Well, there is the Torah, and the Jewish folk who labor pretty hard to keep things going since they can easily claim original ownership of the chapters...
The original language was very likely not Hebrew though (see the Tower of Babel for a scriptural reference as to why). One forgets too easily - those chapters of Early Genesis were most likely passed down to each generation by way of oral tradition. Father told son, old priest told young acolyte, etc.
So the 'original' language is very likely something that we have zero clue about by way of syntax, context, structure, etc.... like the Inuit habit of using 11 different words to describe "snow".
The Catholic Church did do the long-term thing (sort of) right, though - even as far back as The Council of Nicaea, there was an effort to collate and make consistent the scriptures, and they've remained pretty much preserved and copied ever since then... ~1700 years (and counting) isn't so bad by comparison (consider what little technology they actually had), you know?
Buying a flag lot isn't legal? What the hell am I supposed to tell my mortgage lender now?
(I mean, there was already a house on it and everything!)
Okay, okay - Incidentally, no, the other options probably aren't compliant with zoning codes, strictly speaking. OTOH, it's a quick and easy way to get some serious media attention onto the matter in your locale. Telcos tend to hate that sort of thing. They tend to prefer that you and your fellow town-dwellers think of turtles (Comcast), hordes of stalking network techs (Verizon) and so forth... They'd much prefer that the consumer not think about rampant abuses and neighborhood defacements when they think of a given brand name. It tends to make them eager to either move the thing, or to spend some time at least trying to be a bit sensitive to the property-owning folk.
* Charge them rent for the use of your property, sending an invoice monthly. When they don't pay (who knows? a big enough A/P department might), report them to the credit bureaus. When they raise a stink about having to deal with that, offer to sell them the small patch of property for whatever the going rate is per-square-foot in your locale and maybe add a bit of padding for negotiations room.
* Use that spot to build your brand new compost pile. Build a large wooden box big enough to contain the thing, then keep it filled with manure (and when applicable, the 'dog bombs') and your grass clippings. Claim that the heat it generates is perfect for generating high-grade manure, and that you're only recycling otherwise wasted energy.
* Send them a bill for the years (or even decades) of landscaping (even just mowing) you've had to do in the spot the box now occupies. Also send them a bill for any and all landscaping you've done to hide the damned thing.
* Front Yard? Bolt your mailbox to it. Hell, offer to bolt your neighbors' mailboxes to it.
* Plant a tree next to it... the biggest one Home Depot has. The roots will eventually (within a couple of years) destroy the thing from underneath, and most towns now have 'green laws' that prevent a utility from cutting down or even harming the tree. They move, you win.
* Do what I did... buy a house in the back of a "flag lot" (just pick one with enough land around and in it so you don't feel crowded). No utility easements back here, folks. When Verizon showed up to drop in fiber, the only impact I saw was a long, skinny line of spray-paint at the front of the driveway. the neighbor up front OTOH got a shiny new box in his yard (which explains where a lot of these ideas came from).
Dude - send a copy to the Utah State Attorney General's Office.
No, they did nothing wrong, but in 1999 when I was trying to explain that I wanted to put the GPL to use in my former classroom (all non public-domain copyrights are jointly held by a teacher and the State of Utah), most of the Dept'y Att'y General's responses consisted of "...I don't understand". I even pointed him to the GNU website), but he called back later and was still lost. Nice guy, sounded like a good lawyer, but he just couldn't wrap his brain around the concept.
Now that was nine years ago (!? Cripes I'm old),, and things may have changed, but pushing a copy of this new guide to all 50 US State Att'y General offices would, IMHO, not be a bad idea at all.
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
Dunno about that one... The Gemini program's launch vehicles tended to suffer what was called the "Pogo" effect once they reached a certain speed and altitude. Tended to scare the shit out of the first astronauts to experience it.
Not at all. Anyone who saw the means by which SCO went about launching their lawsuit, coupled with the fact that because of the USL v. BSDi lawsuits, there is a huge chance of SCO having made mistakes in their accusations, yet refused to act with any caution (or communication, or even what most lawyers in IP cases consider to be standard procedure) whatsoever?
To top that off, their company was teetering on the brink of death in early 2003 (having lived in Utah at the time, it was pretty common knowledge, at least to me).
While it wasn't the very nanosecond they said "lawsuit", it was relatively immediate that they had no case, and were merely trying to scrape out some dough in a last desperate grab (or as the Russians would put it, they were looking to: "die with music")./P
I suggest you start here. This happened in the 1980s.
