>Add in on top that we have sentient intelligence as well, a completely unique adaptation present in no other species.

Yes, we're so smart we'll live forever. Argument heard -and every palaeontologist on the planet considers it thoroughly debunked.
There is absolutely no proof of our sentience being unique by the way. On the contrary - statistically it's MUCH more likely we're the third or the fourth of the 20th species to do so - the others just to wiped out. Palaeontologists would tell you that most creatures don't leave fossils, in 10 million years nothing we built is likely to have left any recognizable evidence. That's not my opinion - it's the opinion of noted biologists like Jack Cohen. Chances of us being the first technologically sentient species is actually near-zero. The fact that we don't have any evidence of whoever asked "why are we here" BEFORE we did is proof of just how fragile we really are.
Actual biologists consider intelligence to be one of the most generic tricks in evolution - repeatedly arrived at by species independently, statistically the MORE likely scenario is that in EVERY age of the earth there was something as smart as we are.
We're not as special as you imagine.

AGW is not anthrocentric - but the idea that we just don't have to care, that is BUILT on anthrocentric arrogance.

>And the evidence that we have apparently survived other potential extinction events previously (the evidence of genetic bottlenecks tied to ancient eruptions, etc)

Everything alive has survived extinction events. All extinction events have survivors, NOTHING survives them ALL.

>Biological systems can't be so fragile as all that, or we wouldn't be here.

Wrong. 97% of all species that ever existed are extinct. The history of the earth is filled with massive extinction events wiping out damn near everything alive.
Life is resilient, even if just a few bacteria survive, in a few million years there'll be a system with plants and animals again.
But biological systems are incredibly fragile and quite regularly get wiped out.
You probably KNOW about the dinosaurs, but that wasn't a rare event, the history of earth is littered with hundreds of extinction events - most of them WORSE than that one.

Life starts over with the left-overs.

Now see, that's good news in a sense - no matter how badly we fuck up - chances are we can't wipe out life on earth, earth will live on and in a few million years there'll be some other creature who asks "Why are we here ?" - but it's BAD news for us !
Sufficient disturbance to the ballance and it collapses, and we go down with it (hint: the larger the creature the smaller it's chances of surviving an extinction event - we count as a large creature, small in this context means bacteria and single-celled sea-creatures).

There's a standard clause in most extradition treaties that you cannot be extradited unless your action is ALSO illegal in your home country.
In this case - since the UK doesn't know, I suppose they filed him under "Gray area" and when the US said "we do know" nobody thought to give the accused the benefit of the doubt (isn't that what's SUPPOSED to happen with legal gray areas ?)

>I'm fairly certain he was hosting the content himself
He wasn't. It's in the fucking article. He didn't even submit the links himself ! He merely provided a forum where users could submit links.

>If I spent all my money to make an expensive show and then someone ripped it off and started streaming it for free and stealing my viewers and making money off my work that they paid nothing for, I'd fucking kill them.
Really ? You're aware that most people don't pay to watch your TV shows on TV right ? Advertisers pay. If somebody misses an episode and downloads it, how the hell did the studio lose any money ? The show was still aired, still showed ads and the advertisers still paid the network - who ALREADY paid you for the show !
You may have half a point when it comes to movies but for TV-shows your argument falls flat on it's arse. At best you could argue that maybe some of the people watching it online would have bought your DVD release later - but guess what, only hardcore fans of shows buy DVD releases to begin with (usually to re-watch) so that's a fairly small percentage of the income anyway.

>Stealing content is stealing content and making money on someone else's work is wrong.
You cannot "steal" content, copyright law is not property law. You can violate the monopoly granted to somebody under it. There's a huge difference.

> If someone ripped off Libre Office and started selling copies for cash and violating the GPL
Those two things don't go together - you can sell Libre Office for cash, people DO that all the time, and you can do so without violating the GPL. Of course we'd be up in arms if you violated the GPL but none of us would call it "stealing" and RMS (the guy who WROTE the GPL) is on record as saying that if software didn't HAVE copyright there wouldn't be any NEED for the GPL. The GPL does NOT support copyright. It deliberately subverts it, the fact that it uses the same copyright law to subvert it is just cleverness, not an endorsement.

>There is no difference
No, there isn't - but most of us GPL supporters believe there SHOULD be. What the GPL covers, we believe would be better of without copyright, or at least short-term copyright with a requirement for source-disclosure. Changing the law against such powerful foes is difficult. The GPL is a stop-gap intended to destroy their business model - when there is enough free software, nobody will be able to sell non-free software - and the outcome is the same as if the law didn't allow it (but without legal coercion - we achieve freedom using simple market forces).

