Education is the distillation of thousands of years of experience reverse-engineering the brain.
That's true and it sounds great as long as you trust the people in charge of doing the reverse engineering. I, for example, had most of my formal education in Catholic institutions and I do not at all trust the Catholic church to teach me how to think.
So yes, our education system is a process of reverse engineering the human mind. If you think that is done for your benefit, I have a bridge to sell you. It is primarily for the benefit of those in power, any benefit to you is just part of the sales pitch to get you to submit. Since the separation of church and state, public education has become the replacement mind control program.
Nevertheless you haven't demonstrated any equivalence between embryos and parasites. Is there a scientific journal that regards them as equivalent? I doubt you can find one reference to the equivalence of parasites and embryos that isn't part of pro-abortion propaganda. The difference between fertilization and infestation is such that I do not regard them as even close to equivalent.
Clearly an embryo is human if it is a human embryo. The real question is when will we give legal protection to that human. Society decides it is ok to kill humans for a variety of reasons so we shouldn't need to pretend they aren't human if it is ethical to do so. If a person takes a gun and commits a robbery, at that point (in countries with decent self-defense laws) they have lost their right to life in that you may kill them during the robbery if you are able to do so. If you don't kill them and they get away, leave the gun at home and go out, nobody can just kill them, their right to life is restored. At no point do we declare them to be legally non-human.
So what I'm trying to say is that humans are human from conception until death. The right to life is variable depending on circumstance. You can be completely innocent and the government decides it is ok to kill you, for example if you are standing next to someone on the president's hit list. So if you think it is ok to kill an embryo, don't pretend they aren't human, just give your reasons. Lots of people support euthanasia, we don't have to pretend old people aren't human to justify it.
Your reading comprehension appears to be low, because again, you jump to conclusions based on what you think someone meant, not what was actually written.
I do that AGAIN do I? Since my post that you are replying to is the only other post I've made on this story, I'd like you to explain your use of the word "again" for those of us with impaired reading comprehension. I always thought that to do something again, you must have previously done it at least one other time. Educate me, please!
When you say something has become more than something else there is a direct implication that it was previously less than or equal to that thing. I checked dictionary.com for "more" and neither equivalence nor identity were on the page anywhere. Offspring is not equivalent to parasite, except in the case that you want to kill the offspring and are seeking a term with negative connotations to justify yourself.
Check a dictionary if you object to my (not "me") using the correct definition of "more".
You apparently aren't superior enough at grammar to be a grammar nazi, so let's just leave it at that, shall we.
As for the reference to Humpty Dumpty, both my understanding of it and use of it are fine. I wasn't doing a book review or exegesis, I was mocking you. You seem to be upset but I won't be walking on eggshells for you, Humpty.
But let me reverse the question - when, logically, does an embryo become more than a parasite with a potential to either become a human or kill its host?
Ok, logically an embryo is never a parasite because it is not a different species than the "host". Check your dictionary if you object to me using the correct definition of "parasite".
I know, I know, that's just semantics, blah blah blah, etc. When arguing logically, the correct meaning of words is irrelevant.
Should I question you on why you feel the need to use deceptive arguments (since you certainly must know what a parasite is and that an embryo is not one) or just refer to you as Humpty Dumpty from now on?
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
Maybe I'm being alarmist, but to me, it's better safe than sorry - sorry being a desert planet.
You are being alarmist and it is not better to take drastic action unnecessarily than to know what you are doing. You are not going to get a desert planet from this. They are testing to see if it's a mutation because the weather events were not the ones they would have expected to produce cyanide. Production of cyanide by grasses is known and understood, this just happened unexpectedly and in combination with poor animal husbandry.
It's not the only pasture crop that can kill cows if you put them in hungry to fresh grass, either. Even lucerne and other legumes can kill cows by releasing gas and foam in the stomach. I hope you don't think we should kill all legumes just in case.
