A school in the city of Gela, on the south coast of Sicily, the Instituto Majorana, hopes that the bill will help to prevent its break-up. The school, with 633 pupils, is to be split in two, with a major part of the students to go a school with 433 students in the same area. ... Italy recently decided to close all schools with fewer than 600 students [to cut costs]. ... "The Majorana is doing a lot of work to spread free and open source software", explains one of the teachers, Antonio Cantaro on the school site, while wondering if that is somehow connected to the decision to close the school.
It's a shame that schools are closed instead of cutting licensing costs.
Koha began back in 1999, when a local library in Horowhenua, on the north island of New Zealand, was faced with a Y2K problem with its existing library system. ... Horowhenua Library Trust and Katipo Communications Ltd made a joint decision to release Koha as Free Open Source Software under the GPL in 1999 before we started the project. It was recommended to Horowhenua Library as a risk management strategy, to ensure that they could get support and development work done by suppliers other than Katipo, and because there wasn't already an open source system available.
See also Simon Phipps on the same subject. The trademark issue seems to have been solved well and the project is still a free software success story that every library should be interested in.
Now is the time to get cops on board with the OWS movement — especially now ... [that we know] municipal police are being pushed around by a shadowy private policing consultancy affiliated with DHS. If you study any closing society decent people get handed monstrous orders and are forced to comply, and right now municipal police are being forced to comply with brutal orders from this corporate police consultancy, by economic pressure. ... What most citizens don’t fully understand is that hardball politics behind the scenes is not about confrontation — it is about waging favors. Most effective it is veiled confrontation (what can that group conceivably do to me if I make them angry?) combined with overt offers of favors (what can they get for me?) Occupy is in a very powerful position if they only begin to understand this.
If passed, the US would effectively be under martial law.
As Senator Dianne Feinstein put it, "Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge."
The author has some fundamental misunderstandings about the internet. According to the AP, the publisher payed him at least a million dollars.