And who answers questions about the lectures?

NY has "solved" this with EngageNY. This is a series of modules that the teachers are required to use to teach their subjects. The modules say just what they are supposed to teach, how they are to teach it (both method and emotion used), the exact wording they must use, the questions that students should ask, and the responses that the teachers should give. It's an exact script so actual teachers aren't really needed anymore, just glorified actors. Which means it should come as no surprise that our Governor is blaming all school problems on teachers and trying to get rid of them all.

What? How is that individualized in any way? Is this not the very inverse of individualized?

In NY, they get their individual score on the one-size-fits-all standardized test based on the one-size-fits-all state mandated curriculum that the teacher can't customize to suit each student. That's as individualized as our governor wants education. Arnie Duncan - the US Secretary of Education - even went so far as to claim that merely expecting special needs kids to clear a higher bar would mean they would do so. No matter what their challenges. So instead of setting up Individualized Education Plans with supports to help those kids with difficulties, we should just push them harder and that will make their difficulties magically disappear.

The problem is politicians acting as "education experts" often while listening to corporations who stand to make a profit in education (e.g. Pearson) and ignoring teachers who are actually trying to teach students. That would be like a PHB trying to figure out how to configure some computer systems, listening to a Microsoft sales pitch, and ignoring his company's technicians who deal with the systems every day.

Annoying people online is a crime?

Windows is so much better than Linux in every way!

Ok, I'll go turn myself in now. ;-)

Except when the music industry needs to pay out royalties to artists. Then, suddenly, they can't find where the artists live to send the royalty payments.

Or running the Disney Princess angle into the ground with Brave (at least other Princess films had a legend or fairy tale background, Brave was just a complete fabrication)?

Wait, so Disney is criticized when they take stories from the public domain and retell them but also criticized if they come up with new stories? I know that Disney's not the most popular company when it comes to copyright discussions, but you can't have it both ways. If you didn't like Brave, that's fine, but criticizing them for coming up with an original story is really reaching.

Not to mention the legal morass we would have if we had perpetual copyrights. Take some random video game from the 80s and try to find out who owns it. For many games, it's impossible. The original company was bought, split up, shuffled around, went bankrupt, had its assets sold, etc. This is for a work that is only 30 years old. Imagine if Shakespeare's works were still copyrighted. You would need to dig through 400 years of legal proceedings just to find the owner of Romeo and Juliet so you could base a work off of it. Want to mix in some Midsummer Night's Dream? Another 400 years of legal proceedings to sort through since they might not have arrived at the same owner-destination. Perpetual copyright would be a huge legal nightmare.

But if the GPL lacked any enforcement mechanisms, a closed source vendor could take GPL software, incorporate it into their product (perhaps making improvements or linking to proprietary code) without giving back to the community. If IP laws went away tomorrow and Adobe incorporated the exact code that GIMP used for a feature without even crediting the authors, there would be nothing you could do to stop them. Without IP laws, big companies would just hide the IP they "used to own" behind systems to keep people from having anything but the most transitory of copies. They would buy up or simply steal outright whatever they wanted from the little guy.

The better solution isn't no IP laws at all, but a sane copyright length. It shouldn't be 50 years or 70 years. It should be 14 years plus an optional, one-time 14 year renewal (that you would need to opt into for a nominal fee). Alternatively, allow companies to renew their works indefinitely but put an increasingly higher price tag on the renewal. e.g. 10 year Registration is free. First 10 year renewal costs $10. Second 10 year renewal costs $100. Third 10 year renewal costs $1,000. Disney could renew the original Star Wars movie's copyright by paying $10,000 (fourth renewal) while other, less profitable, movies wouldn't be worth that renewal fee and would go into the Public Domain.

After getting a bunch of people sick, she was given an option: Be free but don't work in food service or at least take some basic precautions to prevent infecting others. She refused and was kept in custody. Finally, she agreed and was released at which point, she quickly moved, changed her name, went back into food service, and got more people sick. At least one person died. So she was taken back into custody again and this time held for the rest of her life.

You can claim that her rights were violated, but her right to work in the food service industry ends where the patrons' right to live without typhoid begins. She wasn't ignorant of the threat she posed and yet she knowingly exposed other people to a contagious disease, killing some and sickening others.

