My Comment:

I’m not trying to start a flame fest. And really don’t feel like posting and tweeting to everyone that posts about this.

But the context you are assuming is not there. I watched the live stream. When Mark said try to explain to girls, he was not talking about women not understanding technology. He was talking about how hard the design work is to do, and that if things were designed poorly or had low usability, he would not know how to explain them to girls (my translation). The tone of his voice suggested sarcastic embarrassment, which implies he would prefer to impress girls. So he could have said the same thing about his father. Or better yet. If he was gay, he would have said “guys” not “girls”.

Also note that he was talking about design when he said it. So the argument that he thinks women are not hard core coders or programmers is moot. And yes he does say “guys” all the time. No one says “gals” by itself, because it sounds sexist. And saying “guys and gals” is as pain in the butt as saying gnu/linux. Everyone says “guys” when they mean “people”.

This incident  really is like wild fire erupting before my eyes. All the tweets, re-tweets, and blog posts are echoing the same sentence fragment, and disintegrating into primal noises. Primates can also re-articulate the same sounds they heard someone else make, or wave a flag. Humans on the other hand can think critically, about what they heard.

Wouldn’t it make sense to see the video before claiming it is sexist? Or perhaps even know the context of what he was talking about? Or even the minimalist thing, of getting the actual quote?

Please for the love of reason. When the video or transcript is released, form your opinion. Don’t just re-quote rumors as yours. I respect the work feminists are doing. But this was a knee jerk reaction. Hear the guy in is own words.

I really hope Mark does not let rumors re-create the context of what he said.

So in the spirit of the Metal Gear goodness, I decided to do a quick run-through of my favourite fan-made films. Here are my top 10:

10. Metal Gear Awesome

This is probably my lest favourite. It is still good, but just not as good. It just has too many knee jerk, inconsequential, dirty jokes. That combined with the sloppy animation knocks it down a few rankings.

9. UltraNeki & Solid Snake Codec Scene!

This is awesome just because it has the actual voice actor of Solid Snake (David Hayter), doing custom voice overs.

8. David Hayter’s MGS 20th Year Tribute

Again, here is David Hayter (the voice of Snake) doing some action stuff. It is not really fan made, but still cool. And look! He speaks Japanese too.

7. Metal Gear Crisis 1.1

This is a new one for me. It is much better than the other fan-drawn ones. Because it does not completely fall down the toilet into humour, only little kids would laugh at. Nice animation technique too.

6. Metal Gear: Outer Heaven

This was a bit cheesy. And lacking many scenes, that are filled in with story boards. But it was a relatively large undertaking to make this long beast. I like how the actor they have play Snake, is much more agile than the usual brutes I see.

5. Metal Gear Solid Cast Improv

This is neat, because it shows the actual English voice actors from the games.

4. Mega64: Metal Gear Solid

One of the better, earlier Mega64 episodes. Surprised they did not get arrested running around, and acting like that.

3. Lupin III vs MGS

This is a parody of the original Lupin III into, but made to match the MGS characters. Very cool. And very good artwork. It must have taken a while to animate.

2. Metal Gear Solid: A Day At The Office

This was one of my favourite fan films for a while. It is cheesy as hell. But has some very clever humour. I especially liked the Albert Wesker joke, and the Monopoly game.

1. Metal Gear Solid: Dinner with the Snakes

My Faveorite. Very clever concept. You can see details from many of the MG games. Including Metal Gear Acid, and the original Metal Gear. Nice costumes too.

…

Just donate some fucking money. You tards.

I guess this means I am not buying Mirror’s Edge and Armored Core For Answers any time soon.

Ok. So I really didn’t think they were employees, but it is kind of disturbing to have pictures of fake employees on your website like that.

That’s right. there were thousands of people seeding this thing. And to top it off, there were 969 leachers. So that is almost a 3 to 1 ratio. That is unprecedented

And the best thing about it, is that it didn’t cost the Ubuntu much money in bandwidth (assuming a tracker is cheap)

Here is a picture

Also, You may notice that I am using KTorrent, instead of the default Ubuntu torrenter. It is the only torrent downloader on Ubuntu that “just works”. If you ask me, it should be the default. That is if it does not require too much KDE to install.

And I can’t. For the past week, I have been trying to simply compare two branches. I’m not even at the fucking merge stage. Just comparing. It either takes 30 minutes, or fails with some strange error (possibly a timeout):

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/intuitive_desktop/!svn/bc/209/trunk/IntuitiveFramework/Models'
svn: Processing PROPFIND request response failed: required string: "lp1:version-name" (/intuitive_desktop/!svn/bc/209/trunk/IntuitiveFramework/Models)

I keep having to push the release of 0.5 back, because of shit like this. So close and yet so fucked in the side of the head.

I think there are more than seventeen pirates in the world though.

This article in Wired that was published a few minutes ago demonstrates what I have known for years:
CA Releases Source Code Review of Voting Machines — New Security Flaws Revealed; Old Ones Were Never Fixed

When I read the results of the Sequoia and Hart reviews, I was appalled. This software is the buggiest, most over-engineered piece of shit I’ve seen in a while.

The simple solution is for Secretary of State Debra Bowen to throw out these machines and sue the companies for fraud and gross negligence. Then they can spend the money on making an open source voting system, like the one at the open voting consortium.

I’ve looked around on Google and the redMine forums, and I can’t even find anyone that is using this software on a community project. I’m not one to do this kind of thing, but “layzweb, help me! Fix the code below!”


# part of environment.rb
# SMTP server configuration
config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {
:address => "mail.intuitive-desktop.org",
:port => 25,
:domain => "intuitive-desktop.org",
:authentication => :login,
:user_name => "secret"
:password => "password",
}

config.action_mailer.perform_deliveries = true

# Tell ActionMailer not to deliver emails to the real world.
# The :test delivery method accumulates sent emails in the
# ActionMailer::Base.deliveries array.
#config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :test
config.action_mailer.delivery_method = :smtp