Actually, the tracks themselves are DRM-Free, the thing is, Apple doesn't want you to use them on other media players either, so they aren't going to make that be easy.
Maybe because Adobe refused to port Flash 8, 9, or 10 to any platform other than Windows and Mac OS?
What in the world are you talking about??? I currently have Flash 10 installed and I'm using Linux. And yes it is officially supported, on the other hand Moonlight, the OSS Slilverlight implementation which is the only way to get it to work on Linux really has no backing from MS and is behind the official Siliverlight plugin.
What are you talking about? Most Apple software is quite Spartan when compared to OSS alternatives or even MS's own software. Compare WMP to iTunes, aside from the integrated store, there is much more "bloat" in WMP in terms of little used features, etc and in interface design. Sure, iTunes is slow on Windows because its basically a port of a Mac application while capturing the Mac look and feel, this adds considerable bloat compared to a native Windows app.
Um, sure, they are both proprietary, but Flash is much less so. For example, Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't (well, might have an official Mac port, but not Linux), both are 100% compatible with the Windows version, plus Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser, and Flash lite for mobile devices.
Flash also has a work in progress OSS implementation called Gnash.
Well, someone who views Java or Solaris is the future. Sun also has a rather large stake in Blu-Ray, something that some companies might want to try to get as it won the format war.
But I don't think Apple really wants Sun. Sun seems to be everything Apple isn't. Sun has a lot of corporate customers, not something that Apple really caters to. Java would be a nice acquisition by Apple, but I just can't see them wanting Java for iPhone applications, something that would seem natural if they acquired Sun.
I just think that Sun seems to be everything that Apple has opposed, and acquiring it doesn't seem to make sense. On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.
Put the difference between the cost of your drive and a SSD in the bank (>$200). When one of your mechanical drives eventually fails, take that workstation out of service, and just use the other one to get by when that happens.
...But you can easily get a $100 SSD (8 gigs) that based on the post, would be enough to run the system (either XP, or Linux with DOSbox or other emulation software), and save the documents for about 15 years. This person isn't going to be doing anything more disk intensive as saving about 5 documents a day, assuming that this is computer will always be left on also decreases SSD wear, add in the fact that SSDs fail gracefully (as in, you can still access all the data, just not write it) compared to the catastrophic crashes of HDs alone makes SSDs a good option (considering most people don't make backups). Its easy to make a good system for ~$400-500 with high quality fans, a SSD, and a low-voltage CPU that should last 15 years.
that Iraq had lots of WMDs, and that they believed the US fucking government who were implying he was going to use them against the US.
Meanwhile, weapons inspectors were providing no evidence, the CIA, MI6 and Mossad were providing no evidence and no fucker else was providing any evidence that Saddam had WMDs.
Sure, we knew he used to have them - we knew where he bought them, if you haven't conveniently forgotten that one. We also had no compelling evidence that he still had them, and even less evidence that he was ever planning to use them on the US. The only thing Saddam had was oil.
I'm not pretending North Korea is some haven for sanity, but please, don't insult our intelligence by pretending there was a case for invading Iraq, let alone one based on WMD.
Ok, if this was all some grand scheme to get oil, then why didn't it work? If we really felt like making this a war for oil one would think we would have been more proactive in securing the oil wells under American control. But we really haven't, oil prices rose (and due to the global economic state, crashed and burned). Somehow if this was a war for oil I would think it would have been better executed for oil. If it was due to faulty intelligence about WMDs, the war probably would have turned out to be the train wreck it is. A war for oil would have already been won, a war based on bad intelligence, not so much.
Given the recent US record on human rights the rest of the world has already concluded that the USA has no fucking place telling anybody else how to run a country.
Um, civil rights in the USA are currently as good, if not better than most of the world (the treatment of foreign detainees, not so much, but this was a post about civil rights, not prisoners of war). We don't try to censor the web like Australia, we don't have ridiculous "hate speech" laws like the EU, we don't try to ban all historic references to WWII like Germany does, we don't jail people for insulting political officials like Thailand, etc. Sure, we do have some censorship problems *cough* FCC *cough*, but as a whole the USA has a decent amount of civil liberties and a heck of a lot more than North Korea does.
