Yeah, and then a security vulnerability comes along and you get advertisements for roach motels slapped in your field of vision. In Hindi. Displayed for your enjoyment 24/7, even while you sleep or close your eyes.
Or we come up with a way to keep the... hmmm... 'plastic' nature of the childhood brain continuing through life.
Now that would be cool! Figure that in it's first four 4 years, a newborn manages to _simultaneously_ develop fine motor skills, not only learn a language but learn the very concept of language, develop a intuitive understanding of the physics of the universe, learn how to make use of the veritable deluge of information coming through their senses, and begin to develop human social skills. It's an impressive achievement, to say the least. Imagine if we could continue that same ability to learn into adulthood.
Long-term blindness (or deafness, regrown limbs, whatever) wouldn't be problem because an adult would be able to 'relearn' any lost sensation as if from scratch.
Out of curiosity, what happens if I just lie, either convincingly or blatantly?
I should make a mental list of apt names to respond with. Henry Thoreau comes to mind. Maybe Richard Starke (wrote the criminal-as-protagonist Parker novels, source for the movie Payback)?
Or I could just say my name is John Smith. Considering how many people with that name there are, wouldn't he have to believe it?
And most of them either didn't major in any field of biology or got their degrees from some bible-thumping diploma mill. So some nutters are unable to check their religion at the door. Their claims are as equally unsupported as yours.
Complete with standard creationist conspriacy theory! "All the scientists in the world are in league against us and the TRUTH! If only they'd accept our wild assumptions and total lack of evidence, they'd see that we're right!"
Puh-leeease. Evolution is not in question. Get that through your thick, medeival skull. You think it is because whackjobs like Hovind and Behe tells you it is and so much of your personality is tied up in the Bible being the foundation of the universe you couldn't bear it if was found to be bogus. Which it has been, repeatedly.
I have an invisible, heatless, noncorporeal dragon in my garage.
There is no conceivable test you can conduct which will confirm or deny the existence of my pet dragon, though you are welcome to try. If necessary, I will add traits and characteristics to my dragon on the fly that render your latest test meaningless. My claim that there is such a dragon, therefore, is non-falsifiable. It means that I can never know if I am in fact wrong.
Now, what's the difference between a dragon I cannot show to exist, and no dragon at all?
ID and Creationism both posit Zeus Pater himself intelligently manipulating the universe directly to create the world we see today. What conceivable experiment, even given unlimited technology, could you conduct to check to see if that was an incorrect explanation? Universe-traversing space ships, time machines, whole biospheres watched over for billions of years, none of it will do, since bible-thumpers will just claim it's an illusion created by the Q Continuum to test our faith.
So, what's the difference between a intelligent deity that actively and constantly breaks every rule we've ever found in the universe to hide it's own existsnce, and no deity at all?
Leaving aside the large leap from amino acids to a functioning cell
Typical creationist bullshit. You think there's only one step from amino acids to modern DNA. The only people even mentioning that ridiculous possibility are you guys. You got that? STOP TRYING TO DEBUNK THE STUPID VERSION OF ABIOGENESIS BECAUSE THE ONLY PEOPLE SPOUTING IT ARE DUMBFUCK BIBLETHUMPERS! If you run the actual numbers for amino acids -> polymers -> replicating polymers -> hypercycle -> protobiont -> archaic proto-bacterium, each stage is not only vastly more probable, it's downright _likely_!
the acids were swimming in a sea of chemicals incompatible with life.
So, just what are these chemicals that are so incompatible with life? There are species of bacteria that can survive, no _thrive_, on things that would kill any mammal, reptile, or insect in seconds. You act as if surviving in an ~300K nitrogen-oxygen environment with nearly pure water is the only way life can exist. News flash, dipshit, that oxygen atmosphere you like so much was originally the _waste_ product of early photosynthesizing organisms. The earth and the life on it hasn't always been like it is today. Stop trying to put modern organisms in an environment radically different from what they've adapted to and claim that it proves that earth hasn't changed one bit. You are only fooling yourself.
