Whatever conference or institution he’s speaking at pays for his transportation. He even requests they pay cash and not mention his name when booking bus and rail (not a possibility with air, obviously.)
Dogs that bark angrily and/or jump up on me frighten me, unless they
are small and cannot reach much above my knees. But if they only bark
or jump when we enter the house, I can cope, as long as you hold the
dog away from me at that time. Aside from that issue, I’m ok with
dogs.
If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be
very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I
can visit with, that will be nice too.
DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me.
Ridiculous! Anyone with even a passing interest in security would know that ravens are ridiculously vulnerable to a Man-in-the-Middle attack.
The only truly secure way to update your website is to physically access your hosting server via sneakernet and make the changes yourself using a tiny magnet and a very steady hand.
That rider, while funny, makes me wonder who would ever deal with his bullshit.
It hits me as brutally pretentious and rude.
It’s one thing to stick to your guns and stand up for what’s right, but it’s another to not see/realize/acknowledge that that the train has left the station on some things and it’s time to move on.
Fine- Linux isn’t the “correct” name for the operating system- but that’s what everyone calls it (especially given he’s careful to mention how non-technical his talks are).
I still have no idea how he travels- he won’t do long-distance trains in the US? And I’d assume he won’t fly, so… all busses all the time? The rider makes him sound like the busiest man in the world, but I’m beginning to think it’s not that he’s doing all these talks but rather that it takes him so bleeding long to get from one place to another.
And his talks don’t have any supporting materials? No slides? Nothing? For 1.5 hours? That’s a long time to demand an audience pays attention.
I have no idea why all this bothers me so much. I realize it may be irrational.
I’ll stop now.
His primary work involves a gruelling speaking and travel schedule that has him giving a variety of different speeches of varying length and in a few different languages; each day he has a pretty big volume of email to read and write for FSF and GNU related things; he gives interviews, records videos, and has private meetings; and he is a prolific writer that continues to edit various articles on gnu.org (some that are years old) to keep things up to date. Considering all of that, I find it impressive that he manages to read a lot of books each year, continues to learn to speak new languages, and not only stays abreast on a variety of global political and social justice issues, but also maintain an extremely active personal microblog, which if you look at it, you will see it has a lot of links to web pages.
So, I think that in this bigger context, it is interesting to consider how RMS works. He travels a lot and ends up doing a lot of his work offline. So, when he has an internet connection his client will send out the emails sitting in his outbox and he will fill up his inbox, as well as push/pull any other data or files he needs from servers. His approach to sending emails to retrieve web pages (mostly news articles and blog posts), I think could be seen as a novel way of creating a sort of ‘read me later queue’ – one that fits really well into his overall workflow of using his inbox as his primary tool. And, as he said, when a given website or page doesn’t fit into that workflow, as he says, he will use a browser. He is a workhorse with some peculiar ways of dealing with a tremendous amount of communication. If anything, he has shown that he can stand his ground on issues that matter to him: privacy and computer user freedom, and still be insanely productive.
Python’s actually pretty good in a scientific environment… unlike, say, perl or java, where systematic biologists &etc. will build the most hideous code you’ve ever had to troubleshoot in your life.
Performance doesn’t matter that much, because hardware is far cheaper than highly trained programmers who are comfortable at the intersection of cladistics, linnaean taxonomy and DNA-based molecular phylogeny (if any such beast even exists).
Maintenance and quality control are very big issues in cutting edge scientific programming. In my experience the researchers want to find things out, and they are fiercely internally driven to do so, and without diligent care they will write programs that tell them whatever they want to hear, that can’t be understood by anyone but the author.
Edit: actually, the authors quite often don’t know how their program works!
He’s also got a (possibly well deserved) reputation as a misogynist that hits on any women in site following his talks. I have a coworker (female) who watched it happen to friends of her. Having been warned of this behavior ahead of time, she made sure not to make eye contact with him following his talk. Her friends were not as lucky. So he’s a creeper.
Ok? I’m not sure how that is germane to this conversation since I don’t think Stallman uses Safari (not to mention that all reading lists in browsers are basically “opt in” features, not automatic ones).
