People have been hostile to nerds and geeks since early childhood. I wonder if these efforts will have any further effect. I personally would wear google glass just because it annoys idiot hipsters.

I understand, and those people are playing politics, and anyone with a brain realizes that they've set themselves up to lose badly. The question is whether going for the kill really benefits anyone. The best possible resolution is for the project leads to just change the name already, before further drama ensues.

The rational outcomes of this effort are this:
- Github would sensibly decide it is not going to be the censor police for project names, content, comments, submissions etc. This isn't misogyny, something of this size can't possibly be expected to play censor for everything. They will take unnecessary heat for this because of allegations of misogyny, but if they have a brain they will have to choose to do nothing or else invest infinite time in idiocy. Because of this, 10000 new projects with idiotic names will arise based on GIFT (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory). The perpetrators of the politics will have been "beaten" to the collective benefit of precisely no one.
- The project maintainer, having been incensed by various "feminist" trolls will likely keep the project name in spite of common sense.

The ideal outcome is for the project maintainer to simply take the high-road and change his project to something less silly, because it IS funny but it's a needless distraction for his project, and a good project leader tries to avoid those. Is DICSS about fighting "feminist" trolls, or is it about...whatever it is actually about, I can't be bothered to look. Further, he ostensibly made his project open source and on GitHub to attract developers, and possibly corporate ($$$) support, and anything that detracts from that is actively hurting him.

It has been formally researched, the best way to combat trolls is just to remove the wind from their sails. Certainly in this case it will remove ad revenue from what will almost certainly become a set of circular click-bait links about the phallic male patriarchy of open source that will cause worldwide vomiting.

Quite a lot of open source is worked on by for profit companies. Their contributions are no less than the average guy, and it gets the job done and moves us forward. For profit companies though, have lawsuit concerns that the average anon troll on the internet does not usually have to worry about (provided finding $$$ > potential damages returned). It seems like creating names that might alienate such contributors is not a good idea, and even if you don't think you need/want them, that precluding them from the get-go is just not smart.

While i agree that the world should not have to make itself safe for overly sensitive people, does anyone really think a project named "DICSS" is remotely professional? Do you really want to be associated with DICSS? I understand it's open source, not for pay, etc. but maybe it can have a socially acceptable name, and everyone can just call it DICSS.

I'd hate to go on an interview and someone asks me for a cde sample or something, and I tell them to go look at DICSS, that my contribution to DICSS is quite substantial, and that as a result DICSS has grown quite substantial and is very popular with its userbase.

In fact the only purpose I can see to this name is to make bad jokes.

Doesn't show the magic, how all the wine/champagne ends up in overseas investments, banks and other tax avoidance holes. It's positively great if you don't actually live in a western country.

What is the purpose of security alerts if not to warn people who don't know any better? For the crowd that gets it, you could flash a brief icon featuring a guy fawkes mask and that'd be sufficient. I also wonder how many of them would click "proceed anyway" if the pr0ns were there...

I suspect most users will never install anything to their browsers (intentionally) at all, so that sounds pretty fair.

That's what kills me about this article. Scientists worrying about non-science smells fishy. Murder isn't "wrong" any more than having black hair is wrong. We have a social agreement that we don't kill each other under most conditions, the end. Editing our genome isn't wrong at all, but there are social issues that need to be dealt with, and it's definitely not a matter for science.

It's going to devolve in to class warfare with teh equivalent of environmentalism (i.e. our gene pool may be changed permanently, and the original diversity lost). There will be corporate interest selling "needful mods" that in some cases may be dangerous and unhealthy. Basically it's headed for the same mess we already know about and enjoy.

The way it's written implies something like the "an hero syndrome", but for planet earth. No cause for alarm.

Why not, she's already in the same camp of "people we wish to hear less from"

Judging can be hard work, it's not all bribery and good ol' boyism. Sometimes you have to sit through some real snoozefests.

This sounds like some companies are fighting with Apple over who has to pay for the security checks. Since Apple is posting record profits, they see Apple as the one who needs to do it, even though the problem is clearly with how insecure credit cards always have been .

...and stop calling me Shirley.

Before we knew the sun was the center of the universe, someone believed it was true and went to prove it. There's nothing wrong with believing. The problem is when you assert your belief in spite of significant evidence to the contrary, and/or impose your belief as a system of law or social acceptability. In this case however there is no existence proof, what AI that exists doesn't come close yet.

I agree with OP, I find it hard to believe we're just machines in a simulation. I don't want to believe it, mostly, and it has nothing to do with religion. I do understand that most of our bodies are chemistry and physics, and have no doubt those realities shape a good amount of our behavior. I think attempting to create an AI, either cloned from us, or modeled after us, is essential to understanding exactly what OP describes as "irreducible complexity". But I think what we'll find is a new form of science, something physics and chemistry won't initially be able to explain. Perhaps something like quantum physics, that can't be explained deterministically and can only be bounded with probability functions, but without which, when forced into a deterministic state, radically alters the perception of the whole.

There is an issue with lack of customization, a big one. But that's different than not being able to close a program you are done with. Definitely you should be able to completely kill a program, not just "demand kill" it.

Afaik both android and iOS have ways of doing this that are very simple.