I said nothing about university's not being a place for ideological debate.
What I said, in plain and simple terms, is that universities should not prejudice their decisions with regard to software choice (or choice of anything else, for that matter) based on an ideological debate nobody gives a damn about.
Yes, you do. Got a bug in Windows? Can you fix it in the source, and recompile? Can you give a copy of Windows to a friend?
These are not innate freedoms. I haven't given up anything because I didn't have it to start with. You have no right to give a copy of a digital work to a friend.
Can you reinstall Windows on a second PC? If MS's WGA decides your license is invalid, even though it is valid, can you get MS to restore your license?
Yes, in fact, I can. The fact that you can't says more about how we respond to problems (me by solving them and you by whining about it) than Microsoft.
MS was convicted of a felony, and have not shown any sense of remorse or rehabilitation.
Microsoft was not convicted of a felony. Microsoft was involved in a civil trial. As a corporation, I do not expect nor desire remorse or rehabilitation from them: those are sentencing attributes that apply only to human beings.
If someone was a repeat shoplifter, and continued to engage in shoplifting after conviction, I wouldn't necessarily "refuse to associate" with them, but if I were a shop owner, I'd definitely keep my eye on them if not ban them from my store outright.
And that's your decision, certainly. You can also kick people out of your store because the voices in your head tell you to do so. That doesn't make it a good reason.
Rather, your arguments about Microsoft going back and repeating their actions have not been proven; so at this point, you're the person who's seen someone commit a crime and then sees a crime in everything they do afterward, regardless of whether or not it was criminal or even malicious.
"Somestimes" eh? How many times do you think Ubuntu is "free" as in beer?
Bigger universities get bigger discounts, as I understand it.
So you're saying TCO for Linux is higher? Please, show me hard evidence of that by someone not funded by Microsoft. The cost issue may be very minor for you if you have money. If you're not so rich and taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans already, you might not like being asked to spend thousands more on software and textbooks which could very easily be free.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that IT's continuing costs of maintenance are much higher than their capital outlay for licensing, and so it's a reasonably trivial expense especially with the deep, deep academic discounts Microsoft is giving them.
Ultimately, however, the university is going to see it this way: The vast majority of their students already have Windows licenses. The cost of a windows license for a student who does not have one is, ultimately, trivial.
Therefore, using the 'cost' of Windows compared to Linux is a bad argument. They don't see it. While I'm sure that cost might be a factor under highly specialized circumstances sometimes, under the vast majority of use-cases they're seeing that cost is simply not a factor.
The question of whether textbooks could 'easily be free' is a difficult one to answer, and I certainly don't think it's so easy to handwave. I have only seen a very few free textbooks that are worth shit, and most of those were put out by people who are ideologically supportive of open source (not that that's a bad thing, certainly, but it does demonstrate that they had ulterior motives).
Even, last time I checked, places like MIT's open courseware are not providing you with actual materials- those materials are costly.
In the case of liberal arts textbooks, those materials are costly often because of downstream copyright licensing costs for extracts. In the case of science textbooks, it's because writing a science textbook is not a trivial exercise, and the people who are capable of doing it are a select group who dedicate time to the effort.
Certainly, professors are well known for updating editions on a regular basis with switched around questions: but that is not really an issue about the University itself, but about the professor. You can get your hands on a good college level physics textbook for only a few dollars, if you don't mind it being out of date. The basic physical principles haven't changed much in the past 25 years, at least not as taught at that level.
Given that competence ensures security regardless of operating system, I'm going to say the cost was probably all those hours I spent putting together systems back in the day.
of giving up freedoms,
I don't give up any freedoms.
and of supporting a criminal corporation?
I am fully of the opinion that once you've been convicted and served your time, you're free to go and no stigma should accrue to you. I don't blame Microsoft for having been convicted regarding their business practices any more than I would refuse to associate with someone who, in the past, had been convicted of shoplifting.
What form do you write those costs off on?