I can see using taxes as incentives or disincentives, and that could justify making some of the taxes corporate taxes. But most people believe in no taxation without representation. To these people, taxing corporations gives us a moral obligation to listen to their opinion (or rather the opinions of those running them) when it comes to government policy. We have to let corporations lobby. Wouldn't it be cleaner just to eliminate all corporate taxes, and ban lobbying by any entity which doesn't pay taxes (corporations, foreigners, foreign countries)?
All the shareholders and other interested citizens could be free to lobby the government. Corporations could "lobby" citizens by advertising or existing communications with shareholders. Since corporations only exist because of laws enabling them, unlike people, it could be argued that is sufficient to justify taxing them.
The people involved in the company, either as employees or shareholders, do not loose any of their rights to lobby their government by the existence of a corporation or by the corporation paying taxes rather than coming out of their pay or profits directly. Banning corporate lobbying is not taxation without representation.
A model is no more a sex object than a store mannequin is a sex toy.
They dress scantily when everyone else is fully clothed and they don't hire ugly ones. True, they are not hookers but they do sell sexual attractiveness though not sexual services.
The whole point of the FBI having the copies in the first place is so they can prove they DO have copyrighted content on them...
I presume mhogomchungu is referring to the certainty that there were megaupload users who uploaded their own creations and did not give permission for them to be copied.
If you ever work for a living, you will understand my point. Until then, keep looking for an employer that will pay you to develop software they can't sell.
Since you've immediately resorted insults based on unfounded assumptions about my working life I don't hold out much hope for any type of reasoned discussion from you. I do work, but my work isn't easily duplicated by everyone. If I decide to go into programming, I would be programming industrial robots I would own, not selling copies of a program. I understand your point just fine.
You want to sell proprietary software. That's fine by me. If you were not a freeloader, your position would be that you prefer proprietary licenses to Free/Open Source licenses. You aren't releasing your work as either GPL or BSD. It's other people's work you prefer to be licensed as BSD instead of GPL, so you can use it in your proprietary program. Therefore your preference for BSD over GPL is not based on your desire to sell your own work at a profit, it is based on your desire to sell other people's work at a profit without recompense to them.
Your distaste for the GPL is not a deficiency of the license. You don't like it because it has the intended effect.
This goes well with my point. It's not that I'd consider violating GPL. It's that I consider the terms of the license so objectionable that I wouldn't want to use it at all for any software I intended to sell. BSD license terms, on the other hand, I have no problem with.
You would license software you sell as BSD? Since that would be even worse for restricting redistribution I can only assume you mean that when you want to use other people's code in your proprietary program you prefer BSD.
Obviously proprietary software vendors like to use other people's work for free without reciprocating as it gives them a competitive advantage. I trust you understand that people who illegally copy your work are just applying the same principles as you, sans license compliance.
I'm not saying I approve of copyright infringement, I don't. I use predominantly software under GPL or similar license because I want to use software legally. The license conditions are not at all onerous to me, unlike some EULAs and copy protection schemes etc.
Kids are easily f*cked up. If your response to that is "So?", then you might be a sociopath.
Are kids really that easily fucked up that looking at a picture or video will ruin them? I'd say that institutionalized bullying at schools is a far greater concern than access to porn in terms of damage done. There have been mass shootings at schools in response to bullying, what damage can you demonstrate from porn?
You clearly want us all to know you're saying "fucked" yet you replace the u with an asterisk. What do you think you're achieving? Are your thoughts or words more pure because you deliberately spelled fuck incorrectly? Is your post now harmless to children, whereas another u in the wrong spot would traumatize them? Your post is a great demonstration of the mentality of people who desire censorship.
My own child vaporized in front of my eyes because he glanced at my monitor and I had left an inappropriate page open. People should be warned. The level of guilt you feel when you're responsible for vaporizing your child is crushing.
My definition of childhood includes a period of innocence, or a freedom from some knowledge that's usually difficult for people to make sense of.
