jamie found this blog post up on the HeliOS Project, which brings Linux to school kids in Austin, TX. It makes very clear some of the obstacles that free software faces in the classroom. It seems a teacher came upon a student demonstrating Linux to other kids and handing out LiveCDs. The teacher confiscated the CDs and wrote an angry email to HeliOS's founder, Ken Starks: "Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..." Starks pens an eloquent reply, which contains a factoid I have not seen mentioned before: "The fact that you seem to believe that Microsoft is the end all and be-all is actually funny in a sad sort of way. Then again, being a good NEA member, you would spout the Union line. Microsoft has pumped tens of millions of dollars into your union. Of course you are going to 'recommend' Microsoft Windows."

gaijinsr writes "The damage done in what CERN calls the 'S34 Incident' (and what other people call a major explosion in the cryogenics system) is much more serious than originally admitted: The earliest possible restart date is late summer next year, but with some proposed improvements to avoid repetitions of the incident, it looks more like 2010. They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN."

eldavojohn writes "You might remember the tiny news that Half Life 2 source code was leaked in 2003 ... it is the 6th most visited Slashdot story with over one kilocomment. Well, did anything happen to the source of the leak, the German hacker Axel 'Ago' Gembe? Wired is reporting he was offered a job interview so that Valve could get him into the US and bag him for charges. It's not the first time the FBI tried this trick: 'The same Seattle FBI office had successfully used an identical gambit in 2001, when they created a fake startup company called Invita, and lured two known Russian hackers to the US for a job interview, where they were arrested.'"