Probably the form that requires me not to be an insane zealot.
...if you're technically competent, you probably weren't asking for any support at all.
At which point, they were probably perfectly happy to do absolutely nothing to accommodate you, which is likely what happened.
As I said above, certainly, perhaps, going to a university that isn't hostile toward your preferences on a minor and fairly insignificant issue is something to take into account.
But it absolutely shouldn't be a be-all and end all, and I think you noticed that because you appear to have chosen a school which was, at the time, hostile to your preferences.
As I mentioned, if it's solely about the cost, Microsoft is perfectly happy to make Windows cheap for educational users. Sometimes, even to the point where it's 'free' as in beer.
Plus, as I'm sure has been repeated to you many times, most of the cost in software is not licensing costs, but continuing operating costs. Ultimately, the cost issue is very minor.
I doubt it would be possible. You're not being discriminated against based on an inherent characteristic.
For example, you are essentially asking if you could sue the school for discrimination because they require you to have a textbook for a class. You would not win. You would not even lose: You would be laughed out of the building.
Or maybe they have more important things to worry about than an ideological debate that, ultimately, nobody except zealots on either side actually care about?
You can make a difference between 'free' and 'not free' in the sense of monetary cost, but that's an analysis that ultimately the University will be making anyway- and Microsoft makes it very comfortable for them with MSDNAA and other programs.
You can make an argument based on 'free' and 'not free' in the sense of ideology, but this is not something that universities give a damn about, and to be honest, they really shouldn't. They buy chairs that are patented, buy textbooks under copyright, probably issue textbooks under copyright and apply for patents- universities, certainly, are not ideologically opposed to the current IP-licensing regime, just like 99% of people in the world.
At which point you get Windows and write it off as a cost of attending school, like a textbook (have you seen how much textbooks cost these days?)
Really, your operating system choice should not be so totally ingrained with your personality that you can't change to adapt to situations where you may be required to use something else.
I don't see that defining the characteristics is tricky at all. While people may consider the notion of racial differences to be racist, it also happens to be obvious. You can argue that black people and white people are the same until you're blue in the face, and you might well be right, but someone's going to smack you upside the head and say that one group is black and the other is white.
Similarly, it's not necessary to define religion (although I believe it has actually be done for legal purposes, I'd have to check), so much as it is merely necessary to identify the specific group being targeted.
I don't know if you've read Andrews v. Law Society of Upper Canada or Law v. Canada but they do define what constitute protected grounds in a way that does not directly reference any particular characteristic.
I have the impression that you misinterpreted my comment awfully.
If I have a group of people in a theatre, and you yell "Fire!" when there is no fire and cause a panic that leads to two people being trampled, you are guilty of incitement. The reason, of course, is that the people involved will not conduct a reasoned analysis of their situation. They will simply panic and stampede.
Questions of hate speech can be framed in a similar light. There is a sliding scale between speech that bypasses the listener's higher reasoning and speech that does not. The former we prohibit for the good of society; actions based on the latter are the responsibility of the actor.
But, especially given that there exist a significant number of racial and religious tensions between different groups in society, where do we draw the line between the two where race and ethnicity and sexual orientation etc are concerned, as opposed to in clear-cut cases of mischief?
The difference is, ultimately, one of public policy. The only real motivation to extract speech directed at an individual or group on the basis of racial/sexual/etc characteristics and punish it more harshly is for social engineering.
That said, I am not talking about ordinary incitement. In this case, I am talking about speech that advocates or incites unlawful conduct specifically directed at a person or identifiable group because of a specific series of protected characteristics. Most nations have these characteristics, or a method for determining them- in Canadian law it's S.15 and the analogous grounds.
Does his speech advocate or incite unlawful action targeted at a specific group?
Really, I fail to see why this is contentious. It is true that King advocated and incited unlawful action targeted at a specific group of people (although it wasn't racial, and arguably ideology should not be a protected category for hate speech, but that's another matter).