You've pointed to a bed of clay
Clay doesn't reproduce. Clay doesn't consume or compete for limited resources. It cannot, under any stretching of the term, be called a living thing. What the hell are you doing saying evolution, which categorically states in only works on things that propogate themselves, can't work because it doesn't work on something that just sits there? Nobody except creationists are suggesting that it would.
Say, how's about you post a reference for that? Because IIRC the only references to the shape of the globe in the NT refer to such things as "the four corners" and a mountaintop from which the whole thing can be seen, something not physically possible on a sphere.
You really are proving my point. An otherwise intelligent person who will swallow the most outlandish claims and entertain the most unlikely possibilities, all because it's got the word GOD attached to it.
Where did the universe come from? I don't know. There are a great many scientists actively trying to answer that question, but strangely, very few are willing to say "God did it" and leave it at that. The only people claiming to understand the universe are the ones who answer every question that requires effort with "It was god".
Oh, but you want a Prime Mover, some sort of underlying force that drives the universe? Ok, explain to me why it needs to have intelligence. Explain to me why it would give a flying fuck about me and what I think. Explain to me why it would be qualitatively any different from any of the other forces we recognize today. Gravity is a underlying force that wields great power in the universe, appears to be present everywhere, has no limits to its reach, performs a valuable service in keeping us alive (keeps the sun lit up, keeps the earth intact, keeps us and the atmosphere on the ground), was the first force to become recognizable as such in the very early universe, and is wholly unknown in terms of why it works. Shouldn't I worship gravity? It's got a helluva lot more going for it than anything you've offered.
Anyways, all of this is irrelevant to the topic at hand, Evolution, which has been shown more than a few times not to need members of the Q Continuum to come along and spice things up.
Now, please get this through your thick skull. I do not have faith. I do not believe in fairies, goblins, fire-breathing dragons named Pete, or any of the _thousands_ of deities guys like you have dreamed up over the past few millenia. I am as certain that this god character does not exist as you are that Santa Claus does not exist. But what am I talking about? You actually *do* believe that there's a magical being at the top of the world that watches everything you do, manages to be in many places at once, rewards good people and punishes bad ones, and keeps a small army of similarly magical creatures as helpers, even though there's a far more likely, rational, mundane, and above all, accurate explanation for how those presents got there. You want to play games with "Well, maybe it could happen", you go right ahead. You never know, maybe I *could* actually own a bridge in New York! But stop acting as if you have any sort of empirical or scientific basis for your beliefs. You believe in god because you want to, not because there's any reason to.
To assume that invisible pink unicorns don't exist just because their existence cannot be proven is flawed. Gee, that's fucking stupid.
No, see I don't *have* to prove anything doesn't exist. By default it doesn't exist until you can show otherwise. Do you believe in the aforementioned invisible pink unicorns? If so, ha! If not, why not? They haven't been proven not to exist, after all.
In any event, something can only be proven to not exist if the definition of the thing precludes it's existence. For instance, invisible pink unicorns can't exist because they cannot be both pink and invisible at the same time. QED. Of course, religions with deities prefer to define them as vaguely and with as many meaningless statements as possible. Crap like, "God is all around us", or "God is outside of time". Makes it rather hard to pin down the precise delusion. Fortunately, most of them have some crap about Big Daddy being both omniscient and omnipotent, which does the job on it's own since neither ability can exist in the physical universe. Quantum mechanics puts all kinds of limitations on what you can know and omnipotence is ruled out by "Can god create a rock so heavy he could not lift it".
Also useful is the source of the claim. Let's see, people who believe in god have also made a number of other _falsifiable_ claims about the real world, very nearly all of which were shot down. If everything they say about things we can test turn out to be bogus, why should I take their word on the even more outrageous stuff?
Oh please. I've read creationists' 'debunkings' of evolution. It's more like getting a lesson on logical fallacies, selective quotation, and deliberate mirepresentation of evidence. The whole improbability of molecular abiogenesis? Creationists like to point to the odds against a modern piece of DNA forming by chance, never mind the fact that the only people even discussing that possibility are creationists. When you run the numbers on a simple piece of self-replicating proto-protein, it turns out given an ocean-sized vat of amino acids, the formation of life is not only less improbable, it's downright likely!
