Great point about the law making special exceptions for, e.g. cops!
Further, laws make exceptions for threats, e.g. you against me as compared to you against President Clinton, as an example -- the former would be taken much less seriously, given the same apparent degree of threat if you strip off Clinton's title/office.
But, realize that these aren't exceptions to protect minorities per se -- they are exceptions to protect officers of the law, and there are similar protections to jurors, officers of the court, etc.
Just like cracking some podunk web site is taken less seriously than cracking a DNS root.
The legal system has to protect itself against corruption (inside and out -- wish anti-impeachment advocates had realized this last year) and society must therefore make it clear that those who are charged with laying their lives on the line to implement it are especially protected. Else we are likely to lose not just their lives, but the system as a whole.
So I don't recommend taking these very important, precious exceptions (which I agree might not be needed when the punishments would be severest anyway) as license to protect whatever groups are favored despite not having a specially designated role in our society's system of the rule of law.
Ah, well, yes, if that's all that "hate crime" legislation was about -- looking into the motivations behind the act to assess the degree of the crime -- then, well, we wouldn't need it.
That's because we already have it.
Look into the differences between "negligible homicide", "manslaughter", and the second and first degrees of murder, and you'll see exactly what you're talking about.
From what I can tell, all "hate crime" legislation really does is promote identification of victims as members of groups other than "society" (the term you use, in your post, the sentiment of which I find quite agreeable generally) and then chooses whether those group affiliations are worthy of extra punishment for the accused.
Remove those (sub-)group affiliations from the legislation, and what are you left with of any value to society that isn't already dealt with, e.g. "aggravated rape"?
Ultimately, it's revealing how this sort of legislation is rarely, if ever, promoted by supporting politicos and/or the mass media when a favorite minority is not involved. Draw your own conclusions about their agenda, and choose your own best means to respond to hate, instead of relying on the government to make "hate" crimes unpopular for you!
I cannot comprehend how some can argue that hate crimes are no different from all other crimes. That is why we need tougher laws to prevent and punish them.
I cannot comprehend how some can argue that if someone murders me, or my wife, or my niece, in any of the same ways that Al listed (prior to the quoted line), the murderers should be treated less harshly simply because the three of us chose not to lead an openly gay lifestyle.
I don't even see why our racial heritage would enter into it, so I don't get that aspect of hate-crimes legislation either. Ditto gender, religion, etc.
We can protect minorities of all types from oppression and hate using our most valuable resources -- love, charity, respect -- all we should ask from our government's court system is fairness, which, in setting punishments, should be as blind to the things that differentiate us as possible.
There might well be Christians who organize as such to do scientific research (e.g. based on Biblical and other religious texts), but don't confuse these with "Christian Science", which is a religion that is not about researching material evidence for, say, oil or dinosaurs. The Christian Science Church, among other things, publishes the Christian Science Monitor, and has a more-religious web site maintained by its Mother Church.
In that context, referring to "Christian Science" as an "oxymoron", as another who replied to this article did, is inappropriate, unless one wishes to offend others out of ignorance regarding their religion.
The issue isn't whether a fork might happen. All licenses allow for forks, because the original copyright owners can always fork their own versions for their own reasons!
The issue is whether a third party can legally offer a variant (strictly speaking, yet another fork) that represents the unification of two arbitrary forks.
With the GPL, if the forks have been distributed, then the answer is, basically, yes, a third party can do that, without asking for permission, though it's polite to do so anyway, at least to find out if anybody else is working on the task.
Forks of BSD's or SCSL's code, however, once distributed, might not be available as, or legally accessable and redistributable in modified form as, source code.
E.g. EGCS was a fork from GCC2. The FSF couldn't stop EGCS, but the GPL ensured that EGCS was available as source. EGCS unified back with GCC, but any third party could have produced a unified version at any point.
(Not a big deal, since the fork was more of developer resources than of code base, insofar as GCC2 had a very small "tine" compared to EGCS's as of a few months after the fork.)
So Linux might (and probably does, in a limited sense) fork. Let's say Joe Quux gets a bunch of people to support his fork of Linux, because they don't like Linus's handling. Since Quux Linux must also be distributed under the GPL, i.e. with source code, anyone can come along and merge Linus Linux with Quux Linux to create their fork. The community chooses which fork to support in a variety of ways. Ideal? Hardly, but who better to decide what is the One True Version of, say, Linux than the community?
What I think would benefit everyone in this case would be a levelheaded case-by-case look at individuals whom have a real vested interested in attending. Discrimination of this type (mind you, I use this word very carefully) really has no place in this literal world of tomorrow.
Looking carefully at those sentences, I can see why Comdex might do what it did. If they drop the age below 18, they might get sued for letting in immature, irresponsible "children". If they don't, but do case-by-case checks of those below 18, then they can really be accused of "discrimation", as in "how dare you say my son isn't mature enough to attend this, when you let that 16-year-old in?"
Tough position to be in, given the amount of scrutiny this sort of thing obviously involves. One man's "good" discrimination being another man's "bad"....