Then, I suggest you look at what SCO actually did. I'll paraphrase it (heavily):
SCO: "Linux is stealing our code! We're gonna sue!"
Linux Kernel Devs: "Really? We don't think so. Tell us which parts of Linux that you think we have stolen. The source code for Linux is right there at kernel.org for you to peruse and point at. Tell us in public or in private, we don't care, as long as you say something. And are you sure you didn't get all confused somewhere? Maybe you should look up the USL versus BSDi war while you're at it, 'cause something smells fishy."
SCO: "We can't tell you! You'll just fix it and then we can't sue you for a zillion bajillion dollars!"
Any Lawyer and Law Prof with Half a Brain: "WTF? Is Boies on Crack? You always send a C&D order with specifics before you start filing papers with the Clerk."
Linux Community: "Show us the code! Show us the code!"
SCO: "Okay, okay - we'll show you some examples. But only in our super-secret code! And then we'll sue you for a zillion bajillion dollars - starting with IBM!"
Lawyers/LawProfs: "Damn... he is an idiot - you always sue some small fry first to get precedents... Boies must've skipped the Crack today and went straight to snorting Lysol and Meth."
SCO: (Shows some "code" with some real crappy "encryption")
Linux Devs: "Heh - the encryption was easy to break. Here's what they're whining about, and here's the BSD precedent for this one, and a direct reference from the Lions book for the other part of it, which is public domain. We're good here. SCO is full of shit." (proceeds to perform full audit of Linux kernel source as a double-check, finds bupkis, decides to ignore SCO from that point on).
Linux Community: "Yeah, SCO is full of it. Screw 'em. I gotta compile that needs done today... Oh, hey - that SCO stock price sure shot up since they started making noises..."
SCO: "Oh yeah! We're gonna SUE you! Unless you pay us $699 per user! We'll start with IBM and you'll see!"
(crack of thunder rolls...)
IBM: (pointing at McBride as its legal department marches towards him en-masse) "Don't even leave a grease spot when you're done."
Hi, Darrell! Tell Boies we all said "pwned", willya?
Re:Groklaw is an example of the power of open sour
on
Grokking SCO's Demise
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Thing is, I believe that SCO knew it was doomed from the start, but did it anyway.
McBride still made millions of bucks off of the deal, as did most of SCO's principals. Unless/Until there's criminal proceedings for SEC violations, they probably don't care, and are only making noises for long enough to provide plausible deniability. In short - they got their dough, and they probably don't care what happens to SCO from this point on.
SCO lasted five years longer than it probably would have if it had simply died quietly as Yet Another Dot-Bust Carcass.
Finally, most corps know nowadays that getting into bed with MSFT is a sure recipe for disaster. PlaysForSure, HD-DVD, Windows Defender, OS/2, and numerous other smaller examples are proof-positive of just how badly you get burned in any partnership with MSFT... unless of course you're Microsoft. I think only NBC has managed to not get raped in a MSFT partnership (and even then, only because of NBC's vastly different market segments).
As for Sun? I think they simply got caught in the crossfire. They were looking to license SVR permanently so that they could protect (and eventually open-source) Solaris. Otherwise, they were (and are) hating life anyway, as market dynamics dictate that buying pricey Sparc-based servers is kinda stupid for most applications.
Pamela has taught us (well, at least myself) quite a few things about tech and the law:
* Legal matters may be messy, disgusting things, but in a perverse way, being a lawyer or judge often requires as much (if not more) logical and mental discipline than programming ever did.
* This crap takes time. Five years... five years! Just to throw out what folks who knew better (read: those of us who lived/worked/breathed Linux) saw instantly as an obvious cock-and-bull scam by a dying dot-bust corporation.
* There's a lot going on behind the curtain. Without Groklaw, Microsoft could have credibly denied being any part of the proceedings, and would've been almost perfectly insulated from the whole SCO mess. Now, they're painted with 98 shades of evil, and the tech community at large** has even more reason to reject them unless absolutely necessary.
* Most folks think that IT/Tech is pretty insulated and isolated from the usual crap that infects most businesses. Groklaw proves otherwise. As much as we'd like to be otherwise, we're just as mired and smothered in politics and legal crap as any other commercial endeavor.
I highly recommend Groklaw as a solid starting point for any CS student, perhaps as a semester or two of curricula... just to get the students to realize just what the hell kind of crazy world they're signing on to.
