So the government can say?

So the government can set wages?

"Patriot" is a characterization. That makes it a matter of perception, rarely if ever debatable among people who disagree. If I call the last Bush patriot or coward, venal shill or statesman, does that make any of them true? Skeins of the Russian and Chinese elite are known for self-serving characterization far more preposterous to American sensibilities than the most blatant jingoist blather dribbled out over the media here. Does any so much as remotely considerable number of U.S. citizens rely on foreign judgement of an American citizen's acts? Frankly, I think everyone here knows the answer to that.

So, if you believe what he did was defend the Constitution in the service of humanity as a whole, what word would you apply?

I think if you look through my posting history you might start to suspect I was trying to make a different point. I do see how what I said could be taken that way, though. Sorry about that, my bad, but _really_ not where I was going with that. Think about what's going on with the widely-perceived corporate takeover of government, I think that should be enough context.

Can anyone make a serious argument that Comcast et al. are any better, and if so even remotely likely to stay that way?

Well, if I'm reading my hits right that's a shame. GraphViz is distributed under the EPL, it's not compatible with either GPL and not at all easy to relicense to any of the biggies.

Erm, no.

Theft, when conducted in person while carrying a firearm, is felony armed robbery. In every state in the union.

It's hard to imagine being a police officer ordered to do this. Their choice is between facing homelessness and turning vicious, amoral thug.

Among the "undisputed facts"::

From the court's discussion of the legality of the lower court's grant of summary judgement in favor of the Athearns:

Since the parents knew for almost a year that their child had posted (no kidding, chase the link) grossly offensive, defamatory, libelous information and admit they not only did nothing, at all, ever, to even so much as look at it, they didn't even tell the kid to take it down, the appeals court's reversed the summary judgement in their favor, because it seems apparent that a jury might find them negligent for that.

It's a good thing that government demanding and getting limitless, secret access to every accessible detail of everyone's life has no history of being used for political vengeance and oppression, otherwise he'd be advocating for policies that have an unbroken, horrifying, outrageous, infamous track record.

So, your ECON 101 course left you with the impression that saving can't be immoderate? That it never crosses a boundary and becomes refusal to spend? That excessive not-spending is somehow not a defining symptom of a depression? It would seem times have changed.

Do the math. Hell, it doesn't take econ 101 to do this math, anybody with google and high-school math skills can do it: under those conditions, what happens to M0 if there is no new money being printed? What happens to M0 even if new money is being printed, and still those who already possess the vast majority of M3 are limitlessly ratcheting up that share? Either, over time, all those who possess the existing money spend it and on average do no better than break even (proportionately, including any new money being printed to cover an expanding economy), or M0 dries up. The big question is, what's a good target?

At some point somebody's going to have to admit in public, and national policy is going to have to revert to being based on the acknowledgment, that a free market is nothing more than a tool, one that can be nudged or with some teamwork directed by those with substantial influence over it toward many ends.

As it stands, enough of the wealthy in this country are working to produce a world nobody else wants to live in — are openly claiming that a person's worth is the least amount of money they can get away with paying for his labor, that because so many people can produce the vast majority of the world's simple wealth and services, as a necessary and right and just and good consequence the few that are needed to actually do it deserve to and should live like slaves, that those who aren't deserve to and should live worse "to encourage them to get jobs", — that they're succeeding.

That part, we agree on.

Where we differ is the belief that wealth accruing in (in particular) stocks is somehow not being sucked out of the economy, is somehow doing any considerable good for anyone but the already-(relatively)-wealthy. Please don't carp about the boundary between wealthy and not, it's enough that there is such a boundary. If you want to argue anything along the lines of there is no such boundary, or that it's so fuzzy that nothing of consequence follows, I'd be at least interested enough to read it.

Demand pushes up price. The stock market goes up because people are pouring money into it. That money's coming from somewhere, and the only time it's an actual investment is when the company offers shares.

People selling one stock in favor of another contribute _nothing_. People selling stock to actually produce goods and services with the proceeds take that money out of the stock market, they deflate it. When the stock market as a whole drops, whether the market slides gently or a bubble bursts, money in the affected stocks is destroyed, money spent buying the stocks is just gone -- from the assets of the already-wealthy. When the stock market rises, money is created -- as new assets for the already-wealthy. But during the periods that money that could be spent elsewhere is instead spent buying secondhand shares, it no longer forms any part of, it has been sucked out of, the productive economy

People who aren't wealthy enough to afford the time and expense of financial counseling or education -- let alone find, invest and preserve the necessary capital -- have no chance of accumulating any considerable wealth. Their only hope, currently, is social security and medicare -- and social security for those below that "enough" bar above can't really be considered even a subsistence living.

Presenting a substantial and coherent set of sound arguments in a public debate while simply omitting the idle chatter, the trolls, the other idiots is a valuable service. Necessary, even; it's a way of hosing dirt off the debate. By all accounts (including yours) he did a very, very good job of it.

It isn't the tax part that's new, it's the progressive part.

Not sure how that's going to promote demand for goods and services. It looks to me like a recipe for rewarding not-spending. And not-spending is exactly what's sucking the liquidity out of the economy now, locking it up in the vaults of the wealthy, who refuse to spend at all unless it means that they wind up with ever more in their vaults, and construction of the (was this term ever more apt?) vicious cycle is complete.

Yeh. Hence, my .sig.

But it hasn't. Looking at a couple of potentially-relevant aspects:

The standard for copyrightability of facts is "particular selection, coordination, or arrangement" of facts -- it's why maps are copyrightable but data dumps like phone books aren't -- phone books don't really select, they take pretty much all of them, coordination doesn't really apply, and arrangement is a simple mechanical process that nobody would regard as identifiable as any particular author's work.

The standard for copyright of other useful works has been

The problem there is, clean-room reimplementation is legal. Dalvik is a clean-room reimplementation of the Java API. Headers are an integral part of an API implementation; you can't make them work, at all, without headers using matching names. Not even Microsoft has dared try anything so pathetic as Oracle's argument: Wine is legal, and it implements the Win32 API, names included. Samba is legal, and it implements the CIFS API, names included. Maybe this would be a good starting point for more.