We don't care about your definition. Reality is that childhood is FULL TO THE BRIM of knowledge that's difficult to make sense of. Everything you haven't learned yet falls into that category. If you don't learn about it you still can't make sense of it later.
For instance, we don't confront children with knowledge of death (if we can avoid doing so), because death is difficult even for adults.
You might. Most people do things like buy pets for their children, part of the experience will be learning about death. I grew up on a farm, we bred our own stock and killed for our meat. Our daughter, when she was four, excitedly told her mom "the male duck wants to mate with the female". You don't have to be sexually active to learn about it. Our older children witnessed the birth of their youngest sister. Are they all destroyed? I don't think so, they seem happy and they're fairly well behaved.
We have watched plenty of movies with them that are outside their "classification" and they don't seem harmed and don't have nightmares. Maybe it is because we watch with them and make comments as we deem necessary. Also, they decide not to watch some things like scary parts of movies, so we hide eyes and use the mute control. Some things they like to be close to us as they watch.
I find it hard to believe that just seeing porn accidentally would harm them. I find it equally hard to believe that if they seek out porn I can stop them. When I was a kid and me and my friends saw porn we used to laugh. Now I've been married for 10 years. What is the damage that's been done to me?
It's true that kids need to learn about sex eventually, but if they learn about it from porn they're going to have some pretty screwed up ideas about sex.
Same could be said about religion. Most porn is for entertainment, not education. Is sex education only about disease and pregnancy? I'd argue that some instructional porn could be considered part of a good sex education. There are some pretty detailed and useful videos out.
Not only those without, just less than someone else. I have multimillionaire relatives that tut-tut at billionaires because "no-one needs that much money".
Many people link too much money is evil and set the allowable amount to a little bit above what they have.
I used to regularly get calls from work when they knew I was driving. Took them a fair while to stop despite me not answering. I presume some others are a little less willing to reject a call from the boss.
Given the right circumstances, eg: traveling at 10km/h in peak hour, stopped at lights or on a motorway with no other traffic in sight I have taken calls but people get all bent out of shape when you hang up on them when the conditions change. Most people ramble on the phone too much for it to not be a serious distraction.
Well whether it's a good idea to have a gold standard or not (and we'll just say not for a flower standard), gold does have utility. When people say it doesn't I really wonder what is going on with them. Perhaps they are asexual?
can you explain why you expect he would be more successful as President?
In regards to bringing the troops home, I expect he would be more successful as President because he would then be the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.
I'm not a US citizen so I'm not really a Ron Paul supporter, just saying.
Describe this actual utility, please - particularly in context of the average citizen.
Gold can be used to greatly increase a man's pleasure in life by giving gifts of it in the form of jewellery. I would compare the utility of gold to the utility of flowers. I can put my wife in a good mood by giving her either. Don't even try and tell me that's not useful.
No matter how you phrase it, your stance is that you don't want to pay taces or be a responsible citizen.
You are simply incorrect. Libertarian != anarchist. Libertarians believe in minimal government, not no government, so having some tax will be inevitable. Since some people who call themselves libertarian really have an anarchist position it's an understandable mistake. I clarified this when replying to one of them in a previous story. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2820575&cid=39865967 Or possibly I'm not an ideologically pure enough libertarian for some people.
I think what he's saying that libertarianism is just another form of aristocracy
It's not only rich people who want liberty. I consider that the people who have done me the most damage are people who claimed to want to help me. If I were a praying man, I'd pray fervently that people who want to help me never ever acquire the force of government to help them do so. I claim the right to refuse unwanted help.
Lefties want altruists in government to rule society. Rightists want corporations to rule society. Libertarians want to be self-determining. Neither the left nor the right will remove the aristocracy, where is the socialist country that doesn't have a wealthy, powerful ruling elite?
Similarly, I think content creators should have the same right to deprive people of their own digital creations if those people aren't going to pay
How do you plan to go about enforcing that right? Without locking every device with unbreakable DRM (which doesn't exist) it isn't possible to prevent people. Perhaps with harsher penalties and brutal enforcement we can frighten people into compliance?
