Jeroen van Wolffelaar

• ftp-team for a year, looks good
• dpl-team as a good idea, wants team decisions to take less responsibility on his own. Might be wise, but could be un-leaderish.
• pushes for smooth communication, I am not sure how that will work out - smooth communication means sanding off the edges, but we all know that the best development is always on the edge.
• pushes for code of conduct. While the idea might be quite popular it also states that bad behavior in our community is becoming so widespread that a special code is needed to compensate for that. I do not feel that we are at such a bad state now - more flamewars are raised about the code of conduct then about the conduct itself. I feel this is were simple and decisive action by the DPL should be done and not a birocratic procedure to spread the blame of failure.
• “insider reports” - good idea, like an internal Debian News Station (see Howard 100 News)
• encouraging wiki, forums and IRC as official channels of external communication. Several questions arise here: as a user with specific question - where must I go? to which media? to which list, channel or forum category? It must not be too complex. Also there is the question of spreading knowledgeable users and developers too thin across multiple channels of voluntary support.
• infrastructure transparency - good, but how? even tiny bits of paperwork there can slow the whole project to a crawl.
• mediator in flamewar situations - good, DPL should be doing that.
• media coverage - does Debian need more media coverage? I do not think so. I do believe that we need more coverage in more professional circles (even if in circles of professional psychiatrists) to attract more developers and make them understand us better, but I do not feel that attracting huge crowds of general public would do much good for the project.
• in my opinion team players make mediocre leaders

Five word summary: transparent, wide, smooth, mediative, consensus

Ari Pollak

• whoa … pictures, so sweet
• humor, so much needed in our project
• good point about half-DPL - it would be nice to have DPL delegate as much as they possibly can but be strict and easy with what is left
• Debian Police - sounds like a good substitute for Project Scud and the Finnish Inquisition
• good take on licences, however I would add to the Gnocchi licence the phrase “And you must remove any copies of this licence from your memory as soon as you have finished reading it.” That will show them lawyers …

Five word summary: humor, half-*, police, anti-legalese, illustrations

Steve McIntyre

• got in cheap, but a long time ago
• The CD dude!
• not much new on internal communication, same old “will tell you even that I not doing anything”
• same stuff about the code of conduct, see above.
• social skill test within NM. Good idea, but not a good implementation - you will not get much social conditioning with mentoring inside teams. We need someone to get on the candidate and roast them good - test their asbestos suits. After he has made a package, schedule for time and either call the newbie or IRC with him. Grill him about his package. Must sure to slide into personal insults, religion bashing and political discourses. Watch the response. Evaluate. Post audio online
• open cabalish developments - there is little to be done beyond talking to cabal and making sure all semi-private developments use public Debian infrastructure for communication - draft on wiki and develop in svn, so that everyone can see.
• very good points about professionalism. we must be able to be proud about Debian and demand some level of standards from packages inside Debian. The idea of regular DD reexamination might be a very good fit here, see below.
• Steve looks like a good organizer to me
• however he might be a bit too soft on leadership or simply too diplomatically inclined in his platform statement

Five word summary: professionalism, standards, MIA, tests, communication

Anthony Towns

• not wanting to win too much
• speed up! - release early, release often. Sounds good for the everyday processes, but not for The Release. I still want to see Debian as The Most Stable thing ever.
• recruiting - I would ask, recruit for what? People can not just get into the interesting parts of the project and recruiting for general run of the mill development does not sound too engaging to me. You’d better make a contest for new security team members or new ftp masters or any other position that one person or only a few persons hold now. Have clear requirements and tests and actually get those people into doing those critical jobs. After that we can think about …
• … compulsory turnover. Now there is a good idea that I’d like other DPLs to consider, but only with in conjunction with the previous one. We might not need full rotation, but we could have a rotating ftp team leader post that would iterate among ftp team members. That would alleviate the “hit by a bus” problem a bit more.
• DPL as a discussion and direction leader is quite a nice and needed idea in my opinion.
• I do not agree with aj about compulsory kindness and the general idea of expulsion on social grounds. Currently it creates more problems then it could solve in a lifetime.
• Congrats on declassification thing, historians will surely thank us for that.
• nice legal disclaimer, I like those kind of things

Five word summary: continuity, tempo, newbies, direction, bling

Andreas Schuldei

Not online, to be put here when it appears.

Jonathan (Ted) Walther

• photo, nice touch.
• speak your mind. sound essential to a DPL.
• Ubuntu good. Good.
• Make love (and code) and not Desktop. Let Ubuntu make Desktop if they want to.
• We all are strange people, face it.
• Kicking people out is more harm to the project then those people could ever do.
• Kicking fun out of Debian.
• Great points about improving NM process and worshiping James Troup - I fully agree.
• The best idea here - recertification of all Debian Developers every X years (where X is proposed to be 3 currently). This will almost automatically solve many problems we have in Debian: NM frustration, MIA developers, standards of professionalism, reiteration of best practices, social reshuffling.

Five word summary: Here, goes, my, vote, period. Alternate summary: geek, love, tolerate, recertification, statue.

