From: vinaigrettegirl	Date: April 9th, 2009 12:04 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Best of British luck with that ...

If he can download Brasenose Coll I will eat my college boater without benefit of butter, water, or mayonnaise in my own quad in front of the dinner queue.

	From: ewx	Date: April 9th, 2009 12:19 pm (UTC)		(Link)

They're probably able (at least in principle) to go straight to pirate copies of DVDs they'd otherwise have to get from Amazon.

Joking aside, it sounds like the kind of thing you might expect academic institutions to have a (suitably licensed) copy of available for their members to use.

	From: fivemack	Date: April 10th, 2009 09:36 am (UTC)		(Link)

There are a lot of objects in the sciences (for example, all the data NASA has ever collected, and every genome sequenced at the Sanger Centre) for which the DVD is provided, if at all, at a cost designed to deal with the faff of getting a grad student to stop reading Facebook waiting for their gel to electrophorose writing their thesis and burn a DVD, and if you'd rather download the data you're welcome to it.

If you're coming to linguistics from say bioinformatics, it does seem a little odd that a major underlying database has licensing conditions and costs money. Yes, it cost money to assemble, but the Hubble telescope and the Human Genome Project cost a whole lot more.

I suppose I can imagine myself asking exactly the same question, though maybe not quite phrased the same way, so it doesn't strike me as intrinsically ridiculous.

From: (Anonymous)	Date: April 15th, 2009 10:18 am (UTC)		(Link)

Maybe the student is American or has experience with the ANC? ANC release 2 has a free component (Open ANC) ~14million words. Or some of the other now freely distributed linguistic datasets.
But more likely, a beggar.
-dpv