Yes, a lot of brilliant people believe in god. The thing is, even briliant people seem to turn into complete morons when it comes to theology. Cynics, skeptics, wickedly deep and insightful people, people who are the tops in their professional fields, when you ask then about god they just turn it all off and say they believe in the whole mythology, no questions asked. It's *amazing* what indoctrination can do when you start it early enough. It's no coincidence that one's religion is more inheritable a trait than hair color. The vast majority of believers never question their faith, never apply the same rules of skepticism and requirements of proof that they do for everything else, they just take what they were brought up with and don't ever question it.
Are you not capable of reading? ingram just said, "humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor". Evolution didn't 'stop' for other primates, it made them into what they are today.
You are making the usual Fundie/Creationist mistake of assuming that human beings are the pinnacle of evolution, that the human form is perfect and is what every molecule of DNA strives to be. Uh uh. Chimps and gorillas and the rest are as we see them because that's what worked out best for their ancestors. Evolution heads blindly towards local optima. The human form is actually astoundingly grotesque. The only things we've got going for us are our overdeveloped frontal lobes, vocal cords, social organization, and hands. Beyond that, we are physically weak, poorly armored and possessing of no natural weaponry which is _not_ compensated for by a fast or large breeding cycle, have mediocre immune systems, abyssmal tissue regeneration, nonexistant protection from the elements, terrible skeletal structure for bipedal movement (our knees point the wrong way and a segmented spine is absolutely the worst thing to make a load-bearing vertical column out of), have lousy digestive systems for our omnivorous diet, and are atrociously sense-deficient compared to other animals (practically no sense of smell at all).
Easily solved. Just ask them if they think the admonishment against homosexuality in Leviticus ought to be followed. If they say yes, as fundies unceasingly do, then they clearly feel that the OT is still relevant and _then_ you can stone them.
The reason outspoken Christians are common as dirt is that the absolute affirmation of the existence of something which has not, cannot, and will not be shown to exist is easy to defend when one has no knowledge of anything at all and declares such a state to be a virtue. Just make up so much random crap that the people debunking it can't keep up.
Not necessarily. There are theoretical time travel methods that would allow you to travel into the past, but only to the point where time travel was invented in the first place. For instance, using a wormhole of which one aperature was sent on a relativistic trip. You can travel into the future where the ship has gone to, or you can travel back to where the ship was first launched, but no further.
How exactly would you know that? All the devices we might use to measure the rate of flow of time are themselves dependent on it. If, to external observer, the passage of time 'slowed' (meaningless phrase in this context) as it went on, we'd never notice, since our clocks and our very temporal perception would slow right along with it.
That's how I always think of it. WW1 was pretty much the same as all the other 19th century wars, there was just a lot more of it. WW2 was rather different, new, and scary. Full-scale attacks against civilian populations being among the nastier aspects, and practiced by both sides. Not that genocide is anything new, but usually it was done out of sheer apathy, or even boredom. But when it's done purposefully, knowingly, with full intent as a means of helping to win... ugh.
Actually, it doesn't need bipartisan support. The Republicans are quite capable of passing it even if every single Democrat nay-ed it.
That said, the DMCA passed nearly unanimously. Both sides seem to be equally bought or clueless when it comes to copyright and computers. If never have to vote Republicrat again, it'll be too soon.
Well, one could possibly get both worlds here. How about we say that real humans can get nontransferable copyrights until they die, but human or nonhuman entities can get _transferable_ ones for a fixed period.
So, a company could get their long copyrights... if they were willing to permanently invest the copyright into a single person who can tell them to smeg off if they so desire (contract law would have to recognize that the long-term copyrights are under absolute control of their owners and no contract can stipulate what they can do with it). New Line Cinema can hang onto the copyrights for the LotR trilogy for 14 years (or whatever), or Peter Jackson can keep it locked up in his safe for the rest of his days... or release it into public domain the day it's released, if he so desired.
One thing's for certain, this "every piece of trash put to paper, canvas, stone, film, or RAM is copyrighted" crap needs to stop. It's like allowing people to claim ownership of every individual molecule of oxygen in the atmosphere and start suing when others use what is 'rightfully theirs'. Total chaos! If it wasn't worth some small effort to register, then it's not worth getting a government-granted monopoly.
