Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

Another Legal Threat Against Speech. A Florida newspaper is reporting legal threats against parents who've been criticizing a charter school company and its operations in this forum. The name of the company is Charter Schools USA.

I hope the parents in the community remove any actually defamatory statements, if there are any (and the parents deny that there are). According to the news story, the company wouldn't specify which postings it found objectionable.

But I hope the parents will aggressively defend their right to be critical of a school administration that cancels PTO meetings, among other acts that sound pretty arrogant from a distance. And I hope they get help in that defense from free-speech defenders in the legal community.

Here, meanwhile, is the almost certain outcome in the wider Web community. Many people will now a) link to the story and the online forum; and b) mention the name of the company. (The story was just Slashdotted, which means it's going to get huge play online.)

One result? Before long, if you type "Charter Schools USA" into your favorite search engine, that news story -- and the forum, assuming it stays online, along with some withering commentary about the company -- will be near the top of the rankings. One suspects this will be a consequence that Charter Schools USA did not foresee. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.]
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Job opportunity for out of work Silicon Valley programmers?. Dismantling old ham radio antennas. MercuryNews.com | Dismantling monuments of electronics' fading past. The article suggests that ham radio antennas, especially towers, are becoming antiquated. As older ham radio operators pass away, their widows or their estates are hiring out the dismantling of the old antennas. Old towers might have been used for TV [...] [Common Sense Technology]
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Mars Express Successfully Deploys First Boom [Slashdot:]
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