hoopd

I suppose I'll get labled an MRA for this but I've found feminists to be the absolutely least supportive people in my life over the past X years.

When somebody has an ideological belief that you're luckier than they are it's difficult for them to feel empathy for you.

Yes, I can handle working at a company where I think the CEO is a piece of crap because to me that's part of being an adult.

I've worked with people who endured things like metal holding their bones together because the people who managed them couldn't be bothered to look out for their safety. So do I care that somebody might have their feelings hurt by their CEO's social views? Not really, not when there's zero evidence he created a hostile or unfair workplace.

> and then you find out via the outrage machine that he's donating to groups whose /one and only/ reason for existing is to marginalize you.

This is just ridiculous, it's like you never took the time to understand why people supported Prop 8. They were afraid their churches would be forced to marry same-sex couples and when they expressed that fear they were called bigots so they sought legal protections. I'm not religious and I don't go around apologizing for them very often, but I think calling them bigots it's going too far.

My edit's not showing up on my other post, sorry for double-replying.

> ....The pichforks didn't truly come out until the number of his non-answers on the issue. Someone saying "we support diversity" doesn't sound right when that can be instantly rebutted with "Then why is your company run by someone who donated against LGBTs?"

> It looks bad for Mozilla, and there's no good answer for that question - really!

I think this accidentally hits the nail right on the head. Eich had to go because people couldn't handle the complexity of the situation and so they chose a simplified version where everybody involved was either good or evil. The reality was Prop 8 wasn't so great, but that's a lot of baby to throw out with a very small amount of bathwater.

> The question is actually "Is it appropriate for someone who takes active steps to treat some people as undeserving of basic rights[1] to take the ultimate leadership role in a diversity focused company?"

First, it's not a "diversity focused company" it's a company focused on building a Free and Open internet. Being socially inclusive in their internal culture is secondary. Moreover Eich's definition of inclusivity was perfectly in line with Mozilla's which is that not only are sexual orientations protected but so are religious views as long as the person interacts constructively with the community. He had his personal religious views and by all accounts he didn't let them prevent him from interacting constructively with the Mozilla community.

> "...and Mozilla would suffer due to the volume of people who stated they would not work for or with someone who did what he did."

It was less than 10 employees who asked him to step down, none of them were his direct reports, how many threatened to leave?

There's absolutely no reason that he should be forced to apologize for his donation. I don't agree with the donation but I'm an American and I think it's extremely dangerous to go down the road of persecuting others for taking part in political campaigns, etc.

I agree with you that Eich's actions are to a large extent known, so I again challenge you to provide me with a single shred of evidence that in his 16 years at Mozilla Eich treated even one member of the LGBT community unfairly from his position of power.

There's nothing in Mozilla's mission statement[0][1] incompatible with Eich's personal beliefs.

> You personally, the guy typing the letters into this box, what do you think the outcome of such a "negotiation" would be if it were as successful as humanly possible?

I think it would have been adults acting like adults and accepting you don't have to agree with somebody in order to work with them. Eich already demonstrated he was willing and able to do just that.

From 1998 when Eich co-founded Mozilla to 2005, after seven years as the chief technologist and member of the board, how did he misuse his power? From 2005 to 2014 while Eich was Mozilla's CTO, was Mozilla hostile to the LGBT community? How many discrimination lawsuits did Mozilla have to settle because of him?

Eich spent 16 years at or near the top of the Mozilla, yet there's no pattern of discrimination, not only is there no pattern I've been unable to find any evidence whatsoever that he was unable to set personal differences aside. Worse yet for your case is that Eich helped build a very inclusive company where LGBT persons have always been, from what I can tell, quite welcome.

[0] - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ [1] - https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/

Well allow me to extend thanks to you and everybody like you for damaging a very important Open Source project at a very important time. I understand it would have been difficult to sit down at the negotiation table with Eich and set an example for everybody of how to work with people you have disagreements with, but it would have been the right thing to do.

Either way, you won. I hope it was worth it.

You know, I'm sick of people making such a big deal just becasue Mozilla lost its CEO in such an awful way that he didn't even return to his CTO role. Just because he literally wrote JavaScript, co-founded Mozilla and worked on Firefox since it was called Netscape Navigator it doesn't mean he should be able to take part in America's political process in a way that some find offensive.

