anon3_

Hacker culture may not necessarily be aligned with Eich's personal views / situations. But crucial underlying concept is ignoring nebulous things like that. So taking action / reforms based off the premise feels like a Chesteron's fence [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

Comment · 11 years ago

Yeah but significant still. 27.7% of their pie disappeared.

Recent versions of Firefox have introduced third party plugins (like pocket).

After the Eich thing, they lost the "hacker" cred and their talent was pretty easy much poached. Further, the concept of merit - overlooking the political in lieu of skill / talent - is no longer a core value of the organization. [1]

Recruiters were all over linkedin and taking away the best talent left and right.

[1] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6688

Comment · 11 years ago

It Mozilla on an upswing or a decline since the Brendan Eich / Firefox OS stuff happened?

They're kind of shifting more from technology into politics. I heard they were cutting employees and divisions a lot.

I know former employees have to sign a waiver not to talk about their layoff, but why hasn't Mozilla's layoffs gotten any press, but startups do?

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Mozilla-Reviews-E19129.htm gives a clue.

Comment · 11 years ago

This sounds nice.

So this bandcamp site, is it like an indie itunes? I notice you can sample the whole song without paying. I use soundcloud is good for free music.

I'm kind of thinking it'd be nice to have a monthly what are you listening to while working thread.

Comment · 11 years ago

Can you give some examples of the "ambient spacey" music? Video game music too?

In other comments: If you listen to music can you list some on youtube we can grab?

By the way, if you're music mac, bsd or linux, you can use Youtube-dl to download youtube / video site music:

  pip install youtube-dl
  youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 <url>

Comment · 11 years ago

Related (police pretexting):

http://cryptome.org/police-pretext1.pdf

http://cryptome.org/police-pretext2.pdf

Comment · 11 years ago

Hi, interesting post.

First I wanted to say USA may be different from others in the fact that silence can't be hold against you. If police detain you, the advice I hear from lawyers is to zip it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGgKLgVNfAo is a great presentation featuring a former detective and a defense attorney)

In other countries, like UK - not giving an alibi in situ can be used against you.

In USA - I trust the integrity of the legal system, but the police are trained to use deception - ranging from gigantic pretexts, like posing as your telephone repair man, to simple bluffs and lies. (Funny spoof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfF8OSlGhKk)

This creates a chilling effect of distrust which discourages informants. No one worth his salt can take a cop at his or her word. And I think the cumulative result that has on communities is drowned in relation to what we see with cop violence in the public eye.

Not having a line between community and police means cases can go unsolved and serious crime can go unpunished.