Private property law is legal codification of what is a fundamental principle of the physical universe. I.e., that a thing can only exist in one place at any given moment. Ownership can be protected with force, property law is the government wielding said force on your behalf.
Limited liability corporations and IP law are legal fictions created more or less out of thin air.
Where on earth (haha) are you getting this 2% growth rate? Population growth rates are nearly zero for most nations even remotely capable of space travel. Europe as a whole is barely at replacement levels and half of the US's growth comes from immigration. Even with the unrestrained levels in many 3rd world shitholes, it's only at 1.7% and falling.
So while your argument is mathematically correct, it's founded on a rather dubious assumption.
Such methods would probably resemble the effectiveness of communications protocols at maintaining data integrity. Biochemical CRCs and hashes and checksums and the like. Basically there'll never be a totally foolproof method, but it could be limited to statistical likelihoods orders of magnitude less than evolution has developed.
Remember, Ma Nature doesn't necessarily want perfect replication. To some degree, she _wants_ those lovely, potentially useful mutations, particularly in asexual organisms.
Except when the laws are too numerous to be known by anyone. Or too all-encompasing or poorly written to not be disobeyed. Or contradictory, such that it becomes impossible to obey one law without breaking another. All of these things and more have happened. Remember, premarital sex was illegal in half a dozen states until 2003. Do the millions of people who violated those laws count as criminals?
Again, for a study like this to be at all meaningful in the sense we are looking for, you have to take a standard set of 'crimes' and then count up those. Otherwise you throw the variable of 'what is a crime?' into the mix, and that's just bad science.
It also stems from a willingness to declare trivial acts "crimes" and villify and prosecute them far beyond anything sanity would deem reasonable. What is it, half of the USA's prison population is now there on drug charges? And probably half of remainder is there indirectly because of Prohibition II.
The report is misleading because it does not define 'crime'.
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Yeah, and then a security vulnerability comes along and you get advertisements for roach motels slapped in your field of vision. In Hindi. Displayed for your enjoyment 24/7, even while you sleep or close your eyes.
Or we come up with a way to keep the ... hmmm ... 'plastic' nature of the childhood brain continuing through life.
Now that would be cool! Figure that in it's first four 4 years, a newborn manages to _simultaneously_ develop fine motor skills, not only learn a language but learn the very concept of language, develop a intuitive understanding of the physics of the universe, learn how to make use of the veritable deluge of information coming through their senses, and begin to develop human social skills. It's an impressive achievement, to say the least. Imagine if we could continue that same ability to learn into adulthood.
Long-term blindness (or deafness, regrown limbs, whatever) wouldn't be problem because an adult would be able to 'relearn' any lost sensation as if from scratch.
Out of curiosity, what happens if I just lie, either convincingly or blatantly?
I should make a mental list of apt names to respond with. Henry Thoreau comes to mind. Maybe Richard Starke (wrote the criminal-as-protagonist Parker novels, source for the movie Payback)?
Or I could just say my name is John Smith. Considering how many people with that name there are, wouldn't he have to believe it?
And most of them either didn't major in any field of biology or got their degrees from some bible-thumping diploma mill. So some nutters are unable to check their religion at the door. Their claims are as equally unsupported as yours.
Complete with standard creationist conspriacy theory! "All the scientists in the world are in league against us and the TRUTH! If only they'd accept our wild assumptions and total lack of evidence, they'd see that we're right!"
Puh-leeease. Evolution is not in question. Get that through your thick, medeival skull. You think it is because whackjobs like Hovind and Behe tells you it is and so much of your personality is tied up in the Bible being the foundation of the universe you couldn't bear it if was found to be bogus. Which it has been, repeatedly.
I have an invisible, heatless, noncorporeal dragon in my garage.
There is no conceivable test you can conduct which will confirm or deny the existence of my pet dragon, though you are welcome to try. If necessary, I will add traits and characteristics to my dragon on the fly that render your latest test meaningless. My claim that there is such a dragon, therefore, is non-falsifiable. It means that I can never know if I am in fact wrong.
