phryk

And a good one, too. The honest answer is: I don't know. I think this is highly contextual. At least I can't make a generalized decision for that. If the "less diversity" bit for instance means incorporating a 'No Nazis'-rule then the choice might be clear while in other cases it might be much more nuanced. As a rule of thumb I am against limiting someone's freedom until there is no other way around it. I would for instance only vote for a 'No Nazis'-rule if there would be a real problem with Nazis without that particular rule.

If, however, we are still talking about the case of censoring out profanity, you know my opinion. The people who are filtered out (or constitute the "less diversity") are the sort of people who get offended by me making use of a basic freedom (the one of speech). I am not interested in meeting people like that - frankly I hope they stay as far away from me as fucking possible.

This is similar to the reason of why I am against anti-discrimination rules at hacker cons; They are liable to be abused at some point while not providing anything of worth.

The sort of abuse they are supposed to prevent are reason enough to throw someone out even without those rules. Any major abuse is reason enough to get thrown out of a hacker event, or really any event.

The argument I have heard a few times for anti-discrimination rules is that girls get hit on all the time. I was kind of flabbergasted when I first heard this. I mean I can understand that it gets on ones nerves, but kicking someone out of an event because they hit on somebody really is not the right thing to do. If you don't want to get hit on there's a plethora of ways to communicate that in a non-verbal fashion, like wearing a wedding ring or - less subtle - wearing a shirt that says "I don't want to get hit on" or something, you get the idea…

I can use profanity in a peaceful manner to set emphasis and if someone feels attacked, denounced or otherwise mistreated they can just talk to me. Seriously, I don't bite and if I see your point I will act accordingly. Even if you are offended by someones actions that doesn't mean that they are unyielding dogmatic assholes - Just give them the benefit of the doubt and try to reason with them. And if it works you might've just broadened your personal horizon, maybe even made a new friend.

You'd think a community consisting of some of the most intelligent people on this planet would manage to have a proper communication culture, but in many aspects we are clearly lacking. I hope for this to change and of course discussions like this are a great first step towards doing so.

True that, I will try to get a bit less triggerable about this.

Do you have one single way of expressing yourself? Do you use profanity 100% of the time? Do you automatically reject all feedback on how you express yourself? ... On how you write code? ... Or how you interact with your colleagues?

No, of course not. I have however come into contact with quite a few people who tried to censor me before, that might be the reason why I'm so easily "triggerable" with this.

I'm just getting a bit jittery whenever someone tries to regulate free speech.

If you think I'm an asshole you are hereby invited to meet me at the OHM in a few weeks and yell at me. :)

So it's better to force that significant amount of developers to do your bidding? That sounds just a just a weee bit unreasonable, IMHO.

People communicate in different ways (and with different "curse-densities") and that is completely fine. What isn't fine is trying to get everyone to conform to a certain way of communication that you personally think is agreeable.

Diversity is to be cherished, not frowned upon. It makes for a more interesting world, and I am not willing to lose that just to make my environment have a few less sharp edges.

I don't need nor am willing to be rolled up in bubble wrap for what somebody calls my "own safety", which then isn't even determined by myself.

So you want to censor everyone who doesn't buy into your flowery child talk? Fuck that. Cursing is a perfectly fine means of setting emphasis and I sure as shitpissfuckcuntcocksuckermotherfuckertits am not going to surrender that just so some shithead I don't even care about can jack off to his or her little control fantasies.

You don't like that? I couldn't really give less of a fuck; You're supposed to be a tech person, write a few sloc to filter profanity out or something but don't get on my nerves with that shit.

And yes, that was offensive and I am fully aware of that. That was also exactly what I was going for.

I have to concede that abuse is never a good thing, but since you seem to be seeing profanity as a problem I'm not sure we could agree on what exactly constitutes an 'abuse'.

EDIT:

It was (correctly) pointed out that censoring communication was not mentioned or even necessarily implied in smtddr's comment so this might not apply to said comment. That said, this still reflects aptly what I think about censoring away profanity.

Yes, sorry. I tend to only look at the long term where my personal version of a better society would be one where at least all the production of all the base needs (if not more) is automated and we have deprecated money.

Commercial development will need some sort of protection if it is to be profitable, of course. But there we can for instance directly say that these sorts of protective measures are not applied at all to non-commercial applications.

My thought of train is normally more rooted in the open source way of development, which I think will become more dominant in the next few decades. The resulting openness would enable more cooperation, even between similar projects. Something which is pretty much explicitly excluded in the competitive model.

IP might be needed for competitive development, but I think cooperative development bears much higher potential for innovation.

Sorry if this is a bit garbled intellectually, I'm in the process of picking up my stuff and heading home for the weekend.

Aren't patents at least not applicable to non-commercial uses? Using copyright seems even worse.

I'm against any legal protection of any DNA sequence. This seems like the sort of thing that doesn't just have the potential to greatly stifle innovation but also to take on a very dystopian shape…

That makes sense. But it only seems to apply to species that have already been thoroughly reshaped by humanity (pets, food and similar). Not what you normally think of when someone goes crying about biodiversity. To me it just seems like a more efficient/adapted successor generation to our current designed species.

Exactly. The viruses, bacteria and pests are evolving naturally; they are increasing their resistance to the existing pesticides. With the sterile varieties, there is no evolution, no adaptation to the changing environmental conditions and the changing pests.

Yes, and with biotech we're able to adapt these design-species much faster than 'natural' evolution ever could.

That said, I am wary of anything environmentalist since those people often seem to not have done even the most minute amount of research on their topics and then continue to spread misinformation or plain lies (see the anti-GMO people for instance).

The mentioned site for example, seems to imply that plant/animal patents will diminish biodiversity ("The organisations behind No Patents On Seeds are especially concerned about […] biodiversity.").

