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Hacker Space Festival splits across locations-> 1

Submitted by lekernel
lekernel writes "After the success of the second Hacker Space Festival, the international community of hackers are invited to participate in the multiple events of the third edition. Hackito Ergo Sum (Paris, April 8-10) will be your usual security conference. Breizh Entropy Congress (Rennes, April 15-17, submission deadline March 16) is an eclectic event themed around free culture and technologies. Les Contorsions Technologiques (Paris, May 1st, submission deadline March 20) focuses on DIY hardware. Tetalab Hacker Space Festival (Toulouse, May 28-30) will consist in conferences and workshops revolving around hackerspaces activities. Eventually, Estive Numérique (Southern Alps countryside, July 20-26) will be about autonomy and self-sufficiency in the digital age. With such events blossoming, France looks like the place to be during the next months!"
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:You're doing it wrong. (Score 1) 332

by Giloo (#30534364) Attached to: How Can I Contribute To Open Source?
I totally agree with your point of view. I think that there are many reasons our administrations should require opensource for their projects:
  • there is a real public audit of the software, should it still be developped by a selected corporation
  • money is not lost for private parties, as in, they are many things that could benefit other people, companies.. If it's the taxpayers' money, what can be more transparent to give it back this way to them?
  • it lowers the risk of lock-ins for the administrations, that usually end by costing a lot more when you need to buy again a new solution 3 years later..

I think there is a lot to write & tell about how the many general reasons to endorse opensource could be adapted to the government / administration specifics, in terms of local economy growth, global service & quality improvement of software, ability to share more easily the load between cities/states/whatever and so on..

Comment: Re:Not a "right"! (Score 3, Insightful) 312

by BeardsmoreA (#30141900) Attached to: Spain Codifies the "Right To Broadband"
All of this is nit picking over the definition of the word 'right'. It has more than one meaning! Generally, the precise meaning is determined by who we are saying is 'giving' the right - and in the case of 'basic human rights' we usually imply that either 'the natural order of things' or $DEITY 'gave' the rights. All rights do not have to be innate though - I can contractually give you a right of access across my land. In the case of TFA we are talking about a government / constitutionally granted right. Ok? Can we all stop arguing semantics now? Kthx.

Comment: Re:Bad statistics - GIGO (Score 2, Informative) 1231

by Giloo (#29976418) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
The article sounds indeed more like a rant made public about a problem. Of course, this doesn't deny there is problems with 9.10, but heh, it was in alpha/beta, as the others, and nothing really "that serious" was pointed out I think. Anyway, people ranting loudly enough to make it to The Register may learn that they can also participate in testing the releases..

As for my story, I was running 9.10 since alpha, and it went quite nicely.. Minor pulseaudio glitches that were solved over time and so on. At work and on my laptop, I've upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic when offered to do so by the update manager, and it went nicely too. No problem here, not even a dependency issue, it really went fine, and 2.6.31 is really nice to my setups ;)

About all this issue.. I can't help but think it's more a PR prank than a real spotted issue.. The bugtracker doesn't tell that "that many" users are impacted, and also, that it may be more due to a ATI-card weirdness.. Heh. Not ubuntu's fault in the end, even if they could have worked around it..
Censorship

In the UK, a Few Tweets Restore Freedom of Speech 216

Posted by kdawson
from the inconvenient-truths dept.
Several readers wrote to us about the situation in the UK that saw the Guardian newspaper forbidden by a judge from reporting a question in UK parliament. The press's freedom to do so has been fought for since at least 1688 and fully acknowledged since the 19th century. At issue was a matter of public record — but the country's libel laws meant that the newspaper could not inform the public of what parliament was up to. The question concerned the oil trading company Trafigura, the toxic waste scandal they are involved in, and their generous use of libel lawyers to silence those who would report on the whole thing. After tweeters and bloggers shouted about Trafigura all over the Internet, the company's lawyers agreed to drop the gag request.
The Media

In Defense of the Anonymous Commenter 198

Posted by Soulskill
from the seems-familiar dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Doug Feaver has an interesting story in the Washington Post 'in defense of the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at the end of articles and blogs.' Feaver says that during his seven-year tenure as editor and executive editor of washingtonpost.com he kept un-moderated comments off the site, but now, four years after retiring, he says he has come to think that online comments are a terrific addition to the conversation, and that journalists need to take them seriously. 'The subjects that have generated the most vitriol during my tenure in this role are race and immigration,' writes Feaver. 'But I am heartened by the fact that such comments do not go unchallenged by readers. In fact, comment strings are often self-correcting and provide informative exchanges.' Feaver says that comments are also a pretty good political survey. 'The first day it became clear that a federal bailout of Wall Street was a real prospect, the comments on the main story were almost 100 percent negative. It was a great predictor of how folks feel, well out in front of the polls. We journalists need to pay attention to what our readers say, even if we don't like it. There are things to learn.'"

Comment: Re:I thought I did. (Score 3, Insightful) 747

by Giloo (#27299795) Attached to: Richard Stallman Warns About Non-Free Web Apps

If you don't want to look at code, however bad it is, it doesn't mean you should necessarily turn to proprietary software (or even "not fight for F/OSS).. Which is somehow his point. If locked on proprietary software, his only option was to ask the editor to correct the bug. Which may or may not be willing to do so.

With opensource software, he could have hired someone to waste his time on it, even if the original developper wouldn't have been willing to do so.. Plus it could have been a nice contribution, so probably for a lower price, he could have had his software up&running, and made the software better..

And anyway, just by reading that: "which I can find out by other means than looking at source code", we can probably assume the technical details aren't exactly relevant to him.

Comment: Re:You bring up an interesting point (Score 1) 346

by Giloo (#26840397) Attached to: Moonlight 1.0 Brings Silverlight Content To Linux

Actually, there is one website which has switched to Silverlight.. I'm not sure why they did, but it made me very unhappy:
http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/dests.php?flash=chk

This is a map to show the possible routes from Ryanair airports. They now have included a list of their routes so people can read from it instead of their silverlight map, but still.. I've installed the plugin, and this still doesn't work.

So of course, no, we don't want that MS thing, but at a point.. it's like Flash, if webmasters start to use it, better have some support that works than just whine about who made it in the first place..

fortune: cpu time/usefulness ratio too high -- core dumped.