Sort of like how extortion isn't extortion as long it's called protection money? Theft describes the nature of the act, not the nature of the perpetrator, and glossing over it with nicer-sounding words make it any better.

I agree with the rest of your post, but this bit is ridiculous. You're essentially saying it's impossible for (democratic) governments to commit theft, because everything a government does is morally validated by the fact that it was democratically elected. Sorry, but just because a lot of people agree with something, doesn't mean it's a moral action. Historical examples abound.

Marx's original conception of communism wasn't a system of government, so much as it was a state of being.

He considered socialism as a necessary evil - you had government imposing the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", because people wouldn't do it themselves, but the idea was that as people were exposed to this, saw its benefits and became enlightened, they would start acting this way voluntarily. When the population in general had reached this state, the socialist government would become unnecessary and wither away, and the population would be living, ungoverned, as "communist man", the apex of Marx's conception of social evolution.

Unfortunately, this breaks down, because the great benefits of socialism turn out to be mass starvation and poverty, which the people understandably get miffed about and don't embrace, which leads to their government shooting them in job lots. It's also why a lot of Marxists complain that communism has never really been implemented yet, and use that as a defence against the butchery their philosophy leads to.

I recently started playing Stardew Valley, which is a single dev game. Apparently, for a while there, that dev was manually correcting individual corrupt saves for customers, because he felt bad that his game had failed them. Just try getting that sort of service from a mainstream developer.

Trump has never gone bankrupt.

A fraction of the 500-odd companies he's invested in have gone bankrupt.

Not even the lawyers are sure which bits were and were not in violation of copyright law. They wouldn't have known until after decisions had been rendered at court. Are Vulcan ears copyrightable? Or are they a derivative work from older elf-ears? The world will never know.

What you say is true, but I think you have the chronology backwards. There were proprietary network and information protocols before open ones. The open came after the closed. Same with operating systems - linux and the BSDs came after. There are already some stabs at open social media (like Diaspora, although I'm not sure if that project's still viable). The point is, proprietary systems are often the vanguard, because money is good incentive, and when you've got financial backing, you can blaze trails faster. Open protocols usually follow the trails blazed by their commercial predecessors. There's no reason to imagine that, given time, open social protocols will not evolve and come to dominate.

Sure, but that's irrelevant to the issue at hand. The headline is, as usual, misleading. This is a discussion of the ban on autonomous killer robots. You can still shoot people via remote control, with your bot taking the fire instead of your human soldier. You just can't staple an algorithm to an assault rifle and set it loose.

I was ready to join the lynch mob, up until the last sentence of the summary. It was deprecated in 2012. If it goes dark in 2017, then you've had 5 years to get yourself organised, and migrate. That's plenty of time, and more than adequate notification.

I would. My number one copyright reform would be that any work not available for sale at a reasonable price point* in a given country is not protected by copyright in that country. You want my country to enforce your IP? Then you better be willing to sell it to my countries citizens.

*No offering copies for sale at a million dollars a pop, and claiming that satisfies the requirement.

They get more representation, but it's not proportional, because every state gets two electors, in addition to the number they get based on population. This gives underpopulated states more oompf - per capita - than overpopulated states. That's why Delaware has six times the population of Arizona, but only twice as many delegates.

That's exactly what they were meant to be, since otherwise, sparsely-populated states would never have agreed to join the union.

No, appointing a qualified person just means they have been determined to have the skills required to do the job. It doesn't mean they'll actually be good at it. For example, Fiorina was qualified to run HP (education, experience, etc) but ran it into the ground.

Yeah, it's English bulldogs. But the reason is pretty much the opposite of what this "study" claims - it's not a case of caesareans allowing genes for narrow pelvises to stay in the population, it's a case of selective breeding changing the shape of the dogs. Deliberate breeding, not a side-effect of too many caesareans.

But that would be just as corrupt if the person was qualified - it's not their qualification or lack thereof that makes it corruption, its the fact that they're being appointed to benefit you, rather than the country.