How did this become a right? How about my right to do what I like with code that's sitting on my computer?

Fundamental property rights have been acknowledged by courts for hundreds of years - the product of my labor is my property, and I have some fundamental ownership of the product of that labor. I am then free to enter into mutually-consensual trades with other people, whereby they trade some product of their labor that I want, in exchange for some product of my labor that they want, and we both are enriched by the trade.

If you want a piece of code that does what my code does, you can:
1) Write your own - my copyrights certainly don't prevent you from doing that, and you're welcome to build your own!
2) Negotiate a license for a copy of the code I created, and ensure that the negotiations include license to do "whatever you like with the code."

Your right to do "whatever you like with the code" is dependent on your having "acquired a copy of the code through legal means." If you violated my copyrights by taking a copy of the code against my wishes, then what you are asserting here is that your "rights to defraud" somehow trump my copyrights. I'm pretty sure you'll have trouble finding any courts that would uphold that right of yours.

Want ultimate control over whatever is on your computer? Simple choice, pick one: write your own; negotiate a license you can agree to and abide by it; or do without anything whose licensing terms you can't agree to.

Any other choice simply undermines your own copyrights - which I bet you'll waste no time asserting the first time someone takes your GPL'ed code and does something in violation of the GPL with it.

Culture and knowledge are human rights. You're free to develop your own culture and knowledge, and license the use of the culture and knowledge you develop:

Some people will choose to license their written culture and knowledge very permissively, and share freely - think "public domain."
Some people will choose to attach some conditions to their culture and knowledge that are intended to encourage sharing - think "FOSS licenses"
Some people will choose to set terms and conditions that greatly restrict sharing of the work - think "traditional copyrights, all rights reserved, pay me lots for a single copy of this that you can't redistribute."

What do all 3 of these schemes have in common? They're all based on the underlying principle that a creator is entitled to control the distribution and sharing of his or her work.

That you *disagree* with the choices some people make about how to share their works does not entitle you to a free copy whenever you want it. If you disagree with the licensing of someone else's work, you have 2 options if you wish to remain ethical:
1) Contact the owner of the work you wish to license, and negotiate new terms with them;
2) DO WITHOUT, and work to create your own alternative.

If you violate others' copyrights based on the expedient principle of "but I want it! the pony! buy me the pony, daddy!" then you can expect your own copyrights to be infringed upon too, and you will have absolutely no standing to ask for redress when you've destroyed the protections copyrights afford you.

And what if they don't want to open source their assets?

Your "desire" to see them "succeed" sounds eerily similar to blackmail: "That's some nice source code there, you should probably just make it open source, it'd be a real shame if something were to happen to it."

If you cannot fundamentally respect their rights to license their work as they see fit - even if you don't agree with their choices - then you have exactly zero standing to complain when somebody else disregards your wishes as to how source code YOU wrote will be released and licensed. If you don't agree with someone's choice to not open source their assets, you do not automatically gain the right to take a copy. Don't like their license? Do without, or write your own open source alternative.

I cannot wait to see the day when thugs who feel they have the right to take anything they want at any time they please are shunned out of any civilized company - as they should be.

And when 20 users are saying "you fucked up my game," and 100 users are saying, "awesome," who do you listen to?

So... Apple doesn't pay local taxes on income earned overseas? What's shocking or unusual about that (I'm pretty sure no other company pays taxes on money they earn overseas and haven't repatriated - do you know of some?) or invalidates the claim that Apple is the largest taxpayer in the Bay Area?

heavy sugar cakes (also processed cheese).

That's not got much spam in it.

Where do you get your numbers? Because your number of amber alerts is off by several orders of magnitude, wherever you found them.

NCEMC, which administers the AMBER Alert program, reports that in 2011, there were 158 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States. (source)

13 of those alerts were hoaxes, 6 were determined to be 'unfounded.' 127 of the cases, the child (or children) were recovered within 72 hours.

Since 2005, the number of alerts nationwide has declined from a high of 275 (involving 338 children) to 2011's total of 158 (involving 197 children).

That's a far cry short of "40,000 amber alerts issued," even if you look at the lifetime of the program, unless 2012 and 2013 saw literally tens of thousands of amber alerts issued every year.