...this brings back memories of when I tried attending IEEE Expo in the '70s, at age 16 or so, with my mother. They, too, noticed my "under-age" status and asked if I was representing a company. In a sense, I was, since I sometimes did work for my dad's timesharing firm. They wanted the name and phone number of the firm, so I gave it to them. They called, asked if there was a "James Burley" working there. Well, my dad and I share our first and last names (different middle names though), and he uses his first name normally, so they were told "yes, he's our Vice President of Marketing". They let me in. And it was fun.;-)
Meanwhile, I don't assume Comdex's "decision" here was made by a bunch of suits so much as just the way things happened to be, the way the people staffing the booths thought they were supposed to handle this. It's a loss for COMDEX, at least, but not the end of freedom in America.
Slashdot Mirror
Further, laws make exceptions for threats, e.g. you against me as compared to you against President Clinton, as an example -- the former would be taken much less seriously, given the same apparent degree of threat if you strip off Clinton's title/office.
But, realize that these aren't exceptions to protect minorities per se -- they are exceptions to protect officers of the law, and there are similar protections to jurors, officers of the court, etc.
Just like cracking some podunk web site is taken less seriously than cracking a DNS root.
The legal system has to protect itself against corruption (inside and out -- wish anti-impeachment advocates had realized this last year) and society must therefore make it clear that those who are charged with laying their lives on the line to implement it are especially protected. Else we are likely to lose not just their lives, but the system as a whole.
So I don't recommend taking these very important, precious exceptions (which I agree might not be needed when the punishments would be severest anyway) as license to protect whatever groups are favored despite not having a specially designated role in our society's system of the rule of law.
That's because we already have it.
Look into the differences between "negligible homicide", "manslaughter", and the second and first degrees of murder, and you'll see exactly what you're talking about.
From what I can tell, all "hate crime" legislation really does is promote identification of victims as members of groups other than "society" (the term you use, in your post, the sentiment of which I find quite agreeable generally) and then chooses whether those group affiliations are worthy of extra punishment for the accused.
Remove those (sub-)group affiliations from the legislation, and what are you left with of any value to society that isn't already dealt with, e.g. "aggravated rape"?
Ultimately, it's revealing how this sort of legislation is rarely, if ever, promoted by supporting politicos and/or the mass media when a favorite minority is not involved. Draw your own conclusions about their agenda, and choose your own best means to respond to hate, instead of relying on the government to make "hate" crimes unpopular for you!
I cannot comprehend how some can argue that if someone murders me, or my wife, or my niece, in any of the same ways that Al listed (prior to the quoted line), the murderers should be treated less harshly simply because the three of us chose not to lead an openly gay lifestyle.
I don't even see why our racial heritage would enter into it, so I don't get that aspect of hate-crimes legislation either. Ditto gender, religion, etc.
We can protect minorities of all types from oppression and hate using our most valuable resources -- love, charity, respect -- all we should ask from our government's court system is fairness, which, in setting punishments, should be as blind to the things that differentiate us as possible.
Seems to me that if you can defeat the DIVX scheme, you then get even cheaper movies that you don't have to pay to view at all, compared to DVD!
(I don't use DVD or DIVX, by the way.)
In that context, referring to "Christian Science" as an "oxymoron", as another who replied to this article did, is inappropriate, unless one wishes to offend others out of ignorance regarding their religion.
The issue is whether a third party can legally offer a variant (strictly speaking, yet another fork) that represents the unification of two arbitrary forks.
With the GPL, if the forks have been distributed, then the answer is, basically, yes, a third party can do that, without asking for permission, though it's polite to do so anyway, at least to find out if anybody else is working on the task.
Forks of BSD's or SCSL's code, however, once distributed, might not be available as, or legally accessable and redistributable in modified form as, source code.
E.g. EGCS was a fork from GCC2. The FSF couldn't stop EGCS, but the GPL ensured that EGCS was available as source. EGCS unified back with GCC, but any third party could have produced a unified version at any point.
(Not a big deal, since the fork was more of developer resources than of code base, insofar as GCC2 had a very small "tine" compared to EGCS's as of a few months after the fork.)
So Linux might (and probably does, in a limited sense) fork. Let's say Joe Quux gets a bunch of people to support his fork of Linux, because they don't like Linus's handling. Since Quux Linux must also be distributed under the GPL, i.e. with source code, anyone can come along and merge Linus Linux with Quux Linux to create their fork. The community chooses which fork to support in a variety of ways. Ideal? Hardly, but who better to decide what is the One True Version of, say, Linux than the community?
Looking carefully at those sentences, I can see why Comdex might do what it did. If they drop the age below 18, they might get sued for letting in immature, irresponsible "children". If they don't, but do case-by-case checks of those below 18, then they can really be accused of "discrimation", as in "how dare you say my son isn't mature enough to attend this, when you let that 16-year-old in?"
Tough position to be in, given the amount of scrutiny this sort of thing obviously involves. One man's "good" discrimination being another man's "bad"....
Meanwhile, I don't assume Comdex's "decision" here was made by a bunch of suits so much as just the way things happened to be, the way the people staffing the booths thought they were supposed to handle this. It's a loss for COMDEX, at least, but not the end of freedom in America.