You have the people harping on how cool Android will be because one won't "be locked into one app store" etc.. But in the back of my mind that just increases the risk of someone downloading some "Cool free app" that happens to be a malware app. It only has to happen a few times before the reputation gets out there. And it will happen because people see pops ups now that say, "Hey you have mal ware, down load our malware cleaner." And then they click and install nothing but malware.
But Android will end up being diverse enough to withstand most malware. Even if Android is running on 100% of the phones, not all of them are going to run exploitable versions, others will have more restrictions, still others might be without data and won't receive updates locking them into a specific version.
Also, Android is Linux. You aren't root. Theres nothing you can do to totally mess up your phone. Get a virus? No problem, just delete that user and start again. Sure, you have the downside of losing some contact info if it wasn't backed up, but its sure easier than buying a new phone.
Currently, there are a ton of mobile phone platforms, unlike the desktop. This keeps the number of viruses down, secondly, most phones run slightly modified versions of the OS, not plain versions making exploiting the same hole difficult in the large scheme of things. So as long as a vendor doesn't dominate the Mobile OS market (and with Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian and iPhone OS all going to want to stay in business, it won't) I don't see viruses as being a problem at all.
Brainwashed population:They believed that Iraq has WMDs.
Check.
Um, the Halabja poison gas attacks certainly were WMDs, while when we invaded we didn't find any, we can certainly know that they used to have them. The fact that the US government had bad intelligence does not equate to brainwashing. How many propaganda signs do you find? Heck, in the example that you stated were there any billboards saying "Iraq has WMDs. We must crush Iraq."? Just because we went to war on faulty intentions doesn't mean that we were brainwashed.
Keep on the brink of war at all times:
Dick Cheyney claimed that the War on Terror could go on "indefinitely".
Check.
The "War on Terror" is much like the "War on Drugs", it is fought in far-off places and usually are easy, quick victories. No US citizen gets killed that isn't over there (and Iraq and Afghanistan have been unstable even before the US invasions). On the other hand, if North Korea gets into a war, you can bet that many North Korean citizens who didn't willingly know the risks will be killed because a war move by them would lead to a war on North Korea itself, not some far-off troops in a different country. By your definition of war, the USA has been at war for its entire lifetime, as have just about every other country that has ever dominated world politics.
As for your 4% figure, you have to include the military related R&D spending of all companies in the military industry, such as GE, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and a bunch of others. Just because the US has privatized large parts of its military doesn't mean you can arbitrarily exclude them from the military spending figure. If you include all of these then you'll come to a hell of a lot more than 4%.
...But how many US citizens are starving compared to North Korea? Very, very few. On the other hand, North Korea seems to find it necessary to have a large military budget while ignoring its citizens. The US does not.
Oh, and if you think that you can point to a bunch of government policies and conclude that your country is "better" than another, then the cultural attitude that you represent automatically, in my eyes, makes you worse than just about everyone else.
Yes. The USA is better then North Korea because in the USA every human life is valued and respected (though not as much as they should). Every (adult) human by birth is allowed freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to criticize the government, etc. In North Korea, they are not.
Based on the fact that I believe that every human has the right to basic freedoms, I can easily conclude that the USA is much better than North Korea.
Um, so then tell me, if fallout from the nuke blast ends up affecting people in a nuclear nation such as India, who is to say that India isn't going to perceive a nuking of Afghanistan as an indirect attack on India, then whenever an industrial nation such as India ends up starting a war, we either end up with a Cold War-era of MAD or WWIII.
Um, tell me exactly how this is doing any evil. Because I can search for a trademark (and almost every ordinary word is trademarked to some degree), an ad to the side might advertise a competitors product. Tell me how, by searching for iTunes, and an ad comes up for Amazon MP3 is evil? Sure, arguably the censorship issue is evil, but this trademark thing, it isn't evil, not in the least.
...And that is a severe data integrity issue. For example, on a hung system where a poweroff like that might happen, your Firefox config file could be lost. This causes a major problem because a lot of times little config files aren't backed up, or when they are they are older, giving potential conflicts with newer software versions. And what is going to be the typical response from a typical user that knows nothing about Linux when they see everything in GNOME wiped back to default settings, and not just distro default settings, but vanilla GNOME settings. This also could really affect lightweight netbook distros using IceWM or some other WM that looks totally foreign to the typical user who used to rely on carefully configured scripts to make it look like Windows or OS X.
