December_Stars's comments

Also a trans person and I felt obligated to log in for the first time in over a year seeing your comment.

I've seen comments here that are a nicely packaged up version of 4chan (non lgbt boards), and I strongly suggest you leave here because I think the issue is inherently a lack of moderation and I don't anticipate that changing. I'll be banned for this comment most likely, probably because its "inflammatory" but blatant transphobia apparently isn't, but this is the first HN link I've seen since I quit this site a long time ago and I'm just perpetually disappointed by this website. Cutting out transphobic joints like this was one of the best things I've done for myself.

And @ anyone else who is reading this - there's nothing more injustice loves than inaction. Take it from a trans person who quit because of the bigotry they saw - please believe me, it's a lack of moderation. Speak up for what's right. If you think you have nothing to do with it - by continuing to let it happen, you are silently condoning its existence.

It's a lot more up to date than IceCat, which rarely has binary packages for distributions and hasn't seen an official binary release from the FSF since version 60.7.0 a few years ago.

Hi. I submitted this because I am an AP (American program that allows you to get college credit) CS Principles student that uses code.org for the class. I took the class after being told by the school we'd learn actual Java in the class (our school doesn't offer AP CS A which i know now is the actual Java class). However, I now realize that this isn't Java, or even JavaScript - it's just a nonexistent version of the JavaScript they think is too scary to teach us.

And how will we start the change to more open systems, except by starting in the start of the workforce chain in schools?

Imagine if schools starting teaching everyone Blender over Autodesk Maya, for instance. We create a workforce where most people will end up knowing Blender over Maya. At that point, there is a compelling reason for enterprises to switch, and we see a world in which Blender becomes dominant and where people will encounter it in their daily working lives.

There are practical reasons to do this - Blender is free so schools pay significantly less, it still has its usage in freelance/smaller companies, and it has a wealth of resources from its large community on learning it compared to Maya. Many free/open source software suites are similar in these aspects compared to their proprietary counterparts. This, alongside the ideological reasons, is enough to switch.

And the ideological part matters too! In the English classes I've taken they regularly teach individualism and critical thinking. Why then, should we take away that thinking aspect when it comes to software and just tell students "use whatever they use, don't question its ethics?"

We have to start somewhere, and there's no better place to do so than schools, where it still benefits the school and students overall to use free software over proprietary software.

Odd how no one has mentioned the addition of client side decorations. Personally it's a huge dealbreaker for me, I really dislike how they look. It's a shame, because the release and Xfce in general otherwise seems really good. Guess I'll stick to MATE for now.

First off, you are right in that Linux has major security issues and isn't perfect in it. However, outside of the comments that have already been posted in defense of linux's security, in the end, Linux's relative obscurity at the moment DOES effectively lead to less viruses. Compare that to Windows, who for all the security measures they implement ultimately lead to more because it is simply more targeted. While this isn't truly reliable security, at the moment it works better.

Either way, Windows compromises all of your data nonetheless. So not only are you actually getting viruses, your data's stolen anyways. Compare that to Linux, where viruses aren't as frequent and no ones siphoning your data. In the end, who's better off?

It is missing one crucial truth that dispels the thesis: The fact that a social network does not need to be owned by one entity for everyone on it to be able to interact with each other. See Federation[0], federated social networks like Mastodon[1], PeerTube[2], Pleroma: where you have an account on a Mastodon "instance" (computer), but you can talk to anyone speaking the same protocol, ActivityPub[3]. A Mastodon account can follow PeerTube accounts and Pleroma accounts. And no one controls all Mastodon servers, your Mastodon server is controlled by your server administrator. The author does not seem to understand the internet fundamentally. Email is an example of a federated communications protocol. [0]: https://fediverse.party/ [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/ [2]: https://joinpeertube.org/ [3]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

> It is not possible to imagine a video game produced by an open community, because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus.

A lot of modern videogames use art assets and define gameplay behavior with JSON. Stallman says proprietary data and art is allowed in free software.

There's also LibreWolf, which has a flatpak/AppImage and is more up to date with the latest Firefox - https://gitlab.com/librewolf-community/browser

Pretty sure this was the only available software, iirc it was some Vernier related thing.

There's a few but those are quite prominent. Most notably I remember when I took Physics 1 we used some very specific software which name I do not remember but it was proprietary and only on Windows. Other than that almost every class can be done entirely with free software, at least in HS.

Speaking as a student whose school primarily uses Google's suite (classroom, meet, etc..) but still has a few older solutions, some of which are free software, I can say that there's a common argument that schools should focus on pragmatism and working with what they have - the age-old argument that free software still is not accessible or easy to use. I don't beleive that this is still an issue.

Out of my current teachers and teachers I've had in the past, almost all of them were vocal about not liking Classroom or just didn't use it. It is basically a small layer on top of Google Drive & Meet that does not integrate anything nearly well enough. Most of my teachers seem to prefer Canvas, a free software solution to this, because it has more features. My teachers primarily cited the integrated quiz/test system as its biggest draw when I asked.

Classroom is also is very difficult for less-privileged students to use - speaking as someone who used to rely on a 4 GB of RAM netbook with a Pentium and was still using it for part of this quarantine, even with Linux things really get slow. This could primarily be attributed to relying on a lot of Google tabs at once (for Drive, forms for quizzes, etc) while Canvas I've never had to open more than a few maximum. My only other option is to buy a Chromebook and while my school can afford Chromebooks for every student, many students are relying on just using what they have.

With that, I don't think that the proprietary software really has all too much of an advantage in terms of pragmatism (which imo is even more important in schools). I don't think the usual arguments against adoption of free software really seem to hold up, though I assume that cost might be an issue that I'm not aware of seeing my district is rather rich.

I'd love to hear more teachers opinions on this. Hopefully this gave you an idea of how education tech is from a student user's endpoint.

If our economy damns us if we do have a baby but damns us if we don't maybe the economy is the issue, not us.

Coming from a household where people took this step count goal religiously, it genuinely has no impact on your health. Obviously more steps is better but 10k is just an arbitrary number thats easy to market.

Yes, their products do. Run FF through mitmproxy and look at all of Mozilla's privacy policies and tell me they're not collecting far more data than they should be, at least by default cause 90℅ of users aren't gonna disable most of it. I'm solidly convinced Mozilla is just Google's astroturf.