I haven't weighed in on the Eich thing yet because I couldn't quite put my finger on what exactly was giving me an uncomfortableness about it. I support gay marriage, I'd question why anyone would be insane enough to actually want to get married, but if they want it why not.

What burns about the whole affair is that the relevant parties had their say, the people voted, and that should be that. Instead we've got vengeance seeking from those in favour of gay marriage, making lists, hunting people down and persecuting them by whatever means are available. In other words, McCarthyism.

Fuck that.

I didn't say it was.

Honestly you can hardly blame them, I finally read the summary on the last story after posting a half dozen comments and found that a link I'd spent five minutes googling was the first link up there. Scanning quickly over the other comments I found that three other people had "discovered" this same link and been modded up for it.

Once I figure out how to make relevant comments without even reading the other comments I will truly be a max level slashdotter.

I'm losing track, is it the Koch brothers or cultural Marxism which are doing the rounds on youtube as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man today?

I fail to see how you fail to see what I was responding to, specifically "You're missing the real picture. GNOME is running out of money because they spent it on stupid outreach programs for women and "trans-women"". This does appear to be the case. The rest of the comment is indeed misogynistic and irritating.

I'd have gone the opposite direction, rather than the lame Geordi LaForge effort, make it an ostentatious monocle, cyberpunk or even steampunk style. Offer a variety of skins to suit the early adopter market (mostly nerds) and bling that tech out.

As charming as your characterisation of /.s membership is, I'm more interested in whether or not there is any truth to the assertion that Gnome's funding was eaten up by outreach programmes. I managed to track down this article, so there does seem to be a certain amount of legitimacy to the claim.

Yeah I agree with this. I think it was Zimbabwe (?) where they threw out the white farmers and gave the farms to people who just didn't know anything about it, and as a result the agricultural sector basically collapsed. There's a whole lot of skill to farming.

That seems a bit oversimplified. Just because there's a link between autocratic societies and war/stagnation doesn't neccessarily mean that super redundancy is much better. Some things work best when lots of resources are focused on them, and having a strong executive can be very effective if the roles also come with accountability, which is of course where autocrats and many politicians fall down.

In order for a protest movement to be effective it needs to convince people who make decisions that it is effective. It needn't actually be disruptive, just give the impression that it is. I think a carefully targeted online protest can be quite powerful as long as people believe it's powerful. That means appearances in the mainstream media, mentions at weekly meetings, that sort of thing. Petitions at the petition site are just viewed as a pressure valve by those in power.

Because embracing anthropic climate change involves drastic controls on emissions, manufacturing, and energy generation (specifically coal) as well as being an excuse to raise a variety of taxes on an already strained economy. If something's going to hit them in the pocket people are going to want a lot of good reasons to pay up.

Personally I reckon that human activity probably does play a reasonably large part in accelerating climate change that was happening anyway (although 99% sets off my bullshit meter given that we're in an interglacial period), or pushing it over the point where we won't return to the next ie age, but in order to address it we'd have to get developing titans like India and China to play along, and good luck with that.

The best policy for the forward thinking nation is perhaps to simply prepare for flooding and adverse weather conditions.

I can't watch that show any more. If you know why you won't need to ask, if you don't you're better off not knowing.

I'd like to see a much bigger focus on artisan trades, leatherworking, metal sculpting, custom clothing and the like. There's a huge untapped aftermarket for all those fancy new electronics in terms of accessories. Etsy.com is kinda touching on it but things like this are two parts awesome one part epic.

According to this viewpoint every organised religion is to be respected, or at least soberly considered.

I'm not saying they're wrong neccessarily, just that the expected timescale of their ambitions does not add merit or weight to their arguments. Especially if there are tangible social and career benefits to be gained from backing a position today, or from the other direction possible adverse effects should they choose not to sign the petition.

Oh you and your facts.