Point to a country that doesn't provide universal public education and I'll show you a country that lags the U.S. on every measure of standard of living -- economic opportunity, social equality, civic participation, personal freedoms, etc.
I do not contest that these are real benefits of universal education, and I do not contest that where this ideal has been approached (the Vatican is the only nation I'm aware of with 100% literacy) it has usually been by way of a government school system.
My objection is not event to government schools per se, provided that they are afforded adequate organizational, methodological, intellectual and ideological freedom.
The practical reality, however, is that the current American system has become crippled with restrictions upon how pedagogy is done which are stunting the benefitial effects that the system could potentially produce and has historically produced, leading to our comparative decline in most academic metrics when compared with much of the developed world. For example:
The supplanting of a disciplinary model (your behavior must change to participate in society) with a therapeutic model (society must accomodate your illness/disability). Does any healthy, creative kid NOT have ADD/ADHD/etc? Do we seriously believe that the surge in such "conditions" has more to do with something different about "kids today" than it does with something different about "schools today"?
The out-of-hand dismissal of any proposal which hints at "separate but equal" accomodations, in spite of demonstrable benefits for both separated parties (e.g., the British experiment with schooling boys and girls differently).
The removal of proactive enculturation when it is tangential to religious issues (a teacher may be able to answer the question "what is Easter" in the manner you propose, but they certainly cannot present a unit on it in class, in spite of it being an important topic to understand for basic American cultural literacy).
The removal of moral formation from the pedagogical agenda (How can you persue moral formation when you are prohibited (by fear of lawsuits and local policy if not by actual constitutional law) from endorsing or condemning any moral action/subject on which there is not near-absolute consensus? On what moral questions do we have even a majority agreement? Is such a least-common-denominator morality even worth teaching?)
The lack of any epistemological humility when it comes to the presentation of "the scientific method" (the method itself is unfalsifiable in that it makes unfalsifiable assumptions about pragmatism equating with truth and a closed universe; its best "proof" is a self-referential "it works better than anything else we've tried").
The "comparative religion" course which is (nominally) permissible will be rooted in a western, rational/evidentiary, secular textual-critical/historic-critical presentation of its subjects, that is to say, they are presented from the point-of-view of a particular theological/teleological/epistemological paradigm which may be at odds with the content of some or all of the covered religions, precluding an actual presentation of their substance.
Quoting Churchill is "Godwin's Law Bait"? Sweeeet.
Bzzzzzt. The Bait was:
This is, of course, assuming some religious nutjob doesn't use science to kill everybody.
Now, recount the technologically-enabled genocides of the 20th century, paying particular attention to which ones were "religious" and which ones were "secular".
I am not suggesting that you not go with the scientific paradigm. I am saying that it should be appropriated with epistemological modesty, not the kind of "holy writ completely above discussion, interpretation, and revision" comment that I initially replied to.
And on your point about the golden rule: it is not enough to believe that it would be a good idea to follow the Golden Rule, you also have to form the kinds of people who actually can follow it. Once again, history seems to suggest that this is harder than you say, since most historic societies have agreed that it was a "good idea" and have, as you have so astutely noted, not done so well with it.
Pointy sticks? C'mon, if you're going to be uselessly offensive you can at least try to come up with something creative and entertaining (or, at least, less flagrantly false).
What I am not saying is that the scientific paradigm is useless. What I am saying is that its presumption that the universe as a closed, mechanistic system needs to be presented for what it is - an unproven, unverifiable, unfalsifiable assumption, and that (as such) all "scientific" results are, at most, "true insofar as the universe is closed and mechanistic".
I will also note for the record that this you have posted an excellent example of "Godwin's Law Bait".
The checks and balances are mostly tacet stalemates between politicians (among whom I include local school board members and PTA officials). It still forces the curriculum to be reduced to a lowest-common-denominator majority orthodoxy, which (from the point of view of developing independent-thinking citizens) sucks.