Sure, some of that data ends up in the hands of the average person, but it seems to be increasingly funding in "black box" projects where, while the public gets a shiny new spacecraft, the specs are tied up in "national security" or other laws effectively removing a lot of the benefit.
Um, it really wouldn't be that hard. Assuming Texas orders PCs in bulk, most vendors would be more than happy to ship XP rather than Vista if you are talking about hundreds to thousands of machines, and for a low price too. Also, assuming that Texas would get Vista Business, that comes with a downgrade (upgrade?) option to XP, and if Texas had bulk licenses for XP, its simply a matter of ordering computers with no OS and formatting the disks with an XP image.
Sure, it might be a pain to order one or two computers with XP, but when you are talking about an entire state with hundreds to thousands of computers and an IT staff, well, it becomes less of a pain.
Re:Stolen Laptop, yes. Data, No.
on
Cellular Repo Man
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...But you assume that most thieves actually know something about computers. A lot couldn't care less about the data, they just want to sell the nice hardware. Sure, some actually know a thing about computers, but your typical thief doesn't really care about the HD, they just want to sell it to a pawn shop or a streetcorner for some quick cash.
Because it doesn't make any sense to keep library books. Because, by keeping a library book you are depriving someone else of that book. On the other hand, if I share somesong.mp3 and 400 people download it, me and those 400 people have a full, working copy of somesong.mp3, we can all listen to it at once. If I have Harry Potter checked out of the library, 400 people will have to wait for me to finish or return Harry Potter before they can read it. USA copyright law was based on that. In the 1700-1800s when it was written, to make a copy of a work under copyright I would have to have a printing press (or spend an absurd amount of time with paper and pen). When the photocopier was invented, people tried to apply the same law to it, it didn't really work, however, because copiers are not networked, enforcement was low, so the public didn't suffer much. Today though, we have the same ancient laws attempting to be applied to digital works while strictly enforcing them. This does not work, and today the artists who create works are suffering from it.
Yes, the DMCA actually has something beneficial to the world (a shocker, yes I know), it is the safe harbor provisions that basically lets FB say that they can't control what users post (though they do have to respond to takedown requests). But similarly, this is nothing but a link to a link that may contain copyrighted materials. I highly doubt that it is illegal to link to a link that may contain copyright infringing materials, it just doesn't make any sense if it is because that would be like saying that by linking to a redirect page to www.google.com I would be responsible if Google had any illegal content when I was simply linking to another page that contained no offending materials.
If they were perfect checksums, yes, you might have a point. But there are potentially many, many, many different things that can have the exact same checksum but be totally different. For that to be true then the same people have the copyright of any of those things which doesn't make sense.
One of the reasons why Linux always seems so "slow" booting is because by the time X is loaded, everything is ready to go. By the time explorer.exe loads on Windows, the system is still in fact, booting up (which is why you have to wait a minute before you really do anything). Secondly, on the hardware you have achieved the "overkill" for both systems. For daily, non CPU intensive applications, a decent CPU and 2 gigs of RAM is going to make XP and Ubuntu seem fast. The reason why it doesn't seem faster is because there really isn't that much more "fast" then it can go for daily tasks. On the other hand, if you try gaming or other demanding tasks, you may see a difference.
Ok, tell me why we have laws? To create order. If by running a red light you cause no disorder, no accident, etc. You should have no fine. We the people should not owe the government money for breaking the letter of the law yet not the intention. It is the intention that should be enforced, people can easily determine the intention and determine if what you were doing was really violating the intention of the law, rather then a machine designed to squeeze as much profit out of a commonly ran red light (hint: if the light is commonly ran, its probably in a low-traffic area and they should adjust the timers).
She has no business either selling or giving them to another student. Don't get hung up on the financial operation being the issue. It doesn't matter if she can't make a profit if she isn't supposed to GIVE them away, either.
