The apparent view that Mozilla would articulate their product line as a Fortune 500 company with Google's track record is patently false. Mozilla is required via its pledge to put open source solutions forward as their central focus. They only earn money in the interest of the public which supports the good, which further supports their central mandate.
Google is a greedy, nosy monster of a company that erratically reacts either with self-interest or blatant marketing attempts at taking a higher road. And at times, Google acts solely upon the whim of minimal oversight. Sure some of the unilateral decisions are in line with a hipster's view of the world, but often they are in line with a corporation's lust.
To what extent will Google "do no evil"? Enough only until they decided to strike that from their mandate.
Flooding neutral websites with comments and discussion about how something is wrong or unfair seems to work well with corporations because it hits their bottom line and often hits it really hard.
However with government there doesn't seem to be any effect anymore in the USA at least. In fact negative press, if it's negative enough, can have the opposite effect and rally supporters of the very candidate or party that is being protested... that's how good the political spin machine is.
And that's because the money is there.
DDoS though seems to follow the picketing format at least; close the front doors of the establishment being picketed and disrupt their effectiveness enough so they have no choice but to listen. So from a philosophical position, the DDoS fits the constrains of a modern protest.
However, it may be something in the future that web browsers could tackle. A web browser where the general public could chat about each website that users are visiting... could enable picketing and protest to happen without everyone wondering if the internet is down or if they have some technical problems on their system.
You see with an IRL protest, you see the pickets. You see the protesters... so you know what's up.
Spectrum programmer here. High Functioning Autism is what my doctor calls it. The biggest difficulty for spectrum kids and adults is to make sense of the abstract perception we face. We simply perceive the world directly.
That's the biggest difference. That's why we don't get the jokes unless we spend time developing a response matrix for humour. That's the ticket.
Our biggest advantage is we get to hack our own minds. We can become brilliant or we can cause severe damage to our perception if we make mistakes. The most successful autistic spectrum persons all have luck and bright ideas that are executed perfectly. That's tough.
We don't get euphemisms either. While I recommend seeing the Temple Grandin film, and I see the similarities to how I view things and to how Temple's perception is portrayed in the film, every spectrum person is going to be a little different in their journey.
The best thing any parent can do for a spectrum child is to help them to understand how to perceive better.
For me, we had a tire swing on a swivel in our backyard park. Spinning in the tire helped me to develop a center of awareness... an assemblage of my perception. Prior to the tire, everything was blurry and AT ONCE. I could view and process my surroundings but not like other kids. I had no reference. It was all there bombarding my senses.
Most low functioning spectrum kids have not found enough of a gravitational or electrical/pain stimulus to ground them and get a full snapshot of their perceptional center. This means they live life completely blurry to things. They will often star off in the distance or at one specific part of an object, trying to understand what they are seeing.
Once we get a center, we can then create mneumonic references from that center and trace it back. It's about developing brain pathways to faster interpretive cognition.
The most successful spectrum people all have this in common -- lightning fast cognitive response. Sure they can be wrong just like anyone else, but their responses account for nearly all the variables... and that's why they tend to be on the very outlying boundaries of genius.
One problem that faces spectrum persons is the robust and painful experience of interacting with neurotypical persons who have the advantage of seeing the world the way they want to. They don't see it for what it is. They see it for how they think it is. That's most of you.
You can understand euphemisms because you see the clever connections in your imagination. You've heard them before. You can fake it if you haven't without any kind of painful emotional distress.
You don't see the world like a blur. It's clear. You get it. You can skip over things you don't care about. We can't really skip over things like you can, and especially if we perceive any connection between those things and our pursuit of answers. We lock on. We can't help it.
I won't give any employers advice for dealing with spectrum persons. Make sure your safety programs have a standard for dealing with all your different employees and do not put spectrum information in the disabilities section -- it's not a disability... it's kind of the opposite. The best place for spectrum procedures is in a section about Violence and Harassment because the most hazards exist there for spectrum persons in the workplace. Communication standards should also have a section about communicating with persons who are on the autistic spectrum.
False sense of security built right into Facebook's marketing approach. Perfectly great idea for getting some of the juiciest dirt on everyone dumb enough to believe them.
