Most people I know got the flu this month, but the query asks for "diagnosed". Still, I voted "none" since Dr's in the US are no longer testing every case and I can't prove it's H1N1. Woefully ignorant? I think you mean the question was woefully exacting?

An excellent resource is here:

http://www.teachmetomake.com/

The founders are happy to share insights and ideas!

From the website:
Teach me to make provides science workshops and classes for all ages. Our popular electronics and mechanics workshops for children encourage tinkering: taking things apart; building whimsical comtraptions using salvaged components, recycled objects and inexpensive supplies; and repurposing contraptions to different needs. Using both an artistic and technical approach, each child is guided and encouraged in the way best suited to their way of thinking. Our bilingual instructors are further able to engage and mentor children of varied backgrounds.

You can find your Senator here:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

And your Congressman here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwriterep.house.gov%2Fwriterep%2Fwelcome.shtml

I wrote them a note like this, and you can copy it/use it/change it. Whatever you like.

I support the Open College Textbook Act of 2009!

Open formats for education works derived from taxpayer dollars is essential for the longevity of information. Non-open formats such as .doc (MSWord) are subject to software changes and incompatibility issues. Open formats like .odf (Open Office) and .pdf (Adobe) allow the data to be accessed for countless decades.

Information paid for with taxpayer money should be made freely available to the taxpayers!

I think the entire development team should have to watch! There are often developers who don't care about the end-user experience, and then wonder why their bills don't be paid when the software flops.

I would spend my time and my money researching, creating and standardizing open media codecs. There should be enough prior art to invalidate many existing codec patents, but it takes time and money. Researching prior art, engineering workarounds, and persistent litigation might ensure that our children have access to the digital content we create today. A decade ago, my friend wrote poetry and saved it in Word. Now, he could only access it through Open Office. It's completely ridiculous that we save documents in a proprietary format and then lose the ability to retrieve the files. Paper has the grace to be read after hundreds of years--why doesn't code?

Pain is not my problem with eating animals. Inhumane conditions are the problem! Removing the "pain" part of it would open up even more excuses for factory farming. Seeing that an animal is in pain when it's killed is essential to respecting its life and purpose--and to preventing over-abundance of killing. A hunter should kill out of need and learns that when he sees and animal suffer (read the story of the Rainbow Warrior). Factory farms and lack of pain remove us from this natural cycle. ugh. Don't get me started...

Thank you! When I first went on to usaspending.gov (granted this was just after Obama came into office), there was nothing of the sort.

Might I add, there's little "transparent" about a pie chart. How about a spreadsheet listing exact vendors and amounts?

I'll have to disagree here. There were many plot holes in District 9. Moon, OTOH, was incredible. It was sci-fi for truists. The kind of movie I want to see a sequel *and* a prequel to.

I've used mobile broadband (Verizon) for about 4 years as my "home internet provider". Your connection will likely be dropped a few times a day, and if you have it connected to a wireless router, that might have to be powercycled a few times a week. I would never consider running a web server off of this! As for streaming video, it depends on where and what time you are viewing. In NYC around 9:30am, your connection speed slows to almost that of dial-up. I can watch streaming TV at night, though, and seldom have to wait long for it to buffer. In the end, it's great for home use, but not for a "major internet user" like yourself.

When we all got laid-off from the Gnash project, work on it came to a screeching crawl. When we raised money, we took hardworking volunteers and asked them to work harder--for money! That they did. Now, every one of us has had to find another job and, with that taking up most of our focus, there is less time to contribute to a FLOSS project. Most people are still contributing, but it's certainly not at the same rate.

http://easterbridge.com/ http://easterbridge.com/files/free-software-in-education.pdf Anne's been presenting on this stuff for quite some time and her work is great. She's got a large compilation of studies and anecdotes from around the world and, if you email her, she'll prove to be a great resource. The Skolelinux guys have been great to work with as well: skolelinux.org One of the hardest challenges is Flash Animations. Lots but lots of educational materials are written in flash and that's often been a limit for educational systems like the OLPC. This is something Gnash has been working diligently to support, but there is a lot of material out there!