Ever since the widespread adoption of the internet effective enforcement of copyright would require a dystopian state. Maybe effective enforcement would be a good thing of itself, but the price is too high.
Out of all the pro-piracy arguments, this always seems to me to be the weakest.
That's because it isn't a pro-piracy argument. A pro-piracy argument would be saying that copyright infringement is good. This argument is against calling copyright infringement theft, which is an argument for correct use of language, a necessary thing when discussing ideas.
I have never argued that copyright infringement is good. I personally buy the stuff I want and my wife is a recording artist. However, copyright infringement is not theft and we can't have a reasonable discussion about this issue until people stop claiming that it is.
People who have decided to get their way by loading ignorant people up with propaganda are the enemy of all of us. I know society operates that way to a great extent but it harms us all, please don't buy into it.
No, actually, I'm not. Don't you find it irritating when people try to tell you what you're thinking or what your motivation is? Here's how it really works: when you say something we find out what YOU are thinking. To find out what I'm thinking you have to ask ME. See how I typed "They wanted it"? That's plural. If you're going to tell me what I'm thinking you could at least make it reasonably consistent with what I've said.
Anyway, someone or some group of people fucked up. Being a university I think it's ok if I assume that somewhere along the line one or more educated people was involved in planning and approving the work and that multiple educated people saw what was happening. In any case, I see plenty of stuff like this in educated people's backyards. My point remains.
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Education is the distillation of thousands of years of experience reverse-engineering the brain.
That's true and it sounds great as long as you trust the people in charge of doing the reverse engineering. I, for example, had most of my formal education in Catholic institutions and I do not at all trust the Catholic church to teach me how to think.
Extreme right wing and extreme left wing governments use the educations system to control the populations, as do religions of all flavors. In my own country, Australia, our left wing government is implementing a left wing national curriculum. They got the idea from the right wingers that were in before them. http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/blatant-bias-in-national-curriculum-could-damage-our-democracy-20120707-21noi.html
So yes, our education system is a process of reverse engineering the human mind. If you think that is done for your benefit, I have a bridge to sell you. It is primarily for the benefit of those in power, any benefit to you is just part of the sales pitch to get you to submit. Since the separation of church and state, public education has become the replacement mind control program.
Nevertheless you haven't demonstrated any equivalence between embryos and parasites. Is there a scientific journal that regards them as equivalent? I doubt you can find one reference to the equivalence of parasites and embryos that isn't part of pro-abortion propaganda. The difference between fertilization and infestation is such that I do not regard them as even close to equivalent.
Clearly an embryo is human if it is a human embryo. The real question is when will we give legal protection to that human. Society decides it is ok to kill humans for a variety of reasons so we shouldn't need to pretend they aren't human if it is ethical to do so. If a person takes a gun and commits a robbery, at that point (in countries with decent self-defense laws) they have lost their right to life in that you may kill them during the robbery if you are able to do so. If you don't kill them and they get away, leave the gun at home and go out, nobody can just kill them, their right to life is restored. At no point do we declare them to be legally non-human.
So what I'm trying to say is that humans are human from conception until death. The right to life is variable depending on circumstance. You can be completely innocent and the government decides it is ok to kill you, for example if you are standing next to someone on the president's hit list. So if you think it is ok to kill an embryo, don't pretend they aren't human, just give your reasons. Lots of people support euthanasia, we don't have to pretend old people aren't human to justify it.
Your reading comprehension appears to be low, because again, you jump to conclusions based on what you think someone meant, not what was actually written.
I do that AGAIN do I? Since my post that you are replying to is the only other post I've made on this story, I'd like you to explain your use of the word "again" for those of us with impaired reading comprehension. I always thought that to do something again, you must have previously done it at least one other time. Educate me, please!
