I can't really read those diagrams (as I said, I'm not a biologist) besides being able to tell that the black and white bars indicate some sort of pattern that matches up between the chimp and human chromosomes, and that the pinched parts are centromeres. There are a lot of numbers on each side, and while I'm sure they mean something, I haven't a clue what. (I also don't know what you mean by "ended in 2"; there are a lot of 2's in that graphic.)
Go ahead and read the article and the follow-up comments; any explanation I give here won't be nearly as good, because I'm not a biologist--whatever I know, I got from there. If you still have questions, you might want to try the Wikipedia science desk; they've answered all sorts of questions for me, including whether or not I should risk eating some expired meatloaf. (Seriously!)
Wait, wait... you think poor people are poor because of all the taxes they pay? The problems started rolling in with the New Deal? You think rich people spread their money evenly around, but the government drops it in a pit under Cheyenne Mountain somewhere? Did you even know that the repeal of Prohibition was part of the New Deal? That the New Deal was supported by business interests during the Depression, as well as Ronald Reagan himself?
Bah. You know, there's a place where citizens roam free, unburdened by taxation or regulation or government of any sort. You can ever buy firearms without some gun-grabber looking over your shoulder. It's called Somalia, and I suggest you give it a try; you seem like you might like it there.
You're seriously asking me what harm an infinite-length copyright term could do? That's a remarkably low bar to set. We'll examine the effects of automatically-renewed copyright terms of long, but not infinite, length here in the United States.
(Bear in mind that to seriously argue for infinite terms, you'd have to show harm to the culture that wouldn't occur if terms were only five hundred years long, for instance. And "it enriches their descendants" doesn't count; we have copyright to promote science and the useful arts. Congress can hand me a stack of Benjies for no particular reason, and that'd be "good" for me, but that doesn't make it good public policy, and it absolutely doesn't promote science and the useful arts.)
If you'd like numbers, see Public Knowledge's statistics that of the 3 million registered copyrights from 1923 to 1943, only 2% of them were commercially used in 1998. I think tossing 98% of our culture from that period down the memory hole is a terrible thing to do. (The Lessig presentation has a bit about the role of a noncommercial life for many works--most of the books on Project Gutenberg aren't sold any more, but that doesn't mean they're not useful. Better to have them there than nowhere at all.)
An Orphan Works system--or requiring copyright registration again--would address most of these concerns. But ironclad copyright of a century or more, let alone eternal copyright, is destructive madness which serves to enrich a few corporations at the expense of our culture at large, by locking up (until they turn to dust--essentially throwing away) any works which aren't commercially exploited any longer.
So, yeah, there's my evidence; the losses are far from being simply theoretical. Your house analogy is ridiculous for reasons pointed out elsewhere in this thread; no one short of Jack Valenti thinks that intellectual property should be administered the same way as physical property. You can read some of the Founders' thoughts on that. (As I keep saying, copyright is for the benefit of the culture at large; it rewards creators as an incentive to this end. It is, for this reason, a convenient abstraction, similar to physical property in name only.)
(Also, your distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" isn't the right one; you're thinking of creative and non-creative works. See Feist v. Rural; it's not your efforts that are copyrighted, but your creativity, once fixed in a tan
It's only peripherally relevant, but here are some guys shooting I Am Legend in Columbus Circle. The guys herding people away from where they were setting up shooting were pretty polite, and didn't seem to care that I was taking pictures of them.
The bit about The Bean is pretty odd, but when you think about it, you can't photograph currently-copyrighted paintings and such in a museum and use them for commercial purposes. The thing that surprises me is that the city bought the work, but the artist retains the copyright on it, which seems like an incredibly strange deal. Chicago really struck a pretty bum deal.
If you spend a year, funding yourself, paying your rent, bills, etc, doing maths research and develop a fabulous new theorum - that theorum *belongs to you*. If someone else wants to use it, they pay for it - which is to say, they are contributing to the cost that was needed to develop it.
So what? If I spend a year living like a hermit so that I can figure pi to a million places and publish it as a book, copyright law gives me no protection simply because it was hard to do so. (See Feist v. Rural.) If you run off with my lovingly-constructed digits and publish it yourself, I'm left high and dry, but copyright law is silent on this matter--because copyright isn't for your benefit. I didn't make a creative work which added to the culture, so I get nothing. No matter how much I whine about how hard I worked, copyright simply doesn't extend to the information I compiled.
Here, I'll say it again. Copyright isn't there to benefit you. It's there to provide an incentive for creativity, which benefits society as a whole. The government has no interest in extending an eternal gravy train to you and all of your descendants, no matter how much you wheedle and cajole us about how hard you work. Copyright's function begins and ends with securing sufficient incentive to you to enrich our culture with delicious works; no more and no less.
