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You're saying that I can do whatever I want with OpenJDK until it cuts into Oracle's revenue stream, at which point Oracle will sue me and keep suing me until they find an argument that shuts me down?

No thanks. Free software is based on irrevocable legally-granted rights, not some horrible company's largesses. If OpenJDK really is free software, I should be able to hack it such that it no longer conforms, stick it in a phone, and ship millions of copies without being sued.

Google's case isn't unusual at all. The same logic applies to anyone reimplementing an existing API with anything but bug-for-bug compatibility. Your view means that we can improve nothing, delete nothing, and deprecate nothing, since as soon as an API implementation diverges from the original, it's suddenly not for "interoperability", but rather an illegal appropriation of somebody's revenue stream? That argument is blatantly inconsistent with free software principles.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're just an ardent Oracle fan, not a paid shill. It's really hard to tell the difference sometimes. Please reconsider the effect Oracle's litigation has on the entire software ecosystem. Consider that we wouldn't even have Unix if its view prevailed. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Okay, so can I modify it so that it doesn't conform to the Java specification? Can I modify it bit-by-bit until it's bytewise identical to Harmony? Of course I can't. Because if I do, Oracle will sue me.

Oracle is lying. They claim to be offering free software, but will sue you once you take advantage of that freedom. It's a fucking trap.

Do you really expect the technology community to embrace Oracle technology after Oracle spits in their food and shits in their sink?

Of course, if you don't conform, Oracle will sue you into oblivion. Java is free software as long as you use it in exactly the way Oracle wants, right? It's for this reason that Java is poison to any of my projects. I'll choose Node-fucking-JS over Java, because nobody is going to sue me for using JavaScript the way I want.

Thanks for ruining my holiday season. What's the precedent situation if they do settle it? Is Oracle's latest victory binding even if the final resolution of the case isn't decided by the court?

What prevents gene drive techniques from working on humans? The implications are disturbing, considering that humans have numerous ancestry-specific markers.

Because programmers graduating today literally can't imagine a world full of non-HTTP protocols.

The last thing we need is a tax on children in societies with sub-replacement fertility. A world without growth is a terrible place. (Before you object: yes, economic growth isn't the same as population growth. But to get economic growth with a declining population, you need productivity to grow faster than the population declines, and we're already having trouble keeping productivity growth up.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/business/economy/imagining...

There's a certain strain of environmentalist that sees deindustrialization, technological regression, and human population decline as the solution to the world's problem. This perspective misses the mark, I think.

Smallpox is the best example. Today, it exists only in closely-guarded labs. In prehistory, we also wiped out all the megafauna outside Africa --- partly because they were delicious, I'm sure, but also partly because they found us delicious.

Sure. We don't need extreme specificity though: I'd be content with wiping out the whole family if that's what it takes to hit the ones that prey on humans.

We need to make mosquitoes extinct, just like we made smallpox extinct.

> Hierarchical systems do NOT scale well.

Ahem. Ever hear of DNS?

> The task was designed to produce Nash equilibria that would fit story they wanted to tell.

Unfortunately, this kind of malarkey is common in the social sciences today. In fact, more than half of the results are non-reproducible[1][2]. Whether published in Nature or a lesser journal, the current research climate forces me to treat social science results as noise, especially when the results happen to fit one of the major ideologies currently vying for political domination.

Sure, this heuristic is unfair to well-designed, dispassionate studies, but since I'm not qualified to evaluate the merits of each study, I have to make conservative assumptions.

[1] http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/09/18/whats-to-be-done-abou...

[2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/scientists-repl...

There is no such thing as "hate speech". What you call "hate speech" is merely speech that you find disagreeable. Free speech is valuable not when it protects those who already agree with you. "Hate speech" is very vaguely defined, and you can use the label to smear people raising perfectly legitimate facts like "group differences are recent, profound, and heritable".

Thanks. That scene convinced me to give the show a chance.

How about kill(2)? Why does the POSIX committee endorse murder?

I don't accept that we can't use words that accurately describe a concept merely because some people find that concept unpleasant.

Concepts don't stop existing merely because you ban the words used to refer to them. Masters and slaves have always existed in human history and will probably always exist. When we use the terms in software, we draw a metaphor from this experience. There's nothing wrong with that.

> What is the reason?

Maybe men and women are different

What specific agreements require the US to place faith before science?

It's one of the best places on earth for astronomy. It's a very high mountain near the equator with suitable weather and clear skies.

Please define "unsafe" --- because I feel plenty unsafe as work due to my race and gender, and I feel that going to HR would only exacerbate this risk. If I may be so bold, I don't think, however, you would consider the danger I feel, the eggshells I have to walk on, real problems. I feel like only members of certain groups get to use the "unsafe" card, and as a proponent of equal treatment and fair rules, this feeling bothers me.

Correlations with race are _facts_. Impartially collected data collated with robust statistical methods results in race falling out of the mix as an important correlate with all sorts of things; we then publish these correlations. Which part should we abandon? Impartial data collection? Robust statistics? Publication of the results? Are you suggesting that certain facts are too dangerous to know?

One of the organizations the Koch brothers fund is FIRE, which is dedicated to free speech on college campuses. It's really hard to find fault in that. I really hate the Manichean judgment common in modern public discourse. Everyone is either a saint or a devil, depending on which side you're on.

Yep. Firefox is still a great browser. I'm looking toward the Servo-based version.

This idea that certain political positions are about "rights", so we can't talk about them, vote against them, or donate to organizations opposing them, is sickening.

Imagine your being ousted from your job for donating to the EFF, because the EFF supports encryption and is used by terrorists? Your donation to the EFF is literally killing babies.

Can't you see you're abusing the language of equal rights to demonize your political opponents? Donating to a mainstream cause is a perfectly normal thing to do. I hope that society never moves against any of your current positions and retrospectively calls you a monster.

No organization can simultaneously satisfy SJW strictures and be good at its original mission. What's happened to Mozilla is very sad, because its nominal mission is one I believe in too.

Google wasn't fighting fair. To allow the Chrome team to run free advertisements on the world's most popular website and to allow them to install their browser by default on the world's most popular mobile operating system, well, it's jus dirty. You could advertise IE6 that way and get significant adoption.

Mozilla died the day Eich left. That's the day it became clear that the organized cared more about posturing than results.

Are you trolling? A startup for traffic lights? Versus actual civil engineers who aren't idiots and who have probably fully explored the solution space of traffic handling arrangements?

Traffic is a political problem, not an engineering problem.