Jim Baen, SF publisher and e-publishing pioneer, died yesterday of a stroke suffered earlier this month. The day before the stroke, he called David Drake and told him that he had to write his obituary.

DailyKos’s teacherken draws a line in the sand.

I stand with him.

Barack Obama gives a brilliant speech at the Take Back America conference.

Alito pretends to concur with the other 8 on a decision about employment discrimination, but his opinion basically states that the law, as written, doesn’t mean what it actually says. See the Kos diary I linked to for details.

SednaX, the open-source project to enhance the next version of VFP, has changed its name to VFPX, in preparation for moving from GotDotNet to CodePlex.com.

If you’re interested in working on it, join the project here.

Joel Spolsky, of Fog Creek Software, tells us about the first time he had to review a spec with BillG.

Ok, this is ridiculous.

Time for some civil disobedience.

So there.

Thanks to Elf for the pointer. I had heard about this law before, but I didn’t realize how far they were taking it. And for the record, I do live in Washington. Are you listening, state officials? I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

Dissent@DailyKos is writing a series of articles on New York State’s handling of schoolkids with ADHD, Tourette’s, etc. For example, one principal had outright refused to allow the teacher and staff to get training on how to help “Joey” deal with his OCD, TS, and ADHD. After they switched schools, it took a year with a full-time aide to get him to feel safe, so that they could start helping him improve.

Another student, “Patti”, had to be removed from her school - again, to protect her from the principal.

A paragraph that caught my attention because of Erin’s and my attention-deficit issues bears repeating.

There is, for example, a tremendous literature on ADHD in school settings and classroom environment factors and individual strategies that make a difference. Yet when I go into the schools, most teachers have never been given the information about simple things like what kind of seating arrangement works best for kids with ADHD if you’re teaching new material. Or they’ve never been told or shown how to effectively use color to organize and enhance attention.

We need to make sure our schools are taking care of our kids properly. Be aware.

Now that’s a real shock.

Bill Gates is giving up day-to-day responsibility at MS.

DailyKos’s JBLIII refuses to sit back and do nothing to help his daughter. Even if the problem he’s helping with won’t happen for years, if ever.