The case I referred to is US case law (not even Supreme Court case law), on Wikipedia here; I have no idea what the law is for Australian works.
Hey, do you guys refer to December as being "summertime" there, or does "summer" still mean June-July-August but mean cold and snowy? I'd always wondered that.
You're not a libertarian. Your vaunted right to go kick down the door of anyone who used one of your ideas is a state-provided monopoly based on no natural law. Ideas spread like fire; the State puts restrictions on how they do so to extract greater public utility.
A real libertarian view of intellectual property would be that the State has no business telling you what to say or not to say, and if you kick down my door because I'm singing a song you wrote, you're initiating force against me and I'm morally obligated to shoot you in the face.
The State does not merely secure intellectual-property rights; it creates them. If you want the State to guarantee you and your descendants a cushy life forever, say so. But don't pretend you're being some kind of rugged, manly individualist when you do.
It's not the place of copyright to prevent people from being dicks. Once a work is in the public domain, it's in the public domain. Just like anyone can do a magnificently wanky remake of La Boheme in which Mimi comes back to life at the end and enjoy eternal, grating popularity among high school theater geeks, or anyone can use "O Fortuna" for every fucking movie trailer ever, if someone is going to rape your childhood, don't look to copyright to help.
I should also point out that copyright even as it stands is no protection against commercial abuse. Consider The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie. (The book itself is pretty stunning, and purposely draws extensively on the public domain.) Or I, Robot, or the upcoming adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "The Golden Man", called Next.
Ah, I remember when the school library got ARTstor; I was disappointed that to access the archive, you had to explicitly give up your rights to do what you wanted with the public-domain artwork. I had a librarian insist to me that I could not scan the actual physical books of public-domain art (despite my quoting of Bridgeman v. Corel) because the publishers had gone to considerable length to make the books. But I've never seen anyone, at any point, claiming that they actually owned the copyright on original artwork which had previously been in the public domain simply because they bought the physical item itself.
Despite their attempts at discouraging me, I've gotten some pretty nice pictures out of recently-published art books, which have been featured prominently, even saying where they came from, but I haven't been contacted by anyone about them.
Just try taking photos in an art gallery in front of a security guard if you don't believe me...
I went to the Art Institute in Chicago and didn't get so much as a raised eyebrow by anyone for any photos I took. If I'd used a flash, they would likely have complained, but I took close to a hundred pictures there without getting any complaints from security. Where did you get hassled?
Yes, you're right, but you're not responding to the point the GP made. If anyone can copy, perform and sell a song that you just wrote, that takes away your incentive to write the song in the first place. The whole point is that copyright provides a limited-term monopoly to prevent against exactly the situation you describe. Note that the GP said that anyone can do what they will with the work "after n years".
Copyright terms of length zero lend themselves to abuses which will disincentivize creative work, and thus impoverish the culture. Copyright terms of length infinity lend themselves to abuses which will lock up creative works forever, and thus impoverish the culture. The point, as it has always been, is balance.
Your point holds absolutely, but those would be patents, not copyrights. There actually are expired patents on the lightbulb, the bra, the zipper, long underwear, and plenty of other everyday items invented since the 19th century; I suppose the OP wants us to pay licensing fees for those as well.
Wait, I see, you're only concerned with the market effects on the original creator. Look, if it makes you feel better, you can mail a check to Sophocles every time you read Oedipus Rex, to Shakespeare every time you read Twelfth Night or watch She's All That, and to Aesop every time you read a fable. But please do explain why I'm morally required to do the same.
I should also like to point out that nobody here is arguing for the abolishment of copyright. Copyright was abolished for a time in France, and the result was utter higgly-piggly, publishers going out of business and authors moving to another country. What the people here are arguing for is a limit to copyright terms. Unless you're ready to make philosophy students mail their drachmas to long-dead Aristotle, you don't actually think copyright should last forever. At that point, we're just arguing over terms. So stop pretending that your fellow Slashdotters want to abolish copyright. They don't. Copyright encourages artists, enriches culture, and provides the protections against exploitation that the free software ecology depends on. When abused, it creates a stagnant culture, destroys history by making orphan works rot away when no one knows or can know who owns the rights to them, and cripples technology by making it bow to corrupt interests such as the RIAA.
