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By not supporting medium-sized deployments of, say 30 to 5000 laptops (a typical order from a school or an educational authority) the OLPC Foundation betrays an instinct for paternalism. We have too much paternalism in education already, and the technologies in Sugar were designed to give children democratic access to education.

# Free and open source software under GPLv3 # Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac # Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16 # Full EPUB spec support # WYSIWYG editing # Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View ...

KEI supports the notion that the WIPO SCCR should begin it's norm setting agenda in small confidence building steps, working with communities that know what they want. The reading disabled community is at the head of the line both because they are ready now, and because they have a very compelling need. According to the World Health Organization, there are 45 million persons who are blind, and 90 percent of them live in developing countries, mostly in appalling poverty and with very limited employment opportunities.

Do we need an international treaty for reading disabled persons? Yes, and today the World Blind Union is seeking international support for a proposed Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The next meeting where this matter could be taken up is at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights taking place in Geneva, May 25-29, 2009.

The work of the past half year - also thanks to the open movie project "Big Buck Bunny" - has resulted in a greatly improved feature set, now released as Blender 2.46, the "Bunny release"! This version supports a new particle system with hair and fur combing tools, fast and optimal fur rendering, a mesh deformation system for advanced character rigging, cloth simulation, fast Ambient Occlusion, a new Image browser, and that's just the beginning. Check the extensive list of features in the log below... have fun!

Project to support OLPCs for children in the Caribbean. Includes 30 screencast tutorials for Squeak etoys; free registration required.

"ETAN provides a forum for educators and others to engage in the political process and project a unified voice in support of a common cause - improving teaching and learning through the systemic use of technology. ETAN's mission is to influence public policy-makers at the federal, state and local levels and to increase public investment in the competitiveness of America's classrooms and students."

"The SNSF already jointly signed the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities" with other scientific organisations in Switzerland in 2006. In doing so, it underlined its intention to support the efforts towards establishing Open Access - i.e. free access to scientific publications - in Switzerland."

"A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving. "

I have the court documents for you in the i4i v. Microsoft case, the judgment, the permanent injunction, and the memorandum and order, which explains the legal reasoning in support of the order. I also got for you the original complaint by i4i, Microsoft's answer with counterclaim, and i4i's reply to the counterclaim, so you can understand what it was all about. The law firm that won has put out a press release. Microsoft, of course, will appeal. It has 60 days to do so. You probably think I am delighted. I am not. I hate software patents. And this is precisely why. It is karmic that this happened to Microsoft, who bullies Linux with patent threats and just got an XML patent of its own on August 4th that could, presumably, be used against the entire market. How stupid do we have to be to grant patents on software? On software *standards*? This is what happens. Now do you see it?

Utimaco LIMS distinguishes itself among competitive solutions by its comprehensive multivendor support. It integrates seamlessly with more than 200 different network nodes (switches, routers, gateways, application servers) by all leading infrastructure vendors. Utimaco LIMS enables realtime monitoring of telephony, fax, SMS, MMS, e-mail, VoIP, Push-to-Talk and other IP-based communication services. The modular architecture of LIMS facilitates cost-efficient LI solutions for small operators and is scalable for surveillance networks with several thousand concurrent intercepts. Utimaco LIMS mediates and delivers data in accordance with international LI standards by ETSI, 3GPP, ANSI/ATIS and Cablelabs. The highest security requirements are implemented in LIMS to protect all private data from eavesdropping and manipulation.

The Coalition's mission statement says, "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra." (...) The Guild issued a statement following the protests, explaining its position: "The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights." If the guild is trying to gain sympathy, it will have a very difficult time when it pits "economic rights" against civil rights.

Tue, 08/04/2009 - 14:06 - marc The native format for Stanza is ePub, which is the Open eBook standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum (http://www.idpf.org/). ePub is supported in Stanza Desktop, iPhone, and iPod Touch, as well as in Adobe Digital Editions and the next generation of e-ink readers like the Sony Reader (PRS-505).

Wojcicki is a journalism and English teacher at Palo Alto High School, where she leads one of the largest high school journalism programs in the nation. She leads a variety of award-winning journalism projects, including a newspaper, a magazine, a website, a television program, and a sports publication. Over the past 20 years, these projects have won Gold and Silver Crowns from Columbia Scholastic Press Association, the PaceMaker Award and Hall of Fame Award from National Scholastic Press, and best in nation from Time Magazine in 2003. In February 2009, she was awarded the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Key Award in a special ceremony at Columbia University for "outstanding devotion to the cause of the school press … and service above and beyond the call of delegated duty." She is the president of the Friends of the Lurdes Mutola Foundation to support girls' education in Mozambique and is a consultant for the Silicon Valley Education Foundation and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The Authors Guild is pressuring Amazon to modify the Kindle 2 so that the synthetic speech function can only be used with the express authorization of the owner of the copyright of a work. A coalition of organizations that represent or work with persons with reading disabilities is organizing a protest to persuade the Guild to change its position. KEI supports the protest, and makes this statement on the Kindle 2 issue:

"DICE aims at providing support to teaching and non-teaching staff of Swiss higher education institutions in copyright management of digital content for eLearning. The goal of DICE is: (a) Increasing awareness of copyright issues related with digital content, in order to provide sound knowledge and eliminate unreasonable fears. (b) Developing fundamental skills in intellectual property and copyright management for higher education staff (e.g. understanding basic rules applicable in Switzerland, using Creative Commons licenses, etc.) (c) Increase the readiness and ability of authors to publishing open access resources (aka Open Educational Resources)"

Web standards are sustained by conversation, and Blue Beanie Day is a chance to start some.

Listing of open source alternatives to Norton Ghost for easy machine restoration.