It's a fun story of course, but it also seems that people like OP who abuse public APIs are why we can't have nice things, and why so many web pages these days are bogged down by Cloudflare and Anubis interstitials that waste human time.
> Yeah no, (1) Mozilla was going to be in for a tough go no matter what; I don't think Eich would have fared any better.
Nobody knows this for sure. We do know that Eich was fired for political reasons, and not because of his technological direction.
This betrays a decision making process that prioritizes political correctness above leadership qualities and technical contributions.
> you can't donate to stop your own employees and users from having civil rights without repercussions.
Why not? Why can't the CEO of Mozilla have his own private political views just like anyone else, and donate his own private money to whatever democratic causes he likes?
This really isn't obvious to anyone except the people, like you, who view Mozilla as a political project first, and as a software project a distant second.
Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party only makes sense if you assume the purpose of Mozilla is to push American Democratic politics, rather than make good software that anyone in the world may use (spoiler alert: many users of open-source software are not American Democrats!)
We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support. What happened to Eich was the CEO-equivalent of getting fired.
> Donations are public material support. Not private views.
Not really? Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever? Or are you simply saying that you Mozillians aren't allowed to donate money to conservative causes? Because it sounds a lot like the second one, and then we're back to the original allegation: that Mozilla today is a political project first, and a technological project second. Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
> We both know that CEOs are never fired, but there is a difference between resigning on their own accord and “resigning” because they had no organizational support.
CEOs are never fired is false objectively. CEOs must earn support. And there was no reason to state false information if you believed everyone would understand the context of the facts.
> Not really?
Really. Public records are public.
> Nobody would know what causes Eich donates to if they didn't make an effort to look it up and broadcast that information.
No one would know most news stories if someone didn't research and publish them. No one would know what Mozilla's CEO was paid if no one looked it up and published it.
> Even if you take that view, are you saying that nobody who works for Mozilla is allowed to make any political donations ever?
People are allowed to make donations. People are allowed to choose who they follow or support or not.
And jobs have different standards. Eich remained CTO years after his donation was published with little controversy.
> Otherwise, how do you explain Mozilla caring so much about which political campaigns its employees donate to?
Who are Mozilla to you? The board appointed Eich CEO years after his donation was published
>It's your own fault you lost this argument because you decided to attempt such a pathetically transparent lie, and you can't back-pedal enough to make up for that. Face it, you're just a dishonest bigot on the wrong side of history, still salty that gay marriage is finally legal, impotent to do anything about it besides being a lying keyboard warrior troll.
>I hope for your own family's sake that your own straight marriage isn't so fragile that it was undermined by gay marriage being legal, as Brendan's and other homophobic bigot's tired arguments claim is the insidious threat of gay marriage.
>Maybe you made bad life choices and want to punish people who didn't, but that's on you, so don't take it out on gay people, even if you're one of the jealous hateful closeted self loathing ones yourself.
This is a particularly egregious post that I think warrants more intervention than just a flag @dang. This user has been doing this quite a lot, over a period of many months, if you search his posts for the word "Eich" or "bigot".
> Firing your CEO for not being sufficiently aligned with the American Democratic Party
This is not what happened. He gave money to a cause with the explicit goal of using that money to prevent his coworkers and users from having equal civil rights based on an inalienable trait they were born with.
That's not an "American Democratic Party" alignment issue, and if you genuinely believe it is, your dog whistle may be broken. It's sounding an awful lot like a normal whistle.
He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
> A same-sex marriage lawfully performed in another state or foreign jurisdiction on or after November 5, 2008 was fully recognized in California, but Proposition 8 precluded California from designating these relationships with the word "marriage." These couples were afforded every single one of the legal rights, benefits, and obligations of marriage.
Note the last sentence!
Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters, and Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
> He has a right to do that without fear of government retaliation. But Mozilla has a right to fire him for being a bad person because of it.
I never argued that Mozilla doesn't have the right to fire people for their political views. We're just establishing that Eich _was_ fired for his political views, and that that shows Mozilla had become a political organization first, and a technological company second.
In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters. The fact that that is not true of Mozilla proves it's not a politically neutral company; it's a political project that inherited a software project they are not particularly interested in maintaining except as a vehicle for further promoting their politics.
> That's just factually wrong. Proposition 8 deprived nobody of any rights. Gay couples could get exactly the same rights as straight couples through a domestic partnership, or get married out of state, as even Wikipedia admits:
The US rejected separate but equal since decades.
California domestic partnerships provided most of the same rights as marriage. Not all. The California legislature had to pass bills after to address this.[1]
The bill which afforded same sex couples married out of state the same rights as heterosexual couples married in state passed over 11 months after Proposition 8 took effect. The citation of the last sentence revealed this. You did not read it?
Heterosexual couples were not required to marry out of state.
> Additionally, proposition 8 was not extreme. It was carried by a majority of California voters
Most jobs have requirements which most California voters would not meet.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman” which is essentially what the proposition established too, though Obama opposed using a ballot proposition to settle the issue.
Obama opposed stripping rights by vote is a significant difference.