I am certainly not saying that people who have different opinions commit hate speech. I specifically reference people who advocate and incite unlawful conduct.
If you want to lawfully change the rules targeting a specific group, like blacks or jews, you can try- you'll fail, because the laws have an integrated anti-discrimination component, but you can try. You can't fall back onto unlawful methods and then claim that the law should not punish you.
Firstly, the Constitution is the overall ruling document in Canada, but that does not mean nothing goes before it. In fact, public policy concerns often override Charter rights. This is entrenched in the Charter as S.1, and was elaborated on at great length in R v. Oakes and the subsequent follow-on cases.
The rights enumerated in S.2, specifically, 2(b), are not beyond constraint. They are constrained by S.1, which states, ultimately, that there are public policy rationales powerful enough to override individual rights, and the determination of whether or not they are sufficiently powerful is determined by the Oakes test.
Secondly, the HRT is not a court-like thing. It is a quasi-judicial tribunal, whose decisions are reviewable by the Federal Court and the FCA, etc.
Thirdly, the HRC's 100% conviction rate is incredibly misleading in and of itself. There is no way to be acquitted by a HRT. Complaints are either upheld or dismissed. Someone the subject of a complaint cannot be found innocent. That is not how the system works. In criminal justice terms, this would be vaguely akin to having a system where you were either convicted or had the charges dropped. Actually, of the complaints brought before the Human Rights Commission, 13.5% are referred to the HRT, and 86.5% are dropped. 60% of those complaints referred to the HRT are settled prior to the Tribunal issuing a decision. In total, all of approximately 8.1% of complaints are decided by the HRT, and the HRT has the legal authority, also, to dismiss complaints at that stage if it feels doing so is appropriate (but I haven't found statistics on that).
In short, you're either terribly misinformed or intentionally lying to significantly distort the facts of the case.
So, Martin Luther King, Jr. advocating and inciting the unlawful conduct of sit-ins, unlicensed Freedom Marches, and other demonstration actions directed at segregationist members of the U.S. South... is hate speech?
Yes. I don't see a problem with that. Much change has relied on unlawful and often-times violent revolution, but that doesn't make it any less unlawful or violent. Reference the American war of Independence. Violent and illegal? Absolutely. I wouldn't shy away from calling it such.
I would be certainly want to say "of course not", but your definition doesn't leave me much room.
I think the real question is why you don't think that illegal actions perpetrated in support of a worthy goal are any more legal than those, such as for example those of the KKK, which are perpetrated in support of an 'unworthy' goal?
The problem with drowning out somebody's radio signal isn't freedom of speech, it's a spectrum regulation issue, though.
In the same way, I suppose if university ordinances prohibited drowning out speakers, they could kick out the students- but it wouldn't be a freedom of speech issue.
Does freedom of speech require that people not drown you out? That seems a rather interesting definition of freedom of speech. By that measure, people are required to assist you with your speech, not merely not punish you for it.
While it's true that hate speech requires a listener, that tends to blur the issue rather significantly.
For example, the US Supreme Court case of Brandenburg v. Ohio and the standard of imminent lawless action. There is a sliding continuum from, on the one side, speech that is rationally interpreted and allows the listener to act simply on their own rationally-considered decision and speech which causes an individual to act before they have reached a rationally-considered decision- and the latter is not permissible.
Is it possible to eliminate the listener on the second end of the scale? Not effectively. The most effective method for preventing harm to society in such a case is to eliminate the source.
Trudeau was incredibly popular with a large section of the Canadian population in the East and in Central Canada for his policies and his attitude. He's pretty much only reviled in Western Canada- and there was more than enough assholeish behavior on both sides of that relationship to go around. "Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark", remember?
I'm not sure exactly what they're referring to in this decision, but the Supreme Court in R v. Keegstra and R v. Krymwoski that restrictions on hate speech were perfectly valid under S.1 of the Charter.
