Haha, yeah, I just read through that entire list. I'd say that more than half of those seemed very reasonable and civilized to me. But the people complaining about penis.js seemed to have completely missed the point of that whole project.
I then started browsing through my own code to see if anything seemed offensive. One thing that caught my eye: in SPI communications, there is very clearly a "master" and a "slave". I have programmed many SPI-related code... So now I wonder, what was the original complaint in calling Redis servers "master" and "slave"? That terminology is very, very common in computers.
When I was in college, I was a systems administrator for a lab as a part-time student job. After I graduated, they wanted to hire me full-time. But it was a state university, so they had to open up the job to everyone, and they had to have a specific window for applications. So... my boss wrote the job description exactly around my resume. Lo-and-behold, I got the job.
The Yale rare books library[0] is a beautiful, amazing building to walk around in. Most of the books are off-limits for fear of damaging them, I think. (This is what originally sprang to my mind when I read the title of this article.)
I'm an American living in Japan (about 12 years now). Most of the stuff he's talking about is totally true. But, like some other commenters have been saying, I feel like: you figure that stuff out after a couple years and make peace with it (or not). There are many good and bad things about Japan. And it's different if you're a foreigner in Japan, yes. And it depends on where you're from and what color your skin is, etc.
My only question is why did it take him 10 years to "get fed up" with it? Most people who leave do so after a year or so. Most people who stay longer than a couple years tend to stay for a very long time.
I think some of the points are really exaggerated. Take this:
> That’s not to say that some nasty malice isn’t present because it most definitely is. I lost count of the times when, say, for example, politely pointing out to someone that there was a queue and they shouldn’t push in that the immediate response was a very angry “BAKA GAIJIN” (stupid foreigner).
Really, that happened often enough that he "lost count"? In 7 years, I haven't seen anything close to this.
Hmm, yeah, that's never happened to me, either. I've never been assaulted, either. I have been harassed by other foreigners though, but that's almost always in the "seedy" areas, like Roppongi or Kabukicho.
I rarely, if ever get harassed by the police. But I know some Asian-American friends who get harassed... eg: the cop thinks he's Vietnamese, so starts giving him trouble. When the cop finds out he's from the U.S., all of a sudden the cop starts acting totally nice. I'd call that racism.
In college I had an econ friend who said that there's basically only three ways to grow an economy: more workers, better technology or more capital.
If you look at technology, then I think "yes!" it has improved the economy. Look at engines and trains and telecommunications. The first world economy today, per person, is rip-roarin' compared to 100 years ago.
Many western economies haven't noticed the decline in the birth rate yet because of so many immigrants. Japan is unique in that they are a modern country, with a declining birth rate, but very low immigration.
Populations don't decline uniformly and people don't naturally optimize for infrastructure use and the best use of existent resources.
You don't have to even wait for population decline, we already have more unoccupied homes in the US than homeless by an order of magnitude, but all those homes are in "dead" areas where industry or resource extraction came and went. Now those houses and all the infrastructure around them decay without use, while elsewhere infrastructure is overburdened with concentrated people.
If anything, declining population means more per-capita expense on infrastructure, and the per-capita costs of maintaining current infrastructure (at least in the US) is out of control.[1]
I'm under the impression that this "backdoor" is the fact that these phones can download updates to the OS. The phone checks that the update is signed by Apple. If Apple can be trusted to keep their code-signing keys secret, then surely they can be trusted to keep a special version of the OS secret.
I'm still opposed to this, though... The FBI wants to be able to dictate to a private company what features to build (because of the All Writs Act).
There's an article in the New York Times which says that Apple has already been doing this [1], but they seem to have had a change of heart in the past few years.
Each data-extraction request was carefully vetted by Apple’s
lawyers. Of those deemed legitimate, Apple in recent years
required that law enforcement officials physically travel with
the gadget to the company’s headquarters, where a trusted Apple
engineer would work on the phones inside Faraday bags, which
block wireless signals, during the process of data extraction.
I then started browsing through my own code to see if anything seemed offensive. One thing that caught my eye: in SPI communications, there is very clearly a "master" and a "slave". I have programmed many SPI-related code... So now I wonder, what was the original complaint in calling Redis servers "master" and "slave"? That terminology is very, very common in computers.
EDIT: I guess this is the original complaint?: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185
EDIT #2: I guess I'm late to this conversation: http://antirez.com/news/122