Slashdot Mirror

John Michael Greer's post on the end of the space age confirmed for me what I'd concluded myself: the stars are not for us. Nor the planets. Not even the moon. If you are a person of unwavering faith in the myth of infinite progress then you won't accept what he says. It may even seem ridiculous. Yet for those who've had nagging doubts, it can hit like a punch in the gut to finally hear it stated this firmly and this eloquently.

I was 8 years old when the Eagle landed on the moon. If there's ever a time to make a lasting impression on a boy, it's when he's 8. From that point on, humanity's expansion into space was a given: the bedrock of my vision of the future. In fact, it's hard to believe in infinite progress without taking space travel as a corollary. But I see the world declining now on so many fronts. The myth of progress seems not only false but absurd. Civilizations have their ups and downs. This last one has reached higher than any other, boosted by an enormous non-renewable energy supply, but that supply is now in decline and so are we, like all the others. We reached the moon at our apex, but did not grasp it, and now it is too late. Nobody's ever gonna stand on Mars. And I mean never.

Absolutely agree, when we need some privacy data and profitable protection should take the best provider. http://fashionweek-news.blogspot.com/

• MechaniCards
• Paper Lantern Card
• A store selling moving cards

Now this one just cracked me up. Less impressive, much more geeky:

• Wedding Invite

It's just one component of civil liberties, but the number of whistle-blower prosecutions by the Obama administration seriously disturbs me. Remember, this is the guy that promised a new level of transparency in government.

What happened to “look forward, not backward”?:
http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/prosecutions_10/

What the Whistleblower Prosecution Says About the Obama DOJ:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/16-3

Stop the Criminal Prosecution of Whistleblowers!:
http://www.whistleblowers.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=731&Itemid=81

WikiLeakers and Whistle-Blowers: Obama's Hard Line:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2058340,00.html

Obama Admin: Immunity for Torturers, Prosecution for Torture Whistleblowers:
http://2politicaljunkies.blogspot.com/2012/01/obama-admin-immunity-for-torturers.html

Yeah, those work on a strobe light with a pattern of flashes. On many ambulances you can see the white strobe light on the front of the vehicle. If you can get the timing of the pattern, you can program a circuit to activate a strobe light to trigger the lights. I believe it is illegal as it would be considered "imprersonating an emergency vehicle". You can see the sensor on the traffic lights easily. To be more stealthy, you can put an infrafred filter over the strobe light. Most light sensors are sensitive to the infrared range in addition to visible light. So you can still trigger the traffic signal without the visible flashing coming from your vehicle. In the old hacking texts about red boxes and blue boxes, this device was called a chrome box.

This kind of thing happens all the time in advertising. (NSFW for language).

You're right, Samsung totally didn't create this: http://lawpundit.blogspot.com/2011/08/samsung-digital-picture-frame-2006-is.html in 2006.

Disguised as Ali, Wallraff took on jobs as laborer in construction firms, on farms, janitorial service, and even as a day laborer in a nuclear power plant. In the publication of his 2-year adventure as Turk in Germany, LOWEST OF THE LOW, Guenther Walraff later revealed that the Turkish workers at the power plant were not even provided the same amount of protective clothing at the nuclear power plant as were the German employees at the same plant.

from http://the-teacher.blogspot.com/2009/10/guenther-wallraff-returnsfrom-way-down.html

His summary is dead on (roughly translated from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_unten#Inhalt):

My experiences surpassed my expectations. In a negative way. I have encountered [working] conditions right in the heart of the Federal Republic of Germany, that are usually described in historical accounts of the 19. century.

'Hidden complex social and physiological realities?' I think 'exploitation' and the strive for 'profits' sums it up nicely.

And Microsoft to merely wrap some bloatware round it and call it their own, like they do with their "search engine".

This is so old, XKCD covered it

And the author's considered response and explanation of the claims:

http://donpmitchell.blogspot.com/2012/01/life-forms-on-venus-probably-not.html

Note that Don has access to the original Venera raw data and isn't working from the usual poor quality photos.