The math and english I need in order to vote and do my taxes was covered by the time I finished the 5th grade. The selection and presentation of most of the "reading" I was made to do after that was severely colored by the teachers' (and their unions') social/political/epistemological agendas (e.g., reading "Grendel" in the 4th grade without having ever been exposed to "Beowulf", reading feminist propoganda without a counterpoint in a 10th grade macro-economics class, etc.)
The difference between a public and a private school censoring student blogs is one of free association - there are many things that private organizations are allowed to do (including ideological discrimination) which are not (or at least, should not be) permitted to the state.
To be clear - I am not questioning the need for widespread education (which is the actual need you raise withg respect to taxes, the job market, voting, etc). I am simply questioning whether the existing system of public education is appropriate, particularly given:
The penchant of our system for weeding out fair presentations of positions which dissent from those of the NEA.
The currently prominent radical misreading of the 1st Amendment which substitutes "complete segregation" for "no establishment", which is actually being used to block instruction in areas of basic cultural literacy ("what is Easter? why do so many people celebrate it?").
The fundamentally moral and ethical nature of education and our inability (under current law) to even present (let alone encourage) anything but the aforementioned least-common-denominator majority orthodoxy in these areas.
How much easier would it be to influence people's votes if those people have no education?
How can it be any easier than it is now? Politicians control the curriculum. Politicians control the textbook choices. Politicians control what teachers are and are not allowed to say (do not offend the majority orthodoxy). Politicians control what students are and are not allowed to say (remember all of the post-Columbine harassment of disillusioned kids? yesterday's story about student blogs being censored?).
An inerrant, unalterable, unquestionable dogma, not open to deconstruction, debate, or re-interpretation? Most ID-ers' views of the Bible aren't that exalted.
The real flaw in most "science education" in the US is that it lacks any corresponding study of the philosophy of science and the severe epistemological limitations of the scientific method. "Science" is a vague epistemological family that postulates predictive models based upon their predictive utility, and I pity the fool who equates "predictive utility" with "truth".
Taxes are a different deal, mainly in that they don't force me to kill
Those living in jurisdictions in which taxes pay for executions of criminals or where the government subsidizes abortions may take issue with that statement.
Granted, by paying my taxes I'm not pulling the trigger. But I am putting the bullets in the gun.
HTTP/1.1 requires you to always produce dates in a single format: a fixed-length subset of the format defined in RFC1123 (see section 3.3 of RFC2616). You're also required to be able to parse two other formats for backward-compatibility reasons.
Of course, not everyone plays by the rules. But standardizing on an ISO format doesn't fix that. Changing human nature (or at least the free-wheeling, rule-hating culture of many network hackers/programmers) fixes that.
Boston does have two half-ring highways: I-95/MA-128 is the inner ring and I-495 is the outer. Both jam up pretty regularly. And I'm not convinced that a large enough chunk of the 93/95 corridor's traffic is transiting Boston to make a real shunt road (think "40-mile express lane bypassing the city") all that helpful.
Personally, I'm a fan of the commuter rail (except for the nasty schedule gaps for stops near/beyond 495).
I doubt their public statements terminate their rights (there's nothing in the license about repudiation by a license-holder). However, the fact that they are exercising rights granted to them only by the GPL could constitute a kind of tacet endorsement (analogous to an "implied contract") of the GPL and thus be grounds to have their "GPL is invalid" claim tossed out.
I see. So in situations where people haven't already been granted a right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, the 4th Amendment does not apply? (That right can only be "violated" if it already exists, after all... right?)
</sarcasm>
And, BTW, such a law wouldn't be political suicide everywhere; Massachusetts has set the bar high enough (and made it easy enough for applications to get rejected) that the right to bear arms is effectively infringed in fact if not technically by law.
Can't resist feeding the troll, mostly because (living here in Massachusetts) there are people who actually think this way...