Bill Allombert

• math Ph.D. and researcher.
• wanted to vot for Lars, but as he stepped down saw no one else good enough, so put himself forward. brave words. I like Lars too, bet it’s not like we do not have good candidates this year besides him.
• summary on effect of voluntarism and respectful communication. Quite plain if you ask me. Got me a bit bored there. Not a good sign.
• think globally
• assist others
• help Debian specific software
• observers - sounds like that Debian Action News Team minus all the fun.
• “I am very patient” - be patient when reading and enthusiastic while writing, otherwise people might not read patiently

Five word summary: filler, communicate, more filler, patience

I hope this summary gave someone as much food for thought as it did for me. My favorite is very clear, but can you guess who is my second choice? Leave a comment and let me know what you think

Stem Cells

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/23/60minutes/main1341635.shtml

I must say that I have not been following the stem cell research closely enough in last couple of years and I am very amazed that we can now actually tell a stem cell to develop into a particular type of cell. The sight of a bunch of cells grown into a slab of heart tissue was especially fascinating.

First of all there are at least two problems that I see with the research as it was shown in the program: they are not using cells from the patient, they are simply injecting the cells “in the general direction of the problem”.

The first is probably a problem caused by politics - in a perfect world we would take a cell sample from a patient, take nuclei of those cell, put them in place of the nuclei of the stem cells and we would basically have cloned stem cells of the same patient that we plan to be treating. There would be no problem with nonacceptance of donor organs or confusion of living with another persons DNA inside your cells. Politics block those developments.

The second problem is mostly the simple immaturity of the field of research and microsurgery in general - it is still very hard for us to grow a full slab of heart and surgically replace damaged tissue with it. There are pros and cons to that approach too. Injections do have lower level of post operational risks in the area of effect - there are no tissue scars to worry about. However, having heart tissue flowing in the blood stream does seem quite risky in that it could have unforeseen consequences in other parts of the body. For better or worse.

However, even taking in consideration all that problems (that the scientists of the field) surely do know about very well, it is just plain ridiculously stupid how much the religious right in general and that incompetent president of theirs is grinding all the research to a halt. And do not tell me about that last weeks of him touring bio-diesel facilities, I will come to that too. In short - go California, but I would rather see Bush just getting his marbles together and banning stem cell research in USA altogether, so that all those scientists can come to us, to EU and other places with more reasonable legal systems, because otherwise it seems that they are just asking for trouble there. Trouble that will slow the research to half of its possible speed for next 10 years or so.

Port security

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1344473.shtml

I can only say one thing about security and USA - 90% of the USA security forces only work to ensure that people feel secured: that they see the police, that they are searched regularly enough, that they are stopped from time to time to answer some questions, that they are being “protected” on the Internet (read: being spied upon), that they are feeling harassed enough to feel safe. If the regular people are harassed enough they will never forget that the police is there and they will assume that the real criminals get harassed even more. That instills both content and fear: content for being protected and fear because there is clearly something to be protected from. After four and a half years of this treatment people are becoming very cattle-like, i.e. easy to govern.

And in the same time the real experts can easily see that for real terrorists all those protection measures are completely irrelevant - real terrorists do not try to hijack planes with matches or nail clippers. Real terrorists have people inside, good supplies of profession equipment and have all the information that your government will not tell you “for security reasons”. Cocaine is being smuggled into USA by tons. If put a nuke or two into that stream with enough “green” wrapping, no one will notice anything. Anyone having enough resources to buy a suitcase nuke will have enough resources to get it into USA even if you implement the strictest police state measures the likes of which have not been seen before. Even if you mandate all citizens to implant RFID chips that could be used to track their location from satellite and shoot on (satellite) sight anyone without such chip, there will still be ways to nuke any place in USA if there were any motivation. Clearly there is none.

This again show that only thing that are considered “ok to be debated upon” are being raised in USA nowadays - there has been more debate about that duck hunt incident then about millions of Americans being spied on by their own government. That says much about any country.

I want to bring just one quote from this segment - “It is impossible to do proper inspections of everything without basically stopping all international commerce”.

Montana coal diesel

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/24/60minutes/main1343604.shtml

The idea of making diesel from coal is new to me, but it really is just an old, forgotten technology put into action by Nazi Germany at one point.

The idea is a nice plan in the local perspective (cheap gas, lots of jobs, …) but from a global perspective that is a very dangerous idea. Anything that prolongs the inevitable transition to pure hydrogen economy is. I think that only thing that has a big future is pure electric power with storage in some kind of metallic hydride. You see, I am worried about global warming quite a lot. And burning any kind of fossil fuel bring carbon that has been laying in the ground for millions of years and throw it back into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide (CO ₂). That both speeds up global warming and reduces the amount of oxygen that we have left for breathing. Does look bleak in the long term perspective, doesn’t it?

Yes, digging up coal in your backyard is better then fighting wars halfway across the globe for oil, but not too much.

Dogs

This week Andy was talking about dog shows. Not for me that kind of thing - I like cats much more. And not those lazy show cats, I like simple cats that must rely on their smart to survive (at least be calling their owner to feed them when they are hungry :)).

So here we have the end of my first coverage of 60 minutes. Lets hope that it is not the last and lets also hope that you foud at least something here to be of a value to you.

As always, feel free to comment on what could be done to improve all this.