kirillkh

I'd rather have a specific system of rules governing what I can and cannot say than discover post factum that what I said was illegal based on lawyers' consensus.

While realistically such consensus is required in some cases anyway due to the imprecise nature of lawmaking, we should still strive for clear ruleset as a baseline, precisely so that the little guy is as informed of his rights as he reasonably can be.

It seems we are sinking ever deeper into the victimised state of mind where any opinion you express may and will under certain circumstances be used against you, even by people from your closest circle. So the best course of action is usually to avoid exposing your opinions, especially on controversial subjects. Just pretend to be a nice person, smile a lot and never say anything explicit.

Criticism can get you in trouble, avoid it if you can. If forced to choose sides, try to guess which is less likely to raise any kind of negativity towards you. Counterintuitively, usually it will be the more radical side, as radicals are often younger and more energetic in forcing their opinion on others, so the last thing you want is to offend them.

In short, be a spineless, shapeless wuss with an appearance of calm confidence and a lot of scenical sympathy.

I did it exactly on time. I'm not sure what's meant by an "interlocking part" of circles in Q30, though.

This is a source of major confusion. Ultimately, it boils down to how one identifies him- or herself or, alternatively, how one is identified by others. Jews in USSR were officially considered an ethnicity like any other, based on blood. The Judaism as a religion was suppressed under the Communist rule. But even before that, there was a lot of assimilation and secularization going on. Ultimately, in the 1970's there were very little Judaism practitioners left.

The word "Jew" ("Yevrey") in Russian usually refers to the ethnicity. They use a different word ("Iudjey") when they want to describe someone as a Judaism practitioner.

Most of the kids applying were atheists or agnostics. They were Jews by ethnicity, not by religion.

Since there are so many of us who decided to stick with Firefox 56... wouldn't it be nice if Mozilla declared 56 as ESR release, so that when the time comes we were not forced to downgrade to the much slower FF 52? Also, I've seen it mentioned that you can't even downgrade without losing all your settings.

For me it's DownThemAll, EdgeWise, GMail Notifier, Session Manager, Status-4-Evar, SuperStop. Not upgrading until at least most of them are ported.

Is it now possible to make the title bar blue when the window is active and grey when it's not? The lack of this feature (that once used to be the norm) is one of the most painful things for me.

Not everyone who opposes gay marriage thinks of gays as lesser than them. Some oppose it for religious reasons, for example. Also, what about views on other exclusionary policies? Wherever you live, I'm sure many people in your country think that no foreigners have an inherent right to gain citizenship and residence in your country. Perhaps even you feel that way. This is an exclusionary view and therefore should be punished by prohibiting those people from holding positions of power... right?

Besides, you are still missing the main point. Discriminating against people for their opinions is nonconstructive - by excluding them from dialog, oppressing them in daily lives and proudly putting your intolerance to their views on display, you just make them angry and more entrenched. That kind of demonization might feel really nice (when you're on the giving end of the stick), but it works against liberal values in the long run. Where do you think Trump and Brexit came from?

Please be constructive. If you think I don't know something, feel free to explain or provide informative links.

You are mixing up two different things here. It's true that individuals inevitably have complex, multidimensional views on reality and, therefore, need to concentrate on cooperation based on shared interests. An organization, particularly one based on volunteering and donations, on the other hand, can and should choose a narrow set of goals and pursue them without taking any more sides than necessary. Otherwise people may and will withhold support for that organization because they disagree with its secondary goals.

Political bias is generally supposed to be bad for business, and the current tendency of tech companies to take active political stance is a sign that something very rotten has happened to the public discourse. Indeed: entire sectors of society (mass media, universities, now tech companies) are becoming increasingly hostile towards still widespread conservative views, excluding huge sections of the population from political debate and deligitimizing their views. That population is now oppressed and unable to advocate their views in a public way, but they can still vote, so now USA has leftist mass media going nuts over the election of President Trump. But it's not going to end there: when the conservatives realize that Trump has failed to turn this oppression around, it might come to violence and who knows what else.

You raise an interesting objection. Some questions in this regard:

1) What does inclusivity have to do with Mozilla's core business, namely open-source Internet software?

