wanorris (u/wanorris)

wanorris commented on Why I’m sitting at home crying on a Saturday afternoon violetblue.tumblr.com/pos... · Posted by u/rdl

hugh4 · 10 years ago

> Facebook outed the past name of a transgender person -- that's never ok, and it's a problem taken very seriously in the transgender community.

Why is that not okay?

I mean, if people want to change their names for whatever reason then that's fine, but that doesn't mean that everybody is obliged to pretend that your old name never existed.

If I were Hitler, living under an assumed name in Argentina, and somebody outed me as actually being Hitler, would that be okay? (Pick a non-Hitler but still criminal example if you prefer.)

wanorris · 10 years ago

Really? Trans people are criminals or even Hitler now? Ouch, that's pretty cold.

I have a lot of trans friends. Just hearing someone use their deadname (a common term in the community) can cause serious emotional pain. Having it broadcast to all their Facebook friends would absolutely be traumatic.

Look, if you don't like trans people or you think it's unreasonable to do them the "special favor" of calling them by their actual name, it's a free country and you are just as entitled to that point of view as you are to hold racist views.

I'm pretty sure that Facebook, on the other hand, would not consider it a positive to be widely known as transphobic. So if they are operating in a way that is hostile to trans people, the obvious options are for them to fix it or for trans people and trans allies to keep publicizing it until it completely blows up in Facebook's face. They would be smarter to just try to fix the problem.

wanorris commented on Why I’m sitting at home crying on a Saturday afternoon violetblue.tumblr.com/pos... · Posted by u/rdl

marincounty · 10 years ago

Well, in this case, Facebook indirectly gave Violet Blue a lot of new media exposure? I had no clue to her existence until now.

I don't like Facebook, but in this case, I'm glad FB didn't cave in and give Violet Blue her account back--just because 'She has a friend at FB'. I don't like inside special favors.

wanorris · 10 years ago

1. Violet Blue has been a reasonably widely published journalist for many years now. Her bylines include CNet and the SF Chronicle, and she's written or edited a couple of dozen books. She writes both about sexuality and technology, and sometimes about the ways in which they overlap.

2. Your reading comprehension has failed you. Several different people at Facebook offered to do her inside special favors and she chose to decline that because she doesn't like that kind of thing either.

wanorris commented on Why I’m sitting at home crying on a Saturday afternoon violetblue.tumblr.com/pos... · Posted by u/rdl

MichaelGG · 10 years ago

That link is strange. Person is using Facebook. They then voluntarily send Facebook their birth certificate and are bewildered and upset that Facebook used that info and corrected (read: edited) their profile? I really dislike Facebook but come on, you signed up for this. If you don't like Facebook's policies (and you shouldn't), then don't use it. What gives anyone the right to use someone else's service, then dictate how that service should work?

And even supposing we create some new privacy law, how would that even work? The right to identify with any name? That can't be signed away at all?

wanorris · 10 years ago

The birth certificate was not the only form of ID that person sent. Facebook outed the past name of a transgender person -- that's never ok, and it's a problem taken very seriously in the transgender community.

And yes, if you want, you could say that, well, trans people just shouldn't use Facebook, but given the position Facebook occupies in our society in practice, that's quite a statement.

Just as important, in cases like this, the damage has already been done -- potentially quite serious -- be the time the user might choose to abandon Facebook over the problem.

Forcing trans people to provide a bunch of ID to use the site, outing them to the world, and then saying whoops, sorry, but you can quit the site if you don't like it -- that's not ok.

And your basic attitude seems to be that trans people's own fault for being different from most people, so of course they should expect to see problems or to just stay off of common services if they don't like those problems. This attitude is part of the problem -- basic human empathy seems like it would require a more considerate attitude than that.

wanorris commented on Pricing updates for Raspberry Pi raspberrypi.org/archives/... · Posted by u/Ecio78

joezydeco · 14 years ago

We now have consumerism disguised as hacking, in my opinion.

iOS jailbreaking and Cyanogenmod, for example. A few clever people doing the hard the work and the rest of the users out there clamoring "WHERE IS MY FREE THING THAT I WANT NOW!".

