Nadav Har'El wrote:
Treatment of multiple-children families by the state and society is way OT, as well as
Recently Channel 2 news carried a story about large families (like yours)
whose schools demand 500 shekels a year (or more) from each child for
school trips. For the school it's much easier and nicer to force everyone
to fit this mold and not "cause problems". But what does a person earning 4000
shekels and having "just" 5 kids, do?
politically explosive, lets NOT go there.
The issue you present here is that pupils are required to use a personal computerWhat does the same person do when his kids' school force his children to write homework on their home computer (so one computer is not enough for all the children, just like one desk is not enough for all of them), or to buy specific software that his childrens' teachers demand?
_at all_, and cannot use public PCs in the school's lab or library.
This is not a free standards issue, and to present it as such weakens other, very strong,
claims for free standards (vendor independance, information opacity, service opacity, etc.).
This analogue is, IMHO, a bit unconvincing , for several reasons:Should this hypothetic guy be told to pirate commercial software? Is that any better than telling him "if you can't afford paying for your kid's school trips, why don't you just rob a bank?
1) the previous remark applies here as well.
2) copying software, although wrong morally and by law , is NOT armed robbery,
assault with a deadly weapon, or anything remotely like robbing a bank
(or _real_ piracy, for that matter ...) . Relating them is too strong a claim.
It's like saying "everything who is morally questionable and is against the law
is just as bad as robbing a bank.".
Such Ad Absurdum claims are not, IMHO, very convincing. Not from the MPAA
and not from FS advocates.
There should not be a "digital divide" inside schools...
As long as you make sure you reduce inequality w/o lowering the average, like our education system is so fond of doing in the bagrut, for example ... I agree with you that using linux dev-env will help do exactly that.
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