It warms my heart to see so many Slashdot friends from the old days commenting on this article. I first heard of Barlow and the EFF via Slashdot, back during the 1998 COPA protests. He helped open my eyes to the idea that the old laws for old technology were going to have unintended consequences when applied to new technology. He made me interested in activism, and his accomplishments still inspire me.

The internet has changed a lot since the late 90's, but the struggle between freedom and safety continues. May we never stop thinking about the consequences of going too far in either direction.

Ummm...no, actually I didn't forget that.

Question: how old are you? :). I suspect there are more people with my issues than you give me credit for, although my point continues to be: the $2k for a system76 computer is not apples-to-apples to the $2400 MBP, and that the high-dpi screen, along with the software care that has gone into making it usable and functional across a wide variety of applications and actual "apparent" resolutions is quite valuable.

I agree - most of these comparisons miss the fact that the Retina display is sooo much better for the vast majority of things that most Linux users do with computers. Text-mode consoles and development are infinitely easier with high-dpi text; I've literally more than doubled the amount of time I can use a computer in a day without developing a headache by using higher-quality displays, and Linux support for these is a crapshoot at best. They aren't even available from system76, and if you find a vendor that does have them on Linux-compatible hardware, you're setting yourself up for dealing with difficult refresh rates, visual glitches, and apps that don't scale accurately.

I agree that these new Macs are overpriced for what you get, but to compare with anything that doesn't have a 200+ dpi display is _not_ a fair comparison.

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

I go through recruiters. With X years of programming experience, they come to me. But HR are the ones who gave them the job requirements, usually.

I've been around long enough, though, that I can interpret what HR says into what's actually needed. 5 years of jQuery experience? How about 15 years of object-oriented javascript programming, that oughta be good. I can familiarize myself with a specific library as needed.

Reading through the job requirements from a recruiter is like being at the end of a game of telephone - you have to guess what the actual intent is, see if it's a job you really want, and if it's something you think you're qualified for.

They ought to know the basics of how a network is put together. Understand vocabulary like router, server, LAN, WAN, ethernet, packet. Not saying they're all going to be future sysadmins, but people who understand how data gets from one place to another definitely have an advantage in today's world.

How often does your PM (also the SM?) re-estimate the stories? I could understand doing that at the end of a sprint, but not in the middle of development, other than "How's that widget coming? I should be done tomorrow."

I work on one of several teams adding features to huge, complex software suite. I don't know how well Agile would work when creating a new application from scratch, but for adding features to an existing program it works really well. The methodology helps us keep a rein on our scope and has greatly improved our interoperability with the other teams. With the goal that a given feature has to be releasable by the end of sprint 4, we're releasing small, working features more often instead of massive, buggy features a couple times a year.

Yes. The recruiters who troll LinkedIn must just search for one specific skill and spam everyone who has it. I always get offers for jobs I'm either not qualified for or would never willingly do.

Last year I realized that I'd never changed my LinkedIn job profile info to "not interested" after starting my new job a year earlier. I'd been getting a lot of pings from recruiters, and I thought that might discourage them. Nope. Saying I wasn't interested made the recruiters even more interested in me!

Which would be great if any of them had a job better than my current one, but they never do. Everything is more boring work I'm less qualified for, for less pay.

Our local Rotary Club gives free dictionaries to all the 3rd graders every year. I checked, but it's not the OED Junior, it's a special edition "Dictionary & Gazetteer" compiled by The Dictionary Project (https://www.dictionaryproject.org/).

I think we're going to see a lot of disruption in enterprise software. A lot of companies are currently resting on past success, counting on the fact that it's really hard for companies to completely replace critical business software.

At the same time, innovations in development frameworks, team management, and a better understanding of UX are allowing upstarts to create better enterprise applications.

I'm guessing Salesforce might not be around 10 years from now.