The New York Times: “Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the [48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops] released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to ‘unleash the power of the Net’ to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.”
Bonus: In addition to this being “open source” in the same sense that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was
open source politics and that the term “open source” has been applied to a wide range of non-software fields, including
computer hardware,
genetics,
journalism,
publishing, and even
cola, “open source” is an actual term for an
intelligence gathering discipline that uses information collected from sources available to the general public. Interesting!
FOSDEM is one of the events I really enjoy. Unfortunately, I couldn't
attend last year because I was at a conference in China. However, this
year I was back, and the event was bigger than ever. There's so much going
on that it's really hard to keep up. There are a number of people I'd
really like to have talked to more but there just wasn't time in those two
days which were fully packed. It was nice to meet a number of people
again, though, in particular the usual suspects, including Michi Banck (aka
Hurd illusionist, "it supports two wireless cards now"), Guillem
Jover (Spanish mafia boss living in exile), and Jordi Mallach ("World
Domination for Catalan^WValencian"). I also hung around the Spanish
free software research people with whom I'm going to spend a few months
soon. Crazy Spaniards... I've no idea how I'm going to survive there. Oh,
and Neal Walfield, who still stinks, and who thinks I have a British accent
now (which he thinks is a bad thing while I took it as a compliment).
Regarding new people, I had the great pleasure to meet and talk to Lennert
Buytenhek. I talked to him on IRC a bit recently because he's involved in
the big-endian ARM port and I've been hacking on the ARM based NSLU2
device. Lennert is quite frustrated because joining Debian is so hard.
As it turns out, there's currently a six month wait to be assigned an
Application Manager. I haven't really followed NM recently, but when I
acted as Front Desk I tried to keep it less than approximately six weeks.
Unfortunately, a great number of AMs resigned in the last few months and
years, and it has been quite hard to find good new people as AMs. Lennert
is the kind of person we really want to have in Debian since he's extremely
kind, smart and productive. Given that the current situation seems really
bad I decided to act as Application Manager again, but I only
intend to do that temporarily.
I'm sure I forgot lots of other things. But the summary is that it was a
great weekend, with way too much stuff going on at the same time. And
while I wish I could have devoted more time to my research, I gained some
important insights and did one interview which was really informative.