Sure, she isn't supposed to, but its not a big issue. Theres a lot of things people do that they aren't supposed to, yet no one really cares because they don't harm anyone. A lot of people drive slightly over the speed limit, does that mean we should have radar detectors that automatically give you a ticket if you are 5 mph over the speed limit? No. Similarly, most (sane) cops will realize that its a minor issue and not pull you over for such a minor offense, and if they do, they are benefiting no one other then themselves (more ticket $ == more pocket $) rather then the public good.
So you would require elementary school administrators to know what drugs are "no harm", given that this decision is often gotten WRONG by even the experts and also depends on the specific person taking the drug? No, sorry. I can't see the schools making the right decisions about this. I certainly can't see them having the time to call every parent of every child who is carrying an aspirin once you remove the "no tolerance" policy, much less the ability to contact every parent.
By no harm, I mean substances that are generally recognized as safe. No one would argue that (barring allergic reactions or some massive overdose), ibuprofen is unsafe. Neither are cough drops, Tylenol, etc.
And so the no tolerance policy saves time by just expelling or sending a kid to detention for having aspirin rather then calling their parents? Something isn't right here....
As for your points, I believe I didn't make it clear in my posts, but I was referring to policy, not necessarily the rules. Similarly to how going over the speed limit even 5 mph is still illegal, but the policy might not let an officer stop you unless you were going at least 8 mph over the speed limit. The school could then point to the rule book in the case of a lawsuit and things like strip searching someone for a trivial offense would not have happened.
I think it is a very reasonable assumption that a 13 year old who knows she is doing something wrong might try to hide the evidence someplace where an adult would be unlikely to look.
Sure, but wrong in this case is equivalent to going a tiny bit over the speed limit, illegal, but it shouldn't be strictly enforced.
Having used both KDE and GNOME (along with Xfce and fvwm-crystal) I don't really feel like GNOME is lacking in customization options. While it obviously has less than KDE does, it doesn't feel like it, and everything I felt like customizing either had a pre-made theme or I could do it with the GUI. People always seem to criticize GNOME on its customization, but I don't feel like it is any less configurable than KDE, Xfce, fvwm and even Windows. What features did the old screen saver menu have that the new one does not? Because having just taken a look on it (Using Ubuntu 8.10) I can't find an option that isn't there that I would use.
Crowdsourcing is a bad buzzword that combines the worst of both betas and open source. Far too often "crowdsourcing" is "we want you to find all our bugs for us while we do nothing". By crowdsourcing something you doom it to a perpetual beta while usually not making it fully OSS so it can be really transformed and used.
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Actually, the tracks themselves are DRM-Free, the thing is, Apple doesn't want you to use them on other media players either, so they aren't going to make that be easy.
Maybe because Adobe refused to port Flash 8, 9, or 10 to any platform other than Windows and Mac OS?
What in the world are you talking about??? I currently have Flash 10 installed and I'm using Linux. And yes it is officially supported, on the other hand Moonlight, the OSS Slilverlight implementation which is the only way to get it to work on Linux really has no backing from MS and is behind the official Siliverlight plugin.
What are you talking about? Most Apple software is quite Spartan when compared to OSS alternatives or even MS's own software. Compare WMP to iTunes, aside from the integrated store, there is much more "bloat" in WMP in terms of little used features, etc and in interface design. Sure, iTunes is slow on Windows because its basically a port of a Mac application while capturing the Mac look and feel, this adds considerable bloat compared to a native Windows app.
Um, sure, they are both proprietary, but Flash is much less so. For example, Flash has a 100% supported plugin for Linux and Mac whereas Silverlight doesn't (well, might have an official Mac port, but not Linux), both are 100% compatible with the Windows version, plus Flash has support on some things that Silverlight support will be impossible such as on the Nintendo Wii's Opera browser, and Flash lite for mobile devices. Flash also has a work in progress OSS implementation called Gnash.
Well, someone who views Java or Solaris is the future. Sun also has a rather large stake in Blu-Ray, something that some companies might want to try to get as it won the format war.
But I don't think Apple really wants Sun. Sun seems to be everything Apple isn't. Sun has a lot of corporate customers, not something that Apple really caters to. Java would be a nice acquisition by Apple, but I just can't see them wanting Java for iPhone applications, something that would seem natural if they acquired Sun.
