Mark Thomas
Mark grew up in the land of Thomas Jefferson before traveling through Europe and Africa as a consultant in the geological software industry. He spent 15 years in South Africa during its transition through three different governments. In 2003, he returned with his wife and two sons to his native Virginia, having left nearly all his illusions about the necessity of government scattered to the winds. Mark and his family are serial entrepreneurs, having started a dairy, a few mathematical software consultancies, a volunteer emergency services organization, a private high school class, a coffee shop, and a couple of rock bands.
Peter G. Klein
Peter G. Klein is associate professor and director of the McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Missouri, adjunct professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and Senior Scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is author or editor of five books and over sixty articles, chapters, and reviews. undergraduate, MBA, PhD, and executive courses in managerial economics, entrepreneurship, business strategy, the economics of institutions and organizations, and Austrian economics. His most recent book is The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur: Essays on Organizations and Markets (Mises Institute, 2010).
Gil Guillory
Gil Guillory, P.E., PMP (gil.guillory@gmail.com), is a libertarian writer and registered professional engineer in Texas. He has written for mises.org, lewrockwell.com, antistate.com, and strike-the-root.com, and was a LP candidate for US Congress in 2000 and 2002. An anarchocapitalist and Research Associate of the Molinari Institute, he has read and written extensively about reducing to practice the production of security without taxation. His focus has been to define and assess the viability of a business model he has called “subscription patrol and restitution”.
Jeff P. Zacher
Jeffrey P. Zacher began using computers at age 6, playing backgammon on Datapoint terminals connected to Honeywell and IBM Mainframes. By age 11 he mastered Structured BASIC on the Atari 400. Delving into Player-Missile Graphics and machine language routines, he designed his first video game by age 12. By 13 he had written a program to print amortization tables for a local Real Estate agent. By 15 Jeff had learned to port BASIC programs from ATARI BASIC to Apple BASIC, TRS 80 BASIC and GWBASIC. He also began using the Databus language (now PL/B) to program a Datapoint terminal in his home.
In 1997 he earned an Associates of Applied Science in Computer Information Systems at Oklahoma State University where he studied computer programming, accounting, statistics and economics. His instructors were so impressed with his knowledge of computer systems and programming techniques he was invited to work in the computer lab during his first semester. While in the computer lab, a phone call came in for a Databus programmer. The contract involved maintaining financial software written in Databus on the Intel x86 platform. He soon began the conversion of this software to Visual Basic.
In 1999 Jeff worked for FarPointer in Tulsa where he designed the first remote desktop management system for e-commerce. It was in Tulsa where Jeff began learning good Object Oriented Design, Relational Database Normalization and Management and got his first real taste of the Linux Operating System.
Jeff held a contract at Seagate Technologies in Oklahoma City where he designed Windows Based Disc Drive Tools and Firmware Simulators.
At Global Dispatch, Jeff was able to put what he had learned about OOP to good use designing interfaces that connected a Computer Dispatch Call Center with Remote Clients running software designed by various vendors. His connections used a common base class that were inherited by several classes that contained logic proprietary to the software used in each case.
Currently, Jeff is CEO of Zacher Network Solutions where he maintains software and hardware for clients and provides Free Support Solutions for the general public. Zacher Network Solutions is the first company to develop a method to boot the Gentoo distribution of Linux on a Live USB device that also boots other flavors of Linux. ZNS is also developing new technology that will be crucial to Web 2.0.
Steve Fairfax
Steve Fairfax holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from MIT. His firm, MTechnology Inc. works to keep power and cooling to corporate data centers and major internet services. Using techniques originally developed to evaluate the safety of nuclear power, MTech uses probabilistic risk assessment to assist data center professionals in getting the highest reliability from always scarce capital and human resources.
Tennyson McCalla
Tennyson McCalla is a sometimes photographer, sometimes, writer, sometimes radio show host, and all the time libertarian. He’s worked with the NH Free State Project on their Liberty Forum conferences and volunteered his services for their Porcupine Freedom Festival. Usually based near NYC he can be heard on ThinkingLiberty.net on Tuesday nights.
He met most of the libertarians and anarchists he knows during the 2008 Ron Paul campaign, though he’s primarily apolitical. Outside of explicitly labeled liberty topics he’s mainly interested in the promise of technology and its liberating effects.