So, if the lady is held accountable...

Then all a copyright owner has to do is crack into someone's wireless (or just flat out connect), download a bunch of their own copyrighted work, and then sue them for copyright infringement.

Whoo loopholes!

He should probably stop living in an Islamic country.

If you do something illegal and get caught, you mean.

I am not a lawyer, this is correct.

The motive is more important than the crime because the crime comes about as result of the motive. It is to assert that we seem to be a people obsessed with punishing the actions rather than correcting the cause.

It is not the title that matters, but rather what people who subscribe to the title do: think. Which is to point out that I am a person who thinks, quite a bit. As for formal education and application, I have that too; but these things are not important. Even a person without a degree can be a philosopher: engineers and carpenters, tailors and lawyers.

While being a philosopher does not indicate what someone's moral temperament may be, it does indicate that the person has quite likely put considerable thought into the nature of morality and his own personal beliefs. It was an attempt to push past petty preconceptions about what I have said in hope that people would perhaps evaluate what I have said with a bit more thought.

Moral relativism, hmmm... I have not advocated that position here, nor absolutism or any such thing in between. I have simply said it was difficult to locate a true north. Now disagree with whatever morals I may purport, but this truth is something that all should agree on. Morality and ethics is a very tricky topic that becomes sticky very quickly. It was to attack the post I had to which I replied to point out that what he deems as disgusting is perhaps not so.

Most curious, however, is that you call out moral relativism, and then continue to push the same assertion as the post above: that what the girl did was unequivocally wrong. And you have built yourself a nice little trap in doing so, because you seem to support it with the assumption that drugging another human being against their will is in and of itself a wrong action. Now, should you venture just a bit into the ocean of philosophy, if only to wet your feet, I'm sure you'll find this sort of claim runs into all sorts of snafus. The question of means to an end rears its head once again.

I think the relationship of the parent and child are of high, if not utmost, significance.

I'm a philosopher, actually. If that should answer your questions about my moral compass. And speaking of, it is rather difficult to know what true north is when each person's compass points in a different direction.

My comment was tongue in cheek. But as with all humor it has its own bit of truth.

It is resourceful and clever, at least for their age; this you cannot deny. Now, should these children be jailed? Most certainly not. Because it is not the crime that is of importance; rather it is the motive. Now clearly, they wished to stay up past bedtime and continue playing on the internet... Or computer. This begs a number of questions that keeps me from jumping into the ring of people eager to grab pitchforks. For instance...

Why were the children so eager to stay online that they resorted to drugging the parents?
What is the relationship between the child and her parents?
How did she conceive of this plan?

There are any number of explanations for this. Abusive and authoritarian parents can bring this sort of behavior on themselves. Or perhaps the girl is partially psychopathic, and only did what she deemed was logical (I should point out that being a psychopath is not a crime).

In the end, however, there is work to be done. And not by jailers nor judges, but by psychologists and people qualified. Jailing the child actually might just create even more friction between her and her parents, making a problematic rift even greater.

I say reward them for being so resourceful!

I think they'll go far in life.

Yeah, they pretty much ensured they won't show up on any search engine ever. And no one is going to share articles, ever.

Well, even if the parents were irresponsible twats, you can't very well leave those children to dry, can you?

I mean, you'd really have to game the system to make a lot more than that. Welfare bonuses are a source of income, so you can't just accumulate a bunch of them and be like, "I MAKE NO MONEYZ GIMMEH MOAR." It doesn't work that way. If you get SNAP you may not receive full electricity reimbursement or some other form of welfare assistance. And yes, workers can look up if you are. So I mean, if you're that good at gaming the system, then you'd probably be good at gaming other systems too, like the markets.

A lot of the problem is that full time workers receiving minimum wage are getting 12k a year. If 6k a year costs rent/utilities in some shoddy apartment. That leaves only 6k to live on. You've got $500 a month to pay for food, gas, and other necessities. They work plenty hard, I've seen them, some with a kid. And they have to have SNAP just to be able to live on something other than ramen.

I imagine Microsoft may just release a patch that fixes everything into a "classic" view to gain more sales.

Welfare recipients won't make more than that, unless they're gaming the system through some elaborate ploy. Or if you have like 13 children.

I am not so certain.

Do consider the reasonably bright math graduate. Take away from him the want or need for leisure, and instill in him a burning desire to do nothing but study and think about maths. Now just push his intelligence a little higher than the rest of the reasonably brights.

And then consider the implication that actively thinking about math all of the time changes your brain structure and makes you more intelligent.

Newton later turned to alchemy, and was obsessed with disproving the trinity.

Obsessed, and smart.

He had a mathematician's mind, sure. Probably not much brighter than what we consider reasonably bright and particularly attuned for maths. But what he had that sets us apart, was a raging obsession. The kind of demon that consumed Newton and possessed him to calculate pages of logarithms and Tesla to study from dusk 'til dawn and further, without respite.

I didn't know a dick could have a sexual preference.