Yeah, the "tu quoque" fallacy is big around here.

What alternate universe do you live in? Criticism of Microsoft on Slashdot is consistently and routinely modded +5.

Umm... no. If the US government does something bad, we should criticize it. If the Chinese government does something bad, we should criticize it. If the governments of Liechtenstein or Brunei or Tonga are doing bad things, we should criticize them. The important distinction here is "people being screwed over by their governments" vs. "governments doing the screwing-over", not "US" vs. "China" vs. etc. etc. If anything, the fact that the NSA is acting badly towards Americans should make Americans more sympathetic towards Chinese citizens getting similar, harsher treatment from their government.

Maoism is basically "there are more peasants than workers, so it should be 'peasants of the world, unite.' Oh and by the way, since I'm a Third World guy and most peasants are in the Third World, I should be the leading Marxist now that Stalin is gone. Screw you, Comrade Khrushchev."

I didn't say I was fine with his belief, I said that I wouldn't have wanted him to be fired because of it. Nor would I want him to be fired for donating to promote it.

If he donated it in the company's name, that would be different, but to my understanding Eich made his donations in his own name, not in Mozilla's name. The contribution database merely notes that Mozilla was his employer at the time. So, for the equivalent question, if I were still at the same company as the coworker I mentioned, and he were promoted to CEO, I would not protest it. Nor would I protest if, as CEO, he continued to make such donations in his name. The important distinction is whether or not the views are being espoused by the person on his own, or by the company -- and I mean literally, officially in the company's name, not some vague "associated with the company because he works there in an important position" sort of thing.

Incidentally, I've been in the "leadership might do things I dislike" position, too. Back when I was part of the team of a startup whose CEO was a Scientologist, a coworker and I insisted that our contracts include clauses that the company not use "Hubbard Management Technology" (look it up, it's hilarious, sad, and offensive at the same time), and that if the company gave money to or bought anything from WISE (a Scientology business group) that it would have to make matching contributions to the EFF.

Well, I've worked with someone who denies the Holodomor (the Ukraine famine) and Stalin's other mass-murders, which are on par with the Holocaust. I would never have dreamed of suggesting he be fired for his views, and would have vocally defended him if someone else did -- and I'm about as anti-Communist as you can get.

"Can't get 'em,
They've et 'em.
They're gone and there ain't no moa."

The US (and the West in general) differs from Russia not in our inclination towards surveillance -- pretty much all governments do that -- but in the fact that it's controversial here.

You do know that it's possible to criticize bad things done by the US government, and criticize bad things done by other governments, right? Because your statement seems to indicate that you're unaware of this option.

Tell that to Alexander Litvinenko, Viktor Yuschenko, Anna Politkovskaya, Yuri Shchekochikhin, Yuri Shchekochikhin, and many others.

What's ironic is that the folks who tend to do this, are just as likely to sneer that Americans don't care about anything happening outside the US.

Yes and no, at least based on my recent job searching. Yes, the C++ jobs pay significantly more (at least where I was looking), but there are far, far more Java, .NET, PHP, and Javascript jobs. So, you'll make more money in a C++ job, if you can find one.

I can't speak to intelligence or living situations, but part of my point was that for most people, motivation depends on being interested in something. Back in Jr. High, I recall a clique of proto-stoners who never seemed to pay attention or do well (though they never outright flunked) in the regular classes, yet excelled in woodshop, far beyond anything I could do. (Shades of Brian vs. Bender from Breakfast Club here, I suppose). They were certainly self-motivated to do good carpentry. You do start to get into more-advanced math (by everyday standards, not engineering standards) once you get into more-advanced carpentry. Plus it gives reasons to delve into other subjects. Different woods are suitable for different things, and that goes back to the biology of the trees they come from. Wood treatments involve chemistry to understand fully. Etc.

What I'm getting at is that most students have things they're interested in, and those things provide hooks into wider and/or more-abstract knowledge which teachers can steer their students towards. Yes, that doesn't always mesh with our current Prussian-era education model, but to me that just underscores the current model's shortcomings.

Trivia: Something like this is actually a plot point for one of the characters (Randy Waterhouse) in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. His first major big program is one that calculates calories supplied by various foodstuffs versus the time taken and calories burned acquiring them, to be used for running RPGs.

That matches my personal experience, actually. For example, I learned most of my core trigonometry well before I ran into it in school, because I wanted to write space combat games, and trig is how you answer questions like "my ship is at this position facing this direction, the target is at that position, what angle is it at relative to straight ahead?" Learned most of my Newtonian physics the same way. I learned a fair amount of biology, geology, meteorology, and other things when doing research GM'ing tabletop RPGs. And I know several people who learned things like HTML5 and CSS because they wanted to make nicer websites.

Granted, the basics like spelling and arithmetic probably need to be taught for their own sake. But past a certain point, I find that people learn something more effectively when they're learning it it accomplish a goal they care about. Certainly they're better motivated in those cases.

"Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."

This is purest drivel. A culture is a set of shared behaviors, interests, and values that cause people to cluster together, or derive from them being so. Geekdom, hackerdom, tech, or whatever you want to call it is its own culture. It may be predominantly white male, but it is not the same thing as white male culture at large. If it was, we'd be more interested in football and reality TV and less interested in roleplaying games and Star Trek. Not to say that no geeks like the former and that all like the latter, but the percentages are very very different from mainstream. We have our own slang, places we tend to hang out (especially if you consider online "places"), entertainment interests, people we admire, people we hate, things we like to talk about, and so forth.

In fact, the very idea that someone's ethnicity defines their culture is itself racist. When I hang out with my black, Chinese, and Indian coworkers, we all have common ground due to us sharing the tech culture, rather than being pigeonholed into the cultures we were born in, staying there, and having to overcome barriers when we want to interact.

While the analogy does apply sometimes, when technology is being used to do evil, the software/hardware engineer usually isn't in a role equivalent to a doctor torturing a patient. The engineer isn't the one acting upon the person being done evil to. More typically, since most tech has a wide variety of uses, the engineer's role is much more akin to a developer of medical devices. A syringe can just as easily be used to inject antibiotics or cyanide, and it would be silly to claim that the person designing the syringes is morally responsible for how the things get used. Consider the case of Saeed Malekpour, who wrote some code for uploading images, and is in jail in Iran (and was almost executed) because that code got used on a porn site. (No, not claiming that porn sites are evil or anything like that, it was just the first "syringe maker will never know what gets injected" example that I thought of).

How will the troops live without lutefisk?

The problem with all of those is that there are a limited number of locales where they can work well, and all of them except for geothermal are transient. That means power storage, which means batteries, which means toxic chemical waste. It may or may not be as dangerous on a per-volume basis as nuclear waste (someone more knowledgeable than me would have to answer that), but there would certainly be a hell of a lot more of it.