When you say something has become more than something else there is a direct implication that it was previously less than or equal to that thing. I checked dictionary.com for "more" and neither equivalence nor identity were on the page anywhere. Offspring is not equivalent to parasite, except in the case that you want to kill the offspring and are seeking a term with negative connotations to justify yourself.
Check a dictionary if you object to my (not "me") using the correct definition of "more".
You apparently aren't superior enough at grammar to be a grammar nazi, so let's just leave it at that, shall we.
As for the reference to Humpty Dumpty, both my understanding of it and use of it are fine. I wasn't doing a book review or exegesis, I was mocking you. You seem to be upset but I won't be walking on eggshells for you, Humpty.
But let me reverse the question - when, logically, does an embryo become more than a parasite with a potential to either become a human or kill its host?
Ok, logically an embryo is never a parasite because it is not a different species than the "host". Check your dictionary if you object to me using the correct definition of "parasite".
I know, I know, that's just semantics, blah blah blah, etc. When arguing logically, the correct meaning of words is irrelevant.
Should I question you on why you feel the need to use deceptive arguments (since you certainly must know what a parasite is and that an embryo is not one) or just refer to you as Humpty Dumpty from now on?
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
Maybe I'm being alarmist, but to me, it's better safe than sorry - sorry being a desert planet.
You are being alarmist and it is not better to take drastic action unnecessarily than to know what you are doing. You are not going to get a desert planet from this. They are testing to see if it's a mutation because the weather events were not the ones they would have expected to produce cyanide. Production of cyanide by grasses is known and understood, this just happened unexpectedly and in combination with poor animal husbandry.
It's not the only pasture crop that can kill cows if you put them in hungry to fresh grass, either. Even lucerne and other legumes can kill cows by releasing gas and foam in the stomach. I hope you don't think we should kill all legumes just in case.
I can see using taxes as incentives or disincentives, and that could justify making some of the taxes corporate taxes. But most people believe in no taxation without representation. To these people, taxing corporations gives us a moral obligation to listen to their opinion (or rather the opinions of those running them) when it comes to government policy. We have to let corporations lobby. Wouldn't it be cleaner just to eliminate all corporate taxes, and ban lobbying by any entity which doesn't pay taxes (corporations, foreigners, foreign countries)?
All the shareholders and other interested citizens could be free to lobby the government. Corporations could "lobby" citizens by advertising or existing communications with shareholders. Since corporations only exist because of laws enabling them, unlike people, it could be argued that is sufficient to justify taxing them.
The people involved in the company, either as employees or shareholders, do not loose any of their rights to lobby their government by the existence of a corporation or by the corporation paying taxes rather than coming out of their pay or profits directly. Banning corporate lobbying is not taxation without representation.
A model is no more a sex object than a store mannequin is a sex toy.
They dress scantily when everyone else is fully clothed and they don't hire ugly ones. True, they are not hookers but they do sell sexual attractiveness though not sexual services.
Yes, but criminal investigations are immune from copyright infringement claims.
Hopefully not if they are willfully violating the laws which govern those investigations when they do the copying.
The whole point of the FBI having the copies in the first place is so they can prove they DO have copyrighted content on them...
I presume mhogomchungu is referring to the certainty that there were megaupload users who uploaded their own creations and did not give permission for them to be copied.
If you ever work for a living, you will understand my point. Until then, keep looking for an employer that will pay you to develop software they can't sell.
Since you've immediately resorted insults based on unfounded assumptions about my working life I don't hold out much hope for any type of reasoned discussion from you. I do work, but my work isn't easily duplicated by everyone. If I decide to go into programming, I would be programming industrial robots I would own, not selling copies of a program. I understand your point just fine.
You want to sell proprietary software. That's fine by me. If you were not a freeloader, your position would be that you prefer proprietary licenses to Free/Open Source licenses. You aren't releasing your work as either GPL or BSD. It's other people's work you prefer to be licensed as BSD instead of GPL, so you can use it in your proprietary program. Therefore your preference for BSD over GPL is not based on your desire to sell your own work at a profit, it is based on your desire to sell other people's work at a profit without recompense to them.
