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Brendan Eich: people are not always as they seem
Obviously this is post is all very subjective and opinionated, but this is how I generally feel…
For a long time, I’ve held a high level of respect for people like Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), for Richard Stallman (GNU) and generally the people who have done amazing things without having to pile patents or copyright on them and have worked with open source heavily, etc.
Along with advocating open source and not being evil, I generally feel they’re good with things like human equality and I like to feel that they think “open source” when it comes to equality.
Today, I heard about Brendan Eich, the man who invented Javascript - something I use on a daily basis and something which is forms key part of the work I do and the services I use.
A close friend of mine mentioned him. I said I didn’t recognise the name and he said the guy invented Javascript. Instantly I’m thinking “wow! how didn’t I know about him?” and thinking the world of the guy who has changed a LOT about how my life works. Problem is that this guy isn’t quite so lovely and nice and, specifically, he doesn’t really seem to be into equality. He’s strongly against same-sex marriage.
This surprises me. The guy works at (& is the Chief Technology officer of) Mozilla - an amazing company which works with a massive variety of people from all over the world. Their community is incredibly accepting and inviting of anyone who wishes to be a part of it. How can he fit into that?
Three years ago, California was debating Proposition 8. This was there to remove the right of gay or lesbian couples from getting married. Brendan Eich donated $1,000 in favour of passing Proposition 8. Brendan Eich is no longer one of the people I look at fondly as a “nice open sourcey guy”. (See: http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/donation/8930/)
So the friend who told me about this wrote a letter about it a while back. He couldn’t summon the courage to send it, but showed me today and gave me permission to publish it. I think it’s quite a powerful read and maybe might help some people see why equality is important from the personal feelings of someone it is important to.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I’m a human. I’m a boy. And I’m gay. I was born nearly 15 years ago in a civilized country and I’m a future webmaker. Since I was born, I always had the illusion that my future would be bright and that people would support me to become what I want to be. I’ve been growing up in a nice country and I have lots of friends who like me, not because I’m like everyone else but because I’m just myself. Diversity has always been a huge and important part in my life.
Seeing the discussions against same-sex marriages is painful. Every time I see them, I feel like someone is piercing a needle right through my heart. Years ago, I promised myself to always respect other people and treat them in a way in which I want to be treated too. But unfortunately, I’ve learned about what the world really is like and that my life will be quite hard.
Politicians already put obstacles in my way. I’m only 14 and I want to have a normal like just like everybody else. It was not my choice to be what I am right now, I just want to live in a world where I have the same rights as other people do. Although people say that marriage is only a minor thing, I strongly disagree and to be honest, it is a really personal thing that currently makes me feel misunderstood, disgusted and unwelcome.
Mozilla is a really huge community. Diversity plays a huge role. There are black people, white people, men, women, kids, Africans, Asians, Europeans, Muslims, Christians, straight and gay people. If you’re against one of these groups, you’re automatically against the whole community. Luckily, there’s no discrimination going on. All members are respecting each other, which is a very good thing. In a community, you have to respect everyone, even their opinions. But it’s important to have a border between opinions and discrimination, and in my opinion, this border has been crossed.
In a community, we need to be strong. We need to respect each other’s rights and we should never forget how far we’ve come by working in a team. Some comments highly disappointed me. In fact, sometimes, people don’t have a real reason to discriminate someone or something in general, because they don’t have their own opinions. It has happened very often in my life. At school, outside, yes, even some of my friends are discriminating to a point.
Having your own opinion is important. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons why Mozilla and many other organizations are so successful. We promote choice. We don’t do things like the others do, we do it in a way in which we think about other people, because doing something without keeping other people in your mind would be egoistic.
Mozilla is definitely one of the best communities ever. The members are very accepting, understanding and whenever I talk to them, I feel like I’m wrapped in a warm blanket made of welcomeness, joy and pride.
When I’m older, I want to look back and be satisfied about my life, my achievements. I’ve set myself some personal goals that I want to reach by the end of my life:
I’m determined to move to another country when I’m older, to find a partner and to travel around the world, and I’m determined to marry somebody I love. Yes. There are definitely politicians who can take away my rights to marry someone.
But they can not take away my pride.
Faithfully Yours,
Someone who wants to be like you
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The leech of Europe
What on earth is the point? We don’t use the same currency, we don’t really get involved with them much, we have feuds with half the countries and we’re not even physically linked! (Well, other than the channel tunnel, anyway. Not naturally.)
N.B.:- this is another one of those “ideas” posts which aren’t in any way sourced any are based only upon my general impression of things. AKA:- likely to be rather naïve, unrealistic and just plain wrong!
Apparently the big reason for us being in the EU was (note “was”, not “is”) that it was apparently far easier to do stock market trading if we were all part of one “thing”. Now, of course, it’s not quite like that any more. Today, truly international trade is commonplace and really, it’s pretty easy. Money, shares, etc. are all done digitally these days and it’s not a big deal to do trade across to the other side of the world.
Additionally, other than the odd couple of countries which are doing fine, the majority of Europe are crashing and dying. Their economies are collapsing and the countries who aren’t doing too badly (Germany and us) are pumping huge, crazy, ridiculous amounts of money into them, trying to restabilise them. Unfortunately, they’re run by complete idiots who then go and bankrupt them again almost immediately.
