Gates and Others Offer $150k For Open Source School Software

WebMink writes "With an impending deadline for America's schools to satisfy new federal reporting requirements on academic achievement, a new alliance of state educators is creating a system of open source software to help schools gather and submit the data that the rules require. To get the whole thing started, the Gates Foundation and Carnegie are funding two $75,000 awards for the open source developers who create the in-school software. The winners could also become the linchpins of a new industry in academic software."

Comments

Re:Mr. "depopulation" and Monsatan(GMOs)

[drinkypoo]

are GMO's related to depopulation? GMO's are designed to increase the effective food output of our land

They don't do that, though. They may have done it over a very short time, but in the long run they actually decrease food output. Issue the first, superbugs. Insects are already becoming resistant to BT. This happened slower before, when plants produced less of it. Issue the second, destruction of topsoil. When you use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, etc. you kill biologicals in the soil without which you cannot have healthy plant development, because those organisms which make nutrients available to the plants do not exist. Plants don't just take it out of the soil in any form they find it, it has to be "bio-available" and this is made happen by beneficial biologicals which can make up over 50% of the mass of healthy topsoil. There are two main Monsanto gene-hacks. One is BT production, which has already been proven to be not only harmful to humans (due to the increased quantities found in their tampered food) but also totally pointless over even the medium term, let alone the long term. The other is roundup resistance, whose purpose is to permit the spraying of more glyphosphate. Glyphosphate has been proven to contaminate water, has significant human health risks, and is generally present in our water nationwide. It also, as mentioned above, destroys soil diversity.

The simple truth is that whatever Monsanto might think they are doing, they have already been proven to be decreasing our ability to produce food, not to be improving it.

Maybe you're thinking about the sterility gene that Monsanto patented, but this is designed to be used by the plants

The "Terminator Gene" is the best thing Monsanto ever did, and the cleverest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the people that it was a bad thing. By definition the gene cannot spread to all life on earth, because any organism to which it might be passed on will not produce viable seed. We should have demanded that it be used in any case of gene manipulation of plants which would have solved any number of problems. It would have mitigtated the problem of genetic contamination, and no farmers would be losing their farms for doing what they do every year — saving seed from their crops to plant again next year. It shoudn't matter if a farmer found and deliberately harvested seed from roundup-ready crops, because that is how farming is done. Monsanto should have been required to solve this problem technically, not by stealing land (and this is really stealing, it's not just some bullshit infringement.)

Monsanto is pure evil, and must be destroyed. You know their latest gene-fixes are for aluminum and for agent orange? Aluminum has been discussed broadly as the ideal thing to use for weather manipulation, but it causes serious problems for living things. Agent orange we should already all know about.