Now, what's the difference between a dragon I cannot show to exist, and no dragon at all?
ID and Creationism both posit Zeus Pater himself intelligently manipulating the universe directly to create the world we see today. What conceivable experiment, even given unlimited technology, could you conduct to check to see if that was an incorrect explanation? Universe-traversing space ships, time machines, whole biospheres watched over for billions of years, none of it will do, since bible-thumpers will just claim it's an illusion created by the Q Continuum to test our faith.
So, what's the difference between a intelligent deity that actively and constantly breaks every rule we've ever found in the universe to hide it's own existsnce, and no deity at all?
Leaving aside the large leap from amino acids to a functioning cell
Typical creationist bullshit. You think there's only one step from amino acids to modern DNA. The only people even mentioning that ridiculous possibility are you guys. You got that? STOP TRYING TO DEBUNK THE STUPID VERSION OF ABIOGENESIS BECAUSE THE ONLY PEOPLE SPOUTING IT ARE DUMBFUCK BIBLETHUMPERS! If you run the actual numbers for amino acids -> polymers -> replicating polymers -> hypercycle -> protobiont -> archaic proto-bacterium, each stage is not only vastly more probable, it's downright _likely_!
the acids were swimming in a sea of chemicals incompatible with life.
So, just what are these chemicals that are so incompatible with life? There are species of bacteria that can survive, no _thrive_, on things that would kill any mammal, reptile, or insect in seconds. You act as if surviving in an ~300K nitrogen-oxygen environment with nearly pure water is the only way life can exist. News flash, dipshit, that oxygen atmosphere you like so much was originally the _waste_ product of early photosynthesizing organisms. The earth and the life on it hasn't always been like it is today. Stop trying to put modern organisms in an environment radically different from what they've adapted to and claim that it proves that earth hasn't changed one bit. You are only fooling yourself.
You've pointed to a bed of clay
Clay doesn't reproduce. Clay doesn't consume or compete for limited resources. It cannot, under any stretching of the term, be called a living thing. What the hell are you doing saying evolution, which categorically states in only works on things that propogate themselves, can't work because it doesn't work on something that just sits there? Nobody except creationists are suggesting that it would.
Say, how's about you post a reference for that? Because IIRC the only references to the shape of the globe in the NT refer to such things as "the four corners" and a mountaintop from which the whole thing can be seen, something not physically possible on a sphere.
You really are proving my point. An otherwise intelligent person who will swallow the most outlandish claims and entertain the most unlikely possibilities, all because it's got the word GOD attached to it.
Where did the universe come from? I don't know. There are a great many scientists actively trying to answer that question, but strangely, very few are willing to say "God did it" and leave it at that. The only people claiming to understand the universe are the ones who answer every question that requires effort with "It was god".
Oh, but you want a Prime Mover, some sort of underlying force that drives the universe? Ok, explain to me why it needs to have intelligence. Explain to me why it would give a flying fuck about me and what I think. Explain to me why it would be qualitatively any different from any of the other forces we recognize today. Gravity is a underlying force that wields great power in the universe, appears to be present everywhere, has no limits to its reach, performs a valuable service in keeping us alive (keeps the sun lit up, keeps the earth intact, keeps us and the atmosphere on the ground), was the first force to become recognizable as such in the very early universe, and is wholly unknown in terms of why it works. Shouldn't I worship gravity? It's got a helluva lot more going for it than anything you've offered.
Anyways, all of this is irrelevant to the topic at hand, Evolution, which has been shown more than a few times not to need members of the Q Continuum to come along and spice things up.
Now, please get this through your thick skull. I do not have faith. I do not believe in fairies, goblins, fire-breathing dragons named Pete, or any of the _thousands_ of deities guys like you have dreamed up over the past few millenia. I am as certain that this god character does not exist as you are that Santa Claus does not exist. But what am I talking about? You actually *do* believe that there's a magical being at the top of the world that watches everything you do, manages to be in many places at once, rewards good people and punishes bad ones, and keeps a small army of similarly magical creatures as helpers, even though there's a far more likely, rational, mundane, and above all, accurate explanation for how those presents got there. You want to play games with "Well, maybe it could happen", you go right ahead. You never know, maybe I *could* actually own a bridge in New York! But stop acting as if you have any sort of empirical or scientific basis for your beliefs. You believe in god because you want to, not because there's any reason to.
