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Comment Re:EFF says he should go (Score 1) 495

Yeah, it's not exactly hard to see why if you actually bother to look and listen to his victims, at both MIT and at FSF. I care about free software, and that's why I felt it necessary to sign the open letter and hope both RMS and all the board members of FSF that enable him resign. And until then, I see competent people are walking away from free software, not just the foundation. Because "free software" enables abusers like RMS.
Education

School Field Trips: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Smithsonian 24

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
theodp writes: On Thursday evening, Amazon is hosting a national field trip of sorts, inviting kids and teachers to take part in a Twitch livestream tour inside an Amazon robotics fulfillment center with the goal of inspiring students to learn about robotics and to "illustrate the importance of a computer science education." From the press release: "On the tour, students will see first-hand how teams of associates work alongside robotic technologies to fulfill customer orders. They will see where inventory items are stowed into the system, learn how robots bring storage pods to our associates to pick customer items, and finally, they'll see trucks being loaded with thousands of customer orders." Hey, "program, or be programmed," as they warn kids and parents over at Amazon-bankrolled Code.org!
Ruby

Developer Takes Down Ruby Library After He Finds Out ICE Was Using It (zdnet.com) 463

Posted by BeauHD from the moral-code dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: A software engineer pulled a personal project down after he found out that one of the companies using it had recently signed a contract with the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The engineer, Seth Vargo, cited the ICE's "inhumane treatment, denial of basic human rights, and detaining children in cages," as the reason for taking down his library. The project was called Chef Sugar, a Ruby library for simplifying work with Chef, a platform for configuration management. Varga developed and open-sourced the library while he worked at Chef, and the library was later integrated into Chef's source code.

Earlier this week, a Twitter user discovered that Chef was selling $95,000-worth of licenses through a government contractor to the ICE. The news didn't go well with Vargo, who, yesterday, September 19, took down the Chef Sugar library from both GitHub and RubyGems, the main Ruby package repository, in a sign of protest. "I have a moral and ethical obligation to prevent my source from being used for evil," Vargo wrote on the now-empty Chef Sugar GitHub repository. Vargo's actions didn't go unnoticed, and in a blog post published later in the day, Chef Software CEO Barry Crist said the incident impacted "production systems for a number of our customers." The Chef team fixed the issue by scouring some of the older Chef Sugar source code and re-uploading it on their own GitHub account. Following public criticism of the contract, Chef Software CEO Barry Crist responded by saying the company had been a long-time ICE collaborator for years, since the previous administration, long before ICE became the hated agency it is today.

"While I understand that many of you and many of our community members would prefer we had no business relationship with DHS-ICE, I have made a principled decision, with the support of the Chef executive team, to work with the institutions of our government, regardless of whether or not we personally agree with their various policies," Crist said.

"I want to be clear that this decision is not about contract value - it is about maintaining a consistent and fair business approach in these volatile times. I do not believe that it is appropriate, practical, or within our mission to examine specific government projects with the purpose of selecting which U.S. agencies we should or should not do business," Crist added.
IT

Ask Slashdot: What Kind of Keyboard Do You Use With Your Computer and Why? 363

Posted by msmash from the what's-your-story? dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Hello all. I am looking to buy a good mechanical keyboard for my everyday usage — programming and writing. I see some good offers on certain keyboards -- thanks to Black Friday deals. Just this week, Razer launched what looks like a good mechanical keyboard for people who are looking for a budget gear. One of the issues I have come across looking for a good keyboard is how most of them are designed for Windows OS by default. (I know you can customize keys, but.)

Slashdot has run keyboard discussion posts in the past -- the best laptop with best keyboard, greatest keyboard ever made, and quest to find a good keyboard , but I don't see any recent story on this. I was curious to know what kind of keyboard you use and why did you choose the one you have?
Bitcoin

Major League Baseball Is Going Crypto (engadget.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the trying-to-stay-relevant dept.
The blockchain gaming company Lucid Sight is partnering with Major League Baseball to launch MLB Crypto Baseball. Engadget's Daniel Roberts explains: Ethereum, launched in 2015, is a decentralized platform for "smart contracts," which are automated agreements for an exchange of value. It runs on a blockchain, the same peer-to-peer, immutable, public ledger technology that bitcoin runs on. The cryptocurrency of Ethereum is ether. Because of Ethereum's usefulness for smart contracts, it has become a proving ground for blockchain-based games, where users collect and trade one-of-a-kind items that no one can duplicate or steal. On a blockchain, each digital item (or contract) is verified and tamper-proof.

In MLB Crypto Baseball, users will pay in ether to buy digital avatars tied to specific moments in recent games. They can then sell the items, or in some cases, earn rewards and stickers. The game is a decentralized app, or "dApp." [...] To play the game at launch, users must own some amount of ether and must transfer it to a web plug-in called MetaMask. (CryptoKitties works the same way.) Lucid Sight hopes to have an easy mobile app ready shortly after launch. "We are not building this just for tech savvy people," says Lucid Sight cofounder Octavio Herrera. "That said, the game will roll out in stages. So yes, for version 1 you will need ether, you will need MetaMask, it will be a little bit difficult to get into. But I do think people will open up Coinbase accounts, buy some ether, and transfer it to MetaMask, in order to collect these things they'll enjoy so much."

Comment Re:Of course you should merge the guts if you can (Score 1) 156

by santiago (#56476787) Attached to: Users Don't Want iOS To Merge With MacOS, Apple Chief Tim Cook Says

macOS and iOS effectively are merged already. iOS was born a fork of macOS. Non-UI code is basically portable between the two without any changes, modulo a few frameworks that only exist on one or the other for hardware reasons, and the UI code is similar, but slightly different because one is a windowed system for big screens with pointers and one is a full-screen system for small touch screens. Source: I've been an iOS developer for seven years, and had Mac OS X experience prior.
Facebook

Facebook Donated To 46 of 55 Members On Committee That Will Question Zuckerberg (usatoday.com) 160

Posted by BeauHD from the go-figure dept.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be questioned about user privacy protections next week by members of the House and Senate committees, but as USA Today notes, many of these members were also "some of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from Facebook employees directly and the political action committee funded by employees." An anonymous reader shares the report: The congressional panel that got the most Facebook contributions is the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which announced Wednesday morning it would question Zuckerberg on April 11. Members of the committee, whose jurisdiction gives it regulatory power over Internet companies, received nearly $381,000 in contributions tied to Facebook since 2007, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The center is a non-partisan, non-profit group that compiles and analyzes disclosures made to the Federal Election Commission.

The second-highest total, $369,000, went to members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which announced later that it would have a joint hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee to question Zuckerberg on Tuesday. Judiciary Committee members have received $235,000 in Facebook contributions. On the House committee, Republicans got roughly twice as much as Democrats, counter to the broader trend in Facebook campaign gifts. Of the $7 million in contributions to all federal candidates tied to the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social network, Democrats got 65% to Republicans' 33%. Of the 55 members on the Energy and Commerce Committee this year, all but nine have received Facebook contributions in the past decade. The average Republican got $6,800, while the average Democrat got $6,750.

Comment Re:US robots are cheaper than African workers, but (Score 1) 90

Not if you take into account shipping to the US. If you want to sell in Africa, you'll produce in Africa, but if you want to sell in the US, you'll produce in the US. (And yes, you frequently need to ship the raw materials from somewhere, but producing at either the material source or the selling destination is cheaper than involving a third intermediary location for production.)

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