Woke Slashdot cares less about traditional stuff like Hot Grits and Copyright and more about SJW stuff. Doctorow finally gets what he wants and he's angry about it because it wasn't his team that offered it up.

The aim isn't to enroll the best or the brightest - the aim is to get the highest paying customers enrolled.

Learning is no longer about seeking truth, it is about affirming that the understanding of the world we develop as children is accurate and why discrepancies with reality can be ascribed to things like "patriarchy" and "colonialism"

Lessig's crusade against artists being paid for their work is how we've got to the crazy place of people hawking NFTs and the internet dominated by advertising social media behemoths. Lessig's work was one of the primary philosophical crutches against mechanisms to protect content. Rather than a golden age of indie produced films and content capable of supporting a struggling artist made for a pittance on all these new technologies - we have platforms like YouTube essentially controlling creator speech, content and remuneration. But hey - at least no one has to pay for their music at the record store and videos at the video shop anymore!

Distros will end up run by social justice cliques as the antisocial nerds that actually built Linux are railroaded out due to losing at political games they didn't want to play in the first place. One wonders at what point the acceptance of a contribution will depend not so much on the quality of the code, but the social justice credit of the contributor.

But I guess Iraq was "civilized" and there was good reason to go in and there were no civilian casualties. I mean at least be consistent in your reaction to murderous stupidity. How many people were prosecuted for bolloxing up Iraq again? You're only going to rate limit bastards if you apply the rule consistently.

As Bruce Sterling said "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google"

Long form methodical journalism died on Google's ethos that no one should actually have to pay anything for good information because information "wants to be free". As long as Google was getting a small fraction of the minimal income left on the table, getting a small cut over everyone's pennies meant they still made billions.

So today's journalism is like yesterday's open source documentation. Some of the stuff that's done for free is great but the people we needed to have doing it to function as the immune system for our society have moved onto more reliable and rewarding methods of being remunerated, such as cleaning septic tanks.

Typical Slashdot comment - rather than address the problem (Linux requires extraordinary skills to properly configure in a secure manner) you instead squeal about Microsoft. No need to make LINUX BETTER if you can just WHINGE ABOUT MICROSOFT.

All the carping on here in the 90's directly led to the Google you have today. So busy painting Microsoft as the evil that you decided the only way to fight Windows was to get in bed with something much worse. Welcome to the panopticon you created CMDR TACO

Tim O'Reilly was banging on endleslsy about how Web2 was going to democratize everything and overthrow the gatekeepers and wot not. He pushed it relentlessly in conferences. His efforts indirectly led to the rise of the big gatekeepers of social media today. So if someone is claiming Web3 is the democratizer and we know how well that revolution turned out last time, I can only assume that in 10 years we'll be looking back at today's internet as joyous and free because we'll be in a locked down hellscape

Who wants their business's Google Docs account terminated for using the wrong pronouns? The response to the Damore affair signaled that Google had adopted left wing campus politics as an management paradigm. It's pretty hard to return to a politics free workplace when you hire a ton of people whose political identity is more important to them than keeping customers happy or shipping good code.

For the company that is "cloud first, mobile first" they are second in cloud and non-existent in mobile. Distant second in console. There are more Linux VMs running in their datacenters than Windows Server. The only thing an anti-trust action would do is give lawyers something to bill. Less than 5% of the current Microsoft workforce was there in 2010 let alone 20 years ago.

I'm vaxxed, but isn't it interesting that tech workplaces that are all about personal body autonomy, respecting boundaries around self identification and personal choices are willing to fall back to a different more authoritarian set of assumptions before you can say "cognitive dissonance". I grok the "if it impacts others" argument - but as I'm vaxxed, does someone else's silly decision impact me?

Google's descent from incorruptible (or at least convincing themselves they were) to tarnished is almost balanced by MSFT's rise from the 9th circle of Hell to somewhere around the 4th.

Linux is great if you can manage it yourself and a bloody nightmare if you have to manage the configuration of a couple of hundred desktops, groups of which might have different software requirements and hardware configurations. MSFT came up with a way of standardizing the management of their desktops & servers and then flooded the market with MCSEs that had a rudimentary enough understanding of this process to be employed by non-tech firms to mostly get the job done.