Since I
asked for suggestions on the Brownback town hall, I figured I ought to report what happened.
He was scheduled to spend about 30 minutes in it; he probably spent a total of 40 or 45. He arrived a few minutes early, went around the room shaking hands and asking each person their name (including me). It was polite on the one hand, and a little odd on the other, as he was occasionally reaching over chairs to reach people far away.
Anyhow, he stood up front and had a little speech to start with. He spent the first 5-10 minutes talking about local sports teams. It might have been a nice icebreaker if it was 30-60 seconds, but it just felt weird by the time it was over. Everybody knew he was here to talk about other things and had very limited time. He then launched into the economy, talking about keeping taxes down and making sure they re low in Kansas for the recovery. He touched on energy, supporting wind energy (which led to his most memorable comment of the morning: This state blows, and it s got lots of wind, too. ) He also came out in favor of coal, oil, and gas. Basically he s pro-energy. Can t go wrong with that, eh? He rode our prototype all-electric ZTR mower, and praised it quite a bit.
He touched on health care briefly, saying that he favors incremental changes to bring down costs. He thought health savings accounts and high-deductible health plans (such as one option at my employer with a $2500 deductible) were good innovations. He then opened it up for questions. There was a brief awkward moment when nobody raised their hand, so I did.
I started by saying where I agreed with him. I told him I agreed that health care is way too expensive, that I agree that we need liability reform, and said that we pay almost as much each month in health care as we do in all federal taxes combined. I was going to continue, but he interrupted, and said, Are you serious?
Yes. 80% as much in fact.
Do you have an illness in your family?
My wife has asthma, a thyroid disorder, and we had a baby this year. That s it.
Wow.
So I continued. I told him I was concerned about the 46 million uninsured Americans, that they weren t getting the care they needed. I pointed out that many of them wouldn t be able to afford that $2500 deductible in the HDHP, let alone regular doctor visits. And I said that it is our moral and even religious duty to take care of the least of these when it comes to health care.
He answered by first saying that nobody goes without care that s the law because anybody can get care in any emergency room in the country. Then he spent several minutes describing how he thinks the government can t manage anything, and thus a single-payer system wasn t right for us. After a few minutes of this, he asked if that answered my question.
I said that I don t care how the 46 million people get care, whether it s a public option or subsidies for private companies, just that they get it. I also acknowledged that ERs must provide necessary stabilizing care , but pointed out that 20,000 Americans die each year due to inadequate health care and reminded him that ERs are not required to provide diagnostic or preventative services, or long-term treatment of things like cancer.
For the first, but not the last, time of the day, at that, he got really quiet, sort of hung his head, and said something like, Yeah, I agree. It is hard on the least of these. I wish we could do more.
And moved on to the next question.
At this point, it got weird. The next question was a guy that stood up, saying how we ve got to put God back into the constitution. He said he s lived long enough to see the moral decline in this country, and it s going to hell faster than we know. We need to be God-fearing again, he said. Brownback, in reply, again did the quiet hang-his-head thing and said, I agree. Then moved on.
We then had a question about state s rights, nullification , and the 10th amendment. Though it was obvious some issue was underneath it, I couldn t figure out just what it was. Brownback, predictably, thinks that the federal government has grown way too powerful. (Ironic for someone that supported the Patriot Act, but hey.)
Then one other question, and as he was going to wrap it up, a yelled question from the back: What s good about Kansas? Brownback was caught a bit off-guard, but launched into talking about aerospace, and how he hopes to lure wealthy retirees from California to settle here.
All in all, an interesting experience. More respectful than I feared, more scary than I imagined, and about as genuine as I expected a politician at that level gets.
I can t say I m surprised, but I m still appalled by reading, again, a completely out-of-reality polemic about a leader of the Free software community being called sexist (among other nice names), after an innocent and random word used in a talk.
Oh noes! Serving in the navy will hurt!
It s often that you hear jokes or references picturing French as arrogant, Italians as womanizers, geeks as bearded and smelling under the arms, sailors as gay, et c tera. It s called a clich , and it helps people understand each other because it s part of the collective imagination. If you insert a reference to an Italian in a speech about womanizers, it helps picturing the clich of a guy in a black Armani suit, wearing sunglasses and using gomina. It doesn t mean you think Italians are like this, and if it ever convinces someone that they are so, it means that someone really had trouble using the thing she calls brain to begin with.
