> Punishing the businesses now will just make it harder for these companies to pay proper wages going forward

Possibly the stupidest comment I've ever read on Slashdot and that is saying something.

> The best thing workers can do now is to just put this whole mess behind them, show up to work, and do their
> jobs. Our nation depends on the success of these businesses

Tell you what, from now on, take 25% of every paycheck you get, and send it to Apple and Google. If you don't do that, you are a hypocrite.

> while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also
> needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding
> spiraling costs.

That is bullshit. If an Apple employee has a job offer from Google for $20,000 more, then give the Apple employee a $25,000 raise if you need to keep the team together. Apple has $160 billion or something like that in the bank. They are giving dividends to shareholders whose stock holdings have gone up exponentially over the course of just a few years.

Wages have been flat for 30 years while productivity and corporate profits soared. There's no excuse at all for not paying employees.

If you don't live in California, you may not understand how bad this is. Never mind losing his job as Mozilla CEO — Brendan Eich may not work in California again after this, simply because so many of the people at every single company simply won't want to work with him. Or he may go from job to job, failing badly, because the people around him are either not following his leadership or may even actively thwart his leadership and any potential success.

You have to realize 3 key things to understand what is going on here:

* California, and San Francisco and northern California specifically, are LGBT sanctuaries. LGBT people come from all over the US and all over the world to live and work in San Francisco and Silicon Valley primarily or even solely because they can live and work here free from discrimination, or essentially free from discrimination. The LGBT population in SF and Silicon Valley is probably 25%, not 10% as elsewhere. And here we are almost all out of the closet. That means we have lots of straight allies who also don't want to participate in Eich's hate.

* All of the court cases on Prop 8 failed to find a single benefit from it. Not a single benefit. It existed solely and only as a way for bigots to bash on LGBT people. Whether you knew it or not, when you voted for Prop 8 or funded Prop 8, you were 100% expressing hatred against a minority. That is all you were doing. Absolutely NOTHING ELSE. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR IT. This is maybe the one ironic benefit of Prop 8: the aftermath was like a mass education teachable moment. But Brenden Eich did not participate in this community growth. He still supports Prop 8, even after hearing all the harm it caused to LGBT families for no benefit at all.

* There is a huge amount of anger over Prop 8. A lot of people were badly hurt for no benefit. People are not only not in the mood to work with an unrepentant Prop 8 bigot, they are in the mood to actually confront him or even harm him physically. So many people recanted their Prop 8 support that we were in some sense left without a villain. Especially because the core of Prop 8 support was from out-of-state. But 5 years later, into that vacuum steps Brendan Eich, just got a big new CEO job in Silicon Valley and he's doing fine, totally unrepentant about his Prop 8 funding, says he'd do it again. People can't make rent in northern California and Eich had thousands of extra dollars to spend on trying to prevent his neighbor from having equal rights. He's the perfect villain.

So even though most people in California today may forgive you for voting for Prop 8 — if you later became educated and apologized for the pure, 100% hatred that you expressed — it is very hard to find forgiveness if you were a funder. And he is not even asking for forgiveness. He's like, “I'd do it again if I got the chance.” That is like being elected Governor of Mississippi and we find out you are not only a dues-paying member of the KKK, but you are completely unrepentant about it to this day. You thought you were in the new Mississippi, but turns out you are actually in the old one. But don't worry, the KKK Governor says he'll treat and promote everyone equally. Trust him.

And what Mozilla is saying is, “hey you, who came to Silicon Valley to live a discrimination-free life, whether LGBT or straight, why don't you work all day for the guy who funded that years-long break in your marriage, or your sister's marriage, or your friend's marriage, and who is not even sorry about it, and just trust us that he won't treat you like the second-class citizens he says you are, and hope he doesn't get another chance at something like Prop 8, and now, let's all make a community-sponsored browser together! And lots of partnerships with other companies that don't want to work with Brendan Eich either!”