2) Can any organization declare inclusivity as one of its core values and start enforcing it by firing every person in position of power who holds an exclusionary view on any subject? By the way, there are more people in positions of power than just the CEO. Every person in the corporate hierarchy, except perhaps the lowest, holds power over other people. The exact same argument you make about the CEO can be made about a VP, a CTO or a teamleader. They all represent their group in front of everyone else and they are all looked up to by their inferiors.

3) What is an exclusionary view? Is it one advocating that people in certain category deserve less than in another category? But by that logic, you hold an exclusionary view: after all, you support the idea that people with particular views should not occupy positions of power.

4) Why is it a good idea for an organization to declare holding exclusionary opinions a punishable offense? I can tell you why it is a bad idea. Quoting an excellent comment [1] below, "there's something wrong with injecting ideology into everything, that is, dividing everything in the world into what supports your ideology and what doesn't, making all judgments based on it, and shunning all who don't share your ideology. All must prove their purity and loyalty or be excommunicated. It's a very dangerous approach, and a quick glance at history books will tell you what's at the end of this path."

The life is a complex, non-binary (in fact, multidimensional) thing, and we all err in some regard, including yourself. You don't want to be discriminated based on your opinions, unless you overstep the boundaries of law.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15398460

Thanks for linking that. I agree that whether or not stepping down was voluntary is an important question. But the answer is right there in your link. That whole memo is nothing else than a manifesto saying "Brendan had to go". Your only possible counterargument seems to be that the memo might have been just a PR move, while in fact he stepped down voluntarily. But, when you think of it, publicly saying "Brendan had to go" is not much different from actually making him go in the sense that in both cases the organization makes a bold political statement on behalf of its employees, its contributors, its supporters and with consequences for its users.

> The CEO is the face of the company, and if they can't lead either employees nor can they effectively be the face of the company, they have to go.

And yet no one has explained why a guy holding particular political views can not effectively be the face of the company. If one does believes in gay marriage rights, can they effectively be the face of the company? Clearly, many people oppose that view, so let's oust every CEO out there who donated to gay rights campaigns.

What differentiates between these two CEOs with opposing views on gay rights in this respect is only how much public outrage there is about their biography. Somehow, people holding left views tend to be much louder than people holding right views. Which, without a doubt, has a lot to do with leftist bias in the mass media. So, taking your statement to its logical conclusion, what you are suggesting is we give up any sense of fairness and work ethic and bow to our mass media overlords because they have the microphone.

It's funny how you try to spin this around and claim that it's me who lives in an echo chamber, not the extreme-leftist mass media and SJW 'science'.

So it's okay from your point of view that major news outlets, such as Bloomberg TV, switch into propaganda mode and start making anti-factual claims, such as 'there is no research to support the idea that there are biological causes for the lack of women in tech' [1]. It might be too much to expect commercial media to be objective, but outright fabricating facts is nothing less than betrayal of everything journalism stands for.

Is that a singular case of leftist propaganda? Far from it. If you took a look at Google News the week this story was hot, you'd see your run-of-the-mill articles that open by twisting facts in the title. E.g., 'Anti-diversity manifesto' was apparently considered a mild way to describe it [2]. Some of them proceeded to make false claims, e.g. that Damore was "criticizing the company’s efforts to increase diversity" (no he was not, he considers diversity a good thing and suggests better ways to increase it) or arguing that Google "should stop offering programs to minorities and women" (he was only discussing racist and sexist programs, not _all_ programs) [3].

As to 'fake news' - I take it you're trying to paint me as a Trump supporter. So let me tell you I'm not one, and I didn't even know what that was all about (as I never bothered with US mainstream media before) before it hit me where it hurts with the Damore story. Now I don't know how much pro-Trump media twisted facts, maybe it was the same. All I know is I was shocked to find the mainstream US media to be so ideologically charged as to attack a guy for his [very mild and well-substantiated] opinions with forged facts and labels. Because I know that guy could have been me.

In summary, you, together with the mainstream US culture, need to pop your own obvious, well-documented and plainly visible ideological bubble before you start making claims that people with true liberal, pro-science, pluralistic views like myself are in one.

[1] https://youtu.be/s4WoeOkj2Ng?t=2m1s

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/5/16101978/google-employee-w...

[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/google-fires-employe...