My opinion? Well, I think we should just ditch them. We aren’t going to lose our trading links - they can be redone in a matter of days (very, very big assumption, but I’m pretty sure). We finally won’t be connected in any way with the French (hehe. I don’t actually mind them too much, but love the stereotypes). Our economy (I think) would probably be more stable if we haven’t got “the leech of Europe” on us all the time.
Another one of my 0.02 USDs. As per usual, please put your thoughts over to me via the below comments box, Twitter, email or submit/ask.
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Mac OS Spaces… Y U SO SHIT ON MULTISCREEN!?!
Title explains all, methinks.
I love Spaces on Mac OS. Really, really love, but I have one little (but actually quite significant) hangup about them. When you’ve got more than one screen connected, the way they work is just downright crap.
For a brief explanation to anyone who doesn’t have a Mac/doesn’t use Mac OS, this is what spaces are: (Hopefully, I haven’t disclosed too much from this screenie…)
When you connect another monitor, the behaviour I would expect is something along these lines:-
- You’ve shown a list of screens and a list of spaces. You can drag any space to a screen.
- You can drag one space to multiple monitors.
- Perhaps drag a space across multiple displays at once to make it a double/triple/whatever width space.
This is not the behaviour I receive. This irritates me.
The behaviour which I do receive:-
- Spaces are double/triple/whatever width.
- Spaces move on all monitors if changed on one.
- If app is in full screen, it displays only on the primary monitor and the rest of the monitors show the lovely background of Mission Control, effectively making paperweights out of my two £1000 Thunderbolt Displays. (The two displays I wish I had, not the ones I do have… I don’t actually have any. :( If you feel like buying me one or two, please go ahead… :P)
It is wrong at the moment. Fix it please, Apple. There are very, very few design mistakes in Mac OS, but this is definitely one of them. Fix it.
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So, uh. What are you meant to do with these web log things again?
Turns out you’re meant to post to these things more than once per year. And no, sharing stuff from other people without even changing anything does not count!
My friend Rhys and I were discussing the world’s economy today. I summarise my general thoughts below:- (please pardon my highly opinionated views on things…)
- Greece is actually still a country? Seriously though, their PM is a bit of a joke.
- I think China’s economy is entirely fake and that it will one day collapse in a way reminiscent of the dot-com bubble. (I may be entirely wrong here, feel free to submit and make corrections.)
- The US are going to go back into recession again, right? (Probably along with the rest of us.)
- Since the US relies a lot on China for all their goods and China rely on the US to buy all their goods… when (& if) the US goes into recession, I guess China’s bubble will pop then, right?
- The EU is not looking all that great currently either. Italy & Spain are teetering over the edge of what happened to Greece and France isn’t doing all that well either. The UK are okaaay, but not great and we are slowly falling. If Greece defaults, presumably they’ll pull Italy and Spain with them, with a lot of the rest not far behind.
- Africa is clearly already, to put it in a word, fucked. So oh well. The Russians don’t appear to do all that much though, so I guess they’re relatively stable economically…?
So I’ve got this plan. (All based around my most probably wrong thoughts.)
Since the US and China are going to go into the pits, most (if not all, eventually) of the EU will go with them and Africa is already there, maybe the UK should cut all its ties, wait for everyone to fail, then restart the British Empire.
I’m not patriotic or anything, I just think it might be funny. It’d also be nice to be able to travel to or live in places like America without having to have tonnes of silly rules, etc.
It’d also be an opportunity to manage the world globally. Personally, I’d implement the following:-
- All education is free. No matter what level it is, nursery through Ph.D. A human right.
- Free, uncensored and unrestricted internet access for all. Another human right.
- Healthcare is free. For everyone, no matter what they need. Added to the list of human rights.
- The entire world would be democracy based. People may not like this initially, but it will be forced upon everybody nonetheless. It will then be split into continents, then countries, then regions, then towns/cities.
- With this, all media would be strictly free and entirely uncontrolled by the government. (Obviously you do need some guidelines for making sure that appropriate things are seen by appropriate ages, but that’d be done in a sensible way.)
- All government jobs in the entire hierarchy would be vacated, to be re-elected fairly and democratically for every level.
But then you get to the abuse of the system, etc… which is where it starts to get difficult. I was thinking about how to deal with unemployment. Thoughts:-
- Initially, I reckoned they were provided, not with money, but with the physical things which they require, but people could still be lazy if they really wanted to.
- Maybe all these things would be provided for six months, then cut off. But what if the person genuinely couldn’t get a job? & what if they just got a job for a day, then became unemployed again?
- The solution I worked out eventually was that since the government is effectively running all these human rights based things, they could just employ everyone that can’t find a job. Maybe this wouldn’t work. I like to think it would.
So that’s some of the things I was thinking about on the ten minute walk I have from the college bus to home. Probably almost all utter bollocks, but I do try my best.
If you feel you just wasted half your life reading my utter bollocks, there is a blog about economics which my friend writes which I, so far, have found to be very good reading, the 60 Second Economist.
Sorry for probably wasting a fair bit of your time. xx