It's not going to fly. It has already crashed. Mozilla now has to admit that, fire Eich, and put someone more suitable in there.

The Minecraft guy stopped working with Oculus Rift because they made Zuckerberg their CEO! How the fuck do you think Mozilla is going to get community participation with Eich as CEO?

> "Mozilla recently named a new CEO, Brendan Eich, and as commentators in that article noted,
> there could be some backlash over his private contributions to political campaigns.

No, that is factually incorrect. The backlash is over his PUBLIC contributions to a hate campaign. The only reason we even know he made that contribution is because it is PUBLIC. If you want to sponsor a proposition in California, you have to sign your name to it. It's a public thing. It's by definition a public thing. It is not private as in contained in his private life. It is not private as in contained in a private company. It is not private as in contained in his head. It is PUBLIC. As in you tried to set public policy with your public actions. He took public action to try to prevent his neighbor from having the same rights as he has. He owns that.

> Well, it turns out that they were correct,

Fucking duh.

> and despite a statement from Brendan Eich pledging to continue Mozilla's inclusiveness,

And also a statement from Brendan Eich saying he is not sorry for his support for Prop 8 and continues to support it today, even after it has been declared unconstitutional. Even after millions of dollars worth of lawyers could find not one single harm that would come to Brendan Eich if everyone in California has the same marriage rights as him. Prop 8 has been exposed and defined as being about nothing more than an opportunity to hate LGBT people and actively attempt to destroy their lives.

This is not academic. Lives were destroyed by Brendan Eich's ACTIONS. He funded a hate campaign of lies and propaganda, and innocent people suffered personal and financial trauma as a result.

> some Mozilla employees are calling for him to step down.

Not just employees. Also a large part of the Web development community and the Silicon Valley community in general, and people all across California and elsewhere from every walk of life.

> Should private beliefs

Again — factually incorrect. At first I was thinking you are just uninformed or maybe stupid, but now you are reading like propaganda.

This is not about private beliefs, it is about PUBLIC ACTIONS. Some people said, “let's fuck with the homos, who is with me?” and Brendan Eich said sign me up, here are thousands of dollars you can use to launch a campaign of lies and try to create a 2-tier system with second class citizens so that we will always have an opportunity to exclude LGBT people from the public discourse.

There was nothing private about it from Brendan Eich's point of view. The privacy that has been violated is the private lives of many LGBT couples who were refused marriage licenses by their county clerks because of Prop 8, and then suffered all kinds of public humiliations and trials and tribulations because of that. If you want to defend someone's private beliefs, defend the private beliefs of any LGBT couple in California who believe they are not second class citizens. Why? Because a) courts have shown that they are right, that their private belief in not being second class is in fact a public truth, and b) it is the right thing to do. Defending Brendan Eich is just nerds circling the wagons. Fuck you, nerds. Grow up. Some of you think you are being Libertarian but you have your heads up your asses. There is nothing Libertarian about Prop 8, it is Authoritarian in the extreme.

Eich took ACTIONS. He is responsible for those ACTIONS. He is unrepentant about those ACTIONS. Stop acting like he doesn't want to join your bible class and start recognizing that he tried to kick 10–25% of Californians out of the community because he considers them second-class citizens who don't deserve the equal rights that he enjoys.

This is not, “I'm a Lutheran and he's a Mormon so we agree to disagree,” or even “I'm a Democrat and he's a Republican so we agree to disagree.” This is, “Brendan Eich tried to destroy you because you are LGBT, and the only thing he's sorry about is that he failed.” There is no agreeing to disagree because we are all members of the same community here. He tried to kick us out of the community. He attacked us and he wants to attack again. The idea that we are going to work with him is asinine.

> be enough to prevent someone from heading a project they helped found?"

Yes, joining the KKK should exclude you from becoming CEO of Mozilla. Joining Prop 8 is the same thing.

