On 11/18/06, Jon Pruente jdpruente@gmail.com wrote:
I agree that people like Shannon can cause political uneasyness, but there are many in FOSS that can do the same. Heck, Shannon is an admitted Pink-Liberal-Pacifist. Politically I'm 180 from him, but he is brilliant in areas of computing. He writes his own database interfaces and drivers in hand coded assembly. The community area of BME, called IAM, has over 15,000 users and is a dynamic content creation system with actives users literally all over the world. He had it running smoothly at that level on a P3 850 running Windows and his hand coded software. He has other sites of interest including http://www.priceofhistoys.com/ http://www.undermars.com/ and his blog (linked to IAM) at http://www.zentastic.com/
Aside from political differences (many people on BME/IAM oppose some/many of his views) he is the one person I know who HAS done location and mapping work, on his own, nearly by himself, and gotten it to work. That alone is somebody who should be consulted for a project like this, regardless of his more extreme views. I forgave Linus for his fathers Communist sympathies years ago. :)
Jon.
I may be guilty of overestimating the knee jerk potential here.
But- playing it from my original premise let's still not let our guard down . "WE" may be able to disconnect easily "best programmer" from NSFW pictures. The masses of mundanes sadly are often less openminded and OSS gets put at risk. THAT was why I listed the Edison grandstanding. As re-assurance that Fearmongering often fails in dramatic reversa
Political alignment aside- the link was cringemaking to me for it's potential -if nothing else- to get "netnanny" software associating Linux with "Not child safe" material.
Oren