There is no place for this kind of offensive behavior in a public forum. There is also the responsibility of the organizers to pull the plug on the display, the microphone, and the speaker. The members of the audience have a responsibility to hiss, boo, and shout.

I think I've seen this presentation before and I thought it was funny as did some of my female counterparts who attended the conference. When Hoss was at the conference I attended, he was very self-deprecating. But this was in Canada, and Hoss is Scottish. Never go to the U.S. and do anything remotely like this in front of an American audience.

EDIT: the part I saw a the conference was his orgasmatron flash animation, not all the other stuff mentioned. However, in context during the presentation, the flash animation was still pretty funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TunHciZxXaY

..and walkout in protest.

So let's say you enjoy this sort of thing. What is the appropriate forum? (Are you saying there are just some things we shouldn't talk about or say? Really?)

Anyway, why are programming conferences considered "professional"? I don't consider programming "a profession". It's something I do for fun. I chat with my friends, I write some code... sometimes people give me money, but that doesn't really matter to me, it's a secondary aspect.

So if you consider programming something fun, I don't understand why programming conferences are supposed to be "professional".

"There is no place for this kind of offensive behavior in a public forum."

Did you watch the presentation? I've not. But I've read two simplified accounts, with enough differences to make me wonder what was actually shown, and how much expectations or bias colored the description.

This is pretty cut and dry. If you're interviewing and I Google you and find something like this in your track record, you're a "no hire".

Darn, I wonder if he would have even wanted to work for you. If you are looking for dirt you can always find it. Everyone has flaws.

Oh well.

"Prude or Professional" is not the false dichotomy here. It's "Prude or Adult", where "adult" means far more than having your own credit card number to give to porn sites.

What an obnoxious little wanker.

Here's a different take on the conference events from flash-guy Grant Skinner: http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2009/06/hossgate09_fin...

If Grant doesn't see how an "'orgasm simulator', which showed a female face working through 4 or 5 expressions up to orgasm as he moved the mouse up and down. It was crude, and didn't really have anything much to do with his theme, but it wasn't explicit" is sexist, particularly when shown to a primarily male audience, then he's stupid.

This guy is getting much more attention for his presentation than he would have making something tame. Has everyone here just been link baited?

For the sake of contrast, here is how the presentation was described on the Flashbelt website:

In life we seldom encounter a blank canvas. Starting a new job often sees you filling another's shoes, ice skating means crossing over the scars in the ice left by others, and even tagging a blank wall means working with the imperfections of the builder and painter that created your canvas.

This indirect contact with others creates an often subtle, but uniquely human experience - a shared narrative of being that provides a life enriching subtext.

Hoss exploits this shared narrative in his work to great effect, and will use his inaugural Flashbelt presentation to analyze a series of projects that build on each other's successes and failures to deliver increasingly rich experiences. And he'll say ` Fk ' a lot.