Monthly Archive for September, 2011

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Fluvanna Blogger Wins Free Speech Case Against County

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 2, 2011 in Government and Law and Justice. 3 Comments

Blogger Brian Rothamel has won his lawsuit against Fluvanna County over his use of the county seal, Sharon Fitzgerald writes for the Daily Progress. He brought a suit against the county back in January, courtesy of the Rutherford Institute, after they adopted a law prohibiting anybody from using their seal for any reason. The ordinance appeared to have been passed specifically to prevent Rothamel from illustrating stories about county business with the seal on FlucoBlog. (In the first few years of this site, I displayed the Charlottesville seal as the icon for news related to city government, just as Rothamel was doing for Fluvanna government news.) Federal Judge Norman K. Moon issued an injuction against the county to prevent them from continuing to enforce the law, writing that “the deprivation of Rothamel’s First Amendment freedoms easily outweighs whatever burden the injunction imposes on the county.”

The Progress article doesn’t include any quotes from members of the Fluvanna Board of Supervisors. I certainly hope that somebody gets their respond on the record. The law was unconstitutional on its face, and now that they’ve been smacked down by a federal judge, they’ve got some explaining to do.

City School Board OKs Laptops for Students

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 1, 2011 in Education. 23 Comments

The Charlottesville School Board has OK’d a $2.4M expenditure to buy two thousand tablet computers for students, Graham Moomaw writes in the Progress. These Fujitsu Stylistics aren’t tablets in the iPad sense, assuming the Progress’ photo is representative, but really just laptops with the screen permanently affixed to the back of the computers, with a tethered pen-like stylus in lieu of a mouse, and a wireless keyboard. The operating system is simply a modified version of Windows 7, and not a real tablet operating system. Reviews of what I think are the right model aren’t glowing [1, 2], but presumably the school system’s requirements are rather different than most reviewers’. The laptops will cost $768 apiece, and will show up in a few weeks. CHS students will get them in mid-October, with kids at Buford and Walker getting them in November.

Note that this was originally pitched as a $500,000–$1,000,000 project back in February, a number that the school system was presenting as “below $1 million” in May.

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