PUBLIC MARKS from jasontromm with tag free

A federal judge turned back pro-abortion objections against the Choose Life license plates in Illinois saying motorists have the free speech rights to purchase them and place them on their automobiles. U.S. District Judge David Coar said protests from abortion advocates don't trump the First Amendment. Coar also said the state must issue the specialty license plates as long as the sponsors of it meet normal requirements on the design and number of motorists wanting one. Tom Brejcha, an attorney with the pro-life Thomas More Society law firm that represented the sponsor, hailed the ruling.

A federal court has issued an order that will prevent a New Jersey school from censoring students' Christian musical selections in future talent shows. The Alliance Defense Fund said the order comes down in favor of an elementary school student who, when she was a second-grader in May 2005, had been chosen to participate in the competition, and then picked "Awesome God," made famous by the late singer-songwriter Rich Mullins, to perform. Officials at Frenchtown Elementary School denied her permission, a decision endorsed by the board of education, citing not only the song's religious content but its "proselytizing" nature.

Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have filed a civil rights lawsuit in defense of the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of a seventh grader who was ordered by Maryland middle school officials to stop reading her Bible during free time at school or face disciplinary action. Institute attorneys have asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland to declare that prohibiting students from reading Bibles or other religious texts during their free time is unconstitutional.

Pfc. John Jodka III, Cpl. Trent D. Thomas, Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III, Cpl. Marshall Magincalda, Hospitalman 3rd Class Melson Bacos, Lance Cpl. Tyler A. Jackson, Lance Cpl. Robert Pennington and Lance Cpl. Jerry E. Shumate Jr. are all men who volunteered to serve their country in Iraq. Today, and for the last two months, they are in solitary confinement in the brig at Camp Pendleton, shackled during weekend visits with their family members and frequently deprived of their rights as American citizens as they stand charged with pre-meditated murder of an Iraqi last April. The evidence against them is based largely – if not exclusively – on the word of the family of the dead man, 52-year-old Hashim Ibrahim Awad in Hamdanya.

A community college student in Massachusetts faces possible disciplinary action for shouting "Remember Chappaquiddick!" during an on-campus speech by Democrat Sen. Edward Kennedy.

But reporters still ignore free market advocates who predicted it. Media coverage of problems facing the new Medicare prescription drug plan focused on elderly patients left in the lurch by bureaucracy, producing what CBS’s Bill Plante called a “political headache” for the Bush administration. But in the Jan. 16 reports on the “Evening News” and “World News Tonight,” both networks ignored conservative critics who had argued the plan was doomed to fail because it was a typical big government solution that ignored the free market.

Oracle today announced Oracle(r) Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), a free, starter edition of the world's leading database software. A beta version of Oracle Database XE is available for download today. This new edition of Oracle Database 10g offers application developers, database administrators (DBAs) and students a free starter database to develop and deploy their applications. It is also freely available for independent software vendors (ISVs) and hardware vendors to distribute or embed with their applications and products.

A podcast is an audio or video file that you can subscribe to online. The advantage to a podcast is that you don't need to remember to go back and get the newest information from your favorite online source. Once you subscribe to the podcast it will automatically show up in your reader. The readers are usually free or low cost. The majority of podcasts are available as audio files in MP3 format, syndicated through an RSS (XML) file. Other formats and other types of files, such as video, can also be podcasted. The content is downloaded to your desktop PC or mobile device. It's not streamed, so you can access the content when you want.

Pong is a free desktop ping application that notifies blog tracking web services about updated blogs and feeds. It currently supports XML-RPC protocol pings for up to fourteen services (see the list below) at a time.

Blogs have given individuals of any and every background the ability to freely speak their minds and share information with anyone who chooses to read it, at any time they wish to do so.