/P
** I mean real techs who use multiple platforms, not "Em-See-Ess-Aaay's" who happily swallow Redmond's Kool-Aid (among other fluids) on a near daily basis.
I'd think you could take it off and toss it in a dumpster if you found it.
Wouldn't it be more fun to attach it to a random taxicab instead? If you really want to screw with someone, you could always go to a gas station near a freeway, look for someone towing a boat and obviously on their way to some vacation hotspot, and then attach the device to the boat when its owner isn't looking...
Using your example of sorts: following a car physically only tells you where the car is while it is on public property. The minute that car drives onto a ranch or farm, or the moment it drives into a privately owned garage or building, the police either have to stop cold at that point, or have a warrant handy. A GPS tracker will track exactly where the car is no matter what.
As long as said police follow you around on public property only, they are well within their rights to do so, since they don't have to trespass on your property or violate your privacy to do it. But the moment you walk onto or into a privately-owned property, they need a warrant. Your driveway and garage can be considered considered as private property, for instance. Your car itself is private property, and requires (or should require) a warrant before the police can do anything on it, to it, or with it physically.
It's a lot like the diff between a policeman standing within earshot of your cell phone call out in public, and wire-tapping the thing to get an audio copy of the contents.
...if more people did it, massive data collection projects like this would be a lot less worthwhile.
...until governments begin outlawing network encryption, that is.
I doubt it would happen (VPN's, SSL and such being big fat obvious reasons), but I could see a government or two requiring all encryption users to hand over copies of private keys and to register their encryption tools/mechanisms with the local police department.
Usually one of the first questions I bring up upon being accepted for a position involves comp-time/overtime. Then I get it in writing.
They can (and often do) quote policy at length, but you can (and should) negotiate changes more to your liking. But unless the job is an entry-level/helpdesk position, or the market really, really sucks? Never trust an employer to look out for your best interests... that's supposed to be your job, eh?
Given that VMWare (or any VM really) is really sloppy about keeping accurate system time on the clent VM's (to be charitable about it)? I doubt that NTP or the lack thereof would actually help all that much.
Question is, what does OSX currently have handy that would replace it? (it's been way too long, my memory sucks, so let me take a stab here... Quartz, Core Graphics, whatever-it's-called-nowadays?)
Either way, any developer having to keep two separate code branches for two separate library sets is (okay, just IMHO) begging for pain.
Heh - Games developers may have that luxury, but 3D/GC vendors certainly don't. So unless someone decides to port DX10 to OSX (*snort*) or Linux (sing it with me now: "render farms!"), OpenGL will continue to have a decently-sized userbase for a very long time.
IMHO, anyone making the claim that they're going to suddenly jump to DX10 is only making noise; nobody is dumb enough to cut off the fastest-growing consumer market sectors.
(...besides, doesn't the PS3 use OGL, or do they use some other home-brewed library set? Not sure there...)
That's the funny part - I'm not embracing misanthropy. Empathy != embrasure. I merely understand and empathize with someone's desire to not participate in society at the same level as you or I might do.
If your definitions held, we'd all end up getting accused of "not caring enough" by those who can claim the most empathy, and it then becomes a race to the bottom.
You claim that the logic is too rigid... well in this case it sort of has to be, else it falls apart and morphs into dogma (or worse).
Also, empathy != responsibility. See also the eternally non-resultant act of "raising awareness" - metric tons of empathy (and demands for same from others), but little (if any) actual personal labor or wealth sent to ameliorate the problem whose awareness is being raised.
The "perfect right to do as they will" counters the responsibility of civics, and civilization.
Yes and no. Civilization only requires peaceful cooperation - there's no demand that it require cooperation based on empathy, or that it be based on enlightened self-interest. It can be (and usually is) based on both, as well as including other factors which I'm probably missing.
Civilization is a large unwritten contract, and civics is the maintenance of same. Nowhere does it require empathy as a responsibility... cooperation and respect for one's fellow citizen are usually enough to get (and keep) things going.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there is the Torah, and the Jewish folk who labor pretty hard to keep things going since they can easily claim original ownership of the chapters...
The original language was very likely not Hebrew though (see the Tower of Babel for a scriptural reference as to why). One forgets too easily - those chapters of Early Genesis were most likely passed down to each generation by way of oral tradition. Father told son, old priest told young acolyte, etc.
So the 'original' language is very likely something that we have zero clue about by way of syntax, context, structure, etc.... like the Inuit habit of using 11 different words to describe "snow".