If it's outdated, then you should have no problem getting it repealed. Until then, it remains the supreme law of the land, and arguing about how outdated it is doesn't change that. (Apparently you can do that with sodomy laws, but it still doesn't work when it comes to the Constitution.)
Incidentally, I'm curious what it is about the concept that's outdated. A variant of it worked pretty well for Switzerland in the '40s, which wasn't all that long ago.
The underlying doctrine of the 2nd amendment never had anything to do with one or two guys holding off the government; it has everything to do with making sure the government has reason to fear overstepping its limits and sufficiently pissing off the public. Ultimately, if the people are unarmed, the government can impose its will by force; the second amendment, properly exercised, makes the cost of doing so prohibitively high, because when you take out one "political undesirable", a hundred of his friends will be shooting at you as you drive away.
And by "friends", I'm thinking of everyone who has ever said "I'll defend to the death your right to say it". Or is that just a warm fuzzy sentiment?
No army or police force wants to confront an opposing armed populace. Look at what's going on in Baghdad, and that's being caused by a miniscule minority; imagine 20% of the population (or heck, even 5%) as committed to getting us out as the <0.1% who are now, and you'll begin to get the picture. The army wouldn't stand for it on foreign soil, and their would be a quick coup if it happened on domestic soil.
It does not say "if a well-regulated militia is necessary". It declares unconditionally that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state. (Recall that all militias are, by definition, "citizen militias"; an institutional military may be able to secure a state, but it can quickly become inimical to that state being "free" as the Federalists understood it.)
The "security of a free state" is not the same as "the defense of the state" (as you seem to suggest). In fact, securing a "free state" may well require the armed overthrow of a tyrannical state.
This "right of the people" is motivated, but neither predicated nor controlled, by the phrase "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state"; ergo, a person's right to bear arms is not limited to times in which the militia is activated. "A implies B" does not mean "B only if A".
Well, a line of code can be as long as the programmer wants - but they're usually a lot less than 70 characters. The median is closer to 16 (average is below 32); assuming we use a full 7 bit dynamic range (which we don't), the input space for most lines of code is then 112 bits, less than the 128 bit dynamic range of MD5.
That's assuming that any binary string can be a valid chunk of code. Given the more limited character set used in C code (a subset of ASCII 0x00-0x7f) and given that indentation styles will tend to introduce bytewise similarity, the number is probably a lot lower.
(Using red for the Republicans and blue for the Democrats... hmmm, nice Cold War symbolism there, but maybe not the kind the Republicans have in mind...)
Right. Because Republicans have so much more in common with socialists than Democrats do...
Since Gore did in fact win the popular vote,
The margin of his national popular victory was significantly less than his margin of victory in Los Angeles county. (This is an illustrative example of istartedi's assertion that the "city slickers" could "run everything".) So apart from a single left-coast county, Bush was the popular winner. The combined margin of Bronx, New York, and Queens substantially exceeds the national margin as well. That of itself says something about the amount of skew (i.e., non-lukewarmness) of many regions in that election.
it can't have been as much of a landslide as the map makes it look like. I'd like to see a "hot-cold" pseudocolor map sometime;
All the county-by-county data is available from CNN's election results archive. A quick overview suggests that a significant chunk of the country was far from lukewarm on this election. Here are the states with margins of at least 10% of their popular vote determining the winner of the 2000 Presidential election:
Alabama (R:15%), Alaska (R:31%), California (D:12%), Connecticuit (D:17%), Delaware (D:13%), George (R:12%), Hawaii (D:18%), Idaho (R:41%), Illinois (D:12%), Indiana (R:16%), Kansas (R:21%), Kentucky (R:16%), Louisiana (R:10%), Maryland (D:17%), Massachusetts (D:27%), Mississippi (R:15%), Montana (R:24%), Nebraska (R:30%), New Jersey (D:15%), New York (D:25%), North Carolina (R:13%), North Dakota (R:28%), Oklahoma (R:22%), Rhode Island (D:29%), South Carolina (R:16%), South Dakota (R:22%), Texas (R:21%), Utah (R:41%), Vermont (D:10%), Wyoming (R:41%). (As a curiosity, I'll also mention that D.C. was (D:75%).)
