Charity Watch (aka American Institute of Philanthropy) has been doing this for years and does a damn good job of it. You can subscribe to their ratings guide and always have it on hand if you're interested.

---Alex

Well, in theory, Netflix is eventually coming to Linux courtesy of their efforts to get it working in Chrome.

That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.

---Alex

There's an interesting fiction book called Jennifer Government by Max Berry that explores just that: a distopian, completely capitalist world. Overall it's a book that had the potential to be truly amazing, and ended up somewhere in the vicinity of good instead. Still, a worthwhile read.

---Alex

I have no idea what she is researching, but there may be problems with patient data, etc.

---Alex

If I may make a suggestion: why block perfectly valid words like clitoris, cunnilingus, vagina, penis, anus, anal, fellatio, ejaculate, etc? I assume you do teach sex-ed at your school. Will kids taking these classes not be allowed to discuss these topics via email? Not to mention the sheer amount of well respected literature which includes these terms (and many other listed above)

In my opinion, filtering using a word list is a bad way to go to begin with. Instead, teach the kids to use proper judgment and good taste; that will be far more effective than any word list. However, if using a word list is a foregone conclusion, then I think blocking the proper and technical terms of genitalia is a huge mistake. It sends a message that our sexuality and our genitalia are something to be ashamed of and basically says that the school district's view on sexuality is negative. This is hardly the lesson kids should be learning. People need to be comfortable with their bodies and in control, not told it is a taboo and any discussion of it will be censored.

I wish your district the best of luck with this roll out. I used to work in K-12 IT, so I know just how insane and irrational "protective" parents can be.

---Alex

SparkleShare may be what you're looking for. I've had my eye on it for awhile, but I havn't used it yet.

---Alex

In case anyone is curious, the title of the documentary is "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara." I'm too young to have lived during the Vietnam war, but I found the documentary to be fascinating not only from a historical standpoint but also from watching McNamara himself. He's obviously struggling with what he's done during his life and this documentary is part historical, part confession, and part attempted justification for what he did. The film has a very personal feel to it since they shot the movie with the interviewer's face on a screen and camera right behind it. It does feel like he is talking to you personally in the camera.

Also, even though the movie was released in 2003, it was shot just before September 11th, 2001. McNamara makes some interesting comments about US and warfare. Basically he stated that if we act unilaterally and cannot convince our closest allies to join us, then we need to consider very carefully just what we have become.

It's an interesting film that is worth watching. You don't have to agree with him for it to still be enlightening.

---Alex

From what I understand, one of the first things LibreOffice did after forking was import the GO-oo patch-set. I believe GO-oo and BrOffice intend to merge into LibreOffice and combine their efforts. I am not affiliated with any of the projects though, so some of my information could be incorrect or out of date.

---Alex

There is a project called SparkleShare that is in the works. There is no release yet, but I hope it gains momentum soon. It has the killer feature that DropBox doesn't have: you to host your own repository.

I work in a research lab at a university and we use DropBox all the time to collaborate with researches at other institutions. The 2 GB limit is a problem though, and we don't like relying on an external service run by a company. If DropBox's free 2 GB ever goes away, then we're in a bit of a bind.

Once SparkleShare is ready to go, I'm going to switch all of the labs I cover over to it.

---Alex

The newly released (in the US) HTC Hero has a 5 megapixel camera (http://www.htc.com/www/product/hero/specification.html). I just got the Hero and it takes surprisingly good pictures in low light too. The screen lags quite a bit behind what the camera is seeing, but I'm told that Android 1.6 is supposed to fix that (whenever HTC gets around to releasing the update). ---Alex

For those who would like to take the survey, here's a link. https://www.linux-foundation.org/en/2007ClientSurvey ---Alex