Hey, your 2 year old daughter also wets and shits herself, drools and spits up a lot. I guess she's destined to a life of residing in a skilled nursing facility, too, right?! After all, EVERYBODY knows that your development at the age of 2 is a sure predictor of how the rest of your life is going to go!

And everybody also knows that your child's development up to the age of 2 is absolutely NOT affected by the 2 years of rearing you've already put her through! She developed the way she did because that's just how girls develop! She would be exactly the same if raised by ANY parent, or NO parents, or even being raised by wolves or monkeys in the wild! And anybody with any sense whatsoever knows that girls are MUCH better off aspiring to do things like fashion design, yoga instructor, and stay at home mom - bullying them into hopeless dreams of high-mobility, high-status jobs is just going to lead to their inevitable disappointment!

Do you realize how completely fucking pathetic this sounds as an excuse for why "girls are just different, and nobody should worry if they're not interested in that boy stuff!"?

I can already tell you she would probably be miserable if ever encouraged to go into a field where she stares at a computer all day long, as opposed to spending the day interacting with people.

Good thing that real software work involves LOADS of interactions with people. The myth of the heroic solo coder, building enterprise systems in 24 hour long mountain dew and doritos fueled coding binges is dead. This is not how software development happens in any sane (i.e., not hellishly dysfunctional) organization in the world any more. It's a team sport, and people who value interactions with other people are most definitely needed. You should try encouraging your daughter to explore the field, she might find she quite enjoys it!

I have every right in the world to attach stipulations to the sale of a horse, or a cart, or an axe if I wish. I can even ask you to make it all official-like by signing a legally binding contract with me, guaranteeing, for instance, that the horse will not be used for farm labor, and will be guaranteed at least 4 carrots a day with his feed, because he loves those carrots. I can't force you to accept these conditions post-sale, certainly, but before the sale is completed? I'm allowed to ask for just about anything I want, and ask you to sign a contract agreeing to it.

You are, as well, free to decline to enter into that contract with me. You may be looking to buy a horse to hook to a plow for plowing the fields of your farm, so the conditions I've attached to the sale aren't acceptable to you. Or maybe you're allergic to carrots, and having them in the house would pose a risk to you or your family. In which case you are *free* to refuse the contract as written, and negotiate with me for different terms ("I'll have the neighbors give him carrots once a week, on the day that I'm out of town. And I'll only use him to plow 2 small fields."), or simply seek to buy a horse from a different seller.

What you are not free to do is roll up in the middle of the night with a horse trailer and take the horse. And yes, the analogy is imperfect, because we're talking copying, not exchange of physical goods - but I'm not the one who brought up physical goods in a discussion about copyrights.

However, the principle does apply to copyrighted materials: If you do not agree to the conditions attached to the sale, then do not agree to the sale, and find an alternative seller whose terms you can agree to. I'm not sure why this seems like such a foreign concept to people - certainly there are tons of examples of how the sale of goods and services work with which you're familiar... why does this one, in particular, seem to be such a foreign notion?

The "it's free to copy, so you haven't lost anything by me copying it," argument is nothing but vapid post hoc justification for taking something that doesn't belong to you. The "if you sold it to me, I can do anything I want with it, forever and ever, amen," is just willfully ignoring the explicit terms and conditions of the sale you engaged in.

Let's look at it from a different angle: what prevents me from grabbing some GPL3'd source code, stripping out all license notifications, adding a bunch of proprietary customizations to the code, slapping my own name in the headers, and selling it as "Americano's Super Duper Awesome Appliance," and making billions while contributing exactly zero code back to the FOSS community?

What's that you're shouting? "GPLv3 has an Anti-Tivoization rule, and you can't do that!"?

Well, who the fuck is the FSF to tell me what I can and can't do with my legally acquired copy of that source code?!

(See now why you need copyright, and anything you do to undermine copyright is only going to hurt you in the long run? Just because something's easily copied doesn't mean you have an absolute right to do whatever you want with a copy of it.)

Sure, I'll be happy to. But first, please show me the specific pieces of culture that you have created - and thus own copyrights for - which you feel I've infringed upon.

You know, since you can't copyright the generic concept of "culture" - but you knew that already.

How did this become a right? How about my right to do what I like with code that's sitting on my computer?

Fundamental property rights have been acknowledged by courts for hundreds of years - the product of my labor is my property, and I have some fundamental ownership of the product of that labor. I am then free to enter into mutually-consensual trades with other people, whereby they trade some product of their labor that I want, in exchange for some product of my labor that they want, and we both are enriched by the trade.

If you want a piece of code that does what my code does, you can:
1) Write your own - my copyrights certainly don't prevent you from doing that, and you're welcome to build your own!
2) Negotiate a license for a copy of the code I created, and ensure that the negotiations include license to do "whatever you like with the code."

Your right to do "whatever you like with the code" is dependent on your having "acquired a copy of the code through legal means." If you violated my copyrights by taking a copy of the code against my wishes, then what you are asserting here is that your "rights to defraud" somehow trump my copyrights. I'm pretty sure you'll have trouble finding any courts that would uphold that right of yours.

Want ultimate control over whatever is on your computer? Simple choice, pick one: write your own; negotiate a license you can agree to and abide by it; or do without anything whose licensing terms you can't agree to.

