Uhhhhh I guess hacknernews doesn't let you delete comments or even edit them (wtf??) But it looks like I read the previous comment wrong and responded to something that wasn't actually said.
You can edit a comment within during a certain period after initial creation (20 minutes, I believe). You can delete a comment during that time as well as long as no one has responded. You may have missed the edit window here, but you did the next best thing, make a comment with a correction or addendum.
Bitfinex stopped trading with US Dollars after their bank accounts were closed / blocked / whatever. To workaround that, they invented a custom cryptocurrency called Tether, which they claim is pegged to the US Dollar by keeping 1 USD in their bank account for each Thether that is issues.
The really suspicious thing is that over the last couple of months almost 1 Billion Tethers have been issued, which is highly suspicious because we wouldn't expect sane people to send such a gigantic amount of money to a shady Bitcoin exchange in the other end of the world, in exchange for a crypto token of dubious value. The most likely thing is that Bitfinex is using these unbacked Tethers that they are printing to purchase bitcoin in their exchange and push up the price.
It feels similar to the last bubble, which started out in MtGOX. MtGOX was insolvent (due to having a good chunck of their deposits lost to hackers and fraud). Eventually, they stopped letting people withdraw their US dollars so the only option people had was to purchase bitcoin and withdraw that instead. This extra demand pushed up the price which attracted outside speculation (the bitcoin price was higher than average in MtGOX but also quickly rose elsewhere) and kept MtGOX afloat for a bit longer than it should (because new investors kept throwing money on the dying exchange to get into the action).
That's an argument that can be just as easily applied to FOSS software, yet I see no one in the FOSS community warning against the slippery slope of evil that is free software.
No it can't. FOSS can't be misused to take away a user's access to the software and data produced by said software. Other types of misuse isn't relevant because FOSS can't do anything about them.
>No it can't. FOSS can't be misused to take away a user's access to the software and data produced by said software. Other types of misuse isn't relevant because FOSS can't do anything about them.
You're moving the goalposts now. You claimed that if proprietary software can be misused, it will be, and therefore therefore Stallman is right about all proprietary software being malicious - yet it's precisely those types of misuse you now want to deem irrelevant which underpin the entire moral argument behind the free software ethos.
The argument has never been that proprietary software is immoral merely because the code isn't free, but that the code not being free is what allows those other abuses to occur.
> You're moving the goalposts now. You claimed that if proprietary software can be misused, it will be, and therefore therefore Stallman is right about all proprietary software being malicious - yet it's precisely those types of misuse you now want to deem irrelevant which underpin the entire moral argument behind the free software ethos.
No, you just didn't understand the goalposts in the proper context. "Harm" and "misuse" in FOSS have never been about any type of harm in which software may take part, simply the types of harm that can be achieved by software and licensing.
In FOSS, harm means restricting a user's freedom and ability to control their information, privacy and the devices they own.
Stallman's issue is that he comes across as a fundamentalist extremist, and most of his suggestions require making huge sacrifices to one's quality of life.
Take Stallman's own website[1]. It is mostly text. While this makes it fast, it doesn't make it readable at all. And finding specific stuff is nearly impossible. Yeah, there is a search feature, but is extremely rudimentary and very user-hostile.
If it were up to Stallman, the entire Internet would look and work like this. This was OK in 1990. It no longer is. Sorry.
HN has a coherent layout, nice spacing, a sensical grouping of content and functionality per component and view or page. stallman.org is a pile of unstyled textual content which was clearly assembled without actually being designed. Regardless of the validity of his site as an example of what he thinks everybody else on the internet needs to do, the two examples are not not in the same ballpark for readability. Between the two, the ratio of structural elements to textual elements isn't even close.
I think Stallman's website says more about Stallman's design sensibilities than it does about the ability of plain text to be readable or for search to be effective.
Wut? That's his website and he makes it however he likes. I haven't ever heard him telling people to make websites with default HTML layouts or not use interactivity or better search tools etc. WRT websites his opinions regard the tracking they force upon the users and the closed-source-ness of them. Maybe you should read things before you link them, eh?
I think the website is a bad example, but the above characterization of Stallman being a fanatic who is blind to other's needs is not incorrect. There have been multiple cases with him recommending people forgo having working software and hardware if it isn't 100% free. That might be the ideologically pure stance, but it's also massively impractical. As a true believer he just does not understand that the vast majority of the users just want to do work with their equipment, and that choosing to forgo working drivers for some abstract right to modify that 99.9999% of users will never exercise is just utter nonsense.
Also, Stallman is a grade A asshole. I've met him, and he is a deeply unpleasant man to be around.
WRT your first point, well, he's an eat-your-own-dogfood philosopher, and he sets an example to what is possible with his own behaviour. And he just does not make trade-offs in his views. What we should collect from them is what's useful to us. It would be kind of hypocritical if he was telling non-free software is evil, but recommended some such software.
WRT your second point, that is subjective and ad hominem. I live in Emacs and without GNU I was stuck with Windows. Without GNU none of the good things we have today would've existed, Linux wouldn't have existed, we were all programming in ASP.NET or C# or what not. So even if he is an asshole, he's a very, very, very important one.
Stallman puts himself forward as an authority on the best way to use the internet, even though doesn't actually use the internet in any recognizable way.[1] He comes off like an internal combustion engine designer who has never been in a car, declaring himself a traffic flow expert.
[1] "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation)." (https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)
Outside of a few extremely devout Buddhists, very, very few people I've spoken with adhere to a consistent set of first principles when it comes to making moral decisions across abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and vegetarianism.
The question of what gives a life its value is a difficult one and is nearly impossible to discuss on a forum like this.
Had a convo in my CS class about it today. Literally a room full of 19-20 something males, many who are avid gamers, or want to make tech it into a job... I was the only one who had anything to say about nn. People really don't know.
I'm in the same boat as you, what I'm currently planning on doing is getting the 'cs undergrad' experience by taking a bunch of the lower division classes at my local community college, then doing the upper ones through the university's program of extended studies (the one I'm trying for) then just going straight for the masters. There are some risks, ergo, if I don't reach the master's then I won't have much to show for it other than the classes I took (don't see that happening but still possible), and its going to take awhile; at least 5 more semesters, just to finish math prereqs (up to linear algebra). I don't think the latter is very avoidable, no matter where I go however, and the former is a factor of the later.
I replied generally above, but this is pretty much what I'm doing too. In addition, I think you can usually use extended university coursework to meet prerequisites in a degree program at a different school, if not count some of the credit toward the degree. So that helps mitigate the risk somewhat. Of course it won't line up as nicely as if you just do everything through the same school, but it doesn't have to be entirely for naught either.
It's a mistake to make any sort of broad claims about human nature because we are products of our material conditions. Hierarchies may have been a part of our past, present and even near future, but I don't think they are an intrinsic aspect of what it means to be human, because if anything hierarchies increasingly give way to egalitarianism the more advanced we become.
And chances are you were still being racist/sexist but you didn't even realize it because you've got the wall shadows that deeply ingrained in you.