Oh I was being a little tangential and pointing out that changing packages on Stable to an extent defeats the purpose of it. I just hope they don't start releasing PPAs that'll help people achieve worst-of-both-worlds systems that combine the outdatedness of Stable and the bugginess of Experimental.

Just a note for the uninitiated: when you pin from Stable you just gave up the guarantees that may have been the reason you were on Stable in the first place. This is an area where RTFM is in order:

"WARNING: Use of apt-pinning by a novice user is sure call for major troubles. You must avoid using apt-pinning except when you absolutely need it." https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch02.en....

That's still bundling something fragile with infrastructure that carries heavy machinery. Transporting electricity is a solved problem, we can put a solar farm in the middle of nowhere with current technology. And if we're looking for land that's already owned we could put solar cells underneath long range transmission lines 1000x easier than we could embed them in roads or in train tracks.

No, the implication is that men are only valued based on their productivity and as such don't get to complain because nobody cares.

Point granted, we use asphalt because it's a cheap and I should know better. I would still expect it to last longer than wildly complicated solar panel/computer/light displays that have many more modes of failure.

For this to work you have to do several things to the glass at the same time, none of which come easy: make it strong, make it hard (probably need to get to 8 or 9 on Moh's hardness scale), make it tough, and have it grip rubber as well as asphalt does even when it's wet. Considering scratch resistant and grippy compete with eachother this is not looking hopeful.

Materials scientists do fascinating things with glass, but making it competitive with rocks for road surfaces seems like a waste of effort.

Personally I think Elon Musk's solutions for this problem (decentralized clean power generation) are a bit more compelling, especially the part about putting solar panels on our rooftops instead of in our roads.

http://fusion.net/story/129075/elon-musk-reminded-everyone-l...

Durability, not strength. Asphalt is very durable and it fails in predictable ways, it's difficult to design glass that fails gracefully. Yes, it's a surmountable engineering challenge but this project has more than it's fair share of things that fall in the "technically not impossible" or "we'll figure it out later" categories.

Logistically speaking, there's a nightmarish level of complexity introduced here. Put a country's food distribution network on top of its energy production system? Put solar cells where you know they'll be constantly driven over by heavy machinery? Replace some of the most durable materials known to man (asphalt and concrete) with glass encased electronics?

These things aren't impossible, but it's such an uphill battle that I wouldn't hold my breath. (http://jalopnik.com/why-the-solar-roadway-is-a-terrible-idea...)

Really? On their website[0] they claim their glass surface doesn't require snow removal because the heating elements melt it and as such asphalt roads have a cost of snow removal that apparently comes for free with these.

However, it takes more energy to melt snow than to push it to the side[1] which they simply ignore and that makes me question what other things they're leaving out in order to tell a good story. I'd really like to see the numbers crunched for how many snowy days a year will cause the system to consume as much energy as it produces.

[0] - http://solarroadways.com/snow.shtml [1] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/130/

Look at what blew up in the early 90's: grunge and rap, they were cheaper forms of the 80's rock and R&B that came before them. Rap probably wouldn't have happened without the 808 and samplers, and wikipedia puts the first affordable sampler at 1986 which fits the graph in the article pretty well.

I'm not saying it's all technology but when something is cheap and new that's an attractive combination for musicians looking for a different sound. And that new thing will have new strengths and deficiencies which will determine what types of music sound good on it.

In 1991, around one of their "revolutions" the ADAT was released[0]: "While synchronization had been available in earlier machines, ADAT machines were the first to do so with sample-accurate timing - which in effect allowed a studio owner to purchase a 24-track tape machine eight tracks at a time. This capability and its comparatively low cost, originally introduced at $3995, were largely responsible for the rise of project studios in the 1990s"

Technological revolutions that have lowered the costs of recording and distribution have often precipitated changes in the music itself. Not to mention the new capabilities introduced by new technologies like electric guitars, magnetic tape recording, sampling, digital recording, and whatever that robot-death-sounding thing that they keep doing in Dubstep is :)

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT