Some of the most profitable ventures this century have been objectively illegal, but when you know you won't go to prison for violating the law, why would you care to follow it?
human dissection (grave robbing)
translating the Bible into English
silk production outside of China (death penalty for exporting worm eggs)
rubber production in Asia (seeds smuggled out of Brazil)
the Underground Railroad
heliocentrism
AIDS treatment (see Dallas Buyers Club)
Needle exchange programs for IV drug users
Ridesharing/airbnb/napster (obvious ones)
SF gay marriage licenses (in defiance of CA law)
The context of this is the list of examples was of things done illegally for the first time - it lists these things as "also" in response to a claim that water was *first* chlorinated illegally.
While there were bans or a requirement for authorisation of translations of the Bible in certain times and places (mostly the 1300s to 1500s) the first translations of (parts of the) Bible into English had been done centuries before this, some as early at the 7th century. This makes them some of the oldest written works we know of in English at all. They were also done by the church.
> You can nitpick that "the church executing people for it" is not exactly the same as "illegal" but that's missing the point.
When did this happen? Tyndale was tried and executed by the secular authorities in a place where there were no laws against translating the Bible.
The earliest translations into English were done by the Church.
> The process of chlorinating water was first done illegally.
I tried to find a source on this but it doesn't seem to be true? The first chapter of this book describes the history of chlorination: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Chlorina... (which is a source Wikipedia cites) and it doesn't appear to mention anything about illegally chlorinating water. After looking in that book I asked ChatGPT to find a source for the claim, and it reported the claim was false. Chlorination was initially controversial but I can't find anything claiming it was illegal?
Thank you for replying, I appreciate it. I enjoyed learning more about this history. Making a citation invites the risk of being contradicted, and I respect that.
I do still disagree for the following reasons:
- Jersey City started chlorinating in 1908; Maidstone, England started chlorinating in 1897 and Lincoln, England started chlorinating in 1905. So Jersey City wasn't the first to chlorinate their water.
However, Jersey City seems to be the first deployment in the United States, so perhaps that is what you meant. If this were the only issue I would concede the point.
- This was a civil matter and not a criminal matter.
- The dispute wasn't whether chlorination was legal or acceptable but whether it was sufficient to deliver "pure and wholesome" water. The city wanted them to build a sewer. The utility didn't really dispute that there was a water quality issue but they built a chlorination plant instead of building a sewer (while the lawsuit was still ongoing).
- The water utility won. They demonstrated that chlorination was sufficient.
That depends on their negotiations, no? Fi has been fantastic for me in the years I've had it, far better than first party AT&T or Verizon for my use cases.
Presumably that's because Google was able to negotiate favorable terms from T-Mobile. I assume Apple would be even better at that.
It seems utterly absurd to me that anybody should be able to issue a copyright claim on a collection of colors and fonts. Copyrights are issued to logos and slogans, not design systems.
It seems utterly absurd to me we litigate the ownership of ideas or their expressions, but here we are.
The founder of Bikram Yoga, tried to copyright a sequence of yoga poses, even though similar sequences have existed for for thousands of years. Monster, the energy drink maker, went after business for using the word "monster" in totally unrelated contexts. Disney trademarked "Hakuna Matata" (a Swahili phrase roughly equivalent to "no worries") after using it in The Lion King, prohibiting African businesses from using a common idiom in their own damn language. Don't get me started on Happy Fucking Birthday.
These colours are their trademarks but I believe they don't own the colour in all domains.. probably just food? If you wanted to make a car company logo that colour you'd be ok?
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