Erhm, MP3s aren't illegal. Distributing MP3s that happen to contain copyrighted audio is illegal. It's the act of distribution that's illegal, not the file format or even the songs themselves.
Finally, saying it's not the student's bandwidth isn't really fair. After all, where do you think the money comes from to pay for the bandwidth? That's right, the students.
Something interesting about that is that although insurance companies are allowed to discriminate on the basis of gender, they are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. It's the exact same law, yet the courts have ruled in this odd fashion.
Note that I'm suggestion that discrimination is a good thing. It seems to me they shouldn't be able to discriminate on either one.
Emancipation solves part of the problem, but by no means the whole thing. Even as an emancipated minor, you still can't vote, drive, serve on a jury, etc. Furthermore, even as an emancipated minor, you won't be able to get a credit card or a checking account, or even sell stuff on ebay. All these things are tied to age, not legal competancy.
Finally, the point that everyone goes through this is not a solution to the problem. If we instituted mandatory corporal punishment for all children, everyone would go through it -- but that does not make it a good thing.
In a lot of cases, yes, that's the case. In others, they use the laws with respect to legal competance as an excuse, and nothing more. Many policies are codified with respect to age, not legal competence, but the two do not go hand in hand - A minor could be emancipated, which would grant him/her legal competance, or, conversely, an adult could be mentally incapacitated, which would remove his/her competance.
Besides which, I think you are absolutely correct when you say there is no good way to codify legal competance. That dosen't mean that using age is the best way.
But the point is that the basis of this law is the idea that minors are less mature or responsible.
But in a lot of other cases, the law actually REQUIRES discrimination - such as ages for driving, incorporation, drinking, wearing a bicycle helmet, getting a library card, etc.
Just because something is the law dosen't mean it's right. Remember slavery used to be the law.
Not with my employer; I've been lucky enough to have had employers that respected my abilities (and compensated me accordingly).
But, when I was younger, my age was an issue of constant contest. It seemed everywhere I went I was restricted in what I could do. Opening a checking account? Sorry, under 18. Trying to sell an item on ebay? Sorry, ebay users must be over 18. Trying to buy something online? Sorry, we only take credit cards and you can't get one. I couldn't even manage my own stocks! And when I did get my driver's license, I had to have a paren't signature.
I was fortunate to have had a parent who would assist me in these endeavours; My dad would let me use his card and I would reimburse him. But the feeling of having to check with someone else for simple purchases really felt like being a second-class citizen.
I realize that the purpose behind these restrictions is the idea that the older one gets, the more mature one gets. But the assumption is flawed; It may be that as one gets older one gets more mature, but as a 14-year-old, I knew of many people in their 30s or 40s where were much more childish and less responsible than I.
Age discrimination is illegal, but only if the discriminee is over 40. It's actually legal to descriminate between a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old, and in some cases it's required.
Many people say that the reason we use age as a measure of maturity and responsibility (e.g. for finances, drinking, driving, fishing, etc.) is that there is no more readily availible tool. And although I feel the sentiment is correct it's not clear to me why no one seems to be making any effort to try.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Most end-user applications include not only the software code itself, but also a variety of icons, text, trademarks, and maybe some patented features.
None of these can be put into another work without violating the law.
Yes, that's accurate. When I said "release", I was thinking "make availible"; Obviously if no one is interested in the source there is no obligation to provide it.
(Mental image of software programmer forcing users to take the source goes here)
If you really think spam is OK, consider these figures:
There are about 5.7 million businesses in the US. Now assume that only 1% of those decide to send out spam, and that they send out only one spam per year. That's still 156 messages in your mailbox daily, on average. Some days you might get more.
Given how cheap it is to send out spam, it's very likely that more than 1% of businesses would partake, and also unlikely they would limit themselves to 1 message a year.
Spam is only merely an inconvience as long as the companies that partake are kept underground. If spam is legimized, you can be sure it will be a severe problem.
Not gunzip, but regular old unzip can. The ZIP format allows an ignored preamble, which is where a self-extracting file puts the extraction code.
The problem is that oftentimes these files are not ZIP files, or, worse, are a proprietary installer program. Then you can't really access it under Linux at all.
Since the most recent versions of Windows have built-in support for ZIP files, it shouldn't be necessary any longer to distribute self-extracting files.
Well, the point is that with Linux, you can take it and do your own thing - that's the point of the GPL. The java language hasn't been standardized, and Sun tries to use its copyright on the spec to control anyone who tries to implement the language. So it's not really the same thing at all.
People give a lot of credence to Linus because they respect him; Conversely, Sun tries to enforce control over Java through lawsuits and threats.
If anyone had actually taken the time to read the linked page at Compaq, they would have noticed that this is NOT a high-performance (beowulf) cluster.
This is a high-availibility cluster, the idea being that one of the machines can die without losing anything. Kinda like RAID taken to the systems level.
That linux lacks this has been one of Microsoft's marketing points, so this is a really good thing. Unfortunately, the mirroring software is not open source or free software.:\
It seems it would be pretty straightforward for a company to give their entry-level tech support people a list of keywords, that if the customer mentions enough of them, to send them on to the next level.
Slashdot Mirror
Erhm, MP3s aren't illegal. Distributing MP3s that happen to contain copyrighted audio is illegal. It's the act of distribution that's illegal, not the file format or even the songs themselves.
Finally, saying it's not the student's bandwidth isn't really fair. After all, where do you think the money comes from to pay for the bandwidth? That's right, the students.
Something interesting about that is that although insurance companies are allowed to discriminate on the basis of gender, they are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. It's the exact same law, yet the courts have ruled in this odd fashion.