To assume that invisible pink unicorns don't exist just because their existence cannot be proven is flawed. Gee, that's fucking stupid.
No, see I don't *have* to prove anything doesn't exist. By default it doesn't exist until you can show otherwise. Do you believe in the aforementioned invisible pink unicorns? If so, ha! If not, why not? They haven't been proven not to exist, after all.
In any event, something can only be proven to not exist if the definition of the thing precludes it's existence. For instance, invisible pink unicorns can't exist because they cannot be both pink and invisible at the same time. QED. Of course, religions with deities prefer to define them as vaguely and with as many meaningless statements as possible. Crap like, "God is all around us", or "God is outside of time". Makes it rather hard to pin down the precise delusion. Fortunately, most of them have some crap about Big Daddy being both omniscient and omnipotent, which does the job on it's own since neither ability can exist in the physical universe. Quantum mechanics puts all kinds of limitations on what you can know and omnipotence is ruled out by "Can god create a rock so heavy he could not lift it".
Also useful is the source of the claim. Let's see, people who believe in god have also made a number of other _falsifiable_ claims about the real world, very nearly all of which were shot down. If everything they say about things we can test turn out to be bogus, why should I take their word on the even more outrageous stuff?
Oh please. I've read creationists' 'debunkings' of evolution. It's more like getting a lesson on logical fallacies, selective quotation, and deliberate mirepresentation of evidence. The whole improbability of molecular abiogenesis? Creationists like to point to the odds against a modern piece of DNA forming by chance, never mind the fact that the only people even discussing that possibility are creationists. When you run the numbers on a simple piece of self-replicating proto-protein, it turns out given an ocean-sized vat of amino acids, the formation of life is not only less improbable, it's downright likely!
Yes, a lot of brilliant people believe in god. The thing is, even briliant people seem to turn into complete morons when it comes to theology. Cynics, skeptics, wickedly deep and insightful people, people who are the tops in their professional fields, when you ask then about god they just turn it all off and say they believe in the whole mythology, no questions asked. It's *amazing* what indoctrination can do when you start it early enough. It's no coincidence that one's religion is more inheritable a trait than hair color. The vast majority of believers never question their faith, never apply the same rules of skepticism and requirements of proof that they do for everything else, they just take what they were brought up with and don't ever question it.
Are you not capable of reading? ingram just said, "humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor". Evolution didn't 'stop' for other primates, it made them into what they are today.
You are making the usual Fundie/Creationist mistake of assuming that human beings are the pinnacle of evolution, that the human form is perfect and is what every molecule of DNA strives to be. Uh uh. Chimps and gorillas and the rest are as we see them because that's what worked out best for their ancestors. Evolution heads blindly towards local optima. The human form is actually astoundingly grotesque. The only things we've got going for us are our overdeveloped frontal lobes, vocal cords, social organization, and hands. Beyond that, we are physically weak, poorly armored and possessing of no natural weaponry which is _not_ compensated for by a fast or large breeding cycle, have mediocre immune systems, abyssmal tissue regeneration, nonexistant protection from the elements, terrible skeletal structure for bipedal movement (our knees point the wrong way and a segmented spine is absolutely the worst thing to make a load-bearing vertical column out of), have lousy digestive systems for our omnivorous diet, and are atrociously sense-deficient compared to other animals (practically no sense of smell at all).
Easily solved. Just ask them if they think the admonishment against homosexuality in Leviticus ought to be followed. If they say yes, as fundies unceasingly do, then they clearly feel that the OT is still relevant and _then_ you can stone them.
The reason outspoken Christians are common as dirt is that the absolute affirmation of the existence of something which has not, cannot, and will not be shown to exist is easy to defend when one has no knowledge of anything at all and declares such a state to be a virtue. Just make up so much random crap that the people debunking it can't keep up.
Not necessarily. There are theoretical time travel methods that would allow you to travel into the past, but only to the point where time travel was invented in the first place. For instance, using a wormhole of which one aperature was sent on a relativistic trip. You can travel into the future where the ship has gone to, or you can travel back to where the ship was first launched, but no further.
