drek

The author forgot to mention mouse gestures. The reason I still use Opera over Chrome is because of its excellent support for mouse gestures (the various mouse gesture extensions just aren't that responsive and smooth as Opera's native ones are). To switch tabs I just hold the right mouse button and turn the scroll wheel. To open up a new tab I hold the right mouse button and move the mouse a few pixels down, it doesn't even have to be that precise. For moving back and forward in browser history, I do right button + left mouse button and left mouse button + right mouse button respectively. I wish OS's had native support for mouse gestures system-wide, I think they're widely under-utilized.

Does anyone else thing that the documentation for ember.js is really lacking? Some of the classes it has aren't even documented (ContollerMixin comes to mind) and others are lacking in the documentation depratment. Also, I don't seem to be able to find a full listing of instance methods for a class, I have to climb up the inheritance tree in the docs class by class.

Umm yeah that's a 4k line C file?

Looks cool, but what's up with the source being just one 4k line C file?

Yeah, that's very witty, congrats.

If we were in the steel industry, the right thing to do would be to see that the military doesn't get steel. But we're not, we're mostly programmers here, so I'm saying we should exercise caution and be aware of how the stuff that we make gets used.

The second is the most sensible option. I'm not saying people should stop using Linux, I'm just saying that programmers should be more aware of the politics of their work (professional work is almost never apolitical) and strive to actually use their skills and talent to make the world a better place.

There's also a big difference between buying some gum and having the tax you paid on it go to the military vs. actively developing military drones. I'd say that contributing to Linux would fall somewhere in between these two.

No, I pay EU taxes (which also go to a lot of amoral causes) but I don't have a choice in the matter, really.

Sort of, but the main difference is to what extent are you supporting killing and suffering and whether you have a choice.

The question of social responsibility of programmers (and other professionals) is not an easy one, and I think every programmer should think hard and often about the politics of their work.

Many programmers often dismiss such questions by saying that code in itself isn't moral or amoral, but what is done with it. But when you think more about it, it's just an easy excuse so that they can get on with their lives with a clear conscience.

Yeah, military drones using Linux, what a big win. The fact that the military uses Linux is a big negative for Linux in my eyes. If you support Linux, you're indirectly supporting the U.S. military and by extension murder, aggression and terrorism.

I wish more software licenses had a clause forbidding military use of the code.

Awesome! Very clear and well-written reference.

I wish someone would make a reference like this for remote branches and repos, I always keep forgetting commands for setting upstream branches, checking out remote branches and having them tracked, etc.

Is there anything in the article that leads you to believe he meant important in that sense? Cause I don't see it. He constantly puts important in quotation marks and really doesn't specify what he means by important. Take this paragraph:

For instance, GPU hardware was developed to run first-person shooters with increasingly fancier graphics. Today, it powers some of the largest high-performance computing clusters where “important” science is done.

Would you say that science aided by high-performance computing is automatically important in a cultural sense? What if that science is actually military research? Because I see developing weapons and other means of violence to be detrimental to civilization.

The article is built on the distinction between unimporant and important problems and yet it goes out of its way to avoid stating his opinion on what makes a problem important. He keeps putting the words important and unimportant in quotes.

Something may be important to someone but completely unimportant to someone else. Importance is subjective, so there's no such thing as important and unimportant problems. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill "everything is relative" statement (which are usually not very constructive) but I think that this is pertinent here, because nothing is important on its own, but it may be important to a person or a group of people, so talking about the importance of things without taking into account who they're important to doesn't make much sense.