Hm ... wouldn't that mean that there's nothing morally wrong with eating anything -- including another human? After all, if you ate them, then they're lower on the food chain than you, by definition.

If the website you use is overrun by spam to the point of being unusable, then it's your problem as well.

Perhaps the scary part is how so many supposedly intelligent people lose their capacity for comprehension of sarcasm and irony when they get on the internet?

It sounds to me like you're more interested in revenge than in implementing a copyright policy that benefits society as a whole.

Back to my original point: calling for a complete end to copyright is not likely to lead to any real policy changes, because as a policy that has very little support. If you're fighting a "war", the approach to take is probably not the one that has no chance of success.

Just because I support a position that is not 100% in opposition to those who want to take copyright to extreme levels does not make it "appeasing." That word would only apply if I was taking a position that I do not agree with in order to placate them, which is not the case.

In the case of the inevitable attempt to extend the period of copyright again, I will of course be against it, as I support a much more limited term of copyright. I don't have to oppose copyright completely in order to oppose unreasonable copyright terms.

The law should be set based on what is most beneficial for society, not as an attempt to punish those that you believe deserve to be punished. If abolishment is not the right thing to do, then it should be off the table.

This is a definite case of rose-colored glasses. CmdrTaco posted dupes so often that it became a running joke. A common request was to add a feature to stop the editors from posting a story containing the same link as a previous story.

Calling for a complete end to copyright is not more forceful than calling for reasonable limits to copyright. If anything, it's less powerful, because complete abolition of copyright is a complete non-starter, and is going to go nowhere.

You can find nuts who will take just about any position on any debate that you can come up with. Taking up an equally nutty position in response is not productive.

Well, we could throw them all in prison. Maybe we should hire a few people to babysit them and maybe help them with a rudimentary education. And let them go home to their families at night.

Oh, wait, I guess we already have that.

Shoot the users that submit bad bug reports. Within a few generations, only users that submit good bug reports will remain.

In my experience, they're ensuring that U.S. developers have poorly-designed software to fix.

The reason why software developers will tackle the biggest performance bottlenecks first is because a developer can only work on one thing at a time, and so should attempt to get the largest return on their investment in time.

The government, however, is not a single person, and employs millions of people. The people that are able to address the waste in area A are probably not the same people that can address the waste in area B.

It would be foolish for a large software development team to assign every developer to work on the same performance problem. Similarly, it would be stupid to tell those who aren't working on the top problem to sit on their thumbs until the top problem is resolved. If a source of government waste is identified, then the appropriate thing to do is address it, not come up with excuses why it's not important.

There's no reason why you can't reduce waste in both categories. Which is what most of us who oppose government waste want to do.

All that is is evidence that previous presidents haven't enforced immigration laws either.

So after skimming that presentation, I wondered: would it also be accurate (by the same logic) to say that the Earth doesn't orbit the Sun; it orbits the galactic center (and is perturbed by the Sun)? Serious question; I'm curious as to whether there's a qualitative difference between the two that astrophysicists would identify, or if it's just a matter of scale.

Saying that something is "good, but not for the masses," is elitism; even if you take the rather odd tack that you consider yourself in the group of the masses when you make that pronouncement.