Of course, for someone so well-known, it's easy just to look it up; I was just using that name as an example. But in general, particles in names like "van", "von", "de", etc. might be properly capitalized one way or the other, and it can be impossible to tell which without a close understanding of the author's nationality (which in turn can very difficult to determine).
How is that his biggest problem? He has no impulse control, or no desire for it; he lies incessantly to further his interests; he's a horrible manager; etc.
He lies incessantly because he is a nerd with fantastical ideas and enormous resources. But regular folks won't see this because they put their regular self in his shoes to decide what his motivations must be.
If he used a proper PR team, they would filter most of this out, and shape his communications into a form meant for regular people.
The things you mention may be the problems he thinks he has, but none of them are a problem from our point of view. From our perspective, his problem is that he doesn't hide out in the server closet like a nerdy engineer should.
You're looking at it backwards. White people get an automatic advantage because they're white. Any advantages given to minorities are an attempt to balance the game.
> White people get an automatic advantage because they're white.
By whom? By other white people? Homophily is a real phenomenon in every ethnicity.
But if you're saying that white people get advantages by non-white people, then it's a cultural issue of those non-white people who, for some reason, have internalized racism (look up inferiority syndrome).
‘The future of mankind’ only rests on life beyond earth if everybody gives up on keeping earth livable. The biggest threat to humanity is humanity, and a colony on the moon or Mars isn’t going to fix that problem.
Not quite correct. It's useful to have some remote parts of humanity which could be relatively safe when other parts are busy making threats to each other. Earth still has some remote places - ask any doomsday prepper - but Moon and Mars will certainly add to the list.
So your assumption is everyone going to Moon or Mars is a saint. And if so - who set the standard? Pope? President? And then what do we do if they become not-so-saint? Drag them back to Earth?
The whole idea that some sort of better type humans will travel to another planet is frankly ridiculous. We don't learn from our own mistakes - see WW1, WW2, current state of affairs. If anything, we would most likely destroy Mars and Moon much faster than how we wronged Planet Earth.
There are plenty of things that could destroy all human life on Earth and not destroy all human life on all planets.
Also the argument taken to an extreme is straightforward. We know that massive catastrophes have caused mass extinctions that wiped out most life on Earth. This is clearly visible in the fossil record. Ergo, one of these is certain to happen again. In the extremely long term, the Sun will get hot enough to kill all life on Earth in a couple hundred million years. So Humankind is doomed if we do stay on just Earth for the very long term.
There's also the side argument that "right now" appears very close to making it possible. If Starship and the attempt at reusable rockets were to disappear there's nothing guaranteeing the progress of space technology. It's easy to see a future where we do some more footprints on the Moon and maybe later some footprints on Mars, but no permanent off-earth colony is ever established. Eventually we give up on creating such bases because they're deemed too expensive and "robots do it better" as our robotic technology gets better and better. The technology of how to do reusable vehicles is eventually forgotten over several generations and then we never leave Earth again. (Eventually resulting in our destruction.) This is a "why not now?" argument.
If earth becomes unlivable, then by definition it can no longer support colonies.
The path to making colonies on Mars or the moon self sustaining is not even clear at this point. Starting with the simplest of fundamentals - air, water, food and protection from cosmic radiation. The prospect of growing a technical civilisation on either body, that can develop further without support from Earth is remote.
By contrast, to make earth unlivable basically means nuclear war. Climate change won't do it, biological pandemics won't do it, nor will fossil fuel exhaustion or any other localised event.
On the worst day possible on earth (global radiation aside) its still a million times better to live on than anywhere else.
In terms of global radiation making the world uninhabitable even then tiny, non-sustaining pockets of humanity would survive. At least until their life-support systems failed.
Lastly, I wonder at the need for "the future of mankind" as a goal at all.
If all the water on mars were melted, it would cover the planet in 100ft of water [1]. With the safe assumption of any kind of water recycling, and indoor habitats, there's plenty of water on mars, which also means there's plenty of oxygen on mars (along with the 95% CO2). The atmosphere is 3% nitrogen, and 1.6% argon, which means there's plenty of air on mars. You don't have to fill the sky with air, just the buildings.
That’s all true, but I still think it is a reasonable goal. Having the technology to be self sustaining in another world has the ‘side-effect’ of letting us be self-sustaining on earth… reducing the risks human pose to ourselves.
That said, ‘colonizing’ the artic or shallow ocean floor probably accomplishes most of the benefit for a subset of the cost and risk.
The only real benefit I see to space over the attic is that off worlding mining and production could be a benefit in itself.
It really seems like on a technological level, sustainability on earth is roughly solved even with modern comfort. What remains of the problem and prevents us from implementing it is more social and political than anything...