Citations needed? Here you go (these are all entries on my blog , but I have several links in these articles, and I'm too lazy to copy each individual link...which is fine, since apparently, you were too lazy to Google it yourself ;) :
Train station "VIPR" search.
Again at train stations.
And finally, bus stations and highways.

Citations needed? Here you go (these are all entries on my blog , but I have several links in these articles, and I'm too lazy to copy each individual link...which is fine, since apparently, you were too lazy to Google it yourself ;) :
Train station "VIPR" search.
Again at train stations.
And finally, bus stations and highways.

Citations needed? Here you go (these are all entries on my blog , but I have several links in these articles, and I'm too lazy to copy each individual link...which is fine, since apparently, you were too lazy to Google it yourself ;) :
Train station "VIPR" search.
Again at train stations.
And finally, bus stations and highways.

This is simply not true. Banks cannot issue money they don't have, either physically or electronically.

You don't have to take it from me. Here is a nice visualization of what happens when a bank makes a loan. You can let economist Bill Mitchell explain it to you. Or you can read between the lines in the Basel accords, which define how much leverage a bank can have. Of course, "leverage" is the key word here - banks normally create money when they increase their leverage (technically speaking, they can also increase their leverage by changing their position to be riskier according to the Basel rules, but that is an exception rather than the rule). If you speak German, you might also want to look at this explanation of the German central bank, in particular the section on "Giralgeld". More generally, if you want to understand how money works, the best sources are the writings of Modern Monetary Theory economists, simply because they place value on explaining the down-to-earth mechanisms underlying all the fancy talk. I suggest you start here or here.

If I were you, this cross section of sources from all over the economics spectrum (from ultra-orthodox to highly unorthodox) would convince me.

Seriously, if every loan a bank made "magically created money", we'd be in such runaway inflation it would cost billions for a gallon of milk.

Since the premise of that implication is true without there being runaway inflation (though I want to emphasize that there still is no magic involved), it seems you also have to work on your understanding of how inflation works.

Look, I understand where you're coming from, and I understand you find it hard to believe the things that I'm writing. But consider the possibility that I'm right. Can you risk being wrong about that?

Two years ago, I probably would have reacted like you did (although I hope that I would have better estimated my own lack of knowledge in the matter). The fact of the matter is that, unfortunately, the macroeconomics education sucks everywhere around the world, and unless you study economics at university you never normally come across all these things. That's not your fault. In the context of the financial crisis I've become curious to understand more, and I've read up on all these things. I've come across a lot of unintuitive things along the way, and it takes time to digest everything. It took me at least a year, and I'm still learning new things.

I sincerely hope you will set aside some time to follow some of the links I listed above. It can be an amazing intellectual experience.

Of course this site doesn't go into too much detail but 95% of our money is magically created out of debt.

Actually, it's 100%, and there's nothing magic about that. Just as a matter of accounting, every from of monetary assets is actually somebody else's liability, i.e. debt. Those physical dollar bills in your wallet? They are a liability of the US government.

But that's no reason to go insane about it. Calm down, set aside a few hours, and read the Modern Money Primer by UMKC economist Randall Wray, or, if you don't have quite that much time, this summary on PragCap.

The United States has fiat money. The value of our currency is tied to nothing at all. The value of our money is purely whimsical. So long as people have faith in the currency, it is valuable. When faith begins to fade, it will have no value.

No matter how little "faith" people have in the US$ - and what the hell does "faith" mean in that context anyway? - they will still have to use US$ to pay their taxes, because the government says so. That is the floor that prevents the value of US$ from dropping to zero, and in fact taxes are where the value of money initially came from. Taxes drive money. Not enough people are aware of that, even though it's kind of obvious once you really think it through.

