explainplease

Seriously, I tire of this notion that discussion must be dry and boring. Holding discussion hostage to "don't say anything that might offend, police your tone, and say everything as plainly and factually as possible"-type rules allows intellectually dishonest participants to game the system, i.e. bullshit asymmetry. Clever use of rhetoric is an effective tool for highlighting disingenuous arguments. In this age of information overload, we need it.

Are you trolling?

You're comparing a petrol tax used to maintain roads, to an "expired intellectual 'property'" tax which hypothetically would be used to fund a completely unrelated activity, one which cannot be argued with, because how could you be against cancer research, you heartless bastard? What about the children with leukemia? You monster!

I will therefore raise you a "let's put a cancer research tax on EVERYTHING! No disposable income until cancer is cured! You have to be in favor of it, or you are a cold, emotionless hater!" You can't disagree with me, because "no enemies to the left, no friends to the right."

Do you see how this goes? All I have to do is out-extreme your extremeness, and you can't disagree with me, because emotional appeals to child cancer research. It's an intellectually dishonest form of argument, so please, knock it off.

Seriously, do you not realize that you are proposing to give the government ownership of all expired copyrights? What part of "for limited times" and "public domain" do you not understand? You actually want the government to own everything in our culture?!

    $ mangle find -delete
       ACTIONS
           -delete
                  Delete  files;  true  if  removal  succeeded.   If the removal failed, an error message is issued.  If -delete fails, find's exit status will be nonzero (when it eventually exits).  Use of -delete automatically turns on the
                  -depth option.

                  Warnings: Don't forget that the find command line is evaluated as an expression, so putting -delete first will make find try to delete everything below the starting points you specified.  When testing a  find  command  line
                  that you later intend to use with -delete, you should explicitly specify -depth in order to avoid later surprises.  Because -delete implies -depth, you cannot usefully use -prune and -delete together.

Recommend Debian for the distro. It does a lot of things for you, and correctly, but it is also infinitely configurable. It can be the "just works" distro you need, as well as the hacker's tinkerable distro you want. And it has staying power and consistent security updates. Mix stable with testing/unstable and get stability where you need it and recency where you need that. Plus the community and documentation are very good.

You're framing, and in a very intellectually dishonest way.

> In the past, if you wanted to move fast, you had to own the car. Now you don’t need to own it, and can use the space for something else. Now you don’t need to drive it, and can have your hands free while someone else drives the car.

That's not true. Taxis have been around longer than cars have. Why did you ignore this?

> Owning a car is not freedom.

It certainly is, just as owning a bicycle or having legs and feet that work are.

> Owning a car is being separated from friends and family, because the car is literally, physically, coming between you.

You're being bizarre here. According to you, my car separates me from my family that lives hundreds of miles away, because the metal and glass physically separate us while I'm in the car driving to see them? Are you being serious, or is this an elaborate trolling?

> Owning a car is being stuck in traffic.

Depends on where you live. Many millions of people live where traffic is not an issue. And when the alternative to being stuck in traffic for a few minutes is spending 5x that long walking or riding a bike, it's a net savings of time.

> Owning a car is being a slave to the DMV, the gas station, and the repair shop.

By that logic, walking is being a slave to the shoe company and the supermarket. Again, are you being serious? Do you actually think this way?

> Living without a car is not giving up mobility. It’s living in a place where the car is just one option, and not necessarily the best option. Growing up, my family of five carted around town via public transit. We couldn’t afford to own a car, so living in a place built around car ownership would have meant living in isolation.

Do you actually believe these kinds of blanket statements? Have you ever met anyone who has trouble walking but can drive a car? Have you ever met anyone who needs to transport a walker or a scooter so they can get around after they get out of their car? I guess you would expect them to wait for the city's "old folks bus" to come along and scoop them up--if there even is one where they live. For all your talk about people living in isolation, you are incredibly narrow-minded and inconsiderate of those less fortunate than yourself.

> Requiring a car is not sustainable.

It certainly is. We've been using them for over 100 years and show no signs of slowing down. Cars are as sustainable as any other human activity, which is to say, as sustainable as we want it to be. Of course, there are people, such as yourself, who do not want it to be, therefore you claim that it is not, to convince people to stop, for reasons you would rather not admit to.

> Intensive agriculture has helped make food incredibly cheap, but the concentrated chemicals do not seem healthy to be near.

For you to make such a statement, implying that to live outside of urban areas is unhealthy, is beyond bizarre.

> Not everybody owned the horse-drawn carriage. And people did give up the horse, sometimes reluctantly, because they could not afford to keep it. Fortunately, they lived in places where the horse was just one option, and not necessarily the best option.

Not everyone did everything. Some people did somethings. Some people lived in some places, and some in others. From that, you would derive conclusions about what we should be allowed to do today. Amazing.

You seem to be saying that the feelings of anyone in a community should serve as a veto on anyone else's membership in the community. Am I understanding you correctly?

Of course, in practice, I don't think any average bad guy is going to spend the time to write Windows malware that installs Linux malware on other drives or partitions. Just like any security practice, it's a matter of tradeoffs. Is it worth the trouble to disconnect the Linux drive every time you want to play a game in Windows?