That's 29 out of 50 states with substantial margins of victory. 14 of those had popular margins of 20%. I've boldfaced 9 of those with margins over 25%. That hardly suggests a lukewarm whirled peas color for those states or for their constituent counties - you can't get a 3:2 margin by aggregating a bunch of 11:10 county margins.
This didn't stop the United States Postal Service from running advertisements where they dissed UPS and FedEx for being way more expensive than their own services. ("Fly like an eagle...")
You are right that HTTP persistent connections are an application-layer construct. However, HTTP/1.1 uses no headers to signal use of persistent connections; if the request is "HTTP/1.1" then the default is to treat the connection as persistent. Connection: close signals deviation from that default behavior.
The "Keep-Alive" header was a hack to wedge persistent connections into HTTP/1.0; its use by HTTP/1.1 clients is frowned upon (see RFC2068 section 19.7.1 MUST NOT, and RFC2616 section 19.6.2 which references the above).
So the wedding was at 411 because the bride was 404?
Hopefully it was more like a 503... and I can't imagine Malda would marry a girl without an integrated PDA/cell phone tucked away in her wedding dress somewhere, so there was probably a Retry-After header present too.
Many congrats to the happy couple... I'll look at the photos next week:-)
I seem to recall a usenet group "alt.atheism.satire" (or something like that) which was, at one point anyway, dedicated largely to producing a non-stop stream of articles like this, spoofing/satiring "christian" culture and apologetics and theology.
The amount of vitriolic energy that was poured into that group was pretty amazing. A dozen such articles is a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Your example isn't compelling at all, in that you have completely redefined the word "impoverishment" to mean "deprived of enrichment"; let's say gazillions of people pirate the musician's album. Does the musician no longer "have" his album? Of course not - he still has his master copy, and as many copies as he wants to make, on whatever media he likes, according to his ability to finance said duplication. He in no way has any less in the way of measurable posessions than he did before the whole debacle began. Thus, he is not impoverished; he is merely not enriched.
The right to control ideas and embodiments of ideas once you have disclosed them, and (as a special case of that) to be enriched by them, is purely a legal fiction; the intrinsic properties of physical commodities (principally scarcity) that cause unauthorized acquision to actually impoverish the original "owner" simply do not apply.
This is why comparing selling music and selling carrots is like comparing apples and oranges (or screenplays and oranges?)
Not that I don't feel for the guy - I'm a musician too, and have done work on several professional recording projects - I'm merely making the point that "intellectual property" is beecoming more and more ephemeral and abstract, and that the legal fictions needed to protect ephemeral embodiments of IP are distrressingly close to the concept of "speech" (see the whole DeCSS mess - "source code is speech" etc), as compared with the very tangible objects of copyright law as traditionally constructed (physical duplication of books, recordings, etc).
As for your distaste for anthropomorphizing information, I was merely explaining the thought process that produced the meme, not asserting the meme as a precise statement as to the nature of reality. Metaphor and equivalence are very different types of relationships. So chill.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not contest that these are real benefits of universal education, and I do not contest that where this ideal has been approached (the Vatican is the only nation I'm aware of with 100% literacy) it has usually been by way of a government school system.
My objection is not event to government schools per se, provided that they are afforded adequate organizational, methodological, intellectual and ideological freedom.
The practical reality, however, is that the current American system has become crippled with restrictions upon how pedagogy is done which are stunting the benefitial effects that the system could potentially produce and has historically produced, leading to our comparative decline in most academic metrics when compared with much of the developed world. For example:
Bzzzzzt. The Bait was:
Now, recount the technologically-enabled genocides of the 20th century, paying particular attention to which ones were "religious" and which ones were "secular".