And bear in mind, an AMBER Alert activation in California isn't going to be broadcast to the people in NYC, and vice versa. The number of AMBER alerts any person is likely to see in a given year tops out at 10-15 for people living in California, where the highest number was seen.

Bro, I've seen the documentaries "Hostel" & "Hostel 2". I know all about your little Slovakian enterprise - don't try and fool us into believing eastern Europe is anything but a hellish chamber of torture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/11/black-prison-population-increase-england

There was an update and a correction - doesn't really change the absolute numbers, but it does revise some of the comparison relative to the US penal system.

Doesn't mean the UK justice system is free of prejudice, but the correction does paint things in a slightly more forgiving light.

So anybody at your company can just randomly take DBs offline, restore a backup, and put the DB back online, and there's no automation around that, and no control built around who can do it, when they can do it, and what specific dbs they can do it to?

Yeah... that's the sysadmins fault for at least 2 reasons:
1) Failure to manage access appropriate to role: you don't give the janitor root, and you don't give the application developer root logins on production systems.
2) Failure to design an automated workflow for less-expert users to perform a risky task safely. Be it a script, a web app, or some other means, "Take down DB, restore backup, bring DB back up" should be managed by a workflow, and not left up to the user to remember, if you're letting any J. Random User who wants to execute these steps.

There's these stocks known as Blue Chips. You might want to read up on them.

The Lanham Act that covers trademarks? Please explain what provision I'm missing in understanding how that applies to the topic at hand, because I think I'm missing your point there.

There is no double-dipping - they are not granted any rights they do not already have when they join with a collection of like-minded people to engage in collective political speech.

And again: be careful what rights you wish away. If you wish to ban collective speech, you've also just banned speech by unions, religious organizations, minority rights groups, and any other grouping of people you care to name (nearly all of whom incorporate for the financial & lobbying portion of their work, and seek tax exemption as 501(c) organizations). And worth noting: it's not the corporate charter that grants members of those groups their rights to assemble & speak - they already have those rights, by virtue of their existence as individuals - they are simply *exercising it* in a collective manner.

Why should they get them again as part of a corporation?

No, the proper form of that question is: "why should they lose those rights as part of a corporation?" Or as a part of a union, or religious organization, or civic organization, or minority organization, or political party?

Unless you are advocating for a complete ban on all "collective" political speech - including collective organizations like unions, religious groups, civic groups, minority groups, and any other form of grouping you care to name, then your position is logically incoherent, and amounts to wishing away the rights of some people whose views you disagree with and wish to silence. It really is that simple. And even if your position were logically coherent and you wished to ban all collective speech, it would be a fundamental violation of the rights of individuals.

The Constitution specifically affirms that the people have the right to engage in these activities - individually, or collectively. For someone who claims to be "very careful of rights," you seem to be missing that very clear point. Rather than seeking to silence your opponents (curious undemocratic, that!), you should be seeking to propose better opposing ideas, better arguments, and better solutions - and you're free to do so by grouping together with like-minded friends and neighbors and engaging in collective political speech.

And that's WHY I point out the damage that corporations lobbying politicians does to democracy.

Ah yes, lobbying is evil! Well, as long as we disagree with the goals of the lobbyist organization, amirite?

The NRA? Oh they're evil, they lobby the government!
The EFF? They're saints! They fight for our freedoms!

Campaign for Liberty? LOL LIBERTARDIANS! They're stupid and lobby the government with their backwards ideas!
MoveOn.org? They're brave soldiers fighting the good fight for democracy!

But corporations are collections of people - and those individuals making up the corporation have the rights of free assembly and association, free speech, and petition.

A group of people - whether it's a union, a religious group, a minority coalition, a corporation, or some sort of other collective - have the right to pool their resources for a common cause because of those rights, and trying to restrict them from doing so violates anywhere from one to all of those rights.

Be careful which rights of others you start wishing away - you might not always be in the majority.

Well yes, nobody ever means we should eliminate those rights. What the "why should corporations be allowed to donate" questioner generally means is, "why should people I have political disagreements with be allowed to participate at all? Why can't we just shut them up so I can do what I want?"