I BREAK FOR WATER BOARDING! :: PsyOps ::
+ http://www.pipeline.com/~psywarrior :: The Office of Strategic Services :::
+ http://guardianspies.com/
+ http://osssociety.org/
+ http://ossreborn.com/
+ http://ossog.org/
+ http://ossinitaly.org/
+ http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/oss/oss.htm :: CIA ::
+ http://www.zoklet.net/totse/en/politics/central_intelligence_agency/index.html
+ http://cryptome.org/0005/cia-iqt-spies.htm
+ http://www.youtube.com/user/ciagov
+ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ciagov
+ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004145-1,00.html
+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUBARK
+ https://www.cia.gov/ ::: WoW! :::
+ http://publicintelligence.net/
+ http://cryptocomb.org/
+ http://www.cryptome.org/
+ http://www.cryptogon.com/
+ http://afio.com/
+ http://www.afcea.org/signal/signalscape/
+ http://rijmenants.blogspot.com/

It is legal in Sharia law, which is only half imposed in Indonesia so far. It is in Iran though.

And don't forget Egypt in 2013. ;-)

If we don't allow low wage jobs, then low skilled people can't get work at all.

True. The flip side to that problem though is that most everything in North America is priced for people that have High Wage jobs.

Try buying a house in a decent neighborhood on $24K per year, it just can't be done because most everything is priced for people earning 2 - 4 times that! Or haven't you noticed the increasing trend where families need to have both parents, and sometimes the kids, chipping in to buy a house?

In 1970 the average US home cost 23,400.00 and the average worker made 6,186.24, in other words a house cost 3.78 times what a person made.

Contrast that with 2004, same links as above, where the average US wage is now 35,648.55 but the price of homes has skyrocketed to an average of 221,000.00, or about 6.19 times what a person made. In order to get back to the 3.78 times value from the 70's a person needs to make at least 58,465.61, or the equivalent of 1.64 jobs at the average rate of pay. So you can take on two jobs or amortize your mortgage until your well into your retirement. And I haven't even really touched on the disparity in cities where the 24K wage job still exists but housing costs are so far above the average that the only place you can afford to live is a slum in a crime ridden neighborhood.

I'm sure if I went digging for 2011 numbers the disparity for wages vs housing would be even larger. So yeah, you're right, the 24K wages can and should exist because not everyone has the skills to command a higher wage job. But unlike the 70's the average wage earners can no longer to afford a home for their families, housing ownership is now solely in the purview of people who can command higher wages. Its unsustainable, particularly with the wage gap increasing, and we as a society better get our act together to ensure we're providing affordable housing in nice neighborhoods so people making that small amount of money can actually afford it, otherwise those "Occupy" movements are going to get worse and start getting violent.

The difference between that young lady's story and what happened in Indonesia is this: people were just talking, online, about how much they hate her.

Wrong, she was threatened with violence.

In America, you can voice your dissent, you can call people garbage, and you can do so for any reason

While this premise is correct it does not apply to the situation. The freedom of speech in the USA is not absolute and in the case of threats it does not apply.

Yes.

That is how it is here in the US. If you speak out for reason, you will be persecuted by the Christians. I have no doubt that the majority of Christians would be fine with bringing back stoning and burning at the stake. These folks are scary!

exhibit 1: number of openly self avowed atheists in high office. (hint 0)

exhibit 2: Christians everywhere saying the poor doctor murdered by Christians in Kansas "deserved it"

exhibit 3: Christians everywhere preaching hate of homosexuals, and Muslims.

Christians, Muslims, Jews, they are all evil rotten to the core religions based on hatred of others. This is what you get when your belief system scorns rationality and glorifies hate.

Here are some examples of the best Christianity has to offer. Remember they are talking about beating up / killing a young girl:

http://jesusfetusfajitafishsticks.blogspot.com/2012/01/ahlquist-screenshots-if-by-christian.html

Christians are evil!

If they were obeying their law, why didn't the police let them lynch the guy? Or was the lynching actually illegal, and your statement had no basis in reality?