But since you can't tell the difference between felony theft and civil copyright-infringement I don't expect you to understand a word I wrote, I'm merely correcting your false facts for the sake of other readers.

Odd, I've been exclusively gaming on wine since the days of GTA:VC. Even back then it worked MUCH better on wine than it did on the windows XP partition I tried it on - same machine, but on Wine I got much nicer graphics out of the nvidia card I had in there (was an old GF2 I think).
These days I play WoW, STO and Diablo 3 mostly and all three play exceptionally well under wine and in no cases was there any difficult setup - about the worst I've had to do was to switch to a PPA wine build for Ubuntu with built-in plugdev patches because those aren't available upstream. That's hardly difficult for any regular user of the Ubuntu style systems (I'm a mint user these days myself).

In all cases when I wanted to check - a simple google would confirm if the game work, and usually get me a quick three-step guide on what you may need to do to handle it. I do use separate bottles for my wine games but for non-geeks PoL handles that just fine (and I do that mostly because of interdependencies: STO requires IE8, but there's no way I want that cluttering up the space where my WoW and D3 installs live for example).

Personally I like to write myself short little bash scripts to launch the games with any little tweaks I need (e.g. switch bottles quickly) and then set up a standard desktop launcher to run those.
All utterly painless for a professional programmer (in fact, boringly simple would be a better way to put it) and compared to the hassle of trying to find the exact model number so I can get a driver for my SB:Live card on windows XP (I understand this is better in newer versions but I've never used anything newer) ... it's a massively easier thing.

And the ultimate proof: my fiance is as far removed from a computer geek as you can get. Sure we share a love for comic books, superheroes and cosplay but she couldn't write a shell script to save her life. All the computers in my house run mint, she's a much bigger gamer than me (and plays dozens of them) and she has never even SEEN a terminal. If she has any difficulty setting a game up in PoL. Granted, I usually install them for her.
The best bit is, if I see her playing a game I actually like - I tar up her bottle and the launch script I created for her, copy it to my box, untar and run - zero repeat setups.
That alone is worth the extremely minor extra difficulty in initial setup.

>Also how can I keep from not being fired and magically raise my test scores when students are out at least once a week!

You know, it's quite ironic - but at university there is no roll-call, nobody cares if you show up for class or not. If you hand in all your assignments and pass the exams you can graduate without ever having attended a single class (nobody would actually KNOW if you did or not) hell some of the largest universities in the world are correspondence studies where you go at your own pace, in your own home, and just send in your assignments and go write exams at the end of the year - they don't HAVE classes !

Yet - gifted children have a strongly observed tendency to massively underperform in schools - and their test scores tend to shoot up by several grades once they go to university.
Wow...underperforming kids actually do better in an environment WITHOUT that oppressive rigidity ? No really, hell I was one of them - so was probably more than half the readers of slashdot. I actually FAILED my senior year maths and had to redo it - today I am (for all intensive purposes) a professional mathematician ! At university I was a straight-A maths student - who couldn't PASS the subject in school !

Now you will argue that gifted children are a minority, and the school system cannot be built around their needs, if they underperform in school so be it, most of them will be able to rely on those gifts later on and will make it up by being top-performers in university and later in their careers.
Fair enough - but this girl is in an advanced placement course ! She and EVERY ONE OF HER CLASSMATES are ALREADY identified as gifted kids - and it's well established that gifted kids perform BETTER with LESS rigid rules.

Her school (and in particular her class in that school) is exactly the kind of kids who will NOT benefit from this system at ALL - if anything, they are likely to perform WORSE the better you get at keeping attendance (or any other form of classroom discipline).
Statistically gifted kids perform best in the least rigid circumstances, that's exactly why gifted schools have taken a note-sheat from universities and done away with all the 'discipline' stuff to begin with.

I grew up in a country where uniforms are the norm - even in private schools. In fact, I've never seen a school WITHOUT uniforms here.

Now it's true that some kids wear them creatively - it's also true that fashion is the least important part of self expression (though this is a LOT less true if you're a teenager) - but neither of these facts are relevant to my decision.

My decision is built on the idea that uniforms promote uniformity, dress-codes promote conformity. I consider both those things to be a blight on society which does incredible harm and the cited advantages simply don't outweigh that harm in the least (indeed they are false advantages - it's not like having uniforms meant we did NOT know who the poor kids and rich kids in school was, or stopped the rich bullies from picking on the poor kids - really it didn't, I lived through it).
Now to me - a school that institutes such a policy is inherently subscribing to the idea that uniformity and conformity are good things, that makes them by definition bad teachers in my book. I want my kids taught by people who believe that self-expression is a CRUCIAL right, that individualism is to be celebrated and that critical thinking begins with refusal to conform.

