I think you are deliberately missing the point of the last line. Of course free access to a wide variety of education is a good thing - no one is doubting that.
But gatekeeping recognition for that education behind a paywall ensures that we are judging students not solely on their ability, but also on the size of their wallet.
There is nothing "anti-human" about acknowledging that, in an educational era of plenty, our systems are still failing those without the means to pay.
But would they provide resistance? As nice as the idea of a fully-free distro is, I have the impression that free distros have a minuscule userbase compared to their non-free counterparts. For an already niche distro, this sounds like a significant handicap.
If someone came along and offered a hardware-compatibility repo or redistribution, would the Guix community work with them, or would the relationship be more distant, or even adversarial?
I'm personally very interested in the project, and have no desire to poison the pure core of Guix, but I need my hardware to work.
This is not what is being said - I will quote the parent commenter:
"Here it seems that an influence / behaviour change campaign could be waged relatively cheaply against a relatively small number of people, exist completely outside the normal rules for fact checking or veracity, and the majority of the population would have no idea about it."
This is talking about being "bubbled", and how different collections of people are seeing completely different things, and because both sides don't know what the other is looking at, they become alienated from each other.
Furthermore, there is another problem - while a singular lie can be countered, a thousand different lies told to a thousand different communities is much harder to defend against.
You don't need to fork the entire OS, though - just provide the relevant non-free packages on top of the regular OS.
Guix devs themselves have hinted that "adding impurity to a free OS is much easier than removing impurity from a non-free OS", so I suspect they may not be categorically opposed to the idea of non-free packages.
Essentially, all the benefits touted above apply here, but it is worth noting that Guix is a younger project. The author was originally a Nix dev, but found the DSL to be too awkward to use in practice, and opted to use Scheme through and through. Yes, Emacs bindings are available.
Also, Guix can now produce Dockerfiles, if that floats your boat:
Why was the title changed? The old title was not great, but at least informed us that a) the article was about PaX/Grsec, and b) was trying to present another side to the story.
HN has replaced this with the title of an obscure Linux project, and an awkward and unhelpful metaphor - capitalisation kept, of course, so readers can wrongly assume that "Ark" is the name some piece of software. Yes, it's original, pure and untouched. No, it's not helpful, it's just worse in every way.
I understand that editorialising titles is a bad thing. But if a human is taking the time to make a judgement call on what is or is not editorialised, why not take a few extra minutes to create a more neutral title?
While your point isn't invalid, having to contact my bank and work through the process of setting this up is another layer of hassle that I don't have to deal with on another, more flexible provider.
The issue isn't with the currency, but the lack of pre-paid plans and how that interacts with flat conversion fees.
It's also easy to overlook the euro issue when the majority of popular hosting providers charge in dollars - and I can already see people making this mistake in the thread.
Note that Scaleway bills in euros, not dollars, pounds, etc. They also have no pre-paid policy, so you cannot pay a lump sum upfront to get many months usage. This means that you could be hit by significant monthly fees if you are paying via another currency. But of course, different banks have different policies, and YMMV.
My €3/mo was (IIRC) more like €5/mo once conversion fees were taken into account. This €2 flat fee would not have been a problem had I been paying for 12 months at a time, but Scaleway do not offer this, in contrast to many other hosting providers on the market. After inquiring, I was told there was no current plan to change this policy.
Has there been any update to the status of GuileEmacs? I have read that it aims to be "the future of Emacs", but I rarely see mention of Guile from the Emacs community.
>so blatantly self-serving without being upfront about it
Is advertising actually self-serving if it isn't upfront about what it being advertised?
This statue is not like a traditional billboard emblazoned with a brand name - the only mention of SHE appears to be on the placard at the foot of the statue. Even then, the mention is ambiguous, as how many people will recognize 'SHE' as a stock tracker rather than just a word with emphasis?
I broadly agree with your sentiment, and I understand there is something discomforting about its origin. However I believe the statue would come across as far more tasteless if SHE were upfront with their branding.
This is a comment that seems to pop up quite a lot in discussions of the capitalist status-quo. (Often in a more confrontational manner, unfortunately.) I want to point out that having a solution is not a prerequisite to talking about the problem - if that is what you were implying - that is getting things backwards.
>They can't keep counterfeits off (I just recently got a 'samsung' battery that would only charge to 80%),
Are you sure that it is counterfeit? 80% is a common charging cutoff point for Li-ion batteries to minimise wear-and-tear. Usually it is enforced in software.
Excuse my ignorance, but couldn't a cell that had exceeded its write limit be cycled out for a spare, thus permanently storing a portion of your data in a way unaccessible to any further writes, random-filled or not?