Guidance counselors need to stop asking kids what they want to do when they grow up and start telling them what is likely to become available by the time they are able to work (post education), matrix'd with the student's potential. Too many idiots trying to be programmers that are no better than VBA and Dreamweaver script kids.
If you want to be a programmer, your only option is to get your skillset into group #2, rather than build the skillset you want to build.
The best programmers are good at the things people strongly dislike.
Facebook is not displaying the article to those of us without Facebook accounts.
On another note, HN should not be upvoting Facebook links.
Facebook's whole premise as a website is to farm data from unpaid morons, but it runs even deeper than that.
If we accept FB links, we accept Facebook psychology experimenting with the moods of their users and attempting to change our decision making processes through Pavlovian methods.
We accept that they may have inadvertently or deliberately caused Brexit through Facebook timeline confirmation bias.
If we accept facebook links we accept Facebook recording our attention if we were to purchase Occulus.
We accept them recording our whole IM history through the facebook app. We accept them watching us. Like hunters watching prey.
Drooling. Disgusted at times by us. Loathing us at times.
I get what you're saying however let's not be hasty in criticizing our beloved HN friends.
Experiments are scientific. UI is an art form, and while there is some science present behind UI design, most of that science is founded on observational data, and at times we get someone who has an idea (runs with it) and they just make something and CALL it experimental.
How are they experimenting? Where is the data? What data?
None. No data. No report. No research findings.
So in this context, the word experimental is an excuse for bugs being present, much like how every website server-based tool and how every software release are labeled as alpha or beta indefinitely. They want to lower liability, when it's not really necessary.
This project is NOT experimental. It's an idea that someone came up with and the idea is not new. It's old. It's the idea that minimalism is possible and good. That features are somehow bad or cluttered.
Someone might as well download the latest Linux Mint, remove everything of marginal value, and create a new shell to it you have to guess about how to use... and market the skin as a whole new OS.
Facebook does enable bias in their filtering methods. Note that the average person equates strength of political position by the majority. Therefore when browsing Facebook to gather their position from friends and family, if Facebook buries politicized comments that a particular user would not normally agree with, then the user only sees posts supporting their position.
Considering that Facebook was caught deliberately experimenting on users to change their moods and personality over time, they could therefore use that knowledge and research to engineer massive political shifts and perhaps it could be explored to what extent Facebook was responsible for the whole Brexit mess. Maybe they caused it and hedged heavily on that result?
That's exactly the kind of thing I would expect from Zuck.
Well it's obvious that someone working at Ebay is collecting these passwords. Either they intend to steal a lot of money, or they intend to create user profiles based on data that would otherwise be encrypted to them, or they could also be trying to break the account encryption on the whole network this way. Collect enough valid passwords and use them to get enough to make a fingerprint that could enable them to read passwords without having access to higher security clearance.
Companies like VW if it was dismantled would lose their patents and licenses. So you couldn't just reopen a company like that as the state would take possession of that IP. They would have to completely reinvent the product line, making it pretty difficult to do what you're suggesting.
As for the employees, well that's not going to matter quite as much as these kinds of companies are laying off those jobs anyway as AI will continue to improve to the point where manufacturing will be all automated.
I wish you were wrong. Silos are everywhere -- ugly and unavoidable bottlenecks. Nobody has a plan to fix that culture though because it works only just good enough.
WoW sucks now. It was great back in TBC but now? It's nothing more than a tech-improved facebook game. Garbage.
If you want something awesome check out Path of Exile. Free to play, too. It's like what Diablo 3 should have been but couldn't because Bliz don't know how to gameplay design anymore.
>Like a waiter advising, "Choose the chicken parm. It doesn't have any bones, all the salmonella has been cooked out, and it doesn't have any bad flavor."
I'd blame the author for this. He's obviously not a salesperson. To me it seems more like he's a coder who found a new-ish language and he's happy that it solves some of his problems that he's encountered.
>If I'm going to be successfully pitched a programming language, I will need to see its power of expression or be shown how it solves some problems that other languages don't address well. Some "special sauce."
For me this was pretty open/shut. Kotlin usage appears to rely upon a lot of side projects. I rarely find that beneficial. Too many cooks.