Your point is valid, I hadn't intended my statement to contradict what you're saying but it can be read that way - so your criticism is very true.

It may have been better to say "deliver the education society demands in the MANNER the parents and students want".

>And the difference between a school and the cops, is that you have at least a few alternatives to choose for school for special needs. And it seems that here we have some rather special religous needs.

I would say not being forced to wear a piece of technology that didn't even EXIST ten years ago definitely does not qualify as "special needs" at all. Schools got along fine without it for centuries after all.
To my mind, the burden of proof is always on the the limiter of liberty to show the absolute unavoidable necessity of the limitation.

That said - the difference you cite is smaller than you imagine, there isn't always that many other schools in the region after all. In this case, the school they are trying to move her to lacks the advanced science and engineering courses that her current school offers - and which she had worked hard to qualify for.
It's not unreasonable to assume that few if any other schools in the region would have comparable classes either (after all - how many kids statistically in one town COULD qualify for advanced placement classes of any kind ?).

With that consideration she is effectively being told to either abandon her faith or massively compromise her future career. To my mind - that is not a reasonable level of liberty. If a school in the region could offer the SAME advanced placement science and engineering program without the RFID requirements, then that would be an option - but the available evidence strongly suggest that no such option exists.

That said -as a matter of philosophical principle whenever students complain about an act of discipline in a school I am inclined to take their side (that burden of proof thing I mentioned). As far as I'm concerned: all school rules are wrong until proven unavoidable.

>The school RECEIVES money. That makes them the SHOP, and not the customer.

Yes, I got that sentence wrong. But it was the sentence that used the wrong word, the conclusions I drew were based on the CORRECT term, I had intended to show the difference between a private shop and a government service.

>The parents are paying the school (either directly or with their taxes) to educate and teach their kids. Recording attendance is a part of that. And as you said, keeping up a level of discipline that allows them to actually do what they are paid for is part of that package.

And that level is defined as "the LEAST impact on liberty with which we can still manage to do so". Anything else is oppressive. It's like the way that self-defense laws have a minimum force requirement. You can't fire a bazooka at somebody for writing you a threatening note. You can't eradicate all civil liberties for the sake of discipline either - only the bare minimum you absolutely cannot find another sollution for and even then only as long as that's true i.e. if we find a way to successfully teach a class even if one student is standing on his desk singing "My favourite things" we no longer have the right to restrict his freedom to do so - even if we need it today.

>And providing security for the kids is also an important factor.
Agreed, same answer as above: to do so we may on occasion need to reduce their liberty. When that happens the reduction must be the lowest reduction that can POSSIBLY achieve the required security. Even then there is a balance to be struck. Security can never be absolute after all - there will always be risks so if we don't excercise restraint we'd end up with no liberty - and for the sake of security which is STILL in the end, imperfect.
So a reasonable degree of security should be established, where it has the lowest possible impact on liberty.
The same philosophy in fact, that should guide a COUNTRY.

>The school offered a non-RFID-badge to that student!
But only with strings attached - if she accepted that she AND HER PARENTS would have to also agree to publicly endorse the program. That was unacceptable to them (and rightly so). They still have a problem with the badges as worn by others - and as long as she is not disrupting classes she should still have the right to say so, and encourage other students to demand the same exception that was made for her.
If the exception comes only at the cost of losing her right to express her beliefs, then that's even WORSE than forcing her not to act on them was.

>As with any shop
That only applies to private shops - schools are government shops. If you aren't happy with the service of a private security firm, they have every right to say "go to another one".
If you aren't happy with the service from the cops - YOU have the right to go to your elected representatives or the court system and DEMAND they step up their game. Because unlike the private security firm - the cops are a government entity, with special powers but more importantly their duty is to act in service of the public - who does not get to choose NOT to deal with them (private security don't have the powers they have and cannot replace them entirely).

That's the difference. The same goes for every other public service - and that's what government schools are: a public service, and the teachers public servants.
That means - they work FOR the public, they are employed BY the students, NOT the other way around.
And indeed it works best if you see the students as being the employers - NOT their parents. The parents are more like venture capitalists investing in their children's future. When my boss pays my salary in a startup, I can't refuse to obey his orders because the money actually came from an investor rather than a sale (or his own pocket). But investors are one-step removed, just as parents are.
At the same time, just as a boss can ask investors to shift their investment within the company because one area is underperforming and another is swelling, so students can ask their parents to complain if one teacher is underperforming and to praise when another is doing well.
But the students are in fact the only ones with the hands-on day-to-day experiences to be able to make the judgement. The parents act on the information they provide.

