It's a social construct that has been turned into legislation, which then defines the rights. Some people have the right to get married, and some don't.

When your organisation is built on the concept of "openness and inclusiveness" then it seems strange to me for them to allow someone - their leader - to hold an opinion which is arguably not about those things.

Is the only thing worth being intolerant about, intolerance itself?

Anyway. This is a complicated issue; I still am not sure how I feel about it. I feel sorry for Brendan because of the situation he was put in - but I am probably more sorry for an entire class of people who are denied rights to engage in a social construct of their own free will for some arbitrary reason like the gender of the person they want to be with. I don't know how to do this kind of moral calculus.

I do not understand what you're asking or where that quote is from. Wondering if you replied to me by mistake?

I was wondering this too, but unfortunately his blog post on the subject - which I would say is the only really authoritative source of information - is basically just gutless corporate-speak (e.g., "Mozilla will remain egalitarian blah blah blah").

It does nothing to explain his personal opinion or his history on the topic, so the only thing I can get out of it is that I'll have to remain largely in the dark about what his personal opinions are and hope it doesn't influence any decisions he makes for Mozilla.

I would like to see an honest, up front post on his blog where he lays out his opinion. Even if I disagree with it (as I suspect I would), at least then I'd respect him for being up-front about it.

Your two posts were fascinating, thanks. It has never crossed my mind to think about rats that much, but the sentence about humans effectively keeping them safe from other predators is one of those obvious-in-hindsight things that I probably never would have realised.

As an Australian that has recently relocated to the US, you have also inculcated a new fear of raccoons, which I will now go at lengths to avoid!

Out of interest, have any of Facebook's other acquisitions been used to force users onto the FB platform? In other words, do they have a strong precedent of doing this?

In the case of Oculus spending $2b and then immediately trying to alienate its core user base by somehow pushing FB on the tiny percentage of users that don't already have it seems like it would be a weird thing to do.

Yes, I guess Abrash really dropped the ball when he didn't do his due diligence on what language the parent company of the VR company he just accepted a job at build their website in!!!@@@

What an odd piece of techno-elitist whining. For what it's worth, Facebook's engineering acumen can be seen in some of the software they've released, including the Hiphop VM for PHP as well as the recently announced Facebook Hack. They have contributed to a huge variety of OSS ( https://code.facebook.com/proj... ) - and things like the OpenComputer project ( http://www.opencompute.org/).

The scale alone of Facebook is an impressive engineering feat. That is entirely the point of Abrash's post, really.

This ./ article from 1999 has Carmack talking about Snow Crash:

The Metaverse of the Snow Crash world was basically an epic social virtual reality experience. I've always figured Carmack would be involved in making that a reality somehow, and the Oculus Rift certainly seems like it could be a critical part. Facebook actually makes sense from a social perspective as well.

I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people terrified because of imagined privacy implications, but I'm still fascinated to see where this ride takes us.

...that has recently moved to the USA, I am stunned by Amazon - I mean, I always knew it looked awesome but until I got here I didn't fully understand how much stuff was on there and how amazing it is to order basically anything.

Prime simply adds to my amazement - I can order (almost) anything and it will arrive (almost always) 2 days later. My shopping behaviour has changed significantly, to the point where I'll not buy something while it's right in front of me in a store because I can just have Amazon bring it to my house a few days later, saving me the effort of carrying it around or trying to get it home (I don't own a car yet).

Even at the new price it seems like a fantastic deal, and that's before I add the streaming video service, which I've also gotten a lot of use out of, despite having Netflix and Hulu.

I guess I am surprised by the people complaining about the price hike. I'm back in Australia right now for a couple weeks and from the wistful look everyone here gets when I explain how great it is, I know they'd happily pay twice the new fee just to never have to deal with the local retailers ever again.

Anyway, my 2c: this price raise would in no way dissuade me from renewing next year (if I'm still living in the usa).

To be fair, some people might not be aware that substances are often made up of substance.