Rpi will be the same thing. Someone resourceful and determined will get XBMC, or Android, or whatever running on this chip and the rest will dutifully follow the instructions and either a) have fun for a week and throw it in the drawer or b) live on the forums forever and bitch about what else isn't finished.

Even stuff like Arduino is on the fringe of this. We've taken a fairly simple microprocessor and wrapped it in IDEs and plug-and-play boards to the point where most users have learned nothing about embedded systems development, save for how to wire up an LED or stepper motor without frying your power supply.

wanorris · 14 years ago

I don't really get this complaint. The spectrum of technical investment in your own devices spans all the way from soldering your own boards and implementing custom hardware logic with FPGAs to hacking together your own firmware for hardware you purchased to installing an OS that gives you low level access to being able to run programs you wrote yourself to having to buy all the software from an app store to having a bread machine with 3 buttons on the top that you can press to tell it what to do.

Depending on what you want to do, any of these points on the spectrum can be perfectly valid. Even the bread machine can have you making bread out of scratch ingredients yourself using a recipe you control instead of just buying a loaf of bread at the store.

wanorris commented on What if Hollywood had to use tech like we have to watch movies? aaronklein.com/2012/01/ho... · Posted by u/aaronklein

bigiain · 14 years ago

Really? I can't think of anywhere I could go to buy DRMed music right now if I tried... iTMS watermarks music files, but they're not sold DRMed music files for years. Magnatune has _never_ sold DRMed files. ihearmusic.com - no drm. All the direct from artist music I've bought in the last few years - no drm. Soundcloud or artist "Pay what you want" deals - no drm. I can't recall having purchased any "big four" owned music directly online (as opposed to via someone like Apple), but at least in _my_ little world, DRM does appear to be dead...

wanorris · 14 years ago

Doesn't Spotify use DRM? Which is not to say that it's wrong for them to use DRM on music you didn't buy -- that's a different question.

But "only used for music you don't own" isn't the same the same thing as "dead".

wanorris commented on What I Learned From Opening a Bookstore open.salon.com/blog/jlsat... · Posted by u/fogus

jdpage · 14 years ago

I find this very sad. I do nearly all of my reading with dead tree books (I simply don't find e-readers nearly as satisfying), and if I want a book the first place I check is the used bookstore up the road. I tend to accumulate books faster than I have time to read them, and by the end of my first semester at college I had filled the woefully tiny (1 meter square) bookcase I brought with me and begun to overflow onto the windowsill and my desk.

Surely there are other people who are the same way?

wanorris · 14 years ago

I was that way for years. After accumulating a certain number of cubic meters of books (wish this was hyperbole, but it's not), having shelves to put them on so that they're accessible requires a pretty hardcore commitment in terms of the layout and decor of your home, and moving becomes something of a logistic nightmare.

Many thousands of titles on a nice portable device I can take with me anywhere? Yes, please.

wanorris commented on GoDaddy no longer on SOPA supporter list. godaddy.com/newscenter/re... · Posted by u/seltzered_

bryanh · 14 years ago

I find it interesting that there is no way for GoDaddy to get out of this one. They withdrew their support and... now what? I didn't think the mob was going to let them off the hook anyways, and it looks like they won't.

Not that I mind, I should have moved my domains a long time ago for dozens of different reasons besides the SOPA charade and won't use them again regardless of their stance on any legislation.

wanorris · 14 years ago

The way for them to get out of it was to not help write legislation that their customers would consider completely toxic. In general, this is rarely a wise business move.

wanorris commented on AT&T Drops T-Mobile USA Deal online.wsj.com/article/SB... · Posted by u/marklabedz

jerrya · 14 years ago

Other carriers, Leap Wireless, Cricket, ... seem to want Tmo's assets, and ... AT&T had offered to sell it to them. http://www.mobileburn.com/17966/news/att-reportedly-having-d...

But if AT&T doesn't buy Tmo, one of these might merge instead with Tmo or buy those assets directly.

