Word.

Go read the case law. Any restraint on freedom of movement can be deemed a kidnapping, and is a felony.

Here is one person who has drawn a map based on 50 states having equal populations (~6 million at 2010) as response to the problem of unequal state population in the Electoral College and the Senate:

http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/

"The largest state is 66 times as populous as the smallest and has 18 times as many electoral votes."

He gets 5 or 6 states out what is now California.

Go to the link for the map.

They donâ(TM)t. Corporations do not vote in public elections in the United States.

... what I see is they've been given rights identical to a person when there needs to be some restrictions.

What are those restrictions and why shouldn't they apply to individuals and non corporate associations as well?

The first issue is many things need to scale with the size of the legal fiction.

Same question.

Under oath large corporations can make claims that are blatantly untrue because they've filtered through layers of management and lost the level of uncertainty.

Simply not true. Corporations cannot take oaths. Only individuals can. Corporations have been convicted of Obstruction of Justice. The problem of organizations and communications is inherent in organization. Some corporations are organizations (some are one man shops), and are subject to the problems of organizations, but it has nothing to do with being a corporation.

A great example of this is the tobacco companies testifying to Congress that "nicotine was not addictive", to the executives they had enough doubt to claim it was so, but the reality was there wasn't any real doubt.

It is extraordinarily difficult to convict anyone of lying to Congress. Juries tend to believe that Congressmen cannot tell the difference between truth and lies. See the Roger Clemens case.

Furthermore as a former smoker who kicked a 2 pack a day habit, I have real doubts about the idea of nicotine addiction. I think it is an excuse used by weaklings to deflect their responsibility for their own health.

The issue people have with corporate personhood is the granting of civil liberty rights to corporations, not the ability to own property.

The issue you refer to is a lack of understanding of what rights are. There can be no useful distinction between the right to own property and any other "civil liberty rights" in the US constitution.

John Locke, whose writings in defense of the English Glorious Revolution of 1688, became the inspiration of the Founding Fathers of the United States and part of the basis of the Constitution said that: "The great and chief end, therefore, of men's uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property." Sec. 124 of the 2nd Treatise of Government http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=222&layout=html#chapter_16371.

The ownership of property is recognized and protected by Amendments 4 & 5 of the Bill of Rights and Amendment 14 as well. And, it and was deemed fundamental by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was the first civil rights act to protect the newly freed slaves. The provision is still part of the civil rights laws of the United States 42 USC Sec. 1982 - Property rights of citizens http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1982&%238364;.

That association (including incorporation) does not impair civil rights is borne out by inspection of the First Amendment. Freedom of religion is exercised by the thousands of religious congregations that have incorporated. ABC, NBC, & CBS exercise the right of free speech, as do universities from Harvard to Slippery Rock, which are also corporations. The New York Times and the Washington Post depend on freedom of the press. Trade Associations and Unions are associations (some of which are corporations) formed to petition the government for redress of grievances.

And you can't disingenuously claim "it's religion freedom for JP Morgan or our whole society goes to hell", banking on the naivety of those which don't understand the law.

I cannot parse that sentence. As for the religious freedom of corporations, see above.

Like it or not, the law has _always_ bifurcated the public sphere into commercial and private parts.

And so?

Governments have wide latitude to control the behavior of commercial entities.

Subject, of course, to the overarching structure of the US Constitution.

Civil liberty rights ... were never intended to be applied to corporations, per se.

That is an interesting assertion. Perhaps you would care to provide some evidence for it. It is not, however a logical consequence of the laws.

Associations of persons, yes, but that's different than allowing the rights to inhere in a fictional entity.

It really makes no difference whether you think that rights inhere in an association or its members, unless you believe that individuals forfeit rights by associating.

For example ... unions are considered associations ... union officials and members can go straight to jail if the union as a whole doesn't abide by an injunction.

The conclusion does not follow from the premise. The consequences of a court order depend on whom it is addressed to and how they are notified of it, not on the legal rubric under which they have associated.

A corporation is a title that courts are free to ignore, especially when it comes to constitutional matters and rights that [normally] inhere in individuals.

Courts are not free to ignore the law. If the law provides for the disregard of corporate entity, then that is what they do. But, constitutional rights are not forfeited by association.

unless they're uber-conservative and have a political agenda.

Now we are slandering people. I won't dignify it.

... why should a foreign national have more rights to free speech under the law just by forming a corporation ...

The question assumes that which is not in evidence. No one gains or loses rights by forming an association with other persons, foreign or domestic. A corporation is a species of association.

Why can corporations not go to jail.

