The second to last paragraph states that the author gave a version of the document as a talk at a conference in 1997. So it appears that your memory is spot-on.
The tone of it ("recycling always sucked but now we're finally over it") is definitely different than what you'd read in a liberal paper, but the general facts of it are not much in dispute. I'm all about saving the environment, but recycling programs for years have been more about feeling green than being green.
Hopefully we don't all decide to keep going the way we have, except throw more in the dump, and instead focus more on the reduce/reuse/repair side of things and find ways to make the economics line up with the desired outcomes.
They took the wrong conclusion from the PopSci article, and have few other outside sources that don't link from sister sites.
If people don't read the sources cited, they'll come away with the wrong conclusion.
Case in point, PopSci argued economically valuable materials are heading to the dump instead of being used in other ways, not that recycling isn't economically viable.
Correct. It simply provides context. The article should be judged on its own merits, but it's important to know when a given source leans one way or another. Especially when the organization uses ostensibly general/objective words in its name (see: Center for Immigration Studies).
This is mostly anti-corporate, anti-monopolistic, anti-cloud, and anti-surveillance ideas. Windows, the development environments, etc is a monolithic platform that has very little in terms of customization due to it's structure and prevents competitive integrations. Think of all of the WMs for Linux, or any other modular component in Linux. Linux provides extensive competition, and Microsoft is seemingly attempting to drag people into an all inclusive "developer" network that prevents anyone from doing anything outside the walled garden of their systems in a meaningful way. LinkedIn accounts are going to become Office365 accounts by their own admission when it was acquired. Governments, small businesses, etc are moving to Office365.
Between LinkedIn, GitHub, Skype, and Xbox, their focus on developers is increasingly looking more like a "we want to see what developers do, how they spend their time, and data-mine them so we can tailor our experience better towards them, and assimilate them into our Borg hivemind". If you're fine with data-mining for these purposes, we're going to have to agree to disagree.
WSL is mostly just a means of getting more Linux users to convert to the Big Brother Borg by providing them useful tools so they don't have to install Cygwin.
For those asking why it's bad for a company to make money, you are missing the point. You can monetize GitHub (and it is), without selling over to another company. Even if GitHub is not profitable, that's just bad business management and pricing that needs to be fixed. You can monetize software while making a competitive platform. This goes to the MBAs approach of "blue ocean strategy" over a "red ocean strategy". People are afraid of competition, and want the comfort of knowing someone else has made those decisions for them. I do not, I want competition in technology otherwise we'll get to a stagnant technology development system. It's already theorized by WSJ analysts and defectors from Google, etc, that Silicon Valley is devoid of all ability to innovate, and they are investing and going elsewhere.
Microsoft went from selling a product (Windows), to selling a product (Windows 10) that serves mountains of advertisements. Xbox is guilty of this as well. Telemetry, despite people's claims of the privacy screen, has an upper bound on the amount you can opt-out of (some telemetry, even in Windows 10 Enterprise, is not opt-out).
From a security perspective, even if the data is silo'd off, this also provides many issues as individuals who are highly skilled in cybersecurity will end up needing access across services (especially incident responders), and they become targets for massive troves of data access and breaches.
Microsoft is still attacking Android device handset manufacturers with lawsuits (but not Google), for Android's uses of FAT file systems, etc. Microsoft is inherently still acting as patent troll against open source.
There are accusations of open source plagiarism (not certain the credibility):
GitHub already has issues with pseudo-accounts. You can create a profile that showcases forked repositories that you have not contributed anything to and throw up a neat avatar and it looks like you are a coding god. Not to a skilled developer who understands Git, but to an HR recruiting representative who knows very little in a small business it takes about 5 minutes to create the equivalent of an Instagram fake coding lifestyle.
And I'm really getting sick of the "Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are just as bad, get over it" whataboutisms. Yes they are. It's possible to oppose all of the above.