It is legal in Sharia law, which is only half imposed in Indonesia so far. It is in Iran though.

While you probably won't get jailed for saying such...

...you can still get the Christian mob to lynch you, eg. Jessica Ahlquist

The thing is the Muslim lynch squad is literally a lynch squad and they are obeying their law.

While you probably won't get jailed for saying such...

...you can still get the Christian mob to lynch you, eg. Jessica Ahlquist

Google code search is still up, just at a different URL here:
http://code.google.com/codesearch

And it's not limited to just Google's own code. From this blog post: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/01/google-code-search-still-available.html

Reader

... any news aggregator?
http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators

Gmail?

You're kidding, right? Any mail provider... I don't know what to say.
* I hosted my own until a few years ago
* yahoo
* hotmail
* my isp
* everyone and their brother

I mean we know they are going to close them eventually as well, right?

I don't get it. Why are you just spreading FUD? OK, maybe you don't like google. But you can't come up with a single service that they have shut down and really inconvenienced their users. And you're naming gmail just looks dumb - they make money off that. And while it would not surprise me even a little if reader goes away, I fully expect that it will just roll into some other service they provide (plus, probably); not to mention that they make it trivial to migrate away, should you so choose:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/07/export-feeds-from-google-reader-folder.html

What's the deal?

oh yeah ? and then where is that self-perpetuating, end-of-hollywood idea ? it has been more than a decade since internet has entered living rooms. where is that idea ?

apple does not have the means to catalogue all spendings of almost every western citizen on the planet, and link those spending directly to their identity. if they had it, maybe they could do it.

There's apparently more truth than I realized to the saying "never argue with an idiot, they'll only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience". Rather than acknowledge any of the actual trends that are occurring around you, you instead shoot from the hip of your wonderfully insightful gut and instead respond with "oh yeah? prove it!" ?

Well, after this post I guess it's up to the mods, because I'm done with this bullshit you're trying to perpetuate.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/9/2693228/ubuntu-tv-has-unity-inspired-ui-will-ship-on-televisions-by-end-of
Unity, on TV sets, by the end of this very year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV#Second_generation
Apple TV second generation sales (Good thing SOPA blackout is over)
http://reviews.cnet.com/apple-tv-review
Apple TV Reviews

http://www.google.com/tv/
http://googletv.blogspot.com/2011/01/samsung-and-google-tv.html

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/from_ces_a_few_hints_about_the_future_of_tv.php
CES 2010: Apps on smart TV's, "The Future of TV"

You're on the fucking internet for god sake, use it to get learned.

Here's a guy who looooves SOPA--I'm sure he'd be all for shutting more web sites down.

http://johndegen.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-your-kids-were-taught-to-hate-sopa.html

Back with a bang is Mini-Microsoft

http://minimsft.blogspot.com/

Read what he has to dish out and add your comments.

So fucking what?

That's the crux of a very important debate. If a plane low on fuel encounters some turbulence, does it vector around or take some licks? It could go pear shaped either way.

The worst possible outcome of squelching our petroleum dependence is a global pandemic of mushroom cloud chicken pox. The usual suspects: hubris, hatred, entrenched money, scheming underlings, and mercenary psychopaths. It's not out of the running against some of the worst foreseeable scenarios of global warming.

So I get a bit concerned when scientists with all the intellectual subtlety of Pascal's wager run around telling us the sky is falling. And no, it doesn't improve their subtlety to point out that the most vocal opposition comes from contemptible, self-serving dunderheads. Yeah, we knew that already.

They all hate Bj(slashcode fuckup)rn Lomborg in much the same way the string theorists hate Peter Woit. My perspective is that scientists have essentially no training on the side of the debate where we determine the best course of action. Economists, as dismal as this sounds, have better foundations.