I am not suggesting that you not go with the scientific paradigm. I am saying that it should be appropriated with epistemological modesty, not the kind of "holy writ completely above discussion, interpretation, and revision" comment that I initially replied to.
And on your point about the golden rule: it is not enough to believe that it would be a good idea to follow the Golden Rule, you also have to form the kinds of people who actually can follow it. Once again, history seems to suggest that this is harder than you say, since most historic societies have agreed that it was a "good idea" and have, as you have so astutely noted, not done so well with it.
Pointy sticks? C'mon, if you're going to be uselessly offensive you can at least try to come up with something creative and entertaining (or, at least, less flagrantly false).
What I am not saying is that the scientific paradigm is useless. What I am saying is that its presumption that the universe as a closed, mechanistic system needs to be presented for what it is - an unproven, unverifiable, unfalsifiable assumption, and that (as such) all "scientific" results are, at most, "true insofar as the universe is closed and mechanistic".
I will also note for the record that this you have posted an excellent example of "Godwin's Law Bait".
The checks and balances are mostly tacet stalemates between politicians (among whom I include local school board members and PTA officials). It still forces the curriculum to be reduced to a lowest-common-denominator majority orthodoxy, which (from the point of view of developing independent-thinking citizens) sucks.
The math and english I need in order to vote and do my taxes was covered by the time I finished the 5th grade. The selection and presentation of most of the "reading" I was made to do after that was severely colored by the teachers' (and their unions') social/political/epistemological agendas (e.g., reading "Grendel" in the 4th grade without having ever been exposed to "Beowulf", reading feminist propoganda without a counterpoint in a 10th grade macro-economics class, etc.)
The difference between a public and a private school censoring student blogs is one of free association - there are many things that private organizations are allowed to do (including ideological discrimination) which are not (or at least, should not be) permitted to the state.
To be clear - I am not questioning the need for widespread education (which is the actual need you raise withg respect to taxes, the job market, voting, etc). I am simply questioning whether the existing system of public education is appropriate, particularly given:
How can it be any easier than it is now? Politicians control the curriculum. Politicians control the textbook choices. Politicians control what teachers are and are not allowed to say (do not offend the majority orthodoxy). Politicians control what students are and are not allowed to say (remember all of the post-Columbine harassment of disillusioned kids? yesterday's story about student blogs being censored?).
Of course, I've ranted about this before.
An inerrant, unalterable, unquestionable dogma, not open to deconstruction, debate, or re-interpretation? Most ID-ers' views of the Bible aren't that exalted.
The real flaw in most "science education" in the US is that it lacks any corresponding study of the philosophy of science and the severe epistemological limitations of the scientific method. "Science" is a vague epistemological family that postulates predictive models based upon their predictive utility, and I pity the fool who equates "predictive utility" with "truth".
Those living in jurisdictions in which taxes pay for executions of criminals or where the government subsidizes abortions may take issue with that statement.
Granted, by paying my taxes I'm not pulling the trigger. But I am putting the bullets in the gun.
Just a thought.
HTTP/1.1 requires you to always produce dates in a single format: a fixed-length subset of the format defined in RFC1123 (see section 3.3 of RFC2616). You're also required to be able to parse two other formats for backward-compatibility reasons.
Of course, not everyone plays by the rules. But standardizing on an ISO format doesn't fix that. Changing human nature (or at least the free-wheeling, rule-hating culture of many network hackers/programmers) fixes that.
Boston's inching toward that... doubled parking meter fees in a lot of neighborhoods a few months back...
Boston does have two half-ring highways: I-95/MA-128 is the inner ring and I-495 is the outer. Both jam up pretty regularly. And I'm not convinced that a large enough chunk of the 93/95 corridor's traffic is transiting Boston to make a real shunt road (think "40-mile express lane bypassing the city") all that helpful.
