> They once employed Brendan Eich, ... and they fired him for donating $800 to the Mormons or some such.

Yeah, "or some such". Specifically, he donated money in support of amending California's constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

When he was appointed CEO of Mozilla, this caused controversy, because many people both inside and outside Mozilla were not happy to have the organization led by someone who publicly opposed equal rights.

In response to this controversy, Eich resigned (he was not fired), and the company issued a statement saying he made his decision "for Mozilla and our community".

> They're more concerned with social activism than technical excellence

I don't think that's convincingly supported by misrepresenting what Eich did (donating to a church vs. donating to a campaign against marriage equality) and what the company did (fire him vs. he resigned) does not

I think it's fair to say that a person publicly doing things that provoke strong negative feelings in many people (as is the case here), that harms their ability to do well as a CEO - both as it relates to the organization internally and as the public face of the organization. In light of this, resigning as CEO and letting someone else take that role seems a good decision.

I think you may be talking about a different "supposedly tech website" than The Evil Atheist was in #63038013.

> Pypy is not fully compatible with CPython. It's close but not fully compatible.

True, and that might well be the answer to my question. In fact, I expected that it would be something like that, but I didn't see any mention of it in the linked article, so I guess we're left to guess.

If compatibility is the reason, though, I do have two points to make about that. The first is that while we might wish for compatibility, CPython versions aren't always backwards compatible, either. Both in deliberate and obvious ways and in more subtle ways where code runs, but means something different from what it used to.

The other point is that I wonder if compatibility concerns wouldn't be better addressed by actually improving CPython PyPy compatibility, rather than doing a whole new run-time performance improvement project. It looks to me like PyPy made an honest effort to be compatible with CPython where it counts, even going so far as to implement CPython's extension API. It seems like the project would be receptive to changes that improve such compatibility.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this project isn't cool or isn't doing the right thing. I'm just saying I would have loved to see some words being spent on explaining that they considered PyPy and why they decided not to work on that. Put another way, if I had been in charge of approving the investment into this project, "Why not PyPy?" would be one of the first questions I would ask.

From https://julialang.org/, first paragraph:

> Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM.

Turns out, if you set out to make something fast, and you use the excellent optimization and code generation abilities of LLVM, it is easy to come up with something faster than something that wasn't designed or built to be fast.

I am surprised to see no mention of PyPy. I would have thought that if one wanted faster Python, that would be the place to start. Has there been any mention of why they didn't go that way, what similarities there are, and where they differ?

> Sure, there is software that has better licensing terms. And almost all of it is unusable, amateur shite. If it wasn't, businesses would dump Microsoft/Oracle/etc.

Bwahahahaha!

Thanks, I needed that.

Sure, but after over 100 years of designing plastics with a wide variety of properties and applications, I don't see why we couldn't make plastics that can be (part of) road surfaces, too. If I understand correctly, the performance in wet conditions still has to be tested, but the temperature tolerance is already wider than that of asphalt. Combating the slippery when wet problem has been done before, too (e.g. the anti-slip coating on bath tubs or fiberglass yachts), although I am not aware of any efforts specifically to support cars and tires.

I've read the assertion that plastic roads sound like a crazy idea elsewhere, too. I don't think this ideas is crazy at all. Why would it be? We currently pave roads with asphalt which we get from crude oil. It makes sense to me that if we process the crude (or some other oil or source of hydrocarbons; say, recycled plastic) we can make something that works similarly well or even better.

Right. In general, people in the EU worry a lot more than Americans about what corporations do with their data, and a lot less about what the government does with their data.

The article, though, is about government surveillance of its citizens, and suggests that there is no protection against this written in the US constitution, which it seems to me there actually is. Of course, as you and others have pointed out, that doesn't mean the data isn't being collected and retained anyway, but I do think there is actually a privacy law on the books, right there in the US constitution.

You mean other than:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

?

Not even kidding. I really am.

I'm already imaginig a Beowulf cluster of these.

As a European who moved to the USA a few years ago, I don't think that's quite right. Europe varies from people who have a seemingly unshakable faith in the government to people who will not trust any government, anywhere, ever. On one side, people won't stand up to the government, because why oppose them? On the other side, people won't stand up to the government, at least not openly, until they are fairly confident they can topple it.

By comparison, in the USA, I think a lot of people believe that, anything the government does, they will mess up. Still, depending on the issue, people still look to the government to take care of things. In general, I find there is a lot more debate Statesside about what the government should and shouldn't do, and I really like that.

Where I think the differences are is in that many European governments tend to stand up for the people more, whereas governments in the USA tend to facilitate things for businesses more. For example, people in Europe care a lot about limiting companies' access to their information, politicians listen, and the laws governing what companies can do with peoples' information are fairly strict. In the USA, many companies are somewhat reluctant to do business in Europe because of the legal hurdles. For an example of the differences, see the EU directive that requires websites to notify people of cookie usage.

As for broadband Internet, I think the folks on this discussion who said it is about competition have the right of it. Competition in infrastructure is difficult. So many European countries regulate the infrastructure, and the competition happens at the service level. When done well, the companies selling the services don't also own the infrastructure, and so the service providers compete on an even playing field.

Where I live in the States, Comcast owns the television cable and sells cable Internet service, whereas AT&T owns the telephone lines and sells ADSL. There are a couple of independent ISPs struggling to roll out their own infrastructure. If you are in one of the few areas serviced by the independent ISPs, you can reportedly get great service at good prices. If not, you will have to deal with Comcast (expensive, decent speeds, customer service varies) or AT&T (no experience with them, but they are said to be expensive, slow, and horrible). Elsewhere, there may be other providers, but the story is much the same: infra is owned by the same companies selling the service, so you only get one choice per technology. And the infrastructure is expensive to build, so don't hold your breath for multiple cable providers or even just one fiber provider. This is in a wealthy, high-tech, densely populated area. In rural areas, things are likely worse.

Every time we discuss some tech company on Slashdot, I'm surprised no-one from that company chimes in. In this thread, I have seen a lot of comments from various people, even including some who work for telcos, just not in the USA. Given that there are quite a few cool technologies to play with at telcos, surely some of the folks who work there must be on Slashdot. Am I wrong? Or are they forbidden from joining these discussions, and afraid of the consequences if they do?

No wonder the dinosaurs went extinct! Running the A/C all the time, they caused so much climate change that they wiped themselves out!