but they still don't seriously threaten our society

exactly because we have vaccines, you fucking moron

and if not enough vaccinate, the diseases find vectors to proliferate again, AND they have a chance to get lucky and develop new strains that can get around our exisitng vaccines, threatening everyone period

everyone has to get vaccinated. if not, the person is ignorant, irresponsible and dangerous to all of our health. if you don't agree with that statement, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about and/ or you are blindly selfishly irresponsible

you have no freedom to choose something that threatens other people's lives (nevermind your own)

i see it as the genius of biochemical warfare by plants

our livers have been in an evolutionary arms race with plants for hundreds of millions of years. they make a substance that kills, maims, disorients, or deters us. one up plants. our livers do their best to mop it up. one up animals. rinse repeat

perversely, we've developed a taste for some of those substances. like cayenne pepper or horseradish, as a paradoxically enjoyable taste. or heroin or cocaine, as a disorienting drug

in a way, the plant still wins when we get addicted to them, like these bees. drug use is just slow motion suicide. it might not kill us immediately, but it brings us back for more, and more and more, to finish the job

... now all it needs is a light side and a dark side.

Sometimes common sense is just wrong, particularly when it comes to predicting the behavior of other people who might not agree with what you consider "common sense". If you check his publications in Google Scholar, this guy's been publishing surgical neuroscience papers in real journals since around 1990. I think he really intends to try this.

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.

science!

you can't explain it

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.)

I thought cosmic rays trigger lightning.