is famously hated across the internet…

I believe this and Eich are easy targets (soft targets if we want to keep with the war theme) for people to go after. Seeing the internet mob rally behind this and Eich remind me that these are easy targets for people to pick because it doesn't require much work (internet slacktivisim at work). It would be more enlightening if someone would research all of the board members of many well known SV companies whos names…

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that if you want to change something big, it's a good idea to start out with achievable steps and build up from there.

As to 'Apple supporting Foxconn' - Apple have done more to improve working conditions at Foxconn than any other organization. If you want to boycott someone, it should be all of the other Foxconn customers who are doing nothing.

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#134

Post by [deleted] »

bm1362 wrote: post #130
dmix wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system Condaleeza represents is still active and is heavily entrenched. This campaign may be a good start, but its going to take much more than that to change anything -- and that requires a strong moral consistency than extends well beyond participating in an occasional mob. Amazon is actively supporting infrastructure to an agency that supports torture. Condaleeza isn't even in power any more. It's not that you…

Does this logic apply to the workers who maintain the physical infrastructure for the CIA? The Coke guys who refill soda machines? The internet providers? Where do you draw the line? A government agency leverages services to further it's agenda- should those businesses take a moral position?

[deleted]

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#136

Post by azth »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #15
dmix wrote: post #13

Amazon is building a $600 million datacenter for the CIA. The CIA did all of the bad things listed in Dropbox article as directed by Bush and Condoleezza, and they are still actively trying to cover up torture. I've never heard anyone here not using EC2 over it? The tech scenes pitchfork mobs are wildly inconsistent. I have a feeling this one hit a nerve because Condoleezza Rice is famously hated across the internet…

I don't use EC2 over it. I host a site with a million+ pageviews per month with >250GiB of user data and I host it with Voxility. It used to be on AWS. Edit: FWIW, I also don't use dropbox. I use rsync and a VPS.

Out of curiosity, who is your VPS provider?

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#137

Post by shmerl »

frou_dh wrote: post #131
shmerl wrote: post #127

> almost blindly supports Israel's increasingly unjustifiable occupation Stopped reading since there, since it sounds like a usual blind rant and not anything to do with reality or reason. The moment conflict in Israel kicks in, many otherwise reasonable people lose common sense (it can go in either direction about the sides of the conflict IMHO). Not sure why it's so really. Otherwise valid criticism is discredited…

No one cares about "stopped reading" pronouncements. Spare us and tell your goldfish instead.

Do you think I care about you not caring? Not in the least. Especially if you try to tell me not to express my opinion.

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#138

Post by espeed »

dmix wrote: post #13

Amazon is building a $600 million datacenter for the CIA. The CIA did all of the bad things listed in Dropbox article as directed by Bush and Condoleezza, and they are still actively trying to cover up torture. I've never heard anyone here not using EC2 over it? The tech scenes pitchfork mobs are wildly inconsistent. I have a feeling this one hit a nerve because Condoleezza Rice is famously hated across the internet…

I've never heard anyone here not using EC2 over it? The tech scenes pitchfork mobs are wildly inconsistent.

You can't fight them all. Choose your battles wisely.

   Any fool can criticize, complain, condemn,
   and most fools do. Picking your battles
   is impressive and fighting them fairly
   is essential. —Dale Carnegie
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#139

Post by frou_dh »

shmerl wrote: post #137
frou_dh wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one cares about "stopped reading" pronouncements. Spare us and tell your goldfish instead.

Do you think I care about you not caring? Not in the least. Especially if you try to tell me not to express my opinion.

It's the "stopped reading" meme that's obnoxious, and probably a lie too in this case given the whole thing is less than a page.

Re: Knuth: Open Letter to Condoleezza Rice (2002)

#140

Post by notahacker »

brlewis wrote: post #103
dmix wrote: post #13

Amazon is building a $600 million datacenter for the CIA. The CIA did all of the bad things listed in Dropbox article as directed by Bush and Condoleezza, and they are still actively trying to cover up torture. I've never heard anyone here not using EC2 over it? The tech scenes pitchfork mobs are wildly inconsistent. I have a feeling this one hit a nerve because Condoleezza Rice is famously hated across the internet…

CIA: Amazon's customer Rice: Dropbox's board member I don't think "pitchfork mobs" would object to Rice merely being a customer, even if she stored documents for objectionable purposes.

This is my view, more or less (though one could legitimately argue that bidding to build one's first ever private datacentre for the CIA is a much closer relationship than simply not preventing the CIA from having AWS accounts). Selecting a board member whose most relevant achievements are circumventing security legislation and browbeating foreign governments (she's undoubtedly extremely smart but she's not been appointed for investment or engineering insights) says a lot more about a company than whose cash they'll accept.

That said, the many calls to boycott Amazon were perfectly reasonable too.

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