The Catholic Church did do the long-term thing (sort of) right, though - even as far back as The Council of Nicaea, there was an effort to collate and make consistent the scriptures, and they've remained pretty much preserved and copied ever since then... ~1700 years (and counting) isn't so bad by comparison (consider what little technology they actually had), you know?
What lawsuit? Filing one is a beast and a waste, and the telcos aren't going to file one (think "Streisand Effect").
Buying a flag lot isn't legal? What the hell am I supposed to tell my mortgage lender now?
(I mean, there was already a house on it and everything!)
Okay, okay - Incidentally, no, the other options probably aren't compliant with zoning codes, strictly speaking. OTOH, it's a quick and easy way to get some serious media attention onto the matter in your locale. Telcos tend to hate that sort of thing. They tend to prefer that you and your fellow town-dwellers think of turtles (Comcast), hordes of stalking network techs (Verizon) and so forth... They'd much prefer that the consumer not think about rampant abuses and neighborhood defacements when they think of a given brand name. It tends to make them eager to either move the thing, or to spend some time at least trying to be a bit sensitive to the property-owning folk.
Therein lies the beauty of the beast, no?
* Charge them rent for the use of your property, sending an invoice monthly. When they don't pay (who knows? a big enough A/P department might), report them to the credit bureaus. When they raise a stink about having to deal with that, offer to sell them the small patch of property for whatever the going rate is per-square-foot in your locale and maybe add a bit of padding for negotiations room.
* Use that spot to build your brand new compost pile. Build a large wooden box big enough to contain the thing, then keep it filled with manure (and when applicable, the 'dog bombs') and your grass clippings. Claim that the heat it generates is perfect for generating high-grade manure, and that you're only recycling otherwise wasted energy.
* Send them a bill for the years (or even decades) of landscaping (even just mowing) you've had to do in the spot the box now occupies. Also send them a bill for any and all landscaping you've done to hide the damned thing.
* Front Yard? Bolt your mailbox to it. Hell, offer to bolt your neighbors' mailboxes to it.
* Plant a tree next to it... the biggest one Home Depot has. The roots will eventually (within a couple of years) destroy the thing from underneath, and most towns now have 'green laws' that prevent a utility from cutting down or even harming the tree. They move, you win.
* Do what I did... buy a house in the back of a "flag lot" (just pick one with enough land around and in it so you don't feel crowded). No utility easements back here, folks. When Verizon showed up to drop in fiber, the only impact I saw was a long, skinny line of spray-paint at the front of the driveway. the neighbor up front OTOH got a shiny new box in his yard (which explains where a lot of these ideas came from).
As long as I also got to landscape around it... but hell - I'd offer to help with the installation if that was the case.
Dude - send a copy to the Utah State Attorney General's Office.
No, they did nothing wrong, but in 1999 when I was trying to explain that I wanted to put the GPL to use in my former classroom (all non public-domain copyrights are jointly held by a teacher and the State of Utah), most of the Dept'y Att'y General's responses consisted of "...I don't understand". I even pointed him to the GNU website), but he called back later and was still lost. Nice guy, sounded like a good lawyer, but he just couldn't wrap his brain around the concept.
Now that was nine years ago (!? Cripes I'm old),, and things may have changed, but pushing a copy of this new guide to all 50 US State Att'y General offices would, IMHO, not be a bad idea at all.
Isn't intentional misrepresentation of the law an actionable offense (perhaps in some states, but not others)?
insert car analogy here ...
Ford giving you a discount on your next Chevy (and service on the thing while you own it, too!)
Dunno what would be more incredulous - selling the scheme with a straight face, or actually buying into it with one.
(hey, you asked...)
3. First (I believe) aerodynamically unstable man rated launcher
Dunno about that one... The Gemini program's launch vehicles tended to suffer what was called the "Pogo" effect once they reached a certain speed and altitude. Tended to scare the shit out of the first astronauts to experience it.
The Apollo program had solved that.
You forgot "plus the additional fuel needed to haul that 1600 pounds skyward".
That's the bitch about designing spaceships - for every ounce you add, you need at least an additional half-pound of fuel* to shove it upwards.
* depending of course on such details as specific impulse, fuel density, etc etc.
Not at all. Anyone who saw the means by which SCO went about launching their lawsuit, coupled with the fact that because of the USL v. BSDi lawsuits, there is a huge chance of SCO having made mistakes in their accusations, yet refused to act with any caution (or communication, or even what most lawyers in IP cases consider to be standard procedure) whatsoever?