Your distaste for the GPL is not a deficiency of the license. You don't like it because it has the intended effect.
This goes well with my point. It's not that I'd consider violating GPL. It's that I consider the terms of the license so objectionable that I wouldn't want to use it at all for any software I intended to sell. BSD license terms, on the other hand, I have no problem with.
You would license software you sell as BSD? Since that would be even worse for restricting redistribution I can only assume you mean that when you want to use other people's code in your proprietary program you prefer BSD.
Obviously proprietary software vendors like to use other people's work for free without reciprocating as it gives them a competitive advantage. I trust you understand that people who illegally copy your work are just applying the same principles as you, sans license compliance.
I'm not saying I approve of copyright infringement, I don't. I use predominantly software under GPL or similar license because I want to use software legally. The license conditions are not at all onerous to me, unlike some EULAs and copy protection schemes etc.
Out of curiosity, If APIs cannot be copyrighted, does this mean they cannot also be covered by the GPL?
The GPL is a copyright license. Anything that is not covered by copyright can therefore not have the GPL applied to it.
It bothers me that you could not figure this out for yourself and had to ask.
Kids are easily f*cked up. If your response to that is "So?", then you might be a sociopath.
Are kids really that easily fucked up that looking at a picture or video will ruin them? I'd say that institutionalized bullying at schools is a far greater concern than access to porn in terms of damage done. There have been mass shootings at schools in response to bullying, what damage can you demonstrate from porn?
You clearly want us all to know you're saying "fucked" yet you replace the u with an asterisk. What do you think you're achieving? Are your thoughts or words more pure because you deliberately spelled fuck incorrectly? Is your post now harmless to children, whereas another u in the wrong spot would traumatize them? Your post is a great demonstration of the mentality of people who desire censorship.
I would argue that porn destroys children.
My own child vaporized in front of my eyes because he glanced at my monitor and I had left an inappropriate page open. People should be warned. The level of guilt you feel when you're responsible for vaporizing your child is crushing.
My definition of childhood includes a period of innocence, or a freedom from some knowledge that's usually difficult for people to make sense of.
We don't care about your definition. Reality is that childhood is FULL TO THE BRIM of knowledge that's difficult to make sense of. Everything you haven't learned yet falls into that category. If you don't learn about it you still can't make sense of it later.
For instance, we don't confront children with knowledge of death (if we can avoid doing so), because death is difficult even for adults.
You might. Most people do things like buy pets for their children, part of the experience will be learning about death. I grew up on a farm, we bred our own stock and killed for our meat. Our daughter, when she was four, excitedly told her mom "the male duck wants to mate with the female". You don't have to be sexually active to learn about it. Our older children witnessed the birth of their youngest sister. Are they all destroyed? I don't think so, they seem happy and they're fairly well behaved.
We have watched plenty of movies with them that are outside their "classification" and they don't seem harmed and don't have nightmares. Maybe it is because we watch with them and make comments as we deem necessary. Also, they decide not to watch some things like scary parts of movies, so we hide eyes and use the mute control. Some things they like to be close to us as they watch.
I find it hard to believe that just seeing porn accidentally would harm them. I find it equally hard to believe that if they seek out porn I can stop them. When I was a kid and me and my friends saw porn we used to laugh. Now I've been married for 10 years. What is the damage that's been done to me?
It's true that kids need to learn about sex eventually, but if they learn about it from porn they're going to have some pretty screwed up ideas about sex.
Same could be said about religion. Most porn is for entertainment, not education. Is sex education only about disease and pregnancy? I'd argue that some instructional porn could be considered part of a good sex education. There are some pretty detailed and useful videos out.
Not only those without, just less than someone else. I have multimillionaire relatives that tut-tut at billionaires because "no-one needs that much money".