So, theoretically, any malware with root-equivalent privileges can do whatever it wants to anything on the system. Also, theoretically, malware can be remotely installed on your WAN-exposed router, infiltrate your network, and install malware using zero-days on every machine on your network. Is it worth the risk to air-gap your machines?

More practically, non-gaming stuff doesn't require a high-end machine, and average/SFF machines are plenty powerful, so it's probably reasonable to have a separate machine for gaming. Just get a KVM switch and put a Mac Mini-type machine next to it for your non-gaming machine. Then do all your gaming, using whatever awful incarnation of Windows is currently required, on the other machine, and never do any banking/email/etc. on the Windows machine, never type any passwords into it (except for gaming-related, of course). Treat the Windows installation as a throwaway, ready to be nuked and reinstalled at any time.

I agree with this statement. A lynching is a lynching regardless of why it is done.

> I don't think you understand what a lynching is, because none of what you have described resembles one in any meaningful way.

I don't think you understand what a lynching is, otherwise you would recognize that a mob of people reacting emotionally to harm another person is exactly that. e.g. Webster, 1913: "To inflict punishment upon without the forms of law." That is literally what happened.

When "it becomes known" is a matter of one person going on a moral crusade to destroy the other person's reputation and position because of something about them, wholly unrelated to the project, which they personally dislike--is it still valid for there to be "consequences" within the community?

If so, it seems like only a matter of time for all of us, because surely all of us do things or hold opinions that someone else in a community we participate in would find unacceptable. Therefore, all that is required for anyone to destroy anyone else is to "cause an uproar and crisis" about them.

What will you say when someone causes an uproar and crisis about you?

"I'm specifically talking about how another person's view would affect me, not how I might change my behavior of them based on their view. Their view does not affect me. Their view might affect how I treat them, and my view might affect how they treat me, but their view does not affect me."

It's no different.

He certainly was. I was there and I remember it very well. Twitter and the media went nuts, demanding he be fired.

> Serious questions about his credibility in adhering to values some people expected of Mozilla were raised

And Mozilla employees stood up for him, saying that he always treated all employees equally with respect and fairness.

> creating a PR issue for Mozilla which he was evidently incapable of managing. Mm

How would you suggest he should have "managed" it? Mm.

> This is in no way similar to a lynching, and one must be extraordinarily sheltered to find them similar.

It exactly is, and there's no need for you to turn to personal attacks against me.

This action/position thing is really tired by now. It was all the rage when Eich was being lynched. I was there, I remember. It wasn't logical then, and it isn't logical now. You would deny your political opponents the ability to effectively participate in the political process. That's undemocratic.

> There is no room for hate speech and bigotry in tech

By that logic, there's no room for you in tech. You should really do some serious reflection.

This is a bizarre and grossly impractical idea. Do you interrogate everyone who sells you anything? Who prepares and serves your food at a restaurant? Who delivers your packages? If you don't, you are being a hypocrite. And if we all did that, society and economy would grind to a halt. You are truly an extremist and a totalitarian.

> We ought to feel ashamed when we support someone who's beliefs and actions are reprehensible.

By that logic, I would feel ashamed to support you. Nevertheless, I would accept your code if it were well-written, because I am tolerant of views differing from my own.

I just wish you could hear yourself. Were you writing in a different context, I'd think you were writing satire. It's the same reasoning that actual bigots used against people of different races: they had no rational reason to discriminate against them, but they had learned a massive, visceral backlash reaction, and rather than challenge themselves to overcome it, they just went with it and acted on it. Rationalizing away the cognitive dissonance, racism lived on. So, we got Jim Crow, etc.

Censoring and oppressing is literally what you are advocating. You have become the monster you hate.

In contrast, I, and many other people, would evaluate it on its technical merits and merge it if it was good. It's just code; it inherits no sin from its writer.

But you discriminate against code--not even a person--based on your personal dislike of its writer. Isn't that bigoted?

So what would you say to the gay people who oppose government recognition of gay marriage? Are they bigoted against themselves?

Yes it is. It's literally a regression. The reason for the regression is orthogonal to the fact that it is a regression.

> They’re concerned with on-the-ground experience, and the personal car is not essential to it.

This is a generalization that does not account for the way of life of most of the population.

> Technology is providing car sharing and ride sharing for short distances, and airplanes for long distances. Just-in-time global supply chains that make tropical fruit affordable in the neighborhood grocery store, also provide anything else in the world to my doorstep. Emission control technology and tree plantings make urban life sometimes less polluted than rural life.

None of that helps a family of four cart their kids around town. Or anyone who lives outside of an urban area. Or anyone who likes to have room to carry anything around, go on weekend trips, etc.

> Emission control technology and tree plantings make urban life sometimes less polluted than rural life.

A vague generalization, and generally unlikely.

> We live great lives without personal cars, and we don’t want to be forced into legacy environments that require cars.

This is also bizarre. It's especially so when you look at the bigger picture, in which cars are an evolution of the horse-drawn carriage. Imagine telling a family 150 years ago that their horse is not sustainable, so they have to give it up. Imagine telling them that you live a great life without a horse, and you don't want to be forced into a legacy environment that requires horses, so they should get used to life without a horse.

But why didn't you consider other costs, such as equipment installation and maintenance?

And what about the grid? Can the grid sustain the equivalent amount of energy that the nation's cars burn every day in gasoline?