How exactly would you know that? All the devices we might use to measure the rate of flow of time are themselves dependent on it. If, to external observer, the passage of time 'slowed' (meaningless phrase in this context) as it went on, we'd never notice, since our clocks and our very temporal perception would slow right along with it.
Third millenium. The 1st was 1-1000 AD, the 2nd 1001-2000 AD.
That's how I always think of it. WW1 was pretty much the same as all the other 19th century wars, there was just a lot more of it. WW2 was rather different, new, and scary. Full-scale attacks against civilian populations being among the nastier aspects, and practiced by both sides. Not that genocide is anything new, but usually it was done out of sheer apathy, or even boredom. But when it's done purposefully, knowingly, with full intent as a means of helping to win... ugh.
Well that's no good. What if the MIN(X)/COUNT(X) is already less than one? Taking the square root will only increase it!
Actually, it doesn't need bipartisan support. The Republicans are quite capable of passing it even if every single Democrat nay-ed it.
That said, the DMCA passed nearly unanimously. Both sides seem to be equally bought or clueless when it comes to copyright and computers. If never have to vote Republicrat again, it'll be too soon.
Well, one could possibly get both worlds here. How about we say that real humans can get nontransferable copyrights until they die, but human or nonhuman entities can get _transferable_ ones for a fixed period.
... if they were willing to permanently invest the copyright into a single person who can tell them to smeg off if they so desire (contract law would have to recognize that the long-term copyrights are under absolute control of their owners and no contract can stipulate what they can do with it). New Line Cinema can hang onto the copyrights for the LotR trilogy for 14 years (or whatever), or Peter Jackson can keep it locked up in his safe for the rest of his days ... or release it into public domain the day it's released, if he so desired.
So, a company could get their long copyrights
One thing's for certain, this "every piece of trash put to paper, canvas, stone, film, or RAM is copyrighted" crap needs to stop. It's like allowing people to claim ownership of every individual molecule of oxygen in the atmosphere and start suing when others use what is 'rightfully theirs'. Total chaos! If it wasn't worth some small effort to register, then it's not worth getting a government-granted monopoly.
Private property law is legal codification of what is a fundamental principle of the physical universe. I.e., that a thing can only exist in one place at any given moment. Ownership can be protected with force, property law is the government wielding said force on your behalf.
Limited liability corporations and IP law are legal fictions created more or less out of thin air.
Where on earth (haha) are you getting this 2% growth rate? Population growth rates are nearly zero for most nations even remotely capable of space travel. Europe as a whole is barely at replacement levels and half of the US's growth comes from immigration. Even with the unrestrained levels in many 3rd world shitholes, it's only at 1.7% and falling.
So while your argument is mathematically correct, it's founded on a rather dubious assumption.
Such methods would probably resemble the effectiveness of communications protocols at maintaining data integrity. Biochemical CRCs and hashes and checksums and the like. Basically there'll never be a totally foolproof method, but it could be limited to statistical likelihoods orders of magnitude less than evolution has developed.
Remember, Ma Nature doesn't necessarily want perfect replication. To some degree, she _wants_ those lovely, potentially useful mutations, particularly in asexual organisms.
Except when the laws are too numerous to be known by anyone. Or too all-encompasing or poorly written to not be disobeyed. Or contradictory, such that it becomes impossible to obey one law without breaking another. All of these things and more have happened. Remember, premarital sex was illegal in half a dozen states until 2003. Do the millions of people who violated those laws count as criminals? Again, for a study like this to be at all meaningful in the sense we are looking for, you have to take a standard set of 'crimes' and then count up those. Otherwise you throw the variable of 'what is a crime?' into the mix, and that's just bad science.
It also stems from a willingness to declare trivial acts "crimes" and villify and prosecute them far beyond anything sanity would deem reasonable. What is it, half of the USA's prison population is now there on drug charges? And probably half of remainder is there indirectly because of Prohibition II. The report is misleading because it does not define 'crime'.
Which, coincidentally, more aptly describes the bullshit coming from the Vatican on the topic in question.