And Obama changed his public position by 2014. Eich was unable to say he would not repeat his harmful action.
And many people suspected Obama's opposition to same sex marriage was a lie in 2008 even. 1 of his advisers claimed this later.
> Eich _was_ fired for his political views
Eich said he resigned because he could not be an effective leader under the circumstances.[2] Did he lie?
Let's say everything you said is right: Just because a heterosexual, Christian majority say they don't support "blacks" in their bathrooms and claim the black community should be happy with their "equal" bathrooms, does NOT mean that it is morally acceptable to financially support legal requirements for segregated bathrooms.
> Barack Obama said at the time: “I personally believe that marriage is between a man and a woman”
And yet he didn't force the country to only recognize marriages between men and women. Instead, he did the opposite. He voted against DOMA in 1996. He repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell in 2010.
He appointed judges who looked favorably on gay marriage and then told the justice department not to defend DOMA against constitutional attacks. Then he celebrated the Supreme Court's ruling against DOMA.
> In a politically neutral technology company there should be room for people who side with Barack Obama and the majority of Californian voters.
Barack Obama and California voters (64% of likely voters in 2013 according to PPIC) were on the other side in 2014 when Eich was appointed CEO. Eich remained (and remains to this day) on the wrong side.
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
The problem with that formulation is that it denies the importance of the quantative aspect of the difference of opinion.
Of course there are views so extreme almost nobody would put up with them. But at the same time, being tolerant of differences of opinion is an important aspect of a free society and a functioning democracy. There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
But differences of opinion aren't binary; they lie on a spectrum. Similarly, bigotry lies on a spectrum. The person who doesn't brook the smallest disagreement is a greater bigot that only considers the most odious points of view beyond the pale.
For an extreme example, consider these cases: 1) A CEO is fired for arguing that the US government should round up all Jews and put them in extermination camps Nazi Germany style. 2) A CEO is fired for arguing that the local sales tax should be raised by 0.25 percentage points.
Are these cases exactly the same? You could argue in both cases the CEO gets fired for expressing sufficiently unorthodox political views, but that doesn't cut at the heart of the matter. Clearly it's necessary to quantify how extreme those views are. The extent to which the board that fires their CEO is bigoted depends on how unreasonable the CEO's views are; they are inversely proportional.
So now back to Eich. What was his sin? He donated $1000 to support Proposition 8, which restricted the legal definition of marriage to couples consisting of a man and a woman. This view was shared at the time by Barack Obama and a majority of California voters. It didn't strip gay couples of any formal rights: all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
Clearly this is a relatively unimportant issue; closer to a tax dispute than a genocide. You can disagree with Eich and the Californian public on this one, but being unable to tolerate their point of view doesn't make them monsters; it makes you a bigot.
The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
> There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
No, that's not what that word means.
> all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
That too is not true.
> The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
I feel like we've awakened from a dream. I look around, and I see that the hyper-transphobe's book series has become a best-selling videogame. I wish I were asleep like you...
I think treating every human with equal dignity goes beyond politics. While the specific context here was political, but that is only the context, not the principle.
> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
This would allow the public to retain 50% of the land, while making sure people are able to pass private lots without trespassing, as well as allowing individual lot owners to access their land without trespassing.
But you see, when these rule were being framed bad actors PLANNED on exploiting the checkerboard to expand their effective control. (Or at least it seems so obvious of an issue that I have to imagine _someone_ was scheming along these lines).
The initial idea was to first sell 50% of the land and then sell the other 50%. [1] Thanks to corner crossing, the checkerboard pattern made sure that owners of the first batch wouldn't be cut off from their access by buyers of the second batch.
[1] From TFA: "This checkerboard pattern allowed the government to keep all the undeveloped sections in between and wait for them to go up in value before turning around and selling them to developers".
I think that's more than likely just a fig leaf proposed for and by the people that planned to try to only have to by ~50% of the land they actually wanted to enclose. So much of this land is too far away from anything for much meaningful development.
So are dictionary keys, but Python decided to make them insertion ordered (after having them be unordered just like set elements for decades). There is no fundamental reason sets couldn't have a defined order. That's what languages like JavaScript have done too.
Python's decision to make dict keys ordered in the spec was a mistake. It may be the best implementation so far, but it eliminates potential improvements in the future.
Agreed. The only reason to make them sorted is because people would wrongly assume that they where. You can argue that a programming language should not have unexpected behaviors, and apparently unsorted dictionary keys where a surprise to many, on the other hand I feel like it's a failure of education.
The problem was that assuming that keys would be sorted was frequently true, but not guaranteed. An alternative solution would have been to randomize them more, but that would probably break a lot of old code. Sorting the keys makes no difference if you don't expect them to be, but it will now be a greater surprise if you switch language.
"sorted" and "ordered" mean very different things in this context.
And the reason we have ordered dict keys now is because it's trivial with the new compact structure (the actual hash table contains indices to an auxiliary array, which can just be appended to with every insertion). It has nothing to do with any randomization of the hashing process.
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