Submitter expressed surprise that trouble like this type described is actually rare. This shouldn't be since most open source programmers are proud of their work and have little interest in defacing it. Although most often our projects are not in themselves paying us, the reputation enhancements we get often gets us more and better work opportunities so it sorta evens out over the life of one's career. And its nice to have some projects where I get to make all the calls about what features are added, how fast things need to be done, etc. For me at least its a way to keep sane sometimes and I suspect this is true for many others. Most programmers are just working on corporate grunt jobs, often having limited say in projects and deadlines. So often these open source projects are labors of love. I'd also add that this kind of messing around is not appreciated by the vast majority of other programmers. I recall once a programmer I knew online didn't like the way another project integrated with his code and he wrote a patch to explicitly disallow his library to run in a project that also loaded that other code. The result was nearly universal shunning and a number of his projects ended up forked by others who relied on them but no longer trusted his judgement.

You make very good points here. I was thinking similar since I know Google tosses into Chrome all sorts of things that are most beneficial to their websites and services. I mean that's why they made Chrome. Chrome was a Trojan horse to give Google control over the evolution of web standards so they could;d bend that in a direction most beneficial to themselves.

These are all great points. Here in the USA we lack a strong social safety net, we lack healthcare as a right, and we have a long, historic racism due to hundreds of years of slavery and abuse of indigenous peoples. We have a militarized police force that is completely untrusted by significant populations. We have social problems that don't exist in some countries and its hard for me to believe (well, as a liberal it is) that some of those differences are not as or more reasons why we have more crime issues.

That said given that fact that suicide is the #1 gun related cause of death in the USA and countries like Japan that have crazy hard core gun control have more suicide by population count tells me there's a lot of complexity and nuance here. It's hard to compare since crime gathering statistics vary a lot country to country. Yes other countries that ban guns have less gun crime; but they are not Star Trek style utopians with no crime at all. Wasn't there just a mass killing style attack in the EU where the person was using a bow?

One thing for sure, banning ARs will have a statistically insignificant impact on gun crime. When the US banned ARs for 10 years they did three studies and that was the finding (and the commission was run by a Democrat that really really wanted to find proof that the AR ban was a great idea). Both Australia and Canada did similar studies after banning ARs and both countries had the same conclusion. Those studies are out there in the public domain for anyone to read.

My personal use is self and family defense. However I don't feel I really need to justify it. I personally don't drink alcohol, I think it's unhealthy and dangerous, but I don't think it should be banned since lots of people just enjoy drinking and the vast majority do so without causing trouble. Nobody needs a drink, they just enjoy doing so for personal reasons. Of course I believe like most drinkers that access should have some limits, like you need to be an adult to buy it and anyone that commits a crime using it should be seriously punished. Most gun owners believe similar about firearms.

There's essentially no functional or lethality different between an AR pattern semi automatic rifle and 'classic' styled rifles (wood stock, shoulder butted) like you see in old 50s Westerns. You can get a rifle that fires the same ammo in either style. Many people like the AR pattern because it's a modular gun system that allows you to customize. For example you can change the trigger to one that feels better to you, or change the barrel to one with a different rifling twist or made of different material so it can be lighter or more rugged. Gun control proponents have seized on the visual similarity between civilian AR rifles and the type of fully automatic ones available to the military to brand them 'military weapons' because they know that people who've never handled such a firearm are more likely to be convinced of the propaganda due to the superficial similarities. There's nothing about the AR pattern rifle that makes it more suitable for crime. In fact if you check the stats the vast amount of gun crime in the US are related to handguns. Of the 15K gun homicides in the USA the FBI says about 500 were with what are classified as 'long guns' (this includes shotguns, classic rifles and AR pattern rifles). I'm sad for any gun death but less than 500 deaths across the country is hardly an epidemic. This usage of medical terminology by gun control proponents is just a new tactic they are using. Its just like how the anti abortion folks are always trying to pass laws 'for the health and safety of women', stuff like requiring an abortion clinic to be within a certain number of feet of a hospital when the doctor performing the abortion has admitting privileges. To people with no clue it sounds like a fair safety measure but in reality it ends up closing 90% of the abortion clinics in the State.

Ultimately you could destroy every single AR pattern rifle in the USA and it wouldn't have a statistically significant impact on gun crime. That's why most of the 'AR Ban' laws are trojan horses for laws with significantly more sweep.

I've lived in failed and failing countries and 'just let me be' isn't going to work out. You spend a lot of time coping with local thugs and trying to figure out how to keep what you already have.

I don't see how the home setups are worse than the crappy, cramped setups I had at every programming job in NYC. This seem suspicious to me. There's a total push to get people back to the office, even against their will and self interest.

I bet the part where gender gets all mixed up is actually sorta interesting. Too bad people thought that needed fixing. I mean its sorta like our era.

Every email system I ever used has done what you're asking for. So if you deleted all your social media accounts and simply communicated through email, you'd have all that uninterrupted time, plus you'd probably not miss any significant news or friends' activities.

Perl has had great support for unicode for many years. Not familiar with Slashdot code so can't comment on that

I could sort of understand writing a news story about non-peer reviewed work if urgency is needed to get evidence, any evidence out there. But this? What's the urgency? Why can't we wait for "peer review?" Rutger Bregman is right. Our news system has to stop reporting stuff just because it's "edgy." Wait for the peer review! Especially when one way or the other, it's not going to affect how we'll deal with the situation.

Dang, I was just about to write what you wrote. So I'll just second this sentiment.

I've followed this YouTuber for many years, and I believe his reporting to be in good faith. Perhaps he's wrong, but until a final determination is made, it's at least a theory worth keeping in mind.

One of my favorite You-tube channels claims to have proof that this was, in fact, what happened.

Here's the link:

https://youtu.be/bpQFCcSI0pU

I might be wrong, but aren't Mt. Sinai and the UC San Francisco hospitals public hospitals? I know they're both teaching hospitals.
Were the hospitals that fired those people public or private? Might that account for the difference in policies?