I'm not sure what you're asking for. I showed you evidence that two chimp chromosomes were tacked together to make one human chromosome. I pointed out the mechanism by which a reduction in chromosome count occurs, and that it actually occurs with surprising frequency. (Though, and I'm reading between the lines of the article here, so I may be very wrong, the mutation is usually not passed on because two people with the same mutation don't usually breed, and viable offspring between a mutant and a non-mutant won't carry it.) Also, the mutation isn't a split, as you put it, but rather a fusion of two chromosomes.
The probabilities you're asking for are in the the article I linked to, as well as in the parent post. Are you sure that you're actually reading? I don't understand what you're asking for that I didn't provide, and that wasn't covered in the linked discussion. If there's something you don't understand, the Wikipedia Reference Desk is usually a good place to start.
people, through the State, passed a law saying they could have copies for free - I've just been robbed blind.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. The State doesn't take away a natural right to intellectual property; the State explicity invents a limited-time right in order to provide an incentive to the creative artist. Without the State's intervention, they can make copies to their heart's content. It's only with the intervention of the State that any intellectual property rights appear at all.
Don't pretend the right to intellectual property is the same as the right to physical property; it's not, and it's an important difference.
Yawn. Don't you ever get tired of being wrong? If you want the rich to remain rich and the poor to go fuck themselves, just say so. But don't dress it up in this dishonest crap about helping the poor people.
Well, yes. Yes, copyright does revert to the public domain after a period of time. Says so in the Constitution, and with good reason. If culture can't build on what came before, it's going to be a mightily controlled, impoverished culture. (Lawrence Lessig explains here.)
You're equating intellectual property with actual property, which is a common but unfortunate mistake, encouraged by the dishonest lobbyists we're talking about. See, there's nothing inherently property-ish about knowledge. If I teach you a song, I don't stop knowing it. If I give you my fire, I can still keep my own. Intellectual property is a virtual sort of property, invented specifically to encourage people to create by giving them a government-created monopoly for a limited period of time. There is no natural right to intellectual property; the government is not taking anything away. It is giving the artist a limited-time monopoly, not for the benefit of the artist, but for the benefit of the culture at large. (Really, it's in the Constitution.)
In fact, it's much like patents, which don't last nearly as long as copyrights. In exchange for publicizing the details of your invention, you get a short-term, government-sponsored monopoly on it. Are you saying that the light bulb, the bra, the syringe, the hammer, the bikini, the internal combustion engine, long underwear and a method of making potash would not be part of common cultural knowledge, and we should have to pay the descendants of the inventors who would have every right to not let us manufacture light bulbs, bras, etc.? What, exactly, is the benefit of having our culture's know-how locked up and controlled in that manner?
The fact remains, despite his protestations, that people do in fact continue to work, to produce and so on. If he's really that pissy about it, he can always move to Galt's Gulch with his homies and ride Midas Mulligan's magic railroad 'till the end of time. But he won't, because he doesn't really believe that wealth redistribution entirely removes any incentive to work; he's just bitching. Also, he's completely blind to any form of coercion which doesn't say "the State" on it. Mmm, libertarians.
You seem to have gotten somewhat bogged down in definitions of exactly what the scientific method entails. I think this is a losing strategy, because it's frankly a bit complicated, it's counterintuitive that you can never really be absolutely certain of anything, and epistomology is boring.
You might want to say that common descent is accepted to the same level of confidence as, say, universal gravitation (not "things fall down", but rather, "the force that makes the planets orbit the sun is the same as that which makes an apple fall"), or the germ theory of disease, or special relativity, or plate tectonics. If your creationist is claiming that we can't really know evolution is true, he's right, but then, we can't really know any of those things as well; they're just the best theory we have right now.
Also, a good source you may be interested in is talk.origins's Index to Creationist Claims, which has explanations about some of your creationist's points. (See CB901 "macroevolution has never been observed", and CB902 "macroevolution is distinct from microevolution", for starters.)
Chromosome count in humans is 2n=46; count in our fellow great apes (gorilla, chimp, bonobo) is 2n=48. Here's a picture. You can see how the human chromosome 2 looks suspiciously like the chimp chromosome 2p and 2q tacked together. It doesn't show it there, but remnants of the telomeres that were previously at the top of 2q and the bottom of 2p are seen in the modern human chromosome 2; there's also the remnants of a centromere further down where the one on 2q used to be. In short, it looks exactly as you'd expect two chromosomes tacked together to look.
In addition, PZ Myers has a pretty fascinating account of how chromosome counts change over time, by a mechanism called Robersonian translocation, an instance of which is described above. One in 900 humans has one of these, and (from the Wikipedia):
People with Robertsonian translocations have only 45 chromosomes in each of their cells, yet all essential genetic material is present, and they appear normal. Their children, however, may either be normal and carry the fusion chromosome (depending which chromosome is represented in the gamete), or they may inherit a missing or extra long arm of an acrocentric chromosome.