What's worse, he is still unrepentant about it many years later, after court after court failed to find anything but hate in Prop 8, after news article after news article exposed the harm that was being put on wives and husbands who are lying in a hospital bed after a car accident or being eaten alive by cancer and they couldn't see their spouse because of Prop 8, or did not have health insurance at all because of Prop 8, or were unable to get housing because of Prop 8, or were being evicted from their house because their spouse died and they can't pay the taxes on the “platonic gift” of the house from one “unmarried” spouse to the other because of Prop 8.

So this is not like Hillary Clinton voting for the Iraq War and then a few years later saying, holy shit, that was a mistake, I really got fooled on that one. This is G.W. Bush, 10 years later, Iraq is a smoldering ruin, a million people have died for no reason, trillions of dollars lost, brave soldiers betrayed, the US made a fool in front of the world to the point where we have no moral authority on Crimea, and still, G.W. Bush is totally unrepentant about the Iraq War. Ready to start it again if the opportunity presents itself.

No, Brendan Eich cannot be Mozilla CEO. He cannot be CEO of anything in California. He needs to move to Russia or the moon or the bottom of the Pacific. Whatever he prefers. Move fast before he takes Mozilla down with him. It is probably already too late, though.

So what you're saying is Mozilla is not a company at all, it is actually some kind of rehab center for bigots? The bigot comes in, Mozilla makes him CEO, and then everyone else volunteers their time to educate him to a 6th grade level? You're saying that LGBT employees and other employees of Mozilla have been signed up against their will as some kind of unpaid anti-bigotry counselors for precious Brendan Eich? You're saying that the Mozilla community has been signed up against their will as some kind of support group for Brendan Eich? So we can help him recover from his Hitler fantasies?

Fuck no. I'm not doing it. Mozilla is dead to me as long as he is CEO. Brendan Eich can get cancer and die. I have no interest in spending anymore of my precious life on fucking Prop 8.

> This is a perfect experience to change his mind on the issue regardless of the source of his current viewpoint.

Imagine if the new NASA chief thought the earth was flat. Well, he's in the perfect environment to change his mind on that issue.

Uh — no.

Equality is not an issue you debate. Brendan Eich does not have a viewpoint. It is just hatred. We have seen it many times before.

An issue is something like, “should we let a mining company open-pit mine our county?” and viewpoints are things like, “no, the environment will be ruined and children will get sick and die,” or “yes, we need the jobs and the money will support our children's future.” And then you have a debate over the issue, arguing the benefits and risks to both sides. Then everybody (or their representatives) vote on the issue and move forward as an entire community.

But a key thing that came out of the court cases on Prop 8 is there is ZERO benefit from Prop 8 for Brendan Eich and others like him, except for the opportunity to indulge in hatred. Prop 8 is a gun that you can use to shoot LGBT people. That is it. No issue, no debate over common risks and benefits to the entire community. Prop 8 doesn't build anything, doesn't help anyone, doesn't do anything positive for anyone. It simply provides an outlet for hatred for some people. With years of court cases and millions of dollars worth of lawyers, nobody could show any harm to any straight people or religious people or anyone from LGBT people having the same marriage rights as everyone else. There was no issue of environmental pollution versus jobs, there was no issue of allocation of resources. It is not an issue. It is just hatred. Pure and simple. Brendan Eich continues to assert his right to not only hate LGBT people, but to take public action against them, to harm them, to destroy their families, to exclude them from full citizenship and exclude them from the public discourse. He's not engaging in a debate with the community — he's trying to exclude minorities from the community. He's not expressing his vote — he's trying to take the vote away from others.

No, you have it wrong. Brendan Eich is the same as the Greens.

Complete this sentence:

“______________ has taken public actions to set themselves up as a special type of first-class citizen who has more rights than everybody else, and who can rule over the private lives of second-class citizens at will. They engaged lawyers to argue in court that some people are second-class citizens. They argued in court that second-class citizens should obey the dictates of first-class citizens like lords and serfs.”

