I do not want to debate this with you. I respect you and your opinions (even when I don't agree with them). Fortunately, laws still don't permit anyone (other than the law, which varies country to country and is more relevant when you base it on what you can detect and enforce) telling me what I can do with MY PC. As such, the topics still stand and either a) I can be asked by the committee to avoid certain topics, which would be odd since any potentially offensive topic is warned about well in advance and those thus offended can vote with their feet and not come to the meeting (my half anyway) or you can voice your own dissaproval by not attending the meeting.
It has also been expressed that there may be too many topics to cover during my half. This may be true so I will try and be time conscious. I will speak until the time is up and we will get through what we get through. I would rather have too much to say than not anough and have averyone get bored in the interim. I will try to involve the audience so that I get a feel if we are moving too fast to be understandable.
Kind Regards,
Jason Greenwood
Christopher Sawtell wrote:
Jason Greenwood wrote:Hi Chris,Christopher Sawtell wrote:
I'm not terribly keen on an advertised public demonstration of how to nick a track off a cd. Doing that is essentially giving public lessons on how to commit the crime of intellectual property theft, not exactly a suitable activity for a CLUG evening imho.
If you could possibly do something different for items 1 & 2 that would be a good idea.
I appreciate your concerns Chris, however I feel very different to you. I do not feel that file swapping is illegal or even morally wrong. BUT, that is besides the point, there are many "legitimate" needs to rip tracks from a CD, the least of which is transferring ones own CD collection to MP3-.ogg.
Which is neither morally wrong nor illegal as long as you don't reproduce the files over and over to either sell or give away.
I am sorry, I will not eliminate this topic/s since this is one of the MAJOR uses of a Windows PeeCee these days. I get asked almost daily if this can be done in Linux. It can, with an awesome graphical interface to boot. Also, it is interesting to note that even under US copyright law, it is perfectly legal to rip and trade music files, it is illegal to MAKE MONEY from them.
It's a fact that here in NZ we - thank God - have a juristiction, and sets of laws and penalties which are completely different to those in the US, which seems to me to have laws which are by and large bought by the wealthy thus nearly always revolve around money, rather than morality, and penalties and punishments which are vindictive in the extreme.
Anyway for me it's morally wrong to steal the product of somebody else's hard work and reproduce and sell it, thus makeing money for oneself as well as depriving the author of the work his fair return, or to just give it away thus depriving the author of his sale.
That my opinion anyway, and I hope it's not too far OT to be censored. Zane?
The litigation in the courts ALWAYS centers around commercial operations that make money off either a) selling pirated CD's or b) building a business off of wholesale piracy eg. a file trading service that sells advertising which makes money off the provided pirated files ie. content draws visitors which view the advertising.
That's American law which has nothing to do with us here in NZ, nor much to do with principles of absolute morality.
If you have any further ideas, please advise and I will try and include 1 or 2 of them. So, here is your chance, all of you that want part of the meetings to focus on the desktop!!
You might care to bring to life, so as to speak, my 6 page KDE applications document plus anything else you know about. This could look visually stunning if done under KDE-3.1
Can you explain further please.
html://berty.dyndns.org/KdeApps.pdf ( 3Meg d/l or thereabouts, please don't ./ me folks )
I you want you can have the kword document source.
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C.
