That should be "SCO and MS arguments".

We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.

Bullshit. Nokia mismanaged itself to death by promoting infighting and sabotaging other product groups (rather than competing with other companies) until adopting Windows Phone and killing internal OS development was the least bad option.

Well, there is that, but if you'd make it a little bit harder then we'd move back to nearer targets, like the French and the Irish...

Burning the money actually works reasonably well as an alternative. It reduces the money supply and therefore lowers inflation, resulting in a relative increase in the value of everyone's money. The counter argument is that rich people profit more, but generally if you have enough money lying around that the effect would be noticeable, you've invested most of it in things that have a much better return on investment than cash, so as a proportion of net worth if favours the people whose money is mostly money (predominantly poor people).

That's fine, if late fees are for their original purpose (preventing people using a shared resource from impacting the quality of service for others). It's only a problem when they require them for revenue. Ideally, you want to completely decouple the revenue from punitive fines from the organisation that can set them.

And then those same elected officials are subject to calls to cut taxes, but keep public services the same. Want to be reelected? It's difficult if you voted against lowering taxes and your opponent promises that he won't. But no one notices when you make a decision that raises revenue at the expense of safety.

I've been in quite a few places in the US where the lights one way turn red at exactly the same time that the lights going the other way turn green. In the UK, there's always a few second pause between the two to ensure that the junction is clear. We like to mock drivers in the US for its high level of road accidents per driven mile, but a lot of the blame goes to the road and signal design, which is just dangerous in a lot of places.

The Daily Mail, really?

Hmm, now I'm curious. A fighter may have a takeoff weight of say 15000kg. Let's say that the "short lean female" saves 40kg over an "average male". With the other reductions - clothing, oxygen, etc - you probably get down to maybe a 60kg savings. That's a 0,4% reduction in system mass. The rocket equation (applicable here too) probably boosts that up to about a 0,5% benefit in many regards. Still not that much

However, if you can shrink the cockpit , then you're looking at a much bigger advantage - possibly 100-200kg extra weight savings and maybe cutting 5-10% off the total aero drag. That could actually be a big deal - relevantly faster accelerations, top speed, range, etc.

Good. Space suit design needs a modernization anyway.

There is no "how human societies have been organized". Some societies have had (and even continue to have) near complete segregation of the sexes except for reproductive purposes. Some have had full integration.

And "popular wisdom" is in general stereotype BS. It was "popular wisdom" that said that people of African descent were worthless for anything except manual labor and it's pointless to try to educate a woman, that gays are a social evil that needs to be obliterated, that burning witches is the only way to save the town, and that letting the races mix is tantamount to national suicide.

Males are not optional. ... Male aggressive creativity would be essential to survival

Strangely not creative enough to hide your gross sexism. Perhaps an aggressive retort would help defend your point?

You seriously think you can make a claim credited to a scientific study, and then when you can't show evidence that such a study claiming what you did was ever conducted, suddenly switch to a "but everyone knows" laden with old gender stereotypes and the standard lame appeal to darwin - and think that will fly?

In almost any sentence where people say "Women (verb)..." or "Men (verb)..." and it's about something psychological (as opposed to, say, something involving reproductive organs or a statistical difference in strength / height or the like), 99% of the time it's equally accurate to simply say "People (verb)..." The popular perception of differences between genders (including the effects of both brain structure and hormones) is often vastly different from the statistical reality. Screw Mars and Venus; men and women are from Earth. Psychologically, we're statistically virtually identical in most measures. And in many cases where there are differences that even manage to meet statistical significance, what differences there are may well be artifacts of culture.

How little are most of these "differences"? This set of graphs puts it into perspective.

Again: Either present your supposed "study" or drop the issue.

Debian makes renames latexmk to pdflatex? I sincerely hope not...