I just think that Sun seems to be everything that Apple has opposed, and acquiring it doesn't seem to make sense. On the other hand, (assuming various regulatory bodies would approve it), MS merging with Sun, or Cisco buying Sun seems to work better.
Put the difference between the cost of your drive and a SSD in the bank (>$200). When one of your mechanical drives eventually fails, take that workstation out of service, and just use the other one to get by when that happens.
that Iraq had lots of WMDs, and that they believed the US fucking government who were implying he was going to use them against the US. Meanwhile, weapons inspectors were providing no evidence, the CIA, MI6 and Mossad were providing no evidence and no fucker else was providing any evidence that Saddam had WMDs. Sure, we knew he used to have them - we knew where he bought them, if you haven't conveniently forgotten that one. We also had no compelling evidence that he still had them, and even less evidence that he was ever planning to use them on the US. The only thing Saddam had was oil. I'm not pretending North Korea is some haven for sanity, but please, don't insult our intelligence by pretending there was a case for invading Iraq, let alone one based on WMD.
Ok, if this was all some grand scheme to get oil, then why didn't it work? If we really felt like making this a war for oil one would think we would have been more proactive in securing the oil wells under American control. But we really haven't, oil prices rose (and due to the global economic state, crashed and burned). Somehow if this was a war for oil I would think it would have been better executed for oil. If it was due to faulty intelligence about WMDs, the war probably would have turned out to be the train wreck it is. A war for oil would have already been won, a war based on bad intelligence, not so much.
Given the recent US record on human rights the rest of the world has already concluded that the USA has no fucking place telling anybody else how to run a country.
Um, civil rights in the USA are currently as good, if not better than most of the world (the treatment of foreign detainees, not so much, but this was a post about civil rights, not prisoners of war). We don't try to censor the web like Australia, we don't have ridiculous "hate speech" laws like the EU, we don't try to ban all historic references to WWII like Germany does, we don't jail people for insulting political officials like Thailand, etc. Sure, we do have some censorship problems *cough* FCC *cough*, but as a whole the USA has a decent amount of civil liberties and a heck of a lot more than North Korea does.
You have the people harping on how cool Android will be because one won't "be locked into one app store" etc.. But in the back of my mind that just increases the risk of someone downloading some "Cool free app" that happens to be a malware app. It only has to happen a few times before the reputation gets out there. And it will happen because people see pops ups now that say, "Hey you have mal ware, down load our malware cleaner." And then they click and install nothing but malware.
But Android will end up being diverse enough to withstand most malware. Even if Android is running on 100% of the phones, not all of them are going to run exploitable versions, others will have more restrictions, still others might be without data and won't receive updates locking them into a specific version.
Also, Android is Linux. You aren't root. Theres nothing you can do to totally mess up your phone. Get a virus? No problem, just delete that user and start again. Sure, you have the downside of losing some contact info if it wasn't backed up, but its sure easier than buying a new phone.
Currently, there are a ton of mobile phone platforms, unlike the desktop. This keeps the number of viruses down, secondly, most phones run slightly modified versions of the OS, not plain versions making exploiting the same hole difficult in the large scheme of things. So as long as a vendor doesn't dominate the Mobile OS market (and with Windows Mobile, Android, Symbian and iPhone OS all going to want to stay in business, it won't) I don't see viruses as being a problem at all.
Brainwashed population:They believed that Iraq has WMDs. Check.
Um, the Halabja poison gas attacks certainly were WMDs, while when we invaded we didn't find any, we can certainly know that they used to have them. The fact that the US government had bad intelligence does not equate to brainwashing. How many propaganda signs do you find? Heck, in the example that you stated were there any billboards saying "Iraq has WMDs. We must crush Iraq."? Just because we went to war on faulty intentions doesn't mean that we were brainwashed.
Keep on the brink of war at all times: Dick Cheyney claimed that the War on Terror could go on "indefinitely". Check.
The "War on Terror" is much like the "War on Drugs", it is fought in far-off places and usually are easy, quick victories. No US citizen gets killed that isn't over there (and Iraq and Afghanistan have been unstable even before the US invasions). On the other hand, if North Korea gets into a war, you can bet that many North Korean citizens who didn't willingly know the risks will be killed because a war move by them would lead to a war on North Korea itself, not some far-off troops in a different country. By your definition of war, the USA has been at war for its entire lifetime, as have just about every other country that has ever dominated world politics.
