The definition of stealing does not require tangible property, it just involves depriving the owner of that property.

If you take a trade secret from someone and share it with the world, you have stolen the trade secret, because, while the owner might still have the information, they have been deprived of a secret that was not yours to share. Plagiarism too is a form of stealing, for you are depriving the author of a work from their name rights. (And yes, while not honored in the U.S. outside the bounds of copyright, I agree with the moral rights of authorship.)

Copying a song does not deprive the owner of the source copy nor the author of the original work of anything, hence it is not stealing. It's not even a crime morally. In the U.S., Congress has decided to sometimes make this a civil crime called copyright infringement, because the Constitution allows them to do so if they think it will encourage more work from those authors. Something it's not a crime at all, like for older works or government publications.

In other words, I agree with your sentiment, but don't wrap the definitions of theft and copyright infringement up in the terms of tangible property. Intangible things can be stolen, too. Focus on how it deprives the author of something they previously possessed.

And if you go way way back to get a car with no code, you end up with one of these:
http://themetapicture.com/cras...

Most of us are willing to create civil unrest about something, at least in theory. That's why you have all those guns, right? It just has to be bad enough that you see civil unrest as the only available option.

For emotional teenager minds, police in riot gear surrounding you and presumably yelling at you to disperse while simultaneously preventing you from leaving might be that trigger. Sure the first guy who threw a rock was probably an asshole who should have been expelled for something else months ago, but others might join in who would have also been perfectly happy to just get on a bus and go home if they had been allowed to two hours earlier when school let out.

That's where the police failed - by creating a situation where immature people feel rioting is their only option, when they just as easily could have tackled the rumors of a riot by trying to disperse the kids into the city and away from trouble instead.

In other words, police showing up in full riot gear and marching in unison down the street at you is an incentive to start a riot. Honestly I'm surprised the libertarian gun-loving wing of Slashdot isn't rising up to support people "resisting the police state".

It's a lot easier to address a 3F increase than a 6F increase. Drastic action is needed. It's not time for shoulder shrugging.

Err, under the Massachusetts constitution, any citizen (governor or not) may file a proposed piece of legislation. If you're going to rail on about the government, maybe try a different state?

Wait, when did we start talking about Sony?

Not that it matters any more, but if you work for Google and wonder why ignored all those invites, it's because you, Google, insisted I change how I share my use of your products as a condition of joining Google+.

Before Google+, I used a variety of your products - blogspot, youtube, search. You know that the same person was using all these services - but the world in general doesn't, and most importantly, none of them were tied to my real name.

Then, to join Google+, you wanted me to "convert" my account, and attach my name to everything.* I was not interested in that, so I diligently stayed away. For Facebook, on the other hand, I knew going in that it would use my real name. (I still waited as long as possible and only signed up to avoid becoming a hermit.) Since I knew my name would be attached from the start, the way in which I share has always been somewhat sanitized.

Because you, Google, are so many things, you can't be a real-name social network, at least if you insist that I retroactively claim ownership over everything else. Sorry.

* Even if this isn't true, this is what I got from all of the media coverage, discussion, and your own promotion. If I understood this all wrong and could have keep using the other services separately and anonymously, then it's your fault for advertising Google+ so badly. That's sort of sad, given that advertising is your business.**

** IIRC they did change this eventually, but by then Google+ was already an obvious failure and it wasn't worth creating an account.

Well, there has been almost nothing that has rallied the GOP faithful in the past couple decades as much as their unified undying hatred of all things "Clinton". Really, regardless of how good her chances are of winning, Hillary is doing more for the GOP than the GOP was capable of doing for itself, just by being herself. I thought the conservatives were in overdrive on conspiracy generation with Obama but now we're seeing a whole different magnitude of nuttery.

What I particularly love though - and what this thread is all about - is how they are not bothered in the least by the hypocrisy.

A lot of those criticisms are talking about how they want to string up Hillary for accepting donations from individuals who run corporations that we don't like. But if corporations are people - as we decided in Citizens United (amongst other rulings and government movements) - that exist independently with independent rights and obligations from the people who run them, then why is this important?

For that matter we saw similar arguments fall flat against the Bush family in earlier times. But since the argument is now being used against a Democrat, this is of course all different, right?

Actually, this JE was a response to my friend's amusing accusation of "stalking".

I call not it. I have no investment in this site - well, beyond my $5 subscription - so I don't want to be left liable for cleaning up the mess when it finally folds for real.

And create a new way to exploit the poor and desperate!

I heard he also named his first son up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,a,b,select,start. There just might be something to this conspiracy.