An off planet colony would likely face the same issues of sustainability as soon as different factions start competing for resources.
On one side I can see that rich countries are perfectly happy to have offloaded their polluting industries to developing countries. On the other, it's also very obvious that we mostly end up stacking things instead of replacing them: we've never consumed as much coal as now, even with all the alternative sources of energy available. We simply do more and are more inefficient.
See also ‘domain tasting’ (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting), where registrars would temporarily register non-existent domains when someone attempted to load them, showing a ‘for sale’ page to skim extra money off registrations.
Did GoDaddy do this, too? I only remember Network Solutions.
Incidentally, I was paranoid about this kind of front-running for years before I knew it had actually happened, and would just use whois from the terminal when searching for domain availability.
godaddy 100% did it. i remember looking for a domain, taking a day to debate, they reporteded it registered and they 10x'd the domain price on me. When I reached out to ICANN about such a bs move they just came back with "GoDaddy isnt doing anything wrong." This was 10-15 years ago.
That was the last time i registered anything with GoDaddy
Does any money change hands for this kind of front-running? If so, I think there's a good opportunity to either cost them a ton of money or drain whatever budget they allocate to this practice by baiting out registrations.
Originally it did, and some companies still tried the buy-from-under-and-jack-up-the-price thing on what could be valuable domains. Back then I checked the availability of a four-character (letter-letter-number-number) domain and two days later found it taken by “someone” using the same registrar I check it was free on and there was a holding page there offering it for sale at a not-insignificant cost multiplier. Luckily I had other options and just took one of those (from a different registrar). I also checked the availability of other domains on the original registrar, and encouraged others to also. We probably didn't cause enough financial disruption for someone to notice, but I liked the petty revenge anyway!
Later the 5-day grace period was added by ICANN to deal with accidental registrations, a full refund would be given if the domain was released in that time. Supposedly to protect end users against mistakes like typos and other errors, though I'm not sure why that would need five full days. This made “domain tasting” an open season and a great many registrars would do it, even registering a few times to extend the five days. Some actually did it as an advantage for the end user: they were not going to get snipped by waiting a few days and the registrar didn't jack up the price. But many were a bit more nefarious.
They later added a small processing fee to the refunds in the grace period after the first few domains per account per period (or similar) which vastly reduced this happening, so it is now pretty much a historic problem.
If I remember correctly (probably from stories on HN a few years ago), GoDaddy had the ability to "taste" the domains—ie, pay for them, hold them for a few days, then get a full refund if you didn't end up buying through them. I don't recall whether this was something special for large registrars like GoDaddy.
I'm sure tasting still happens on dropped domains, though; registrars have data on search interest and can find dropped domains that are likely to be profitable even taking transaction fees into account.
It's unfair that registrars can abuse their position to pick up valuable dropped domains. But somebody was going to do it in the moment after they drop if not them. That feels like a different and less serious problem.
Years ago I wrote a script that would release and renew a DSL line (to get random IPs) while spamming several registrars with bogus domain availability lookups, and found that something like 10% of the available domains were registered within 2 hours of looking them up, and I spammed something like 200,000 bogus domains in one night.
My problem with code search is that when I’m searching I’ll randomly get dumped to github.com/search with the search blanked, and anything I put in the search box at that URL is ignored. I have to go back in my history until I’m in the normal GitHub UI again. My search has also been discarded there, but at least I can interact with it.
'After April 2021, when the key was leaked to the corporate environment in the crash dump, the Storm-0558 actor was able to successfully compromise a Microsoft engineer’s corporate account. This account had access to the debugging environment containing the crash dump which incorrectly contained the key.'
So either the attacker was already in the network and happened to find the dump while doing some kind of scanning that wasn't detected, or they knew to go after this specific person's account.
Or they knew/discovered that there was a repository of crash dumps - likely a widely known piece of information - and just grabbed as much as they could. Nothing in the write-up indicates any connection between the compromised engineer and this particular crash dump, other than they had access.
so, he was forced out of mozilla for his private constitutionally protected political activity.
how exactly is that evidence that he believes "people don't have a right to exist?"
it seems like some people think people with his beliefs don't have a right to exist. maybe they are just projecting the hate in their own hearts onto their enemies/victims?
It's actually not protected. In fact, only very few states even have laws that protect political activity from being used for workplace terminations. And even states like NY and California make a vague exception for "political activity that interferes with the functioning of the business."
The only ones constitutionally protected are government employees since the government cannot fire someone for 1st amendment speech (but companies can because the 1st amendment does not apply to private entities)
Now you’re reacting to hyperbole with more hyperbole.
It’s more like OP just wants to use rhetoric to have you ignore and silence Brendan Eich. Which I still think is going too far, even if I disagree with his (apparent) private political views.