To top that off, their company was teetering on the brink of death in early 2003 (having lived in Utah at the time, it was pretty common knowledge, at least to me).
While it wasn't the very nanosecond they said "lawsuit", it was relatively immediate that they had no case, and were merely trying to scrape out some dough in a last desperate grab (or as the Russians would put it, they were looking to: "die with music"). /P
I suggest you start here. This happened in the 1980s.
Then, I suggest you look at what SCO actually did. I'll paraphrase it (heavily):
SCO: "Linux is stealing our code! We're gonna sue!"
Linux Kernel Devs: "Really? We don't think so. Tell us which parts of Linux that you think we have stolen. The source code for Linux is right there at kernel.org for you to peruse and point at. Tell us in public or in private, we don't care, as long as you say something. And are you sure you didn't get all confused somewhere? Maybe you should look up the USL versus BSDi war while you're at it, 'cause something smells fishy."
SCO: "We can't tell you! You'll just fix it and then we can't sue you for a zillion bajillion dollars!"
Any Lawyer and Law Prof with Half a Brain: "WTF? Is Boies on Crack? You always send a C&D order with specifics before you start filing papers with the Clerk."
Linux Community: "Show us the code! Show us the code!"
SCO: "Okay, okay - we'll show you some examples. But only in our super-secret code! And then we'll sue you for a zillion bajillion dollars - starting with IBM!"
Lawyers/LawProfs: "Damn... he is an idiot - you always sue some small fry first to get precedents... Boies must've skipped the Crack today and went straight to snorting Lysol and Meth."
SCO: (Shows some "code" with some real crappy "encryption")
Linux Devs: "Heh - the encryption was easy to break. Here's what they're whining about, and here's the BSD precedent for this one, and a direct reference from the Lions book for the other part of it, which is public domain. We're good here. SCO is full of shit." (proceeds to perform full audit of Linux kernel source as a double-check, finds bupkis, decides to ignore SCO from that point on).
Linux Community: "Yeah, SCO is full of it. Screw 'em. I gotta compile that needs done today... Oh, hey - that SCO stock price sure shot up since they started making noises..."
SCO: "Oh yeah! We're gonna SUE you! Unless you pay us $699 per user! We'll start with IBM and you'll see!"
(crack of thunder rolls...)
IBM: (pointing at McBride as its legal department marches towards him en-masse) "Don't even leave a grease spot when you're done."
I think we know how this one turns out, no?
Hi, Darrell! Tell Boies we all said "pwned", willya?
Thing is, I believe that SCO knew it was doomed from the start, but did it anyway.
McBride still made millions of bucks off of the deal, as did most of SCO's principals. Unless/Until there's criminal proceedings for SEC violations, they probably don't care, and are only making noises for long enough to provide plausible deniability. In short - they got their dough, and they probably don't care what happens to SCO from this point on.
SCO lasted five years longer than it probably would have if it had simply died quietly as Yet Another Dot-Bust Carcass.
Finally, most corps know nowadays that getting into bed with MSFT is a sure recipe for disaster. PlaysForSure, HD-DVD, Windows Defender, OS/2, and numerous other smaller examples are proof-positive of just how badly you get burned in any partnership with MSFT... unless of course you're Microsoft. I think only NBC has managed to not get raped in a MSFT partnership (and even then, only because of NBC's vastly different market segments).
As for Sun? I think they simply got caught in the crossfire. They were looking to license SVR permanently so that they could protect (and eventually open-source) Solaris. Otherwise, they were (and are) hating life anyway, as market dynamics dictate that buying pricey Sparc-based servers is kinda stupid for most applications.
Pamela has taught us (well, at least myself) quite a few things about tech and the law:
* Legal matters may be messy, disgusting things, but in a perverse way, being a lawyer or judge often requires as much (if not more) logical and mental discipline than programming ever did.
* This crap takes time. Five years... five years! Just to throw out what folks who knew better (read: those of us who lived/worked/breathed Linux) saw instantly as an obvious cock-and-bull scam by a dying dot-bust corporation.
* There's a lot going on behind the curtain. Without Groklaw, Microsoft could have credibly denied being any part of the proceedings, and would've been almost perfectly insulated from the whole SCO mess. Now, they're painted with 98 shades of evil, and the tech community at large** has even more reason to reject them unless absolutely necessary.