You can fill in that blank with either Brendan Eich or the Greens. They are the same.

Also, “beliefs” have nothing to do with it. We are talking about ACTIONS. PUBLIC ACTION. COURT ACTION. Brendan Eich funded and promoted a 2-tier system where he has more rights than some others. The Greens funded and promoted a 2-tier system where they have more rights than some others.

As for the corporate responsibility, the fact is that both Mozilla and Hobby Lobby will suffer loss of reputation and loss of finances based on the actions of their CEO and/or ownership, because both of those companies depend on the people whom their CEO and/or ownership are trying to victimize. At the very least, that gets you non-participation from those people. This is somewhat similar to how corporations today have forgotten that when they drive wages down artificially over the course of 30 years even as productivity soars, they also drive down the spending power of 99% of their customers and hurt their own company's long-term prospects.

If he was a KKK member, Mozilla would likely not have made him CEO. That is the discrepancy here. That is the mistake that Mozilla is being called out on.

If the KKK in California had put up a proposition to ban so-called* interracial marriage and Brendan Eich gave thousands of dollars to it, and then it passed because of money that flooded in from the slave states, then Mozilla would not have made him CEO. Here, we have a situation that is even worse than that, because years later after much public suffering, after Prop 8 was struck down as unconstitutional, Brendan Eich *still* supports it. He makes no apologies for his support of the KKK or the actions he took to try and make some people less equal than others.

So Mozilla is saying, some kinds of hatred are just OK with us. We give him a pass for his anti-homo actions. Mozilla says, “won't everybody please respect Brendan Eich's right to put triangles on the arms of all homos and single them out for special second-class citizen treatment?” No, he doesn't have a right to do that. And he doesn't have a right to be respected by the people he victimized with his actions. Mozilla gains Eich as CEO and loses a large part of its community in return. Action gets reaction.

(* I say so-called interracial marriage because there is only one race — human race — and therefore all marriage is humanracial marriage. In related news: the earth is round, evolution can be seen under a microscope, environmental pollution damages your health, and it is the 21st century.)

Utter bullshit. Complete ignorance. Entitled, frat-boy whining.

This is about Brendan Eich's PUBLIC ACTIONS, not his private beliefs. Yes, Brendan Eich is responsible and culpable for his PUBLIC ACTIONS. Nobody else is. Nobody has a responsibility to protect the integrity of Brendan Eich's small mind. Nobody has a responsibility to be kicked in the face by Brendan Eich and then smile back at him in return.

This is also not about Brendan Eich's suffering. The suffering here is the married couples who were told their marriages were not valid because of Brendan Eich's public actions. The suffering here is their kids who had married parents one day and not the next. The suffering here is the people who could not get married when the appropriate time came in their relationship because of Brendan Eich's public actions. The suffering here is the people who died while their marriages were invalidated and their spouses lost the home to the tax man because they were seen as just a platonic friend who gifted a house to another platonic friend. The suffering here is the American wives and husbands who watched their foreign spouses get deported back to their home country instead of given Green Cards like the Brendan Eich -approved straight couple next door. The suffering here is the wives and husbands who couldn't get into a hospital room to see their sick or injured or dying spouse because of motherfucking Brendan Eich's actions. The suffering here is the wedding industry in California that lost 15–25% of its business while Prop 8 was in place, including some straight couples who refused to get married while gay couples could not.

Brendan Eich's suffering has only just begun. And it is entirely self-inflicted. He slapped the world and the world is slapping him back. And he is not even sorry for what he did. He hasn't even woken up from his hysteria and recognized, whoa, I was wrong about this, I should apologize for trying to create a 2-tier segregation society in the United States of America in the fucking 21st century. He hasn't said I was wrong to try to break up loving families. He hasn't said I was wrong to cause so much pain and hurt for such little reason that even million-dollar lawyers could not find a way to make my case, and even 65 year old conservative judges could not find a way to get the law to agree with me.

