—are terribly important. I don't object to Stallman's passion or his trying to convince people that language such as intellectual property is loaded; I object to his condescending and coarse treatment of people, particularly how he treated Linc, who I thought had a valid question by the way. If openness and control and the four freedoms are the issues, then by what principle does copying come in and nullify those concerns when it comes to hardware? So the lack of a "hardware copying device" means those concerns disappear? I never did hear him connect the dots on that one. Maybe he could have explained it, but he was too busy telling Linc how confused he supposedly was. What an ass.The pharmaceutical industry is a tough area anyhow, with concerns about the cost of research, FDA approval, and testing making it terribly expensive to create drugs, and then you must take into account that you're not just paying for the manufacturing cost of the pill or vaccine, but the research and testing of all the drugs that didn't make it as well. There's no easy answer to making drugs accessible to others while still allowing pharmaceutical companies to make enough money to fund future research. So I see someone trying to cut through the complexity of such an issue by simply lumping it together with murder is avoiding a ton of thorny issues, and I call them on the cop-out it is.
This isn't about theories or word choice, it's about reality. Tsuroerusu, these acts that have been described are not murder in theory or practice. If some guy gets hit in the street, and you don't help him, you still did not murder him. You chose not to help him, which makes you a disgusting human being, but you still didn't murder him, neither in practice nor in theory. You don't simply get to call something murder just because it's bad, unless you want to dilute the meaning of words to where they become meaningless. When the word rape can mean both the horrible idea it is meant to express and also mean that when some girl gets drunk, leads a guy to her room, takes his clothes off and aggressively moves in to have sex with him, then rape begins to lose it's meaning. That sort of dilution of a word is despicable, because it begins to lose all impact and meaning.
You seem to make no distinction between what is usually talked about as sins of omission and sins of commission. There's been disease and starvation throughout the history of man, and there will certainly continue to be disease so long as we live. A pharmaceutical company is not responsible from someone contracting a disease, or that person's death. It would have happened had the pharmaceutical company not even existed. They didn't cause anything to happen.
They may choose not to help, but then it becomes a very complex ordeal, much more complex than someone who didn't help a dying man by making a simple phone call to fetch an ambulance. If they give those drugs away, it cuts into their profits, which cuts into research funding, and you get the idea of the domino effect that comes from this. Basically you start getting down to choices of losing money now to help someone now, or making more money to fund future drugs that will help someone else down the line. No good decisions either way. Throwing the word murder around so loosely doesn't help anyone.
