02.15.12
Links – Education Watch, BBC Apologizes for Selling Out, BP Oil Lingers
Reader’s Picks
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What’s Happening With FLOSS in USA?
This article uses NetApplications data, but even they can not hide an intersting correlation between technical competence and gnu/linux use. Towns where of Google, Yahoo and Lockheed Martin employees live have 88% gnu/linux use. California overall has 19%, which is probably closer to actual world use than the 1% nonsense that NetApplications usually publishes.
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XP/IE6 in the Enterprise
“IE6 is dug in like a First World War sniper with 80 per cent of that market, according to Browsium” Wow! If that’s true then XP may also be larger than the stats show, by a large margin. … This could explain the “missing” licences for “7″. The enterprise is not buying licences for “7″ but installing XP on their new machines bought naked. The world is shipping 90 million x86/amd64 PCs per quarter but M$ is only selling 50 million licences per quarter.
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Please meet the Mozilla Conductors
Mozilla Conductors help Mozillians with difficult online conversations. We offer advice, suggestions, a listening ear, moral support and, in the case where the discussion is public, occasionally direct intervention. But the goal is to help everyone communicate effectively, not to be enforcers.
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More FUD Gone
The naysayers trot out some pet application that they may never have used as an example of an application not available on FLOSS systems. The reality is that FLOSS on a general-purpose computer can do just about anything.
Science
Health/Nutrition
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Open Source Tackles Healthcare In Places Microsoft Can’t.
This is one way the US may fall behind the rest of the world, being stuck on non free software.
Security
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Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery
Copy is not theft. Most of the privacy problems people have are Windows exploits and the power non free software owners help themselves to in the first place. As usual, the NYT is lost in a maze of details and misses the big picture.
Defence/Police/Aggression
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Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist
Protecting your privacy while being different will land you on FBI watch lists.
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Andrew Adler says he deeply regrets writing a column suggesting Mossad agents should consider ‘a hit’ on the president if he fails to support Israel
States that practice assassination are a threat to everyone.
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Press-Register: Bloody red lesions on more than half of fish caught in surf off Dauphin Island (PHOTO)
BP oil is suspected.
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Report: White House Pressured Scientists to Underestimate BP Spill Size
an email released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) traces efforts to downplay the spill size in the initial weeks back to the White House. The group released a May 29, 2010 email from Dr. Marcia McNutt, the director of the US Geologic Survey and head of the government’s Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) … she cited pressure from the White House as the reason the numbers were low-balled.
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CMD Unveils Documents Detailing Insidious PR Campaign to “Greenwash” Weed-Killer Polluting Drinking Water Across the Country
These documents reveal a multi-million dollar effort by Syngenta and its PR flaks to influence the public’s perception of atrazine in an effort to stave off regulatory and legal action against the weed-killer, which has been found in drinking water across the nation. As part of this greenwashing effort, Syngenta’s PR team investigated the press and paid scientists, economists and other ‘experts’ to spin the media and the public on the ‘benefits’ of atrazine
Finance
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The Shadow Banking System: A Web of Financial Fraud
Not only has the system destroyed county title records, but it is highly vulnerable to bank runs and systemic collapse. And that is what happened in September 2008 following the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers. Gorton explains that it was a run on the shadow banking system that caused the credit collapse that followed.
Basically, rich people used mortgages as a slush fund between other risky deals.
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Foreclosure Deal to Spur U.S. Home Seizures
About 1 million foreclosures with be completed this year, up 25 percent from 2011, according to the firm.
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Where Did the Benefits of Technology Go?
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“Good for Wall Street – Bad for Students”: SEIU Hosts Webinar on Predatory, Proprietary Colleges and Universities
A good history and primer on the for profit diploma mill in the US. Student loans are even worse than fraudulent home loans because bilked students are not allowed to default, ever.
Anti-Trust
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Absent interoperability in desktop applications locks-in Mannheim city
The city decided early on to limit its approach to only the IT infrastructure, and to not make major changes on the desktop. This tactic, Armbruster now says, wrecked the entire migration. “By not changing anything on the desktop, the migration failed for the IT infrastructure.”
To get rid of non free software, you have to kick all of it out. Non free software owners will resist this and sabotage you if you let them. The upgrade train won’t spare those who try to sit still with non free software either.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this town has the German equivalent of the East Texas software patent court – caution, Florian influenced site. Try this better article.
