RMS himself has said that he would only be okay with getting rid of copyright (and hence the basis on which GPL and its copyleft protection stands), if copyleft itself is written into law - i.e. if redistributing binaries without access to the code becomes illegal.

Really? So Vietnam war wasn't a war, and neither was the Soviet war in Afghanistan?

I have a very simple definition of war. If you have a "legitimate military operation" with "legitimate military objectives", then guess what, it's a war.

Just as we can compel you to pay your income tax by force if needed, so we can compel you to get yourself vaccinated. You can protest as much as you want, and you're welcome to "fight us to the death", but judging by the fact that you're still alive, it seems that you have diligently filed your tax returns so far, so I'm going to file it as "just talk".

In my state, knowingly spreading disease (e.g. by going to the crowds) if you know that you're infected is against the law.

No-one has an absolute right to anything. All rights are ultimately balanced against the good of society. That's why free speech does not preclude libel & slander laws, for example, and why RKBA doesn't mean that you have a right to own a cruise missile.

In this particular case, your right to control your body is overridden by the extreme degree of common good that results from mandatory vaccinations, combined with a very low degree of personal invasion that such a vaccination actually entails.

Even a quick search violates your privacy rights. The question is what exactly is "reasonable suspicion". It can't just be a hunch, they have to have some tangible evidence for that.

The basic idea there is that the dog can't tell anything other than whether you have drugs or not, and 4A is not deemed to be applicable to your criminal activity (i.e. you don't have the right to privacy to evidence of the crime). The reason why your right to privacy is violated in a regular warrantless search is because of all the other things that cops get to see that aren't related to a crime. But if they have a magic device that can only detect evidence and not anything else, then that doesn't affect anything other than evidence and hence is not an infringement. Cops claim that drug-sniffing dogs are such devices.

They can still use a dog, because that doesn't count as a search (for 4A purposes). But now it's only true if they have one at hand already, and do it as part of the traffic stop without extending your detention (because such an extension would be illegal).

There is a lawyer who's doing some nice comics that explain all those intricacies - he has a strip covering dogs.

However, dogs are still BS, for the simple reason that a signal from the dog is considered to be probable cause, which is ridiculous because they can be conditioned quite easily to do so at the handler's signal (and often do it without the signal just to please the handler).

You know, some people in US actually have that kind of a deal on the grid...

I actually wonder if anyone needs to be paid to handle this stuff. It's a useful service, and hence potentially profitable - why wouldn't the market deal with it? Once we start getting substantial excesses of power from residential solar, the energy companies would be seeking for places to dump it, and one can offer such a thing, for a fee. And then sell that power back to the company when they need it (peak of consumption) at a slightly higher rate. So long as this roundtrip is cheaper than the cheapest generated power, the energy companies would participate.

Natural gas is already paid separately for the connection and for the gas itself, so adopting such a model wouldn't be breaking any new ground.

Sure. And a starving guy who can't find a job is not entitled to the contents of your wallet if he finds it on the street, but you'd have to be a sociopath or a retard to actually blame him for not returning it to you, even if that's a "right thing" to do. Or claiming that he's somehow a bad guy if he doesn't.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

Shipping Mexican citizens into the US won't fix the problems in Mexico.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

Saying that green card lottery is a viable way to legally immigrate is like saying that gambling is a viable way to legally earn money for a living. It's true in a very pedantic way, but practically meaningless.

I'm not saying anything of a kind. In fact, I didn't say a single word about what government should or shouldn't do, only about your attitude towards people who break that particular law. I don't know about you, but I know dozens of people who break the law - most of them smoke weed. I don't see why it should affect my opinion of them in any way, since it's obviously a bad and stupid law that I don't have to respect.

I am an H1B as well, so I can relate. But ...

Let me make this clear: you are being abused (the terms of H1 visas are effectively abusive for would-be immigrants due to the way they tie you to a specific employer with a very complicated switching process, and reset your green card application if you switch while it's still ongoing), and so you don't like it when other people - who don't get even the abusive option that you do - dodge that?

(And of course being in US as an illegal immigrant is still a very subpar experience to being legal ... hell, just try opening a bank account that way!)

The point is, people tout the illegal status of an immigrant as some kind of huge moral character flaw or failure, sufficient in and of itself to treat them as scum. I'm merely point out that it's not true in general, and specifically depends on how easy it is to immigrate legally for the same person, and how strong are the reasons that prompt them to immigrate. As I'm sure you know full well from your own experience, it's not a light decision to take in the first place, and US immigration system in particular is a mess of gigantic proportions with no coherent immigration policy whatsoever - just a confusing mish-mash of random decisions made over the last few decades.