So yes, rethink your ideas on the basis that the teachers are employed BY the students, and accountable TO the students.

She EARNED the right ot be in this high performance school through having BEEN a high performing student.
The "other school" cannot offer her an equivalent education (notably the maths and science plan).

They also didn't OFFER her another school - they are trying to forcibly MOVE her to one. That's an entirely different kettle of fish.

Still, no point arguing with somebody who can't even read.

You raise valid points. The problem in Nigeria spreads rather further though - there you can buy a can of Heinz baked beans which was decidedly NOT made by Heinz (but I bet even Mrs Kerry would have struggled to tell them apart).

The problem with fake medicines is just icing on the cake.
That this is fraud as well is also true, trademark protection does however (in theory) provide another level of protection - it gives the manufacturer a means of combating those who sell fraudulent products under it's name - and they usually have more resources for doing so than you and me do.

On the other hand - that still only works if you're in a country where reliable law enforcement and court systems are available (Nigeria decidedly has neither) - which is why such fraud is rife. Even the mighty pharma companies (who obviously lose a lot of legitimate sales to fraudsters) cannot stop it there.
The flipside is that the even more unscrupulous companies take advantage of that lack in ways that go far beyond the pale of what individuals are capable off. Shell (the oil company) has been shown to have actually assassinated critics of their Nigeria operations - to date, nobody has been prosecuted for those murders.

>They completely have the right not to endorse the program

You said they should have accepted the offered compromise, but the compromise came with the requirement that they agree to endorse the program and publicly support it. Did you read only HALF the article ?
Indeed if she took the compromise now, and finished school - she would still not be allowed to protest the program in ten years time.

How the hell is that a reasonable string to attach?

Even if she felt that disabling the chip would satisfy her, getting it at the expense that she can no longer tell others "you should demand YOUR chip be disabled as well" is an unreasonable demand by the school.

She is not imposing her beliefs on others, she's not demanding the cards be banned, she's merely demanding the right to choose what she wears on her own body.

Damn, I am glad I'm in a country that recognizes that kids DO have rights to liberty. Around here, a few years ago a school tried to expel an Indian girl for wearing her earrings (those elaborate ones that some Hindi women wear). She argued that due to the religious significance of the earrings their demand violated her religious freedom. The school argued that since the religion does not REQUIRE the earrings they were not violating it.
She took them to the constitutional court (the highest court in the land - and with more power than the government - indeed they are the main watchdog OVER the government). The court found that exactly BECAUSE the earrings are optional in the religion, wearing them is a MORE significant act of self-expression within the religion and the school did NOT have the right to intrude on that.
Another school tried to force some Rastafarian kids to cut their hair short, citing standard rules that ALL boys must have short hair. That one never went to court, the kids wrote a letter to the minister of education to complain - the next day he stood in front of the country at a press release to announce that no schools in the country will be allowed to have any hair-rules whatsoever ever again.

Schools have a need to enforce discipline and ensure safety, for this reason some limitation on the liberty of students is required - I can accept that, but only on the principle that whenever liberty is reduced it be done the LEAST possible level that achieves the needs it's limited for, and that there are some liberties which may not be intruded upon whatsoever.
So while I can understand not letting kids stand on their desks screaming the entire lesson long being an acceptable free speech for them - if you expell one for using the word "fuck" in a school newspaper article you have crossed the line and if it's my kid I will see your ass in court for it.

Oh and to show I'm not a hypocrite, I live by my own rules, whenever I get contacted by a headhunter about a possible position - the first thing I tell them is "No dress-codes - I refuse to work for any company that tells me how to dress or look, so check with your client first, because they can't pay me enough to change my style."

I am merely aiming to secure the same rights for my children.

> I see this as no different from a dress code that virtual every school has

Yeah those are just as evil a violation of basic rights. I have long since made up my mind that I will NEVER subject my kids to a school with uniforms OR a dress code.
You know why ? Because any teacher who thinks either of those things is a good idea is going to teach my kid things that I would prefer to protect them from. Bad values like "conformity" and "obedience".
I would prefer to raise my kids to subscribe to values like "individuality" and "critical thinking".
If that means homeschooling is the only option then I'll find SOME way to do it.

For the life of me I'll never figure out on what basis you Americans decided that children should NOT have the right to free speech and self-expression - they need it perhaps even MORE than adults do.