I have no clue how granting patents on plants and animals is supposed to diminish biodiversity. Won't new plants and animals increase biodiversity? I mean yes, without the patents you could crossbreed and remix GM and other plants more freely which would boost the increase even further, but even a small increase is still pretty much the opposite of a decrease and dismantles the argument.

And before someone gets into cross-pollination and other ways of patented species overtaking 'natural' species habitats: For that to happen you need the GM species to be vastly better at reproducing. The chances of this happening without it being a goal of the development (which it usually isn't, since they want you to buy shit again and again…) are pretty small. As far as I know most GM organisms are even made sterile.

And while the risk of GM organisms "taking over the world" is relatively slim, naturally occuring species do this kind of stuff right this moment. The so-called 'Killer bees', some species of fish and crustaceans, red fire ants. et cetera, et cetera.

Many people have this sense of nature being balanced and that if we don't touch it, it'll all be alright ("Man made everything bad!", the environmentalist version of original sin). This is complete and utter bullshit, just doesn't work that way. Ecosystems are not static, they are extremely dynamic and never balanced.

As far as I know the submitter has to give all the rights to the journal while the reader pays a shitload of money that doesn't even go to the submitter (the people doing the actual science, you know?)…

Not encrypting to stay secure is just plain fucking stupid. If you don't encrypt they can read your shit anyways. Plus "reasonably believed to contain secret meaning" in all likelihood means "whatever the fuck we want".

As someone else already noted: There's strength in numbers. Let's just encrypt everything and have those fuckers deal with humongous amounts of data, most of which will be completely useless. Shit, if you're inclined to do so let some piece of software run all day that just produces encrypted gibberish and sends it off to random recipients.

I can second that. It's great to get into quickly and just hack something together. But it has lots of problems. Admittedly the devs have begun addressing a lot of issues - like the database access one, where you had just a bunch of functions that didn't even offer auto-escaping and resulted in a lot of unsafe sites - but the old stuff is always kept for backwards compatibility, which means that a lot of sites just continue to be unsafe.

I think a lot of those problems are stemming from the fact that php doesn't have any sort of built-in module system and everything is just on the root level of the language. There are optional namespaces, but even for those they use "\" (like \parent\child), which IMHO is just about the worst choice ever.

Then you have issues like the devs just pushing out a new version even though like 99% of their tests failed (but hey, apparently they at least have tests).

And of course you have the never-ending story of bad php-developers which came into the field because you can just hack stuff together with copy-pasting googled code-snippets and not understanding anything. Seriously, if anyone thinks this issue overstated - it's not. If anything, it is understated.

I have seen productive systems over which money in the tens of thousands of Euros came in which had hidden fields in the HTML containing complete SQL queries which even included the price (apart from the obvious downfall of enabling someone to just POST a 'DROP TABLE' statement, etc.). I have seen systems with something like static 5-digit user authentication tokens that would show up in the URL; You could just sit behind an admin, note the token and be an admin forever. And of course I have seen the ugliest, completely unmaintainable mess of code that would be humanly possible, with no documentation whatsoever (of course).

I also heard from a friend who had to fix something in the C-code making up php about hundreds of lines of codes being copypasted to different locations twelve times. While I haven't verified that for myself, it's not something I'd be surprised about.

Then of course there's the issue of php's design. For one your complete software has to be loaded for every single page view, which is just really fucking inefficient. But having the application not run continuously is also a problem if you want to write any sort of real-time application, which are going to become more and more frequent. You can do stuff like long-polling, but that's just another ugly hack. You might of course be able to have another hacky solution with continuously running php-cli with FastCGI or something like that, but even if that would work in principle, some php script would just die within a few minutes and the site'd be dead.

TL;DR: For small projects that may be hacky and potentially insecure, php is fine - For everything that is supposed to be proper, secure or highly performant I recommend you stay away from php as far as you possibly can. Everything else will just result in huge frustration.

Look at open source 3D printers. Did you know there is an open library for smart materials? For genetic information? Open Hardware projects are multiplying, think arduino, raspberry pi, beagleboard…

I mean shit - even the last CCCamp had it's own piece of open hardware. I myself am thinking about developing a little robot that can tend plants, basically an open source toolchain for vertical farming… There is more and more stuff like this coming up all the time.

And of course there's even an open source civilization starter kit you can inform yourself about at http://opensourceecology.org

IMHO the risk of one faction being all-powerful is nearly zero. We have good times ahead. Even though the road may have a few bumps.

I guess most people will spend a very large chunk of their newly won time socializing and I don't see anything wrong with that. If everyone can celebrate each and every day of their lives, I'm strongly in favor of it. :)

I personally am against capitalism, I think we don't even need money in the long run. I'm pretty sure we could obsolete it within the next few decades. Just distribute goods according to need…

And even if we're not needed for research it doesn't take the joy out of doing it anyways; Learning is pretty much self-rewarding. Plus there will always be enough projects to keep yourself busy, even if it's "just" organizing the next rave, party or other social event. But before that happens we will have plenty of new frontiers to conquer.

When talking about this I often encounter people going "BUT WHAT ABOUT THOSE FAT LAZY SLOBS WHO WON'T DO ANYTHING?!1!?" to which I can only reply: What about them? So a few people will sit around and do nothing. What's so bad about that if their labor isn't needed? It's not like a few lazy people will bring about the end of our civilization…

And as far as making the world a better place goes, I'm currently looking into the possibility of automated vertical farming with hydro- or aquaponics. Even if I just have a teensy bit of success with that it would probably have a larger impact than organizing protests, an activity about which I know NOTHING.

Since I'm living in Münster, where a lot of the German Pirates are and know quite a few of them, I'll be the first one to join any protest or demonstration they organize locally.