The game of science is to describe reality, not formulate policy. I can tolerate some cheerleading for urgency. It's normal to have some wise men around muttering "this could end badly" and even raising a clenched fist or two. I don't mind them speaking up as concerned citizens of spaceship earth. But I do mind them hammering on the risk analysis side of Lomborg's position because he sucks at science, and even if he does suck at science, that's no reason to exclude him from the risk side of the debate. Many excellent scientists suck at risk and I welcome their participation in sharing what they know and confronting what they don't.

Scientists tend to start with the elitist view that correct science is the starting point for entering the debate. Nothing else of importance in this world seems to work that way. And that's often a good thing, because science is most reliable after the consensus matures for 50 to 100 years. Premature consensus is the mother of all knee-jerk overreactions.

And before someone pipes up with the precautionary claptrap, the precautionary principle applied to geopolitical stability suggests we don't tamper with the world's tenuous social order with the right-thinking alacrity of Armageddon.

Yeah, I know, when there's a possibility that life as we know it is hanging in the balance, we're right back to Pascal's wager. That's a cheesy way out. One way or another we're going to have to accept some stretch marks on "life as we know it".

TARP looks like a success on paper, but a big chunk of another $3 trillion was involved to prop up the assets of those companies so they could repay the TARP loans with subsidized valuations. Fannie May and Freddie Mac took the heat for a lot of those losses. http://pra-blog.blogspot.com/2011/03/true-costs-of-tarp.html

Free market could handle this were it not for the lobbies and regulations that favor big business. Why *must* automobiles have airbags and be built to survive impacts of 100 km/hr? So drivers don't have to worry about messing their hair with helmets? A $10000 car with 1000 km range could easily be fielded, and let the courts decide who is to pay when the occupants are smeared by an SUV.

  A $3K electric bicycle can easily carry 200 kg with 100 km range at a top speed of 50 km/hr. It would be illegal in most civilized countries :)

This guy seems to disagree with you that SOPA was bad. lol.

http://johndegen.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-your-kids-were-taught-to-hate-sopa.html

Not just Chinese spies ... America is LOADED with Mossad and AIPAC agents. Turkish agents. Saudi princes ready to party. Ukrainian mafia probably put about a Billion dollars in the coffers of the Bush family -- likely they are rolling in Opium today. It's all up for grabs...

Nobody is going to attack America if they can merely bid for the Speaker of the House. I'm wondering when Christies is going to quit playing with the chump change million dollar art auctions and organize this mayhem into a profitable enterprise.

Via looking the other way because EVERYONE was corrupt, Washington has become the fricken' UN. I can imagine that most of the work for Chinese intelligence is sifting through the crap that they already stole, and sorting that from the crap that already came in a diplomatic pouch.

When Sibel Edmonds blew the whistle about Nuclear weapons secrets that she translated from Turkish intelligence communications -- she was ignored and told to sit down and shut up. Going higher only got her in trouble. She also claimed that Dennis Hastert was on Turkey's payroll -- nothing happened. Now D H is a highly paid consultant for Turkey -- he's probably giving them million dollar history lessons like Newt gave Fannie Mae.

Commonly used for pipeline repair, it can involve welding a pipe flange to a full, even pressurised line or container of flammable liquid or gas. The trick is not to blow through the wall. The product cools the container side of the weldment. A cutter head is attached then connected to your equipment of choice. Mechanical connection of hot tap flanges is also done.

http://gs-press.com.au/images/news_articles/cache/FurmaniteHotTapGraphic-0x600.jpg

http://www.professionalmariner.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=46E64A4C77774A5684F286CF18FCD2F8&nm=Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=5762266029234C438FDE435B61BEFE08

It can even be done on BURNING railroad tank cars to offload product. WaPo link in this thread no workee but the others are good. Check the procedure in the .pdf

http://weldingweb.com/showthread.php?t=59857

Example equipment:

http://easy-tapper.com/

Flooding to "float" petroleum for recovery:

http://recyclingships.blogspot.com/2011/11/grounding-off-coast-of-tauranga-last_12.html

See also: http://lawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
http://www.askmen.com/entertainment/better_look_3800/3816_law-school-scam.html

Or:
http://www.google.com/search?q=law+school+scam
"About 2,940,000 results (0.10 seconds)"

See also: http://lawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
http://www.askmen.com/entertainment/better_look_3800/3816_law-school-scam.html

Or:
http://www.google.com/search?q=law+school+scam
"About 2,940,000 results (0.10 seconds)"

This time thankfully only soda cans bought it.