I don't need to be an expert on sexism to make judgments on it. This is one benefit we get from science: it allows one to make accurate judgments without becoming an expert. If one had to be an expert to make any judgment at all, one would never be able to leave their house.

Of course, some disclaimers apply. Any conclusions you draw based on a study have to stay faithful to its constraints. And you have to keep in mind that some fields are more trustworthy than others. E.g., so-called 'social sciences' seem to be as much overrun by extreme-left fanatics as the 'progressive' mass media, which is evident in ignoring obvious control factors (e.g. taking into account marital status and number of children reverses results on sex bias [1]) and in publication bias [2].

Also, it's you who needs to prove something wrong, since it's you who doubts a scientific study. And please stop linking news articles, I'm no longer entertained to learn more ways in which the mass media spins the Damore story.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/...

You, sir/madam, seem to enjoy making illogical claims. First you link worthless bragging in attempt to prove that a peer-reviewed scientific study is "deeply flawed". Now you proceed to claim that I "never really wanted to understand sexism" because I question these sources and that I "will go with my opinions no matter what".

Ironically enough, based on the above evidence, the last statement likely applies to you.

Disproving a scientific study with blog and newspaper links?.. Sorry, but you will have to do better than that.

It seems that the most likely explanation for the pay gap is the gap in dedication and energy spent at work. Until recently, many studies had found a bias against hiring women women in education and tech. But once corrected for lifestyle/marital status (i.e. single men without children compared against single women without children, etc), we observe the opposite picture. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...

There is an umbrella issue that aggregates proposed improvements to WebExtensions [1]. If you look at RESOLVED WONTFIX issues linked in that bug, you will find a lot of them are rejected based on political reasons. For example: [2]. So there will never be anything close to feature parity with XUL extensions.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215059

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246706

I wonder whether the effort in question was scientific. In particular, did it control for life-style (e.g., single without children, married with children)? Sociological results on sex-related biases have been reversed when properly controlled for this parameter [1], which warrants skepticism towards any study that doesn't give it a serious consideration.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...

Legacy extension system vs WebExtentions is actually a false dichotomy. Mozilla still can develop a low-level API in front of its new and improved subsystems. Yes, that will require more development and will be harder to maintain. But the benefits it would bring may arguably be worth it.

Thanks for that link, now I can clearly see that from the power-user perspective WebExtensions is a dead-end. If you look at the RESOLVED WONTFIX issues linked in that bug, you will find a lot of them are rejected based on political reasons. For example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1246706

Listen, I don't care whether features that I need don't fit the WebExtensions security model or whether they are confusing to a clueless user. If you can't support these features as part of WebExtensions, please design a separate set of APIs. Fine with me if you market extensions targeting these lower-level APIs as "dangerous, use at your own risk".

Your arguments may convince Mozilla not to port these features to WebExtensions, but what are you trying to tell me? To go fuck myself? What you're missing is there are many niches like these, and many people using many niches. It might still be a small percentage of users overall, but we're the geeks and we sit right in the center of the culture. Get rid of us, and the care-about-Mozilla temperature goes down significantly.

Mozilla should find a way of moving forward while keeping the code open enough to modding. AFAIK, features offered by these extensions that I use are not implementable in WebExtensions even in principle, and that is the main problem. Break the compatibility if you must, but make it possible for someone who cares enough to step in and rewrite these extensions to the new architecture.

No, like this: https://vgy.me/VBLBYH.jpg And when the FF window is not focused, the title bar is grey. Like it's supposed to be.

It's not part of a plugin, though, I had to patch something manually (I never remember what and have to re-google it every time).

I know it's not a good way out, but it's something we could at least in theory work with.

Isn't v55 already multiprocess? How are these extensions working right now?

The devs still have a voice in the sense that they can always quit and fork. Or, in case of Firefox, join the Palemoon team.

If it keeps working in FF 57 and won't break after every minor update, I might upgrade. I was actually thinking that providing some kind of officially unsupported backdoor for determined users like us might be a way out of this situation.

Then they should bring back the old UI we came to love. I want my blue title bar on Windows, my menu bar, my status bar, my square tabs, etc, etc. Also, I can't imagine living without EdgeWise, so they would have to incorporate that, as well. Other people use different sets of features, which are also not supported in the new plugin model. How can Mozilla ever hope to plug all these holes (pun intended)?