There are, however, a variety of differences between those cases and this; the primary one being that those were criminal complaints and this is not. That said, the Supreme Court and lower courts have long upheld the Human Rights Act and have often supported the decisions of the Human Rights Commission under that act, so I think the chances of this being overturned on appeal are slim. Any overturning would likely be procedural: the procedures do not provide sufficient safeguards, the Tribunal operated beyond its powers in this instance, etc.
I find it unlikely in the extreme that the Supreme Court would simply overturn the Act itself.
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I said nothing about university's not being a place for ideological debate.
What I said, in plain and simple terms, is that universities should not prejudice their decisions with regard to software choice (or choice of anything else, for that matter) based on an ideological debate nobody gives a damn about.
These are not innate freedoms. I haven't given up anything because I didn't have it to start with. You have no right to give a copy of a digital work to a friend.
Yes, in fact, I can. The fact that you can't says more about how we respond to problems (me by solving them and you by whining about it) than Microsoft.
Microsoft was not convicted of a felony. Microsoft was involved in a civil trial. As a corporation, I do not expect nor desire remorse or rehabilitation from them: those are sentencing attributes that apply only to human beings.
And that's your decision, certainly. You can also kick people out of your store because the voices in your head tell you to do so. That doesn't make it a good reason.
Rather, your arguments about Microsoft going back and repeating their actions have not been proven; so at this point, you're the person who's seen someone commit a crime and then sees a crime in everything they do afterward, regardless of whether or not it was criminal or even malicious.
Bigger universities get bigger discounts, as I understand it.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that IT's continuing costs of maintenance are much higher than their capital outlay for licensing, and so it's a reasonably trivial expense especially with the deep, deep academic discounts Microsoft is giving them.
Ultimately, however, the university is going to see it this way: The vast majority of their students already have Windows licenses. The cost of a windows license for a student who does not have one is, ultimately, trivial.
Therefore, using the 'cost' of Windows compared to Linux is a bad argument. They don't see it. While I'm sure that cost might be a factor under highly specialized circumstances sometimes, under the vast majority of use-cases they're seeing that cost is simply not a factor.
The question of whether textbooks could 'easily be free' is a difficult one to answer, and I certainly don't think it's so easy to handwave. I have only seen a very few free textbooks that are worth shit, and most of those were put out by people who are ideologically supportive of open source (not that that's a bad thing, certainly, but it does demonstrate that they had ulterior motives).
Even, last time I checked, places like MIT's open courseware are not providing you with actual materials- those materials are costly.
In the case of liberal arts textbooks, those materials are costly often because of downstream copyright licensing costs for extracts. In the case of science textbooks, it's because writing a science textbook is not a trivial exercise, and the people who are capable of doing it are a select group who dedicate time to the effort.
Certainly, professors are well known for updating editions on a regular basis with switched around questions: but that is not really an issue about the University itself, but about the professor. You can get your hands on a good college level physics textbook for only a few dollars, if you don't mind it being out of date. The basic physical principles haven't changed much in the past 25 years, at least not as taught at that level.
Given that competence ensures security regardless of operating system, I'm going to say the cost was probably all those hours I spent putting together systems back in the day.
I don't give up any freedoms.
I am fully of the opinion that once you've been convicted and served your time, you're free to go and no stigma should accrue to you. I don't blame Microsoft for having been convicted regarding their business practices any more than I would refuse to associate with someone who, in the past, had been convicted of shoplifting.
Probably the form that requires me not to be an insane zealot.
...if you're technically competent, you probably weren't asking for any support at all.
At which point, they were probably perfectly happy to do absolutely nothing to accommodate you, which is likely what happened.
As I said above, certainly, perhaps, going to a university that isn't hostile toward your preferences on a minor and fairly insignificant issue is something to take into account.
But it absolutely shouldn't be a be-all and end all, and I think you noticed that because you appear to have chosen a school which was, at the time, hostile to your preferences.
As I mentioned, if it's solely about the cost, Microsoft is perfectly happy to make Windows cheap for educational users. Sometimes, even to the point where it's 'free' as in beer.
