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MIT Pirate Certificate

physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu

111–120 of 123 posts

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#111
post #9
post #3

> The MIT Pirate Certificate is for entertainment purposes only and does not give the recipient license to engage in piracy or any pirate activities. Jeez, what buzzkills.

A certificate says “we are Some Group that Knows about This Stuff and we think that so-and-so is capable of doing pirate-y things” You’d want a letter of marque for an endorsement of being “allowed” to do pirate-y things. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque

If you doing it under the authority of a letter of marque, then I think it stops being pirate-y. We do it 'cause the crew got drunk and voted to do it, not because some hoity toity government type singed a page.

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#112
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Article I of the United States Constitution lists issuing letters of marque and reprisal in Section 8 as one of the enumerated powers of Congress, alongside the power to tax and to declare war. It's still a thing

“It is a power enumerated in the Constitution of 1789” does not mean “It is a practice still relevant in the world of 2023”. The US hasn’t issued any Letters of Marque and Reprisal since 1815, and while it remains a Constitutional power of the US government that a couple Republican members of Congress keep trying to breathe active life into since 9/11, it seems well and truly dead in practice.

I read up on this topic; there was a conference in Paris in 1856 after the Second Crimean War where almost everyone abolished the Letter of Marques, but not the US even though the last letter was written in 1815 (41 years prior).

You can't get one from Spain, France, the Netherlands, or Germany – all nations with a tradition of Privateering, but you could get one from the US — maybe in Trumps second term, all it needs is a pirate cryptocoin

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, the number of classrooms leads me to ask, "Where is the tuition going?" It's not a good excuse. The students are paying plenty of tuition. Why shouldn't they get the courses they want?

Oh, I absolutely agree that tuition is much higher than it needs to be in universities across the world. The reason is also quite clear. Administrative staff has increased way too much, and universities also provide services that should in principle be provided by the government or larger society. The correct answer is to this is to cut that administrative staff and reduce tuition. Not to redirect money towards easy…

This assumes the purpose of a university is to prepare students for a job. But wasn't a university meant to teach and carry out science? Is it really a credentials provider mostly? Especially in the tech industry it seems the notion of having knowledge has gotten more important than just having credentials (though this could also just be a direct consequence of employers not trusting university credentials anymore)

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#114
post #3

> The MIT Pirate Certificate is for entertainment purposes only and does not give the recipient license to engage in piracy or any pirate activities. Jeez, what buzzkills.

If you were licensed wouldn’t you be a privateer anyway?

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#115

Not actually related to article, but the title made me think this... I feel like the piracy / p2p / scenegroup communities have been aging and being whittled down by brutal relentless lawsuits and lobbying from corps. I get the impression not many younger people are interested and are generally more content to accept the corporate slop they are given. This is a bad thing. However u feel about piracy, keeping the skil…

If it weren't for software pirates, countless old pieces of software (esp. DOS-era games) would be forever lost now. Society owes software pirates a huge debt of gratitude for keeping historical digital data archived. However, I feel your perception of the piracy/p2p communities might be dated. I think they took a bit of a nosedive a while back when Netflix reigned supreme, at least for movies, but due to the fragmen…

>the streaming services there haven't made the huge mistakes the movie/TV services have

I'm not sure it's so much mistakes of the streaming services as the fact that music has a near enough to universal for most people licensing scheme from a handful of major labels that the major services can offer a near-universal essentially interchangeable (other than UX and integration with other services) service to consumers.

Whereas the fragmented (and frequently changing) rights owners in the film/TV business have no equivalent. I'm honestly not sure of the impact on piracy though. A lot of us shrug our shoulders, see all the content that is at there with a few subscriptions, and just ignore all the stuff we can't trivially watch.

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#116

Not actually related to article, but the title made me think this... I feel like the piracy / p2p / scenegroup communities have been aging and being whittled down by brutal relentless lawsuits and lobbying from corps. I get the impression not many younger people are interested and are generally more content to accept the corporate slop they are given. This is a bad thing. However u feel about piracy, keeping the skil…

If it weren't for software pirates, countless old pieces of software (esp. DOS-era games) would be forever lost now. Society owes software pirates a huge debt of gratitude for keeping historical digital data archived. However, I feel your perception of the piracy/p2p communities might be dated. I think they took a bit of a nosedive a while back when Netflix reigned supreme, at least for movies, but due to the fragmen…

>Software piracy appears to be largely dead

Certainly not dead, but the multi decade long DRM arms race and the more insular nature of the scene recently means there isnt many new people joining. On the other hand, I'd say the groups that are already established are doing better in the last few years than they did before. Just to name a few recent breakthroughs:

- WIBU dongles getting fully emulated in software by R2R. Used in higher end software like Propellerhead Reason.

- The first scene proper of Office 365 by BTCR

- Denuvo is still getting cracked after all these years.

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#117
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It is a power enumerated in the Constitution of 1789” does not mean “It is a practice still relevant in the world of 2023”. The US hasn’t issued any Letters of Marque and Reprisal since 1815, and while it remains a Constitutional power of the US government that a couple Republican members of Congress keep trying to breathe active life into since 9/11, it seems well and truly dead in practice.

It does not need such letters anymore. The US got a better thing called "sanctions", which apparently allow US Navy to forcefully detain ships on the high seas and sell their stuff on the grounds of them being engaged in "illegal trade", despite the ship having nothing to do with the US.

ok - unless you are talking about fishing past ecological boundaries, or gangs of boats trading "silent running" to enter internationally protected waters to do fishing. In that case, as a human being, yes, stop them.

Tax revenue on another countries brand of cigarettes, sure, hands-off.. agree

Actual piracy with weapons? how about losing a gun battle with US Navy and going to jail, yes.

In other words "it depends" .. a lot

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#118
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn’t MIT dredge a lake on campus then?

Have you looked at a map of Boston/Cambridge? The Charles is practically a large dredged up lake on MIT campus, it just happens that MIT only occupies one side of the 'lake' lol

...and the rest of campus is some of the most valuable real estate in the world.

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#119
post #68

I bet $20 they are gonna remove the pistol requirement from this.

Why? Shooting is an Olympic sport, it is also very pirate-y. Archery is the odd one here. It is not part of the popular image of a pirate, and historically, I don't think they saw much use in the 1600s and after (so, not during the "golden age").

Same way the bipartisan safer communities act defunded archery and hunting programs in public high schools, it’s part of the plan to delegitimize all guns.

Re: MIT Pirate Certificate

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or executive orders. Where can you find congress agree to drone strike some dwelling in Afghanistan?

> Where can you find congress agree to drone strike some dwelling in Afghanistan? Congress generally doesn’t seek to separately and redundantly authorize specific attacks once it has generally authorized the President to use military force, whether it was the bill passed in 1941 stating “the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resourc…

Thank you, that's enlightening.
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