was RickRussellTX @ reddit

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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Perhaps worth noting, there was a SCOTUS decision in the early 2000s (New York Times Co. v. Tasini) that held that freelance journalists whose contracts did not specifically include an electronic distribution clause were entitled to damages when those articles were subsequently released on the web and to electronic news services like Lexis/Nexis.

    Big publications like the NYT came to settlements that allowed them to pay to redistribute the older articles (by paying the original authors), but smaller publications may not have such a settlement structure in place and may not be allowed to redistribute the original articles without additional permissions.

    FYI, I have a copy of the Dragon Magazine Archive CD-ROM version that came out in 2001… only to immediately disappear off the market for this very reason!













  • The purpose of hard age limits isn’t just to restrict the autonomy of minors.

    It’s also to allow adults to know where they stand, with respect to the law, and eliminate ambiguities that could be used for selective enforcement.

    As an adult, I can’t decide whether to sell alcohol to a minor, or have sex with a minor, etc. based on some concept of “real world maturity”. And if you give prosecutors flexibility in charging adults with crimes based on some mushy concept of maturity, you can probably guess who will get the shaft: poor folks, and black & brown & red folks.

    I don’t know that hard age limits are “fair” to minors, I suppose I would probably agree that they are not. But we have to consider what is fair to the person who might be accused of a crime.



  • It was never a question of being technically right or wrong. Linus’ realization was that his inflammatory language was viewed as permission by other people in the Linux community to be verbally abusive to their peers. People who had been valuable contributors to Linux projects explained to Linus how they had been berated by colleagues, and when challenged those colleagues cited Linus’ own language.

    What Linus wants is working code, and you don’t get working code by giving tacit permission to your most aggressive & abrasive community members to attack others.