Just troll people with the question mark.

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.

Well, I'd say "fewer men should die" if I were going to make that statement.

It turns out, actually, that certain jobs are dangerous and unpleasant, and men seem to self-select for these jobs more often than do females.

There are a number of interesting possible explanations for this, but none of them are terribly surprising unless you've thought for most of your conscious life that the two genders are truly and completely identical, and any differences are only the result of social conditioning.

Of course, this is absurd.

Biologically, men are expendable and women are not. Biologically, the humans of today come from a narrower range of paternal ancestors, because human breeding was selective. Men who had power, prowess, ambition, and ruthlessness passed on their genes AND shaped the socities that men and women lived in.

In considering distributions of male size, strength, intelligence, and so on, the distributions are wider than when considering females. The smartest men appear to be much smarter than the smartest women; the dumbest men appear to be much dumber than the dumbest women.

Males simply have higher expressed variability.

Men need less sleep than women; men are not as attuned to empathy as are women; men engage in much riskier behavior than do women, and their neural reward and risk center works differently than it does in women.

You can continue to pretend that gender is a social construct, or that male and female distributions and outcomes should be identical, but here on the real world, they aren't and they won't be.

In the event that any public entity (e.g. a government) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should repeal that policy.

In the event that any private entity (e.g. a business) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should think that business owner is a jerk.

Individuals in a free society should be free to do as they like.

But what we should stop assuming is that men and women are interchangeable and will have broadly identical social preferences and outcomes.

They won't, and that's not because anything is standing in their way. They're just different.

By Nature.

In your view, is it a problem that men are nearly 10x as likely as women to die on the job?

What systemic factors should we address so that the number of women dying in mine cave-ins rises to equal the number of men?

Oh, this isn't a priority for you? Why not?

Good approach.

The difficulty with the Verizon hotspot is that it has an internal battery. It is designed to be used when not plugged in.

To power cycle it you have to unplug the wall-wart, then use the power button to power cycle it, then plug it back in.

Simply cutting power doesn't help :(

Spying on their citizens - Check

The difference here is that we the people still have the right to question the government, and organizations like the EFF continue to fight for it.

Economic stagnation - Check

You must be joking. American economy is anything but stagnant. Between 2009-2013, the U.S. GDP growth 1.9%, which is pretty good compared to most other OECD countries.

It may be "stagnant" when you compare it to a country like China at 7.7%, but that is simply not sustainable, not without artificial currency manipulation.

Riots - Check

A few days of media blitz over a police shootout is not the same as protesters fighting for democracy.

High unemployment - Check

What on earth are you talking about? The U.S. unemployment is at 5.9% as of September 2014 and China's is estimated at ~4.5%.

Most software developers are not in pure software development companies. They are in large companies doing something like fortune-500 stuff or selling ads (Google) or moving goods (Amazon.)

Very few companies think "let's hire more developers, they add value!" Hiring a developer is a last resort when the tech you have doesn't do what you need. It's like needing to hire a lawyer - you don't want to do it, but it's the cheapest way to achieve your goal.

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

Dial-up is functionally unusable in 2014. Hitting facebook.com pulls down several MB of data just to draw the page, load the JS, etc.

That said, my home phone line is so noisy even the phone company asks me if it always sounds so bad. They're not sure why the line is noisy. It just is. I don't think I'd be able to sustain a 56k connection.

Satellite also has monthly xfer limits -- that are much lower than Verizon. Most people that have had Satellite switch to LTE and don't switch back.

There is a WISP in the area but he is very busy, isn't very reliable, (e.g. blows off appointments, doesn't answer emails) and his tower is pretty far away and several forests block LOS between my place and his tower. To have any chance of using his tower I'd need to do some significant work -- more than I am doing to actually do my own custom backhaul.

Customers of his have told me that they have a few days of downtime a year while he has to go climb a tower and re-aim something. It sounds very shoe-stringy to me.

Thanks. I've looked into the cradlepoint stuff a bit and if I thought I was permanently stuck with VZN, I would make additional hardware investments along those lines.

That said, even if it was perfectly reliable, my "plan" gives me 20GB of data a month for a family of 5, and I blow through that limit many months, and that involves no online gaming and no video streaming -- both things I used to enjoy doing.

So, I need to get an unmetered connection again, even if I could make the LTE connection perfectly reliable.