Again, this is about PUBLIC ACTIONS, not private beliefs. It is not about what Brendan Eich thinks or feels or believes. It is about his actions. It is about things he did which he alone is responsible for. He burned bridges with a lot of people, and now he is complaining that those bridges are gone.

And human rights are not subject to your fucking precious beliefs anyway. You can go around thinking that some of the people around you are lesser people, not real humans, and they shouldn't have the same rights as you. Everyone has a right to what is in their own head. But if you then take action on that, if you actively work to take rights away from those people, if you say right to their faces, “I believe you are subhuman, not a true person, and I have given thousands of dollars to a group that is right now trying to break up your family” then you shouldn't be surprised that those people say back to you, “I don't want to work with you anymore, I don't want to partner with your company, I don't want to support anything you are doing.” That is just basic action/reaction. For Brendan Eich or anyone to say that they not only have a right to try and destroy your family, they also have a right to be treated in some impartial way afterwards by their victims is absurd and stupid and also typical of entitled frat boy culture. That is not how the fucking world works. This was not some kind of political debate like, “should we let Wal-Mart open a store in our town or not?” that we debate and then vote and then move on. This is an active bigot who is unapologetic even now about his campaign to destroy the families of about 25% of Californians. (Roughly 10% who are LGBT, plus their straight kids, brothers, sisters, parents.)

And, Mozilla is being vilified for their actions also. They didn't see KKK membership as a disqualifying factor in their CEO search, so now they own a piece of the KKK. This could easily be the end of Mozilla. It is for me. If they don't fire him within another week or so, they are likely done. Even if they fire him, it will take years for Mozilla to fix what they just broke, and it's probably not even possible.

this is about PUBLIC ACTIONS. Nobody is responsible for Brendan Eich's public actions except Brendan Eich. He reaps what he sowed just like we all do.

Brendan Eich publicly funded a political campaign to destroy the marriages and families of about 25% of his fellow Californians. Some of whom work for Mozilla, and some of whom partner with Mozilla. Private beliefs are something that is private, inside your own head. Publicly funding the Prop 8 campaign is public, and takes place well outside of Brendan Eich's own head.

Had Brendan Eich kept his hatred and bigotry inside his own head he would be OK right now. There are CEO's who are racist bigots and they keep it to themselves. What Brendan Eich did by comparison was sign up for the KKK and donate thousands of dollars to *successfully* reimplementing racial segregation in California, by aligning himself with money and groups that came mostly from outside California. Because of the actions of Brendan Eich and other bigots like him, millions of Californians were told by their government to start sitting at the back of the bus, and this went on for years while the courts laboriously went through everything and said, yes, we already knew that creating second-class citizens was wrong. No, you don't have the right to make them into second-class citizens.

Married couples were told that their marriages were invalid. People died while their marriages were invalidated, and their partners got kicked out of the home they had lived in for years because the house was taxed as a gift between two platonic friends.

Me, I am not going to be involved in anything Mozilla-related while this bigot fuck is CEO. I took Firefox out of my development targets. Not because of Brendan Eich's “beliefs” but because of his actions.

I'm withdrawing all of my support for Mozilla, including using it as a development target, until Eich is fired. I'm teetering on the edge right now of simply banning the browser from my sites. I only get maybe 10% of users with Firefox, but fuck those users too. Fuck every extra hour that I worked around some awful Mozilla bug for those users.

The question you should be asking is why is streaming video so expensive that DVD (shipping little plastic discs around) is cheaper than sending bits over a wire?

That is the conspiracy.

Apple has instructions for transferring an iPad to someone else.

There are all of 3 steps:

1. Back up your device.

2. Go to Settings > General > Reset, then tap Erase All Content and Settings.
This will completely erase your device and turn off iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Game Center, and other services.
If you're using iOS 7 and have Find My iPhone turned on, your Apple ID and password will be required. After you provide your password, the device will be erased and removed from your account so that the next owner can activate it.

