tskaiser

A vital difference is that companies do not have a sapient capacity for emotion and empathy.

But that is not moral, is it? The company is still not beholden to a willful idea of morality, but rather sociopathically concerned with appearance. For companies where this matters little this concern for appearance is quickly shed.

I agree that a corporation can make what would be perceived as moral actions, exactly due to the human staff running it, but that does not erase that morals does not factor into the objective function that a corporation is meant to optimize. This is exacerbated as the morals of its actions become difficult to analyze for the individual and the moral actions of employees becomes less individually significant. The concerted effort, on which the fitness of the corporation is ultimately measured, will still amount to the optimization of the bottom line.

This is especially true when the corporation outgrows the control of its original founders who may have had a moral vision.

In the end the analogy I am making is that a corporation has reins, and as it grows it becomes increasingly unwieldy for the handlers (= staff) to direct it where it does not want to go (away from profit).

It is of course easy to have a corporation act moral when this objective overlaps with optimization of its objective function. I don't consider such a happy occurrence to qualify as truly moral, however.

Corporations, at least the for-profit ones, are principally amoral legal constructs, which I find all the more terrifying than the notion that they could be evil.

Insomuch as they can be anthropomorphized they don't even truly care about whatever their 'customers' are or their well-being, so long as the bottom line is optimized across time.

The rank and file humans that make up the functions of a corporation might be moral and may influence the corporation to make 'irrational' choices due to human morality, but that is not the rule.

Okay.

It is an interest idea and a great starter for philosophical thinking, but no-one is treating it like literal gospel.

We could do so at any time if the community decided it was for the better. Linux being open source means anyone can fork it if needed be.

China is setting the stage for an actual dictator.

I imagine you could still update with some wench-work. An EOL date of 6.5 sounds to me like a way to say that "beyond this point we will stop testing and ensuring compliance, and to avoid fucking over your relic (in PC terms), with an update that is untested on your specific hardware, we simply disable the automatic updates. Good luck."

"Most of the time"? Citation needed.

While I generally agree with the sentiment of "do more by coding less", and minimalist user interfaces, there are plenty of cases where you throw a whole lot of functionality out the window by outright banning JS.

While I accept that my description of JS et. al. might be contentious, I don't see that you have argued against my piece on the WWW in general.

Regarding latency and responsiveness I agree that they are issues that depend largely on your use cases and your skill at implementing solutions. In this regard I can agree that some pages simply don't need JS. It is also being misused for ads and tracking to a degree that is problematic and can in itself cause issues.

Yet each of those steps solved a different problem.

Early computers did not have the local processing power needed to run heavy jobs.

Early PCs did not have the storage.

WWW solved an entirely different problem, namely distribution and communication.

JS et. al. solved the problem of responsiveness and interaction ie. latency.

I don't really see those as exhibiting cyclical traits, at best I see it as a correlation ie. side effects of the true problems being solved.

Wanting not to be discriminated against / handled separately != wanting special treatment. It is quite the opposite, in fact. The only people who consider that an entitled position are those who think there is nothing wrong with relegating people to second-class citizen status, even if they refuse to consider it as such.

Heck, it is quite entitled for people to think that they inherently deserve privileges that others are denied simply because "that is how it has always been". Bullheaded traditionalism is the actual cancer.

Store credential information where it is used. It is not used by the repository, so it is an improper location for it.

If someone gains access to a system that uses the credentials, then there is, in principle, no difference between puppeteering that system versus stealing its credentials.

Thank you for the insight. It is one thing what holds in theory, and quite another what happens in reality, as you point out.