What would you have done to balance her rights and their rights when she clearly didn't care about the risks she posed to others and when she demonstrated clear willingness to move/change names/infect more people? Honestly, she should have been charged with murder at that point. (Or at least manslaughter.)

Not that I would do this, but it might be fun to see someone stick something like this in a backpack and walk past an Apple store.

From WeirdAl's website:

Does Al get permission to do his parodies?

Al does get permission from the original writers of the songs that he parodies. While the law supports his ability to parody without permission, he feels it’s important to maintain the relationships that he’s built with artists and writers over the years. Plus, Al wants to make sure that he gets his songwriter credit (as writer of new lyrics) as well as his rightful share of the royalties.

Also, the WIkipedia Article on Parody which states that parody is "a work created to imitate, make fun of, or comment on an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of satiric or ironic imitation." Note that the definition is more than just making a comment on a work or its author ("some other target").

Later in that article, Copyright is discussed. While the Seuss case is mentioned, so is Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin which "upheld the right of Alice Randall to publish a parody of Gone with the Wind called The Wind Done Gone, which told the same story from the point of view of Scarlett O'Hara's slaves, who were glad to be rid of her."

Parody doesn't need to make a comment on the original work. If I made a "Wrecking Ball" parody song and altered the lyrics to target a politician I didn't agree with, Miley Cyrus couldn't come after me for copyright infringement because my song would clearly be a parody work. Weird Al asks for permission first because he's polite, not because he needs to.

As Weird Al's song is clearly parody, it would fall into an exemption in copyright law. They could no more sue him for copyright infringement than JK Rowling could sue SNL for a Harry Potter sketch.

Before 9/11, terrorism was some nebulous thing that happened in some far off land. It was sad to watch on the evening news but then you changed the channel to a sitcom and everything was alright again.

Right after 9/11, the horrors of terrorism came up close and we couldn't ignore them. This, in itself, is fine. The problem was that these people saw that we were scared and jumped in promising to stop terrorism. All they needed in return was a little of this liberty - just a little bit - we wouldn't even notice it was gone. We quickly agreed in our panicked state - shouting down the minority who said it was a bad idea by yelling "Are you taking THE TERRORISTS side? Are you with THEM?!!! DO YOU HATE AMERICA?!!!!!"

Slowly, we began to come to our senses, but were still on edge enough to be scared into approving anything if the politician said "Terrorism" enough times.

Hopefully, by now, we've regained enough sanity that we can a) smack around any politician who tries to claim that removing liberty will prevent terrorism and b) start the long, hard process of getting back the liberty we were scared into giving up years ago.

Actually, you don't have the right to spread germs around willy-nilly because you don't feel like taking basic precautions. Look up the tale of Typhoid Mary. Despite being a carrier of Typhoid, she refused to take basic steps to stop spreading the disease (since she didn't agree with those steps). After people died, she was locked up so she couldn't infect anyone else.

why should parents be allowed to force anything on their children?

Answering as a parent: Because young kids are really bad at making long term choices. If I let my 2nd grader decide all the foods he ate, he would live on a diet of pizza, cookies, McDonald's chicken nuggets*, and macaroni and cheese. Perhaps he would occasionally eat a piece of fruit. Instead, I prompt him to eat veggies that he declares gross before even trying them - but which he'll often love after eating them. If it were solely up to him, my 2nd grader would grow up with horrible eating habits. It's my job as a parent to force good eating habits on him in the near-term, teach him why good eating habits are important, so in the long term - when he's old enough to make these decisions himself - he'll eat healthy.

* We have McDonald's on an extremely rare basis. One meal from there a month is a lot for us. I have no problem with the occasional fast food meal, but it definitely shouldn't be a regular part of your diet.

Getting back to vaccines, keeping the law from imposing rules upon religions is fine, but when the action (not vaccinating) leads to people dying, then the religion doesn't get to claim freedom of religion. It doesn't hurt anybody if I don't eat ham/bacon because it's not kosher. It's not like I'm banning everyone else from eating it. (In fact, if I'm eating with someone and my food comes with bacon, I might ask that they get my bacon. Win for both of us.) But not vaccinating your child because of "religious reasons" means that you are putting your child and any other child your child comes in contact with in harm's way. You wouldn't get the fire a gun randomly in a crowd and claim "freedom of religion" and you shouldn't get to not vaccinate and claim "religious freedom."