3. Contact your carrier for guidance on transferring service to the new owner.

What to do before selling or giving away your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5661?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

So, again, if you want to will your iPad to someone, you have to give them the Apple ID account credentials and the decryption password for your iPad so that they can wipe it and activate it for themselves.

If you want to will some data to someone, that is a whole separate issue. There are about 1000 ways to do that, both using Apple tools and 3rd party tools. It has nothing to do with iPads or Apple ID's.

One way NOT to will some data to someone is to lock it up in an Apple ID account and not give them the credentials for that account. That is how you DON'T share your data. That is how you keep data private.

Every problem with a will has to be resolved in court. If a person has no will, the court makes all the decisions. If you say the deceased wanted to will you the contents of their safe but you don't have the combination and you want the safe manufacturer to give you that combination, you will need a court order. Safe manufacturers are not in the business of cracking safes for anyone with a heart-wrenching story. A court has to decide if the story is true and what to do about it.

You're way off on the facts. Put your bleeding heart back in your body.

> Me, I'm thinking about what it'd be like if my mum or dad died and left me their documents in a storage facility

No, no, no. The woman died, and SHE DID NOT LEAVE HER DOCUMENTS TO HER SON. That is the whole problem. He wants them anyway.

To continue your analogy, if your parents did not leave you the number of their storage locker, did not leave you the passcode to the building, did not leave you the key to the storage locker, and you went to the storage facility to get your deceased parent's documents without all of that, THEN YES YOU WOULD NEED A COURT ORDER TO GET THE CONTENTS OF YOUR PARENT'S LOCKER. At the very least you would need that.

> Anyone who values their family's thoughts and images should avoid buying their product,

Anyone who values their family's thoughts and images SHOULD SHARE THOSE THOUGHTS AND IMAGES WITH ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE FAMILY, and also BACKUP THOSE THOUGHTS AND IMAGES. Apple provides a 1-click iPad backup to any Mac/PC running iTunes, and a Mac can further be 1-click backed up to an external hard disk. AND, there are about 1000 ways to share media from an Apple device user to any other user.

The user is responsible for their data, not Apple.

The user is also responsible for passing on account credentials if they want to pass them on, and if they don't, then their family is responsible for getting a court order in order to untangle all of that.

Google doesn't need to brag about the lack of security on Android.

Yes, the user is in control:

- of passing on the account credentials to someone else
- of passing on the data to someone else
- of backing up their own data

The user is not in control:

- of Apple
- of Apple's security policies

The Apple ID does not just give a user access to a particular iPad. It also gives them access to all of the user's other Apple devices, all their iCloud documents and backups, all their iTunes purchases, their credit card information, and their personal details.

If I can steal an iPad from you and then make a convincing case to Apple that they should give me your Apple ID and password, I can then wipe your iPhone, Mac, all your online backups, all your documents, and then use your credit card to buy a bunch of new Macs and iPads and iPhones from the Apple Store.

Apple has been criticized in the past for resetting the password too easily on an Apple ID. In this case, the user does not even have the Apple ID, and they are not even the person who created the account. Apple is not being unreasonable at all.

> If Apple can't plan for a common contingency like this in their security model, then they shouldn't choose
> to be in control of other people's property.

If the user can't plan for a common contingency like this in their will, then they shouldn't put their data into an Apple account.

How much more basic can security get than “if you want to give someone access to your account, you have to give them the credentials.”

The user is responsible for their data, not Apple. You can backup an iPad to a Mac or PC running iTunes, which is almost all of the Macs and PC's in the world.

If you want to pass on data, YOU HAVE TO PASS ON DATA. You can't just pass on an iPad and expect to get access to all of the user's online accounts.

Do you think that this guy got access to all of his mother's Yahoo, Google, Facebook and other accounts without even having her username?

Think for a second.