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Links May 2011

John W. Dean wrote in insightful series of three articles for Findlaw about Authoritarian Conservatives [1]. In summary there are Authoritarian Followers who follow their leader blindly and Authoritarian Leaders who do whatever it takes to gain and maintain power. The Authoritarian mindset lends itself towards right-wing politics.

Mick Ebeling gave an inspiring TED talk […]

Are Assholes Essential to a Free Software Project?

What do Assholes do?

Rusty just wrote a post titled “If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot” [1] about some of the anti-social tendencies demonstrated by programmers, including some that are implied to be fairly important. His post seems to imply that there are really great programmers who are anti-social […]

Book Company Bankruptcy

In February Borders went bankrupt [1], since then they have been in the slow process of closing down. Now Borders is trying to clear the last of their stock and offering 80% discounts off the marked price.

I bought a book by Stephen Baxter and one by Peter F. Hamilton and those appeared to be […]

Preventing the End of the World

Some crazy people led by Harold Camping who call themselves Christian claimed that the world was going to end yesterday [1]. Harold had previously done this in 1994 so he’s got form for predictions that don’t come true.

The bible says that “the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night” […]

Osama bin Laden

After almost 10 years the Americans finally found Osama bin Laden, unfortunately they were unable to take him alive. The Reid Report has a good summary of what happened [1].

Sam Varghese wrote an interesting analysis of the political aspects of this event in Pakistan [2], and he’s a lot less positive about it than […]

This Event Will be Photographed

The above sign was prominently displayed at a fair that was recently run by the Banyule Council. We have had some discussions in the Linux community about what policies should be used in regard to photography at events, it seems that this is a precedent for being able to opt-out of public photography.

Related […]