I used to wonder about this, too, and was quite pleased when the explanation was this interesting.
So: (a) chromosome number can change without any change in the actual complement of genetic material carried around. (b) It happens all the time.
I think you missed the sarcasm. I was taking a commonly-held belief here in the States ("life begins at conception, because that's when you first have a genetically unique organism") and taking it to its hilarious logical conclusion. The idea is that if you truly believe that--and the "emergency-contraception is murder!" folks do--you also believe some pretty wacky things.
I'm just sick of hearing criticism and hatred of the current administration interpreted as hate for the nation as a whole. It's a technique I've seen used to deflect criticism of the bozos in charge by moving the focus off of their failings. It is, as it always was, irrelevant.
I made some assumptions based on your use of that argument; sorry if I bit your head off. I sometimes get on a bit of a roll.
In theory, the decomposing shit in the tank is gravity-fed out through your yard, where it makes the grass grow high and mighty. Of course, if you flush things like q-tips and tampon applicators, it'll plug up the tank, and someone will have to go in there and unplug it, discovering a fascinating smell along the way.
The standard response to your assertion is that embryos are genetically unique, and that's when they become people, endowed with immortal souls and whatnot.
So, are identical twins one person? Which one gets the soul? Does it alternate? Do they each get half a soul? What about chimeras--do they have two souls? Do they get to vote twice?
Now, you might be thinking, that's ridiculous! But if you're going to start accepting criteria like sapience or a fully-formed nervous system, then you're back onto the slippery materialist slope and you'll be sucking down delicious baby smoothies within the week. None of that! Like begins at conception, twins share a soul and chimeras have two. If you disagree, you eat babies.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't really read those diagrams (as I said, I'm not a biologist) besides being able to tell that the black and white bars indicate some sort of pattern that matches up between the chimp and human chromosomes, and that the pinched parts are centromeres. There are a lot of numbers on each side, and while I'm sure they mean something, I haven't a clue what. (I also don't know what you mean by "ended in 2"; there are a lot of 2's in that graphic.)
Go ahead and read the article and the follow-up comments; any explanation I give here won't be nearly as good, because I'm not a biologist--whatever I know, I got from there. If you still have questions, you might want to try the Wikipedia science desk; they've answered all sorts of questions for me, including whether or not I should risk eating some expired meatloaf. (Seriously!)
Wait, wait... you think poor people are poor because of all the taxes they pay? The problems started rolling in with the New Deal? You think rich people spread their money evenly around, but the government drops it in a pit under Cheyenne Mountain somewhere? Did you even know that the repeal of Prohibition was part of the New Deal? That the New Deal was supported by business interests during the Depression, as well as Ronald Reagan himself?
Bah. You know, there's a place where citizens roam free, unburdened by taxation or regulation or government of any sort. You can ever buy firearms without some gun-grabber looking over your shoulder. It's called Somalia, and I suggest you give it a try; you seem like you might like it there.
You're seriously asking me what harm an infinite-length copyright term could do? That's a remarkably low bar to set. We'll examine the effects of automatically-renewed copyright terms of long, but not infinite, length here in the United States.
(Bear in mind that to seriously argue for infinite terms, you'd have to show harm to the culture that wouldn't occur if terms were only five hundred years long, for instance. And "it enriches their descendants" doesn't count; we have copyright to promote science and the useful arts. Congress can hand me a stack of Benjies for no particular reason, and that'd be "good" for me, but that doesn't make it good public policy, and it absolutely doesn't promote science and the useful arts.)
If you'd like an example of how current culture always makes use of the past, and how that past has been taken out of the hands of creators, there's an excellent presentation by Lawrence Lessig.
If you'd like numbers, see Public Knowledge's statistics that of the 3 million registered copyrights from 1923 to 1943, only 2% of them were commercially used in 1998. I think tossing 98% of our culture from that period down the memory hole is a terrible thing to do. (The Lessig presentation has a bit about the role of a noncommercial life for many works--most of the books on Project Gutenberg aren't sold any more, but that doesn't mean they're not useful. Better to have them there than nowhere at all.)
If you'd like anecdotes, you can start with Save The Music's overview, then read anecdotes from researchers who had to change or abandon projects because there was no way to clear rights for orphan works, archivists and documentarians who can't use materials from companies that went out of business many years ago, or old folks who can't get their wedding photographs repaired if their kid tears them, or the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America--hardly a bunch of Napster-licking college students--collecting anecdotes where the early pulp heritage of SF can't be reproduced or even preserved because early magazines folded, and no one knows who owns the copyright.