Plus, as I'm sure has been repeated to you many times, most of the cost in software is not licensing costs, but continuing operating costs. Ultimately, the cost issue is very minor.
I agree, but I wasn't referring to the original question, merely the poster above me.
I doubt it would be possible. You're not being discriminated against based on an inherent characteristic.
For example, you are essentially asking if you could sue the school for discrimination because they require you to have a textbook for a class. You would not win. You would not even lose: You would be laughed out of the building.
Or maybe they have more important things to worry about than an ideological debate that, ultimately, nobody except zealots on either side actually care about?
You can make a difference between 'free' and 'not free' in the sense of monetary cost, but that's an analysis that ultimately the University will be making anyway- and Microsoft makes it very comfortable for them with MSDNAA and other programs.
You can make an argument based on 'free' and 'not free' in the sense of ideology, but this is not something that universities give a damn about, and to be honest, they really shouldn't. They buy chairs that are patented, buy textbooks under copyright, probably issue textbooks under copyright and apply for patents- universities, certainly, are not ideologically opposed to the current IP-licensing regime, just like 99% of people in the world.
At which point you get Windows and write it off as a cost of attending school, like a textbook (have you seen how much textbooks cost these days?)
Really, your operating system choice should not be so totally ingrained with your personality that you can't change to adapt to situations where you may be required to use something else.
Er, my mistake. It's Andrews v. Law Society of British Columbia. I don't know why I typed Upper Canada...
I don't see that defining the characteristics is tricky at all. While people may consider the notion of racial differences to be racist, it also happens to be obvious. You can argue that black people and white people are the same until you're blue in the face, and you might well be right, but someone's going to smack you upside the head and say that one group is black and the other is white.
Similarly, it's not necessary to define religion (although I believe it has actually be done for legal purposes, I'd have to check), so much as it is merely necessary to identify the specific group being targeted.
I don't know if you've read Andrews v. Law Society of Upper Canada or Law v. Canada but they do define what constitute protected grounds in a way that does not directly reference any particular characteristic.
I have the impression that you misinterpreted my comment awfully.
If I have a group of people in a theatre, and you yell "Fire!" when there is no fire and cause a panic that leads to two people being trampled, you are guilty of incitement. The reason, of course, is that the people involved will not conduct a reasoned analysis of their situation. They will simply panic and stampede.
Questions of hate speech can be framed in a similar light. There is a sliding scale between speech that bypasses the listener's higher reasoning and speech that does not. The former we prohibit for the good of society; actions based on the latter are the responsibility of the actor.
But, especially given that there exist a significant number of racial and religious tensions between different groups in society, where do we draw the line between the two where race and ethnicity and sexual orientation etc are concerned, as opposed to in clear-cut cases of mischief?
The difference is, ultimately, one of public policy. The only real motivation to extract speech directed at an individual or group on the basis of racial/sexual/etc characteristics and punish it more harshly is for social engineering.
That said, I am not talking about ordinary incitement. In this case, I am talking about speech that advocates or incites unlawful conduct specifically directed at a person or identifiable group because of a specific series of protected characteristics. Most nations have these characteristics, or a method for determining them- in Canadian law it's S.15 and the analogous grounds.
Does his speech advocate or incite unlawful action targeted at a specific group?
Really, I fail to see why this is contentious. It is true that King advocated and incited unlawful action targeted at a specific group of people (although it wasn't racial, and arguably ideology should not be a protected category for hate speech, but that's another matter).
I am certainly not saying that people who have different opinions commit hate speech. I specifically reference people who advocate and incite unlawful conduct.
If you want to lawfully change the rules targeting a specific group, like blacks or jews, you can try- you'll fail, because the laws have an integrated anti-discrimination component, but you can try. You can't fall back onto unlawful methods and then claim that the law should not punish you.
Your comment is extremely misleading.