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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BBC to issue global apology for documentaries that broke rules
Independent revealed programmes were made by third-party in pay of governments and firms
Techrights has written a lot about Microsoft BBC corruption. The apology is a good first step. The BBC should abandon broadcast to focus on publicly financed program production and public domain distritution to free itself from money problems. More money, not less should be provided for this.
Privacy
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Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook
In less than a year, Mr. Schrems’s one-person operation has morphed into a Web site, Europe Versus Facebook, and a grass-roots movement that has persuaded 40,000 people to contact Facebook in Ireland, where its European headquarters are located, to demand a summary of all the personal data the U.S. company is holding on them… Mr. Schrems filed the grievance after using a provision of Irish law to obtain from Facebook a copy of all of the information the company had been keeping on him. … Facebook was routinely collecting data [1,222 pages worth] that he had never consented to give, like his physical location, which he assumes was determined from his computer’s unique address identifiers, which can be traced geographically. Facebook was also retaining data he had deleted…
Education Watch
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The F-word of Ed Reform — and its unholy alliance with right-wing union-busting
There is a word for this kind of anti-democratic collaboration between business and government, but we haven’t used it much since the 1940s: fascism.
This article is a good run down of what’s going on in the world of civil servant union busting and “education reform”
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More Anti-Charter School Resolutions in Washington State
It looks like a good backlash it on the way. That’s good for Washington state and a good example for the rest of us.
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60% Teach for America , Inc. recruits and 40% credentialed teachers in Lousiana
Louisiana would have money for their schools and other things if government had the guts to tax the multinationals that run cancer alley.
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New Orleans: Beachhead for Corporate Takeover of Public Schools
New Orleans is important in the national education debate, but not for the reasons we commonly hear; it is important because it is the beachhead for a national movement to remove schools from local democratic control and accountability. The privatization trade-off is that the public sacrifices control of schools for a privatized system that delivers better education for the same tax dollar. While the citizens of New Orleans certainly lost control of their schools [after Hurricane Katrina], it cannot be said that they have received a better education, if that also means an equitable education, nor can it be said that it came at the same cost. … Hurricane Katrina was the perfect storm for the corporate education movement: No democracy, no unions, and a goal of 100% privatization of all public schools. It is no mystery why they chose New Orleans as their beachhead.
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The Myth of “Choice” in New Orleans: How the Recovery School District, Through the Charter School Movement Has Cheated Nearly 5000 New Orleans Students Out of Access to Real “Choice”
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An essay by a former Teach for America recruit: Why I did TFA, and why you shouldn’t
I’m glad I ‘did’ TFA. Twenty years ago they filled a need. Putting a few hundred barely trained teachers into the toughest to serve schools was one of those concepts that was ‘so crazy, it might just work.’ We weren’t always doing ‘good,’ but we also weren’t doing much harm. Our five or six hundred teachers were pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.
Over the next twenty years, TFA did a lot of growing, but not a lot of evolving. They replicated their institutes and increased their regions. The 2011 corps is nearly 6,000, twelve times as big as the cohorts from the early 90s. Unfortunately, the landscape in education has changed a lot in the past twenty years. Instead of facing teacher shortages, we have teacher surpluses. There are regions where experienced teachers are being laid off to make room for incoming TFA corps members because the district has signed a contract with TFA, promising to hire their new people. … TFA has participated in building a group of ‘leaders’ who, in my opinion, are assisting in the destruction of public education. -
Occupy the DOE in DC from March 30th to April 2nd
The key lever is the vaunted score on high-stakes state standardized tests, used to justify a slew of controversial decisions. As a result of ten years of this kind of reform, we are experiencing schools just as segregated by race and social class as they were in the 1950s. We in the United States are also experiencing a teaching profession that is constantly undermined and under attack. The culture of punishment and competition created under No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top has proven to be a massive failure.
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The NAACP Resolution on Charter Schools: Segregation is Not Innovation
ACTA
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ACTA bombshell: Germany refuses to sign anti-piracy treaty amid protests [Update]
With protests against the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) set to rage across Europe on Saturday … More recent reports suggest Germany is simply delaying its decision on signing ACTA until a later date, rather than refusing to sign the treaty outright. This is a lesser victory for ACTA opponents, but still a sign that the public outcry against the agreement is having an effect.
Go protest till they kill it properly.
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