This timeit was a support column.

This time a cop accidentally shot a Bologna, so I guess it's not a CCW, and maybe the Bologna was resisting arrest.

This time it was in a starbucks, some kind of lead extra latte.

This one was in a school.

This Guy apparently hit himself in the leg when he dropped the gun at a Grocery store.

Again, This one is not a concealed carry, but as the guy was DEA and actually demonstrating gun safety to a group of children at the time he accidentally shot himself I think it merits inclusion on the grounds that accidents can clearly happen to even the most highly trained.

We people are the ones that could be shot at any time without warning because someone felt that the risk to others of their carrying a weapon was worth it. In this litigious society I would have though the insurance costs of packing heat would be prohibitive. Around 2% of gun deaths are from accidental discharges.

Israel protecting itself from children.

Even some of these you seemed to have singled out as incorrect, are more correct than incorrect.

For example, on the gymnastics one, you cut out: "Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium." That part definitely has come to pass. Also, the general thrust of the whole thing was correct. Physical education in the current era has more emphasis than it did in 1900. You are sort of thumbing your nose at the idea that an emphasis on gymnastics will begin in the nursery as we live in an era where the government is promoting a Let's Move initiative for children.

For the fruit one, while most did not happen in a widespread, practical way one did. Practically all grapes bought these days are seedless. In addition, some of these, if not broadly adopted are also not unheard of. We can grow huge fruits if there was any practical reason to, for example, strawberries the size of apples. I'd also be willing to bet fruits are bigger than they used to be in 1900, but there isn't much of a point to grow them monstrously big.

To England in Two days sounds silly at first, but if you read the description of the craft it describes, "supported upon runners, somewhat like those of the sleigh. These runners will be very buoyant. Upon their under sides will be apertures expelling jets of air. In this way a film of air will be kept between them and the water’s surface. This film, together with the small surface of the runners, will reduce friction against the waves to the smallest possible degree" sounds a lot like a hovercraft. The passenger-grade hovercraft linked to can do 83 knots or about 95 miles per hour. New York to London is about 3500 miles. So, it would take 37 hours roughly to travel on this ship from New York to London, or in other words, two days. So, really, the prediction came true, it just didn't end up being a popular mode of transport since we have faster and easier ways to traverse the distance.

He may also only be about 50 years off on the no-cars-in-cities prediction.

All in all these predictions were remarkably accurate and even a few of these "wrong" ones came pretty close.

This is just the next generation of Transparent OLED's that I have already posted about.
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2011/08/transparent-oled-screen.html

Here is my post from CES:
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2012/01/ces-2012-transparent-samsung-smart.html

This is just the next generation of Transparent OLED's that I have already posted about.
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2011/08/transparent-oled-screen.html

Here is my post from CES:
http://videotechnology.blogspot.com/2012/01/ces-2012-transparent-samsung-smart.html

Given that Dear Leader Steve said that "good artists copy great artists steal" Given that the Ipad "shamelessly copied" this device and this device

Of course, it didn't help that the main blogger behind this - the one that you linked to - was fairly obviously just throwing things at the wall in the hope that they'd stick. I mean, if you read his e-mail to Stallman he went on to argue that Richard Stallman was evil for daring to parody Christianity, an idea that's more than a little controversial in hackerdom:

I also think you may find it worth considering that there are active and important members of the free software community who consider themselves Christians—I’d cite Michael Meeks as just one example. While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them, and I thought it likewise inappropriate to take keynote time to create a situation in which you marginalize members of the community by mocking Christianity. Again, this is a technical conference.