Firstly, the Constitution is the overall ruling document in Canada, but that does not mean nothing goes before it. In fact, public policy concerns often override Charter rights. This is entrenched in the Charter as S.1, and was elaborated on at great length in R v. Oakes and the subsequent follow-on cases.
The rights enumerated in S.2, specifically, 2(b), are not beyond constraint. They are constrained by S.1, which states, ultimately, that there are public policy rationales powerful enough to override individual rights, and the determination of whether or not they are sufficiently powerful is determined by the Oakes test.
Secondly, the HRT is not a court-like thing. It is a quasi-judicial tribunal, whose decisions are reviewable by the Federal Court and the FCA, etc.
Thirdly, the HRC's 100% conviction rate is incredibly misleading in and of itself. There is no way to be acquitted by a HRT. Complaints are either upheld or dismissed. Someone the subject of a complaint cannot be found innocent. That is not how the system works. In criminal justice terms, this would be vaguely akin to having a system where you were either convicted or had the charges dropped. Actually, of the complaints brought before the Human Rights Commission, 13.5% are referred to the HRT, and 86.5% are dropped. 60% of those complaints referred to the HRT are settled prior to the Tribunal issuing a decision. In total, all of approximately 8.1% of complaints are decided by the HRT, and the HRT has the legal authority, also, to dismiss complaints at that stage if it feels doing so is appropriate (but I haven't found statistics on that).
In short, you're either terribly misinformed or intentionally lying to significantly distort the facts of the case.
Yes. I don't see a problem with that. Much change has relied on unlawful and often-times violent revolution, but that doesn't make it any less unlawful or violent. Reference the American war of Independence. Violent and illegal? Absolutely. I wouldn't shy away from calling it such.
I think the real question is why you don't think that illegal actions perpetrated in support of a worthy goal are any more legal than those, such as for example those of the KKK, which are perpetrated in support of an 'unworthy' goal?
And this is a problem because...?
I didn't say it was a generally used definition, but it was one that, I thought, fulfilled the requirements he laid out.
The problem with drowning out somebody's radio signal isn't freedom of speech, it's a spectrum regulation issue, though.
In the same way, I suppose if university ordinances prohibited drowning out speakers, they could kick out the students- but it wouldn't be a freedom of speech issue.
Does freedom of speech require that people not drown you out? That seems a rather interesting definition of freedom of speech. By that measure, people are required to assist you with your speech, not merely not punish you for it.
Speech that a reasonable person would consider to be advocating or inciting unlawful conduct directed at a person or identifiable group of people.
While it's true that hate speech requires a listener, that tends to blur the issue rather significantly.
For example, the US Supreme Court case of Brandenburg v. Ohio and the standard of imminent lawless action. There is a sliding continuum from, on the one side, speech that is rationally interpreted and allows the listener to act simply on their own rationally-considered decision and speech which causes an individual to act before they have reached a rationally-considered decision- and the latter is not permissible.
Is it possible to eliminate the listener on the second end of the scale? Not effectively. The most effective method for preventing harm to society in such a case is to eliminate the source.
Trudeau was incredibly popular with a large section of the Canadian population in the East and in Central Canada for his policies and his attitude. He's pretty much only reviled in Western Canada- and there was more than enough assholeish behavior on both sides of that relationship to go around. "Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark", remember?
I'm not sure exactly what they're referring to in this decision, but the Supreme Court in R v. Keegstra and R v. Krymwoski that restrictions on hate speech were perfectly valid under S.1 of the Charter.
There are, however, a variety of differences between those cases and this; the primary one being that those were criminal complaints and this is not. That said, the Supreme Court and lower courts have long upheld the Human Rights Act and have often supported the decisions of the Human Rights Commission under that act, so I think the chances of this being overturned on appeal are slim. Any overturning would likely be procedural: the procedures do not provide sufficient safeguards, the Tribunal operated beyond its powers in this instance, etc.
I find it unlikely in the extreme that the Supreme Court would simply overturn the Act itself.