Many people link too much money is evil and set the allowable amount to a little bit above what they have.
I used to regularly get calls from work when they knew I was driving. Took them a fair while to stop despite me not answering. I presume some others are a little less willing to reject a call from the boss.
Given the right circumstances, eg: traveling at 10km/h in peak hour, stopped at lights or on a motorway with no other traffic in sight I have taken calls but people get all bent out of shape when you hang up on them when the conditions change. Most people ramble on the phone too much for it to not be a serious distraction.
Can we drop this "automagically" word? It freaks me out...
It's the correct word. The installation is done by invoking a daemon.
Well whether it's a good idea to have a gold standard or not (and we'll just say not for a flower standard), gold does have utility. When people say it doesn't I really wonder what is going on with them. Perhaps they are asexual?
can you explain why you expect he would be more successful as President?
In regards to bringing the troops home, I expect he would be more successful as President because he would then be the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.
I'm not a US citizen so I'm not really a Ron Paul supporter, just saying.
Describe this actual utility, please - particularly in context of the average citizen.
Gold can be used to greatly increase a man's pleasure in life by giving gifts of it in the form of jewellery. I would compare the utility of gold to the utility of flowers. I can put my wife in a good mood by giving her either. Don't even try and tell me that's not useful.
No matter how you phrase it, your stance is that you don't want to pay taces or be a responsible citizen.
You are simply incorrect. Libertarian != anarchist. Libertarians believe in minimal government, not no government, so having some tax will be inevitable. Since some people who call themselves libertarian really have an anarchist position it's an understandable mistake. I clarified this when replying to one of them in a previous story. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2820575&cid=39865967 Or possibly I'm not an ideologically pure enough libertarian for some people.
I think what he's saying that libertarianism is just another form of aristocracy
It's not only rich people who want liberty. I consider that the people who have done me the most damage are people who claimed to want to help me. If I were a praying man, I'd pray fervently that people who want to help me never ever acquire the force of government to help them do so. I claim the right to refuse unwanted help.
Lefties want altruists in government to rule society. Rightists want corporations to rule society. Libertarians want to be self-determining. Neither the left nor the right will remove the aristocracy, where is the socialist country that doesn't have a wealthy, powerful ruling elite?
Similarly, I think content creators should have the same right to deprive people of their own digital creations if those people aren't going to pay
How do you plan to go about enforcing that right? Without locking every device with unbreakable DRM (which doesn't exist) it isn't possible to prevent people. Perhaps with harsher penalties and brutal enforcement we can frighten people into compliance?
Ever since the widespread adoption of the internet effective enforcement of copyright would require a dystopian state. Maybe effective enforcement would be a good thing of itself, but the price is too high.
Out of all the pro-piracy arguments, this always seems to me to be the weakest.
That's because it isn't a pro-piracy argument. A pro-piracy argument would be saying that copyright infringement is good. This argument is against calling copyright infringement theft, which is an argument for correct use of language, a necessary thing when discussing ideas.
I have never argued that copyright infringement is good. I personally buy the stuff I want and my wife is a recording artist. However, copyright infringement is not theft and we can't have a reasonable discussion about this issue until people stop claiming that it is.
People who have decided to get their way by loading ignorant people up with propaganda are the enemy of all of us. I know society operates that way to a great extent but it harms us all, please don't buy into it.
You are thinking it was one person.
No, actually, I'm not. Don't you find it irritating when people try to tell you what you're thinking or what your motivation is? Here's how it really works: when you say something we find out what YOU are thinking. To find out what I'm thinking you have to ask ME. See how I typed "They wanted it"? That's plural. If you're going to tell me what I'm thinking you could at least make it reasonably consistent with what I've said.
Anyway, someone or some group of people fucked up. Being a university I think it's ok if I assume that somewhere along the line one or more educated people was involved in planning and approving the work and that multiple educated people saw what was happening. In any case, I see plenty of stuff like this in educated people's backyards. My point remains.