Note that I'm suggestion that discrimination is a good thing. It seems to me they shouldn't be able to discriminate on either one.
Erhm, when I do that all I see is the default IIS 404 page, which is not useful in the least.
Reading over that list, the only W3C standard I see that Mozilla dosen't support is PICS, and that for a good reason.
So, perhaps you'd like to substantiate your claim that IE has better standards compliance that Mozilla.
Emancipation solves part of the problem, but by no means the whole thing. Even as an emancipated minor, you still can't vote, drive, serve on a jury, etc. Furthermore, even as an emancipated minor, you won't be able to get a credit card or a checking account, or even sell stuff on ebay. All these things are tied to age, not legal competancy.
Finally, the point that everyone goes through this is not a solution to the problem. If we instituted mandatory corporal punishment for all children, everyone would go through it -- but that does not make it a good thing.
In a lot of cases, yes, that's the case. In others, they use the laws with respect to legal competance as an excuse, and nothing more. Many policies are codified with respect to age, not legal competence, but the two do not go hand in hand - A minor could be emancipated, which would grant him/her legal competance, or, conversely, an adult could be mentally incapacitated, which would remove his/her competance.
Besides which, I think you are absolutely correct when you say there is no good way to codify legal competance. That dosen't mean that using age is the best way.
But the point is that the basis of this law is the idea that minors are less mature or responsible.
But in a lot of other cases, the law actually REQUIRES discrimination - such as ages for driving, incorporation, drinking, wearing a bicycle helmet, getting a library card, etc.
Just because something is the law dosen't mean it's right. Remember slavery used to be the law.
Not with my employer; I've been lucky enough to have had employers that respected my abilities (and compensated me accordingly).
But, when I was younger, my age was an issue of constant contest. It seemed everywhere I went I was restricted in what I could do. Opening a checking account? Sorry, under 18. Trying to sell an item on ebay? Sorry, ebay users must be over 18. Trying to buy something online? Sorry, we only take credit cards and you can't get one. I couldn't even manage my own stocks! And when I did get my driver's license, I had to have a paren't signature.
I was fortunate to have had a parent who would assist me in these endeavours; My dad would let me use his card and I would reimburse him. But the feeling of having to check with someone else for simple purchases really felt like being a second-class citizen.
I realize that the purpose behind these restrictions is the idea that the older one gets, the more mature one gets. But the assumption is flawed; It may be that as one gets older one gets more mature, but as a 14-year-old, I knew of many people in their 30s or 40s where were much more childish and less responsible than I.
Age discrimination is illegal, but only if the discriminee is over 40. It's actually legal to descriminate between a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old, and in some cases it's required.
Many people say that the reason we use age as a measure of maturity and responsibility (e.g. for finances, drinking, driving, fishing, etc.) is that there is no more readily availible tool. And although I feel the sentiment is correct it's not clear to me why no one seems to be making any effort to try.
Actually, that's not entirely true. Most end-user applications include not only the software code itself, but also a variety of icons, text, trademarks, and maybe some patented features.
None of these can be put into another work without violating the law.
Yes, that's accurate. When I said "release", I was thinking "make availible"; Obviously if no one is interested in the source there is no obligation to provide it.
(Mental image of software programmer forcing users to take the source goes here)
No, under the GPL you must release source code along with any changes. There's nothing in there requiring you to make your changes public.
If you really think spam is OK, consider these figures:
There are about 5.7 million businesses in the US. Now assume that only 1% of those decide to send out spam, and that they send out only one spam per year. That's still 156 messages in your mailbox daily, on average. Some days you might get more.
Given how cheap it is to send out spam, it's very likely that more than 1% of businesses would partake, and also unlikely they would limit themselves to 1 message a year.
Spam is only merely an inconvience as long as the companies that partake are kept underground. If spam is legimized, you can be sure it will be a severe problem.
Pretty much, yeah.
Hmm. I had never read the quote that way, but you're correct - it makes much more sense that she was not, in fact, referring to sharing files.
:\
Now I have to go find a new sig.
Yes, except that fingerprints are not genetic. Identical twins have different fingerprints.
There's nothing to stop you from takinga DNA test from the unidentified body, of course, but you needn't make a clone to get that.
Erhm, you know that freshmeat is owned by VA too, right?
If you want to uncompress an ARJ, then you should use unarj, but I don't know if it can handle SFXs.
Not gunzip, but regular old unzip can. The ZIP format allows an ignored preamble, which is where a self-extracting file puts the extraction code.
The problem is that oftentimes these files are not ZIP files, or, worse, are a proprietary installer program. Then you can't really access it under Linux at all.
Since the most recent versions of Windows have built-in support for ZIP files, it shouldn't be necessary any longer to distribute self-extracting files.
Well, the point is that with Linux, you can take it and do your own thing - that's the point of the GPL. The java language hasn't been standardized, and Sun tries to use its copyright on the spec to control anyone who tries to implement the language. So it's not really the same thing at all.
People give a lot of credence to Linus because they respect him; Conversely, Sun tries to enforce control over Java through lawsuits and threats.
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
If anyone had actually taken the time to read the linked page at Compaq, they would have noticed that this is NOT a high-performance (beowulf) cluster.
:\
This is a high-availibility cluster, the idea being that one of the machines can die without losing anything. Kinda like RAID taken to the systems level.
That linux lacks this has been one of Microsoft's marketing points, so this is a really good thing. Unfortunately, the mirroring software is not open source or free software.
Well, PB's server should accept relayed mail from anyone with a Pac Bell address. :\
Keywords might include:
My bad. I was thinking of the article liked to from this post.