(Oh, and a few days prior to that he'd done a lovely and rather slanderous attack piece on someone else using the same blog, claiming that person got someone else to contact his workplace and get him fired based on e-mails from an internet troll claiming to be that person. The funny thing was that that the signed e-mail from this person to the troll that he was using as proof they were conspiring to do this included a quote from said troll denying he'd tried to get the blogger fired in the first place. Yet he not only claimed that this was evidence of a conspiracy, he threatened to actually sue the target of his posts for libel for complaining about his slanderous blogging.

What did the target of the prior blog post and Richard M Stallman have in common? They were both critical of Mono and C#, as he mentioned in rather dismissive terms in the blog post between those two. He then went on to call the entire part of the FLOSS community that didn't like them the fake FLOSS community going up against the Mono-supporting real FLOSS community, in case you're not quite getting the message yet.)

Of course, it didn't help that the main blogger behind this - the one that you linked to - was fairly obviously just throwing things at the wall in the hope that they'd stick. I mean, if you read his e-mail to Stallman he went on to argue that Richard Stallman was evil for daring to parody Christianity, an idea that's more than a little controversial in hackerdom:

I also think you may find it worth considering that there are active and important members of the free software community who consider themselves Christians—I’d cite Michael Meeks as just one example. While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them, and I thought it likewise inappropriate to take keynote time to create a situation in which you marginalize members of the community by mocking Christianity. Again, this is a technical conference.

(Oh, and a few days prior to that he'd done a lovely and rather slanderous attack piece on someone else using the same blog, claiming that person got someone else to contact his workplace and get him fired based on e-mails from an internet troll claiming to be that person. The funny thing was that that the signed e-mail from this person to the troll that he was using as proof they were conspiring to do this included a quote from said troll denying he'd tried to get the blogger fired in the first place. Yet he not only claimed that this was evidence of a conspiracy, he threatened to actually sue the target of his posts for libel for complaining about his slanderous blogging.

What did the target of the prior blog post and Richard M Stallman have in common? They were both critical of Mono and C#, as he mentioned in rather dismissive terms in the blog post between those two. He then went on to call the entire part of the FLOSS community that didn't like them the fake FLOSS community going up against the Mono-supporting real FLOSS community, in case you're not quite getting the message yet.)

Of course, it didn't help that the main blogger behind this - the one that you linked to - was fairly obviously just throwing things at the wall in the hope that they'd stick. I mean, if you read his e-mail to Stallman he went on to argue that Richard Stallman was evil for daring to parody Christianity, an idea that's more than a little controversial in hackerdom:

I also think you may find it worth considering that there are active and important members of the free software community who consider themselves Christians—I’d cite Michael Meeks as just one example. While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them, and I thought it likewise inappropriate to take keynote time to create a situation in which you marginalize members of the community by mocking Christianity. Again, this is a technical conference.

(Oh, and a few days prior to that he'd done a lovely and rather slanderous attack piece on someone else using the same blog, claiming that person got someone else to contact his workplace and get him fired based on e-mails from an internet troll claiming to be that person. The funny thing was that that the signed e-mail from this person to the troll that he was using as proof they were conspiring to do this included a quote from said troll denying he'd tried to get the blogger fired in the first place. Yet he not only claimed that this was evidence of a conspiracy, he threatened to actually sue the target of his posts for libel for complaining about his slanderous blogging.

What did the target of the prior blog post and Richard M Stallman have in common? They were both critical of Mono and C#, as he mentioned in rather dismissive terms in the blog post between those two. He then went on to call the entire part of the FLOSS community that didn't like them the fake FLOSS community going up against the Mono-supporting real FLOSS community, in case you're not quite getting the message yet.)