At other times, there has been speculation (or even work done) on a Sprint / Tmo merger which would bring two weak players together but also allow for more direct competition between the GSM and CDMA world with an LTE path going forward.

wanorris · 14 years ago

They use completely different technologies with incompatible handsets and cell towers, so a Sprint/T-Mo merger is likely to be worth considerably less together than separate.

wanorris commented on AT&T Drops T-Mobile USA Deal online.wsj.com/article/SB... · Posted by u/marklabedz

maratd · 14 years ago

There is really no such thing as too big to fail. In the case of the "financial crisis", the few failing banks should have been allowed to fail. Some were and the sky did not fall. There were plenty of sound ones who were not involved in the nonsense. The same can be said for the automotive industry. The bailouts were nothing more than a transfer of wealth orchestrated by the government. From the middle class and the wealthy, to the incompetent clowns in the government and private industry who created the mess in the first place.

There is absolutely nothing worse for the people at large than the collusion between government and the private enterprise. It is very simply the definition of corruption. Read the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith for more love.

As for AT&T and T-Mobile, the government created the problem in the first place. By selling spectrum, they necessitate the existence of large massive companies in the space. They're the only ones who can afford the spectrum. If the government instead chose to keep the spectrum open, like say the way they do for WiFi, you would literally be able to start your own cellphone company in your garage ... and there would naturally be quite a bit more players in the space. They would still need to cooperate to make things work, but having more choices is the goal here.

If you look hard enough, behind every market problem and failure, you'll find a fat bureaucrat and fat "business man" working together to keep each other fat and the rest of us miserable.

wanorris · 14 years ago

> There is really no such thing as too big to fail.

Yes, actually there is. Too big to fail means that when an institution fails, its default will cause a cascade failure of other institutions relying on it -- and still other institutions relying on those -- including otherwise healthy ones whose only mistake was being integrated with the world economy.

This can ripple through the whole economy and work in tandem with the Paradox of Deleveraging to effectively cause a GDP death spiral. (See also: Great Depression.)

wanorris commented on Nerds and Male Privilege kotaku.com/5868595/nerds-... · Posted by u/seancron

einhverfr · 14 years ago

What's infuriating to me was that even when I was going through this (mid-1990's), I was aware of the statistics, that everyone who had studied gender and violence concluded that there was no significant difference in severity or frequency of domestic violence--- that men were more likely to "beat up" their partners but women were far more likely to assault with weapons. This isn't new data. The problem is that talking about gender privilege has taken place entirely in a discussion about sexism rather than a discussion about society in general.

When we talk about trying to get rid of "heterosexism" (I prefer the term heteronormative because it's purely descriptive but also a lot broader), I don't think that still leaves room at the table for heterosexual male victims of DV. We are still well outside a problem that is mainstream to talk about.

wanorris · 14 years ago

You're right -- the erasure of straight male domestic violence survivors is not an example of heterosexism, it's gender essentialism. It involves the assumption that being male means being stereotypically masculine, and being female means being stereotypically feminine. (Heterosexism occurs when domestic violence survivors in same-sex relationships are erased because the relationships don't follow the heteronormative male/female dynamic.)

> The problem is that talking about gender privilege has taken place entirely in a discussion about sexism rather than a discussion about society in general.

I agree. Because the first waves of gender studies were "women's studies", it made it much harder to discuss topics outside the basic men-oppress-women dynamic of sexism. And even as gay and lesbian studies became more prominent, there wasn't nearly as much work being done on gender roles as they apply to heterosexual males. Most of the work I've seen that's really applicable to the problem is being done either (to a lesser degree) in studying masculinity and femininity in the context of butch and femme lesbian roles, or from a trans* point of view. Some trans men, in particular, claim the right to be considered men and still be feminine or androgynous, and they can approach the topic without the stigma attached to either gay or straight cis men when they broach the topic outside of narrow venues like drag performances. Hopefully this will be the precursor to constructively reconsidering the entire topic and a general fight against that stigma.