Personally, I'm a fan of the commuter rail (except for the nasty schedule gaps for stops near/beyond 495).
I doubt their public statements terminate their rights (there's nothing in the license about repudiation by a license-holder). However, the fact that they are exercising rights granted to them only by the GPL could constitute a kind of tacet endorsement (analogous to an "implied contract") of the GPL and thus be grounds to have their "GPL is invalid" claim tossed out.
IANALBMSILI (IANAL But My Sister-In-Law Is).
I see. So in situations where people haven't already been granted a right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, the 4th Amendment does not apply? (That right can only be "violated" if it already exists, after all... right?)
</sarcasm>
And, BTW, such a law wouldn't be political suicide everywhere; Massachusetts has set the bar high enough (and made it easy enough for applications to get rejected) that the right to bear arms is effectively infringed in fact if not technically by law.
Can't resist feeding the troll, mostly because (living here in Massachusetts) there are people who actually think this way...
If it's outdated, then you should have no problem getting it repealed. Until then, it remains the supreme law of the land, and arguing about how outdated it is doesn't change that. (Apparently you can do that with sodomy laws, but it still doesn't work when it comes to the Constitution.)
Incidentally, I'm curious what it is about the concept that's outdated. A variant of it worked pretty well for Switzerland in the '40s, which wasn't all that long ago.
The underlying doctrine of the 2nd amendment never had anything to do with one or two guys holding off the government; it has everything to do with making sure the government has reason to fear overstepping its limits and sufficiently pissing off the public. Ultimately, if the people are unarmed, the government can impose its will by force; the second amendment, properly exercised, makes the cost of doing so prohibitively high, because when you take out one "political undesirable", a hundred of his friends will be shooting at you as you drive away.
And by "friends", I'm thinking of everyone who has ever said "I'll defend to the death your right to say it". Or is that just a warm fuzzy sentiment?
No army or police force wants to confront an opposing armed populace. Look at what's going on in Baghdad, and that's being caused by a miniscule minority; imagine 20% of the population (or heck, even 5%) as committed to getting us out as the <0.1% who are now, and you'll begin to get the picture. The army wouldn't stand for it on foreign soil, and their would be a quick coup if it happened on domestic soil.
The problem seems to be with your rather odd reading of the english language, not with my logic...
"B only if A" does not mean "B is a necessary condition for A".
"B only if A" means "A is a necessary condition for B", i.e., (not A) implies (not B).
(A -> B) != ((not A) -> (not B))
No, what I intended was "'A implies B' does not mean 'B only if A'".
How would "B implies A" be useful to the discussion? ("The people have the right to be armed; therefore, they should form a militia"?)
Horse manure.
A few obvious observations:
Well, a line of code can be as long as the programmer wants - but they're usually a lot less than 70 characters. The median is closer to 16 (average is below 32); assuming we use a full 7 bit dynamic range (which we don't), the input space for most lines of code is then 112 bits, less than the 128 bit dynamic range of MD5.
That's assuming that any binary string can be a valid chunk of code. Given the more limited character set used in C code (a subset of ASCII 0x00-0x7f) and given that indentation styles will tend to introduce bytewise similarity, the number is probably a lot lower.
Still pretty freakin' huge, but certainly lower.
Right. Because Republicans have so much more in common with socialists than Democrats do...
The margin of his national popular victory was significantly less than his margin of victory in Los Angeles county. (This is an illustrative example of istartedi's assertion that the "city slickers" could "run everything".) So apart from a single left-coast county, Bush was the popular winner. The combined margin of Bronx, New York, and Queens substantially exceeds the national margin as well. That of itself says something about the amount of skew (i.e., non-lukewarmness) of many regions in that election.
