Re: BARRIER - json, thin, eventmachine - do not install on windows

On Monday, May 23, 2011 05:35:26 AM Ilias Lazaridis wrote:
> On 23 目澵鬪 02:27, Johnny Morrice <[e-mail]> wrote:
> [...] - (off topic, off line, personal)
> 
> Mr. Morrice.
> 
> I hope you are aware that you have already crossed moral and legal
> lines.

Unlikely.

Moral -- When you ask a group of volunteers for help, you _ask_. You don't 
demand, with "requirements", and then refuse to read the responses because 
they're "too complicated" without offering a single reason why. I would 
actually consider it a moral obligation to point these things out, so that 
others don't waste their time trying to engage you.

Legal -- I'm calling your bluff. You can either claim that troll is well-
defined enough that it is a factual claim, in which case, I think the evidence 
is against you -- and even if you were able to show it to be false, for it to 
be slander, you would also have to show it to be malicious. If troll is not 
well-defined enough to be a factual matter, then it is an opinion, and 
opinions are not actionable -- if it is merely our _opinion_ that you are a 
troll, it is also our right to express that opinion.

Legally, it's more complicated than that, of course. But there's also the 
Streissand Effect -- if you do attempt to sue any of us because we called you 
a troll, you're going to make headlines in any geek, Internet, or developer-
oriented news sources. The fact that the readers Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, 
Wired, etc would all know that you couldn't handle someone calling you a troll 
would do far more damage to your reputation than anything we say here.

So please, don't make legal threats. You know legal action over this cannot 
possibly end well for you. Since you are hopefully smart enough not to pursue 
such legal action, mentioning that it "crosses legal lines" is both childish 
and irrelevant.

> I hope that the professionals within this group will intervene at some
> point, if the "attacks" on my person continue.

What form would you expect that intervention to take? There have been much 
more heated flamewars, with much worse names than "troll" thrown around, 
without people being banned from the list.

Or are you expecting people to speak out on your behalf? In that case, it 
would help if you did anything constructive, even something which would 
benefit you: Read and understand the "complicated" advice, or ask us questions 
about it, and actually engage us, instead of:

> And of course I hope that there are still people on this group which
> are professional enough to simply reply based on a given requirement,
> instead of starting to discuss the requirement.

It would be unprofessional of me not to discuss a requirement with an actual 
client who is actually paying me, so where does that leave you?

Consider: If the client wants a Java Web Start application which does nothing 
but open a web browser pointed at a Flash application which does nothing but 
grab XML over HTTP, pass it to a Silverlight app which applies an XSLT 
transform to convert them to HTML, and finally render them in the browser...

It would be unprofessional, immoral, and stupid to "simply reply" based on 
that requirement, let alone to actually build that nightmare. It would be my 
obligation as a developer, a professional, and a human being to at least 
"discuss" it with the poor misguided user -- try to talk them out of it, or at 
least figure out why they're doing it that way instead of applying the XSLT on 
the server and serving plain HTML, or delivering the XML+XSLT to supporting 
browsers, or at the very least, using JavaScript to perform this task rather 
than three separate plugins.

Now consider your case. It would be unprofessional of me not to ask why you 
cannot have build tools, as this would be a trivial solution to your problem 
without requiring anyone to do anything to any existing gems.