As for your 4% figure, you have to include the military related R&D spending of all companies in the military industry, such as GE, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and a bunch of others. Just because the US has privatized large parts of its military doesn't mean you can arbitrarily exclude them from the military spending figure. If you include all of these then you'll come to a hell of a lot more than 4%.
Oh, and if you think that you can point to a bunch of government policies and conclude that your country is "better" than another, then the cultural attitude that you represent automatically, in my eyes, makes you worse than just about everyone else.
Yes. The USA is better then North Korea because in the USA every human life is valued and respected (though not as much as they should). Every (adult) human by birth is allowed freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the right to criticize the government, etc. In North Korea, they are not.
Based on the fact that I believe that every human has the right to basic freedoms, I can easily conclude that the USA is much better than North Korea.
Um, so then tell me, if fallout from the nuke blast ends up affecting people in a nuclear nation such as India, who is to say that India isn't going to perceive a nuking of Afghanistan as an indirect attack on India, then whenever an industrial nation such as India ends up starting a war, we either end up with a Cold War-era of MAD or WWIII.
Um, tell me exactly how this is doing any evil. Because I can search for a trademark (and almost every ordinary word is trademarked to some degree), an ad to the side might advertise a competitors product. Tell me how, by searching for iTunes, and an ad comes up for Amazon MP3 is evil? Sure, arguably the censorship issue is evil, but this trademark thing, it isn't evil, not in the least.
...And that is a severe data integrity issue. For example, on a hung system where a poweroff like that might happen, your Firefox config file could be lost. This causes a major problem because a lot of times little config files aren't backed up, or when they are they are older, giving potential conflicts with newer software versions. And what is going to be the typical response from a typical user that knows nothing about Linux when they see everything in GNOME wiped back to default settings, and not just distro default settings, but vanilla GNOME settings. This also could really affect lightweight netbook distros using IceWM or some other WM that looks totally foreign to the typical user who used to rely on carefully configured scripts to make it look like Windows or OS X.
Sure, some of that data ends up in the hands of the average person, but it seems to be increasingly funding in "black box" projects where, while the public gets a shiny new spacecraft, the specs are tied up in "national security" or other laws effectively removing a lot of the benefit.
Um, it really wouldn't be that hard. Assuming Texas orders PCs in bulk, most vendors would be more than happy to ship XP rather than Vista if you are talking about hundreds to thousands of machines, and for a low price too. Also, assuming that Texas would get Vista Business, that comes with a downgrade (upgrade?) option to XP, and if Texas had bulk licenses for XP, its simply a matter of ordering computers with no OS and formatting the disks with an XP image.
Sure, it might be a pain to order one or two computers with XP, but when you are talking about an entire state with hundreds to thousands of computers and an IT staff, well, it becomes less of a pain.
...But you assume that most thieves actually know something about computers. A lot couldn't care less about the data, they just want to sell the nice hardware. Sure, some actually know a thing about computers, but your typical thief doesn't really care about the HD, they just want to sell it to a pawn shop or a streetcorner for some quick cash.
Because it doesn't make any sense to keep library books. Because, by keeping a library book you are depriving someone else of that book. On the other hand, if I share somesong.mp3 and 400 people download it, me and those 400 people have a full, working copy of somesong.mp3, we can all listen to it at once. If I have Harry Potter checked out of the library, 400 people will have to wait for me to finish or return Harry Potter before they can read it. USA copyright law was based on that. In the 1700-1800s when it was written, to make a copy of a work under copyright I would have to have a printing press (or spend an absurd amount of time with paper and pen). When the photocopier was invented, people tried to apply the same law to it, it didn't really work, however, because copiers are not networked, enforcement was low, so the public didn't suffer much. Today though, we have the same ancient laws attempting to be applied to digital works while strictly enforcing them. This does not work, and today the artists who create works are suffering from it.