All the county-by-county data is available from CNN's election results archive. A quick overview suggests that a significant chunk of the country was far from lukewarm on this election. Here are the states with margins of at least 10% of their popular vote determining the winner of the 2000 Presidential election:
Alabama (R:15%), Alaska (R:31%), California (D:12%), Connecticuit (D:17%), Delaware (D:13%), George (R:12%), Hawaii (D:18%), Idaho (R:41%), Illinois (D:12%), Indiana (R:16%), Kansas (R:21%), Kentucky (R:16%), Louisiana (R:10%), Maryland (D:17%), Massachusetts (D:27%), Mississippi (R:15%), Montana (R:24%), Nebraska (R:30%), New Jersey (D:15%), New York (D:25%), North Carolina (R:13%), North Dakota (R:28%), Oklahoma (R:22%), Rhode Island (D:29%), South Carolina (R:16%), South Dakota (R:22%), Texas (R:21%), Utah (R:41%), Vermont (D:10%), Wyoming (R:41%). (As a curiosity, I'll also mention that D.C. was (D:75%).)
That's 29 out of 50 states with substantial margins of victory. 14 of those had popular margins of 20%. I've boldfaced 9 of those with margins over 25%. That hardly suggests a lukewarm whirled peas color for those states or for their constituent counties - you can't get a 3:2 margin by aggregating a bunch of 11:10 county margins.
This didn't stop the United States Postal Service from running advertisements where they dissed UPS and FedEx for being way more expensive than their own services. ("Fly like an eagle...")
Picking nits...
You are right that HTTP persistent connections are an application-layer construct. However, HTTP/1.1 uses no headers to signal use of persistent connections; if the request is "HTTP/1.1" then the default is to treat the connection as persistent. Connection: close signals deviation from that default behavior.
The "Keep-Alive" header was a hack to wedge persistent connections into HTTP/1.0; its use by HTTP/1.1 clients is frowned upon (see RFC2068 section 19.7.1 MUST NOT, and RFC2616 section 19.6.2 which references the above).
Hopefully it was more like a 503... and I can't imagine Malda would marry a girl without an integrated PDA/cell phone tucked away in her wedding dress somewhere, so there was probably a Retry-After header present too.
Many congrats to the happy couple... I'll look at the photos next week :-)
I seem to recall a usenet group "alt.atheism.satire" (or something like that) which was, at one point anyway, dedicated largely to producing a non-stop stream of articles like this, spoofing/satiring "christian" culture and apologetics and theology.
The amount of vitriolic energy that was poured into that group was pretty amazing. A dozen such articles is a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Your example isn't compelling at all, in that you have completely redefined the word "impoverishment" to mean "deprived of enrichment"; let's say gazillions of people pirate the musician's album. Does the musician no longer "have" his album? Of course not - he still has his master copy, and as many copies as he wants to make, on whatever media he likes, according to his ability to finance said duplication. He in no way has any less in the way of measurable posessions than he did before the whole debacle began. Thus, he is not impoverished; he is merely not enriched.
The right to control ideas and embodiments of ideas once you have disclosed them, and (as a special case of that) to be enriched by them, is purely a legal fiction; the intrinsic properties of physical commodities (principally scarcity) that cause unauthorized acquision to actually impoverish the original "owner" simply do not apply.
This is why comparing selling music and selling carrots is like comparing apples and oranges (or screenplays and oranges?)
Not that I don't feel for the guy - I'm a musician too, and have done work on several professional recording projects - I'm merely making the point that "intellectual property" is beecoming more and more ephemeral and abstract, and that the legal fictions needed to protect ephemeral embodiments of IP are distrressingly close to the concept of "speech" (see the whole DeCSS mess - "source code is speech" etc), as compared with the very tangible objects of copyright law as traditionally constructed (physical duplication of books, recordings, etc).
As for your distaste for anthropomorphizing information, I was merely explaining the thought process that produced the meme, not asserting the meme as a precise statement as to the nature of reality. Metaphor and equivalence are very different types of relationships. So chill.