Of course, it didn't help that the main blogger behind this - the one that you linked to - was fairly obviously just throwing things at the wall in the hope that they'd stick. I mean, if you read his e-mail to Stallman he went on to argue that Richard Stallman was evil for daring to parody Christianity, an idea that's more than a little controversial in hackerdom:

I also think you may find it worth considering that there are active and important members of the free software community who consider themselves Christians—I’d cite Michael Meeks as just one example. While no one insists that you agree with or subscribe to a particular religion, people are every bit as entitled to their own beliefs as you are to your lack of them, and I thought it likewise inappropriate to take keynote time to create a situation in which you marginalize members of the community by mocking Christianity. Again, this is a technical conference.

(Oh, and a few days prior to that he'd done a lovely and rather slanderous attack piece on someone else using the same blog, claiming that person got someone else to contact his workplace and get him fired based on e-mails from an internet troll claiming to be that person. The funny thing was that that the signed e-mail from this person to the troll that he was using as proof they were conspiring to do this included a quote from said troll denying he'd tried to get the blogger fired in the first place. Yet he not only claimed that this was evidence of a conspiracy, he threatened to actually sue the target of his posts for libel for complaining about his slanderous blogging.

What did the target of the prior blog post and Richard M Stallman have in common? They were both critical of Mono and C#, as he mentioned in rather dismissive terms in the blog post between those two. He then went on to call the entire part of the FLOSS community that didn't like them the fake FLOSS community going up against the Mono-supporting real FLOSS community, in case you're not quite getting the message yet.)

The reasons for the lack of female participation in open source are a touchy subject, and I probably risk offending some folks, but the fact is that the movement is largely made up of male computer nerds with few social skills and little female contact. My guess is that women fare better in proprietary software development because it implies a level of professionalism, since if you can't interact well socially with co-workers, you usually don't work there anymore.

Richard Stallman made some infamous remarks at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit about "EMAC virgins", explicitly defining them as women who needed to be "relieved" of their EMACS virginity as a "holy duty." RMS defended it as a parody of religion, missing the point that the complaints were about the sexism and not the religious satire (RMS also believes in legalizing pedophilia and possession of child pornography--probably not the most palatable spokesperson to get behind in the first place).

If you're a man who rarely hangs out with women, it's easy to forget what it's like for the other side, especially if they're in a field in which they're practically outsiders. Women didn't take too kindly to being singled out like that at a tech conference. The bigger problem is the backlash from male techies that always flares up when this issue is discussed, which was amplified in the case of RMS because his core supporters tend to be so rabid.

I'm subscribed to the Cocoa-dev mailing list, and one of the regular members there began submitting messages under her real name, revealing that she had previously been posting under a male name because they found that they got more direct responses and less obnoxious comments. And this is Apple platform development, where you might assume the more liberal elements of that particular demographic would lend itself to increased tolerance.

I really can't imagine what it must be like to be a female developer and hope some of them voice their opinions here.

I have had a fair amount of success using open source GIS tools for one of my side project to create a hunting map book. I am not too sure of how well either one would work for what you are trying to do but I would be surprised if they didn't. The 2 tools I have had the most success with are uDig GIS and GRASS GIS. Both of them will run on Window, Mac OS, or Linux just fine, they all can process shape files, and DB input as well as geo tiff files as well as other file formats. Another popular OS GIS program is Quantum GIS. When I started I found OSGeo4w which had a bunch of open source GIS programs compiled for windows with everything you need and tried out a few of them and found 2 that best suited my needs. At the time I know it included GRASS, uDig, QGIS, and a couple of other ones, you might want to check out OSGeo as well as there may have been other projects that have started or better meet your needs.

Here is an example of some of what I have done. It is a map of the MN deer areas showing the antlerless deer harvest per square mile for each area in relation to all the others during the archery season. This map is a 10 year snapshot where the darker area indicated more deer were taken per square mile.

Yes, it's strictly business...