Yes, the DMCA actually has something beneficial to the world (a shocker, yes I know), it is the safe harbor provisions that basically lets FB say that they can't control what users post (though they do have to respond to takedown requests). But similarly, this is nothing but a link to a link that may contain copyrighted materials. I highly doubt that it is illegal to link to a link that may contain copyright infringing materials, it just doesn't make any sense if it is because that would be like saying that by linking to a redirect page to www.google.com I would be responsible if Google had any illegal content when I was simply linking to another page that contained no offending materials.
If they were perfect checksums, yes, you might have a point. But there are potentially many, many, many different things that can have the exact same checksum but be totally different. For that to be true then the same people have the copyright of any of those things which doesn't make sense.
One of the reasons why Linux always seems so "slow" booting is because by the time X is loaded, everything is ready to go. By the time explorer.exe loads on Windows, the system is still in fact, booting up (which is why you have to wait a minute before you really do anything). Secondly, on the hardware you have achieved the "overkill" for both systems. For daily, non CPU intensive applications, a decent CPU and 2 gigs of RAM is going to make XP and Ubuntu seem fast. The reason why it doesn't seem faster is because there really isn't that much more "fast" then it can go for daily tasks. On the other hand, if you try gaming or other demanding tasks, you may see a difference.
Ok, tell me why we have laws? To create order. If by running a red light you cause no disorder, no accident, etc. You should have no fine. We the people should not owe the government money for breaking the letter of the law yet not the intention. It is the intention that should be enforced, people can easily determine the intention and determine if what you were doing was really violating the intention of the law, rather then a machine designed to squeeze as much profit out of a commonly ran red light (hint: if the light is commonly ran, its probably in a low-traffic area and they should adjust the timers).
She has no business either selling or giving them to another student. Don't get hung up on the financial operation being the issue. It doesn't matter if she can't make a profit if she isn't supposed to GIVE them away, either.
Sure, she isn't supposed to, but its not a big issue. Theres a lot of things people do that they aren't supposed to, yet no one really cares because they don't harm anyone. A lot of people drive slightly over the speed limit, does that mean we should have radar detectors that automatically give you a ticket if you are 5 mph over the speed limit? No. Similarly, most (sane) cops will realize that its a minor issue and not pull you over for such a minor offense, and if they do, they are benefiting no one other then themselves (more ticket $ == more pocket $) rather then the public good.
So you would require elementary school administrators to know what drugs are "no harm", given that this decision is often gotten WRONG by even the experts and also depends on the specific person taking the drug? No, sorry. I can't see the schools making the right decisions about this. I certainly can't see them having the time to call every parent of every child who is carrying an aspirin once you remove the "no tolerance" policy, much less the ability to contact every parent.
By no harm, I mean substances that are generally recognized as safe. No one would argue that (barring allergic reactions or some massive overdose), ibuprofen is unsafe. Neither are cough drops, Tylenol, etc.
And so the no tolerance policy saves time by just expelling or sending a kid to detention for having aspirin rather then calling their parents? Something isn't right here....
As for your points, I believe I didn't make it clear in my posts, but I was referring to policy, not necessarily the rules. Similarly to how going over the speed limit even 5 mph is still illegal, but the policy might not let an officer stop you unless you were going at least 8 mph over the speed limit. The school could then point to the rule book in the case of a lawsuit and things like strip searching someone for a trivial offense would not have happened.
I think it is a very reasonable assumption that a 13 year old who knows she is doing something wrong might try to hide the evidence someplace where an adult would be unlikely to look.
Sure, but wrong in this case is equivalent to going a tiny bit over the speed limit, illegal, but it shouldn't be strictly enforced.
Having used both KDE and GNOME (along with Xfce and fvwm-crystal) I don't really feel like GNOME is lacking in customization options. While it obviously has less than KDE does, it doesn't feel like it, and everything I felt like customizing either had a pre-made theme or I could do it with the GUI. People always seem to criticize GNOME on its customization, but I don't feel like it is any less configurable than KDE, Xfce, fvwm and even Windows. What features did the old screen saver menu have that the new one does not? Because having just taken a look on it (Using Ubuntu 8.10) I can't find an option that isn't there that I would use.
Crowdsourcing is a bad buzzword that combines the worst of both betas and open source. Far too often "crowdsourcing" is "we want you to find all our bugs for us while we do nothing". By crowdsourcing something you doom it to a perpetual beta while usually not making it fully OSS so it can be really transformed and used.