* Most folks think that IT/Tech is pretty insulated and isolated from the usual crap that infects most businesses. Groklaw proves otherwise. As much as we'd like to be otherwise, we're just as mired and smothered in politics and legal crap as any other commercial endeavor.
I highly recommend Groklaw as a solid starting point for any CS student, perhaps as a semester or two of curricula... just to get the students to realize just what the hell kind of crazy world they're signing on to.
** I mean real techs who use multiple platforms, not "Em-See-Ess-Aaay's" who happily swallow Redmond's Kool-Aid (among other fluids) on a near daily basis.
I've been duped!
s'okay - so have most of the stories around here. ;)
I'd think you could take it off and toss it in a dumpster if you found it.
Wouldn't it be more fun to attach it to a random taxicab instead? If you really want to screw with someone, you could always go to a gas station near a freeway, look for someone towing a boat and obviously on their way to some vacation hotspot, and then attach the device to the boat when its owner isn't looking...
Using your example of sorts: following a car physically only tells you where the car is while it is on public property. The minute that car drives onto a ranch or farm, or the moment it drives into a privately owned garage or building, the police either have to stop cold at that point, or have a warrant handy. A GPS tracker will track exactly where the car is no matter what.
As long as said police follow you around on public property only, they are well within their rights to do so, since they don't have to trespass on your property or violate your privacy to do it. But the moment you walk onto or into a privately-owned property, they need a warrant. Your driveway and garage can be considered considered as private property, for instance. Your car itself is private property, and requires (or should require) a warrant before the police can do anything on it, to it, or with it physically.
It's a lot like the diff between a policeman standing within earshot of your cell phone call out in public, and wire-tapping the thing to get an audio copy of the contents.
...if more people did it, massive data collection projects like this would be a lot less worthwhile.
I doubt it would happen (VPN's, SSL and such being big fat obvious reasons), but I could see a government or two requiring all encryption users to hand over copies of private keys and to register their encryption tools/mechanisms with the local police department.
Usually one of the first questions I bring up upon being accepted for a position involves comp-time/overtime. Then I get it in writing.
They can (and often do) quote policy at length, but you can (and should) negotiate changes more to your liking. But unless the job is an entry-level/helpdesk position, or the market really, really sucks? Never trust an employer to look out for your best interests... that's supposed to be your job, eh?
Given that VMWare (or any VM really) is really sloppy about keeping accurate system time on the clent VM's (to be charitable about it)? I doubt that NTP or the lack thereof would actually help all that much.
Question is, what does OSX currently have handy that would replace it? (it's been way too long, my memory sucks, so let me take a stab here... Quartz, Core Graphics, whatever-it's-called-nowadays?)
Either way, any developer having to keep two separate code branches for two separate library sets is (okay, just IMHO) begging for pain.
Heh - Games developers may have that luxury, but 3D/GC vendors certainly don't. So unless someone decides to port DX10 to OSX (*snort*) or Linux (sing it with me now: "render farms!"), OpenGL will continue to have a decently-sized userbase for a very long time.
IMHO, anyone making the claim that they're going to suddenly jump to DX10 is only making noise; nobody is dumb enough to cut off the fastest-growing consumer market sectors.
(...besides, doesn't the PS3 use OGL, or do they use some other home-brewed library set? Not sure there...)
That's the funny part - I'm not embracing misanthropy. Empathy != embrasure. I merely understand and empathize with someone's desire to not participate in society at the same level as you or I might do.
If your definitions held, we'd all end up getting accused of "not caring enough" by those who can claim the most empathy, and it then becomes a race to the bottom.
You claim that the logic is too rigid... well in this case it sort of has to be, else it falls apart and morphs into dogma (or worse).
Also, empathy != responsibility. See also the eternally non-resultant act of "raising awareness" - metric tons of empathy (and demands for same from others), but little (if any) actual personal labor or wealth sent to ameliorate the problem whose awareness is being raised.
The "perfect right to do as they will" counters the responsibility of civics, and civilization.
Yes and no. Civilization only requires peaceful cooperation - there's no demand that it require cooperation based on empathy, or that it be based on enlightened self-interest. It can be (and usually is) based on both, as well as including other factors which I'm probably missing.
Civilization is a large unwritten contract, and civics is the maintenance of same. Nowhere does it require empathy as a responsibility... cooperation and respect for one's fellow citizen are usually enough to get (and keep) things going.