A corporation cannot go to jail because it is not a tangible thing. A corporation can be convicted of a crime, and the consequences of conviction may not be trivial. Just ask the former employees of Arthur Andersen, several thousand of whom lost their jobs when the entity was convicted of obstructing justice. Conviction may also result in fines and asset seizures. Furthermore, the living human beings who animate the corporation can be, and have often been, sent to jail.

Why can corporations be made up of people with rights, but individual cells don't have rights? You can easily declare a corporation has all those things without being a person.

Because human beings. and not their parts are the rights bearers. Further they do not lose rights because they have formed an association. The personhood of a corporation is a consequence of its structure not a premise. See my post above.

It is specifically corporations like the East India Trading company...

Corporations are associations of individual human beings. They are neither better nor worse than their constituents. The British government could have done what they did in India without the East India Company, as they did after the 1857 Rebellion.

Corporations ... have become, above the law ...

I have no evidence of your assertion. Logically, though, corporations being creations of the law cannot be above the law.

Historically, you are wrong. At the time of the American Revolution, almost all of the corporations in the US were religious, municipal or schools. Not until the time of the Civil War were there many business corporations.

Corporations and lawyers are the root of nearly all evil in our country currently.

That is quite an assertion, do you have any facts to back that up?

... willful erosion of private rights and expansion of corporate rights.

The rights of corporations are the rights of their constituent individuals. The expansion of one is the expansion of the other, and the erosion of one is the erosion of the other.

When our politicians are literally allowed to be bought ... by corporations ...

There is nothing new about bribe taking politicians. They have existed since the greatest antiquity. The formation of corporations didn't make them accept bribes and the abolition of corporations would not stop them. The existence or non existence of corporations will not affect the propensity of men to do evil.

As Solzhenitsyn, who knew evil well, said: "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Come true.

In the Robot stories, the "brains" of the robots were made out of an alloy of platinum and iridium.

Platinum currently costs ~$1300/oz. and Iridium costs ~$400/oz. Just imagine how much those robot brains would have cost.

Fortunately, we base our computers on silicon, which is relatively cheap and very abundant.

Just kill the automatic updating.

Open the Control Panel open the System applet.

There is a tab that says "Automatic Updates".

Click that tab. Then click the button that says "Turn Off Automatic Updates".

Problem solved.

Your "rhetorical" answer to your question only reveals that you do not understand the law.

First we must remember that the rubric "corporation", includes not only Microsoft and Wal-Mart, but also universities, hospitals, churches, municipalities, and clubs. The first corporation to assert constitutional rights in the US Supreme Court was not a business. It was Dartmouth College. ("It is a small college, but there are those that love it." - Daniel Webster).

Corporations are associations of natural persons (i.e. individual human beings), who themselves have full legal capacity and who themselves bear "rights". The associates include the directors and officers of the corporation.

Granting them corporate personhood allows them to own property and enter into contracts in their roles in the association. The Latin word for a role is "persona".

Doing this allows the property and contracts to inhere in the association so that if an individual dies or retires from his role, the property and contracts automatically transfer to the next individual who holds that role. If we did not do this, the property and contracts of the association would have to go through probate if one of the associates were to die, or be deeded for every resignation, or even worse, be subject to litigation.

The underlying social logic of this type of legal structure has been laid out by Nobel Prize winning economist Douglass North. In his view the open availability of institutional structures like the corporation is one of the hallmarks of advanced societies like the US. The lack of these structures defines base state societies like Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan. See "Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History" by North, Wallis, & Weingast.

IAAL. As Chief Justice Coke explained to King James I, (see "Prohibitions del Roy"), issues concerning the life, liberty, and property of citizens, are not decided by the King's natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgment of Law, which is mastered only by long study and labor. But, the Law is the golden measure that protects everyone, governor and governed alike, in safety and peace.

The Time Lords are mere children compared to Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones.

"These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. ... But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. ..."

"The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

This won't stop until they start throwing the parents who fail to vaccinate their kids in jail. No mercy, and no excuses.

"can you trust your return information any more or less to an online platform than you do to the equivalent software on your computer?"

Well, the information on your tax return will eventually be sent to the Internal Revenue Service. You may not know this, but the IRS is part of the same United States Federal Government that also has the NSA spying on you. Once the IRS has the information, you are hosed.

I would not advise shorting the IRS. That is a very bad idea. They can be downright chippy about it. Protesting the loss of privacy is just going to get you rubber hoses.

The problem is not online systems, it is the the US Government.

Serendib is the Arabic name for the Island, and Serendip in Persian. A Persian folk tale "The Three Princes of Serendip" became known in England through a 16th century Italian translation. The protagonists of that story were in the habit of discovering of things they were not seeking. In 1754 Horace Walpole, English writer and parliamentarian, coin the English word "serendipity" to capture that happy characteristic.

Taprobane, a Greek name for the island, would be another literary allusion.

Shouldn't it be Sri Lanak?