The same goes for a talk about people not being familiar to computers, that is using women as a clich . When you look for a picture in your mind of someone who has trouble with using computers, what do you find? A granny fighting with her keyboard which keys are not in alphabetical order, or a busty blonde following with her eyes each movement of the mouse cursor. It s only natural to use these pictures as a ground for communication, and it doesn t mean you think bad of grannies or busty blondes. And if, because of that or of anything else, some people end up thinking that women can t use a computer, or that they are not equal to men in this regard, these people are the sexist ones. Not the guy who drew that picture in a magazine you read 10 years ago and forgot since, nor the one using it as a reference.
My intolerance is worth more than yours
And instead of actually focusing on educating or slapping those people, some of us are conducting a witch hunt, in which anyone implying the very existence of different categories of people, called men and women, regardless of his merits or opinions, is called a sexist and has stones thrown to him on several public fora. This is not acceptable. Do not let your speech be dictated by intolerance. If you apply the same reasoning to anyone that could be possibly hurt, in a completely literal and simplistic analysis of the speech, you can stop right now using any kind of metaphor, idiomatic expression or proverb. All that remains is a poor, sterilized speech. And when the speech is poor, the ideas get poorer as well.
Imagine what would a complete stranger reading those blogs understand. She would surely picture hackers as a completely misogynistic community in which people only talk about women (whether it is for sexist jokes or for rhetorical discussions about them) and never talk with them. Which would be utterly wrong, since hackers (and geeks in general) are on the contrary open-minded and friendly to feminism, compared to the rest of the population of course, except for the OMG OMG it s a woman! We need to be nice!!! kind.
And this is actually the reasoning that hides behind all this insane RMS and Mark Shuttleworth are sexist trolls. The picture they are giving of women are that of fragile little things that need to be protected against any attack of all these evil misogynist bearded geeks. Pretty ironical for people who claim fighting for gender equality, isn t it?
Questioning the unquestionable
Frankly, RMS and Mark are among the people I trust the less in the community, but I don t need to paint them as misogynists for that. Look at what they say instead of how they say it: one is an intolerant man who used to be a visionary but turned his principles into dogma; the other has seen the light and behaves as if he was the savior of Free software. I d prefer if we questioned their vision and leadership based on their ideas and actions, not on distorted ways to interpret what they say based on a few people s neuroses.
Or, to say it shorter: dudes, get a life.
Sarah told me a while ago that she was planning an early birthday present
for me, but it was going to be a surprise.
Last night, I found out what it was: tickets to see 
One of my awesome colleagues from 
Normally I, like most people, ignore cold calls but someone asking about opinions on software caught my interest - doesn't happen often. Turned out to be a study using contact data gleaned from a now dead Linux magazine which, in turn, had been gleaned from the attendance information submitted to a now all-but dead conference: 
I was gonna write this as a comment to 
So not even 3 months out from 
Since I returned from 
I was thinking about how I often end up in a directory path
where the names of one or more components repeat. It seemed
there should be a name for when this happens.
Arrived at Manila yesterday. At least in the parts we passed through
(Pasay, Makati, and Malate,) everything seems back to normal, with
almost no sign of the 
I read 
It is interesting that Fran ois Marier recently posted a brief "howto" document 
I have been meaning to switch to 
I ve been back from KDE (4.2!) to Gnome and with the mighty powers of Compiz my desktop is the envy of my Windows coworkers and still geeky functional. Well, somehow functional. For a while I wondered why I can t properly use VNC to remote-control my desktop from home. The connection works and I see the desktop but nothing seems to happen when I click or type. Now I figured out the desktop in the VNC client window is just not refreshed while my mouse and keyboard actions really do what they were supposed to on the VNC server. This is my sad tale of how I learned that a regression may mean driving the motorcycle to work in the middle of the night after cursing VNC. 
After a little searching through the lazyweb I found out that it s a 
[Sorry to my sponsorees who's package sponsoring requests were delayed again due to this mess.]