Again, here is someone who didn't look at the request and doesn't understand why it was rejected. Just lap up that SJW narrative and don't think about it. You get an A+ in modern activism.

What happened here is a request was deferred for valid technical reasons and then removed because of intra-project politics. Those same politics led to the forking.

You're blinded by your strong support of activism. The issue is the way that Joyent threw the guy under the bus. They said, in essence, "We would fire this guy if we could, but he's totally not an employee. We hate him as much as you do, so don't hate on us!" And they said it in a very public way. That's alienation. Oh, they forked it? Big surprise.

If you actually looked at the merge request he rejected it for being a worthless change. He didn't invest any value in a change that had no functional improvements and didn't even make the documentation any clearer. It was just churn. He didn't reject it on the grounds that pronouns should be masculine.

Wow, after reading that blog post, I suddenly understand exactly why they're forking themselves away from Joyent. And to be honest, I'm now expecting that Io.js will become dominant over Node.js in time, which is the opposite of what I thought yesterday.

Apparently Joyent doesn't want to focus on the product. 99% of people who depend on Node.js don't give a flying fart about what pronouns are used in COMMENTS in the library.

Because nobody uses your crappy software.

I don't completely agree with this. Yes, it will cost a fortune to skip commercials, but that is because the commercials are still tied to the legacy business model. They exist to make money for broadcast television, and have been a solid revenue stream for cable television for decades. If people can switch their content delivery medium and skip commercials, the demand for the commercials from the customer side (the customers are the advertisers) will plummet, and the legacy model will collapse. Once the legacy model has faded away, I doubt there would be any real requirement to make ad skipping outrageously expensive. I expect it would be more like a Netflix+Hulu model. You pay for delivery, then access to ad-less back catalogs would cost a bit of money, and access to "live" episodes would be either a nominal fee or commercial supported.

I don't doubt this kind of thing is happening. The government has been moving itself into ever darker shadows of secrecy to avoid oversight, while at the same time has been violating privacy rights of its citizens ever more egregiously. This is not a problem with any particular party or political viewpoint. This is just the nature of power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The powerful elite will always consolidate and expand. In this country, the One Ring of Power is the law system, and the magic is provided by technology. I believe Ms. Attkisson.

Having said that, she is going to need much better proof than she has or nothing will come of this. There has to be a smoking gun in the had of an actual federal agent. In this case that would be an actual order to spy, provably given by someone who is high enough to be responsible for their decisions. She will never have that.

I really like my OCZ SSD.

Let's do a thought experiment. Start with a blank piece of paper and some colored pencils. A person begins drawing a picture. The page begins as a completely meaningless object, and as marks are made on the page, it gains meaning gradually. A line on paper is not illegal, or at least it shouldn't be by any moral or ethical standard. Two lines, three lines, and so on. Each are probably completely innocent individually. If these scribbles were forming letters and words, they would be clearly protected expression, until they formed some kind of credible threat. At least, that's how I understand it.

But this isn't a written message, just a picture. A head takes shape. Eyes, nose, mouth, and hair. The subject starts to emerge. Still this is a legal drawing by any measure. Eventually enough marks are made on the page that the subject has context. Clothes, background... and actions. At some point the scene depicted by this collection of lines and smudges becomes forbidden. What was an figment of someone's imagination is now a very real crime.

How does that happen, and when? Who specifically does this law protect? Is the person who drew it a criminal, or is it only a crime when someone buys it? Is every viewer of the picture a criminal or just the ones who enjoy it? How do you tell which is which? What about the imagination that spawned the picture? Would the artist have been a criminal if they hadn't put their mental image to paper? I find these questions very difficult to answer in a way that makes sense for a society. Every seemingly obvious answer can lead to some very harmful laws.

But the main motivation is one of greater public good. A scribble that harms nobody is made illegal because by locking up the people who like the scribbles, they cannot remain free to eventually harm real people in the same way. It's a noble cause and perhaps an effective law (I have not seen proof one way or the other). However it is also disturbingly close to pre-crime. I'm not entirely comfortable with that.

These aren't flash games. Granted, some of the games on offer actually ARE mind-numbing, but FTL definitely isn't

asm.js is the underlying technology they used to port the games to the web. According to Wikipedia, "asm.js is an intermediate programming language consisting of a strict subset of the JavaScript language. It enables significant performance improvements for web applications that are written in statically-typed languages with manual memory management (such as C) and then translated to JavaScript by a source-to-source compiler."

but, so help me God, if Comcast blocks bittorrent traffic, I'm going to call for heads to roll!

I'm not sure how you can diminish the achievement of someone's invention because other people use it in a way that may not be appropriate. Should the graphene guys not be honored because their invention could be used irresponsibly? (yes, I'm aware of Nobel and his explosives)

Having said that, the Nobel committee did seem to consider the importance of LED lighting, so there's that. Still, I'd think that any danger to eyes could be eliminated with a proper design.

You're a fool. You have issues with certain design choices that you blame on the blue LED? To use a car analogy, that's like blaming Toyota's braking issues on the invention of disc brakes. Disc brakes are a good thing, like blue LEDs. You like Blu-rays? Then you're using this technology.

No it wouldn't. Public health is the most slam-dunk reason to restrict civil liberties. Travel is restricted for much less important reasons, like politics. You have your rights restricted to possess anthrax, even in your own home. A quarantine could prevent travel to West Africa, if it was shown to be a hazard to public health.