Any other choice simply undermines your own copyrights - which I bet you'll waste no time asserting the first time someone takes your GPL'ed code and does something in violation of the GPL with it.

Culture and knowledge are human rights. You're free to develop your own culture and knowledge, and license the use of the culture and knowledge you develop:

Some people will choose to license their written culture and knowledge very permissively, and share freely - think "public domain."
Some people will choose to attach some conditions to their culture and knowledge that are intended to encourage sharing - think "FOSS licenses"
Some people will choose to set terms and conditions that greatly restrict sharing of the work - think "traditional copyrights, all rights reserved, pay me lots for a single copy of this that you can't redistribute."

What do all 3 of these schemes have in common? They're all based on the underlying principle that a creator is entitled to control the distribution and sharing of his or her work.

That you *disagree* with the choices some people make about how to share their works does not entitle you to a free copy whenever you want it. If you disagree with the licensing of someone else's work, you have 2 options if you wish to remain ethical:
1) Contact the owner of the work you wish to license, and negotiate new terms with them;
2) DO WITHOUT, and work to create your own alternative.

If you violate others' copyrights based on the expedient principle of "but I want it! the pony! buy me the pony, daddy!" then you can expect your own copyrights to be infringed upon too, and you will have absolutely no standing to ask for redress when you've destroyed the protections copyrights afford you.

And what if they don't want to open source their assets?

Your "desire" to see them "succeed" sounds eerily similar to blackmail: "That's some nice source code there, you should probably just make it open source, it'd be a real shame if something were to happen to it."

If you cannot fundamentally respect their rights to license their work as they see fit - even if you don't agree with their choices - then you have exactly zero standing to complain when somebody else disregards your wishes as to how source code YOU wrote will be released and licensed. If you don't agree with someone's choice to not open source their assets, you do not automatically gain the right to take a copy. Don't like their license? Do without, or write your own open source alternative.

I cannot wait to see the day when thugs who feel they have the right to take anything they want at any time they please are shunned out of any civilized company - as they should be.

And when 20 users are saying "you fucked up my game," and 100 users are saying, "awesome," who do you listen to?

So... Apple doesn't pay local taxes on income earned overseas? What's shocking or unusual about that (I'm pretty sure no other company pays taxes on money they earn overseas and haven't repatriated - do you know of some?) or invalidates the claim that Apple is the largest taxpayer in the Bay Area?

heavy sugar cakes (also processed cheese).

That's not got much spam in it.

Where do you get your numbers? Because your number of amber alerts is off by several orders of magnitude, wherever you found them.

NCEMC, which administers the AMBER Alert program, reports that in 2011, there were 158 AMBER Alerts issued in the United States. (source)

13 of those alerts were hoaxes, 6 were determined to be 'unfounded.' 127 of the cases, the child (or children) were recovered within 72 hours.

Since 2005, the number of alerts nationwide has declined from a high of 275 (involving 338 children) to 2011's total of 158 (involving 197 children).

That's a far cry short of "40,000 amber alerts issued," even if you look at the lifetime of the program, unless 2012 and 2013 saw literally tens of thousands of amber alerts issued every year.

And bear in mind, an AMBER Alert activation in California isn't going to be broadcast to the people in NYC, and vice versa. The number of AMBER alerts any person is likely to see in a given year tops out at 10-15 for people living in California, where the highest number was seen.

Bro, I've seen the documentaries "Hostel" & "Hostel 2". I know all about your little Slovakian enterprise - don't try and fool us into believing eastern Europe is anything but a hellish chamber of torture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/11/black-prison-population-increase-england

There was an update and a correction - doesn't really change the absolute numbers, but it does revise some of the comparison relative to the US penal system.

Doesn't mean the UK justice system is free of prejudice, but the correction does paint things in a slightly more forgiving light.

So anybody at your company can just randomly take DBs offline, restore a backup, and put the DB back online, and there's no automation around that, and no control built around who can do it, when they can do it, and what specific dbs they can do it to?

Yeah... that's the sysadmins fault for at least 2 reasons:
1) Failure to manage access appropriate to role: you don't give the janitor root, and you don't give the application developer root logins on production systems.
2) Failure to design an automated workflow for less-expert users to perform a risky task safely. Be it a script, a web app, or some other means, "Take down DB, restore backup, bring DB back up" should be managed by a workflow, and not left up to the user to remember, if you're letting any J. Random User who wants to execute these steps.

There's these stocks known as Blue Chips. You might want to read up on them.

The Lanham Act that covers trademarks? Please explain what provision I'm missing in understanding how that applies to the topic at hand, because I think I'm missing your point there.

There is no double-dipping - they are not granted any rights they do not already have when they join with a collection of like-minded people to engage in collective political speech.

And again: be careful what rights you wish away. If you wish to ban collective speech, you've also just banned speech by unions, religious organizations, minority rights groups, and any other grouping of people you care to name (nearly all of whom incorporate for the financial & lobbying portion of their work, and seek tax exemption as 501(c) organizations). And worth noting: it's not the corporate charter that grants members of those groups their rights to assemble & speak - they already have those rights, by virtue of their existence as individuals - they are simply *exercising it* in a collective manner.