An Orphan Works system--or requiring copyright registration again--would address most of these concerns. But ironclad copyright of a century or more, let alone eternal copyright, is destructive madness which serves to enrich a few corporations at the expense of our culture at large, by locking up (until they turn to dust--essentially throwing away) any works which aren't commercially exploited any longer.
So, yeah, there's my evidence; the losses are far from being simply theoretical. Your house analogy is ridiculous for reasons pointed out elsewhere in this thread; no one short of Jack Valenti thinks that intellectual property should be administered the same way as physical property. You can read some of the Founders' thoughts on that. (As I keep saying, copyright is for the benefit of the culture at large; it rewards creators as an incentive to this end. It is, for this reason, a convenient abstraction, similar to physical property in name only.)
(Also, your distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" isn't the right one; you're thinking of creative and non-creative works. See Feist v. Rural; it's not your efforts that are copyrighted, but your creativity, once fixed in a tan
It's only peripherally relevant, but here are some guys shooting I Am Legend in Columbus Circle. The guys herding people away from where they were setting up shooting were pretty polite, and didn't seem to care that I was taking pictures of them.
The bit about The Bean is pretty odd, but when you think about it, you can't photograph currently-copyrighted paintings and such in a museum and use them for commercial purposes. The thing that surprises me is that the city bought the work, but the artist retains the copyright on it, which seems like an incredibly strange deal. Chicago really struck a pretty bum deal.
Here, I'll say it again. Copyright isn't there to benefit you. It's there to provide an incentive for creativity, which benefits society as a whole. The government has no interest in extending an eternal gravy train to you and all of your descendants, no matter how much you wheedle and cajole us about how hard you work. Copyright's function begins and ends with securing sufficient incentive to you to enrich our culture with delicious works; no more and no less.
The case I referred to is US case law (not even Supreme Court case law), on Wikipedia here; I have no idea what the law is for Australian works.
Hey, do you guys refer to December as being "summertime" there, or does "summer" still mean June-July-August but mean cold and snowy? I'd always wondered that.
You're not a libertarian. Your vaunted right to go kick down the door of anyone who used one of your ideas is a state-provided monopoly based on no natural law. Ideas spread like fire; the State puts restrictions on how they do so to extract greater public utility.
A real libertarian view of intellectual property would be that the State has no business telling you what to say or not to say, and if you kick down my door because I'm singing a song you wrote, you're initiating force against me and I'm morally obligated to shoot you in the face.
The State does not merely secure intellectual-property rights; it creates them. If you want the State to guarantee you and your descendants a cushy life forever, say so. But don't pretend you're being some kind of rugged, manly individualist when you do.
It's not the place of copyright to prevent people from being dicks. Once a work is in the public domain, it's in the public domain. Just like anyone can do a magnificently wanky remake of La Boheme in which Mimi comes back to life at the end and enjoy eternal, grating popularity among high school theater geeks, or anyone can use "O Fortuna" for every fucking movie trailer ever, if someone is going to rape your childhood, don't look to copyright to help.
I should also point out that copyright even as it stands is no protection against commercial abuse. Consider The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie. (The book itself is pretty stunning, and purposely draws extensively on the public domain.) Or I, Robot, or the upcoming adaptation of Philip K. Dick's "The Golden Man", called Next.
Despite their attempts at discouraging me, I've gotten some pretty nice pictures out of recently-published art books, which have been featured prominently, even saying where they came from, but I haven't been contacted by anyone about them.
I went to the Art Institute in Chicago and didn't get so much as a raised eyebrow by anyone for any photos I took. If I'd used a flash, they would likely have complained, but I took close to a hundred pictures there without getting any complaints from security. Where did you get hassled?
Yes, you're right, but you're not responding to the point the GP made. If anyone can copy, perform and sell a song that you just wrote, that takes away your incentive to write the song in the first place. The whole point is that copyright provides a limited-term monopoly to prevent against exactly the situation you describe. Note that the GP said that anyone can do what they will with the work "after n years".
Copyright terms of length zero lend themselves to abuses which will disincentivize creative work, and thus impoverish the culture. Copyright terms of length infinity lend themselves to abuses which will lock up creative works forever, and thus impoverish the culture. The point, as it has always been, is balance.
Your point holds absolutely, but those would be patents, not copyrights. There actually are expired patents on the lightbulb, the bra, the zipper, long underwear, and plenty of other everyday items invented since the 19th century; I suppose the OP wants us to pay licensing fees for those as well.
Wait, I see, you're only concerned with the market effects on the original creator. Look, if it makes you feel better, you can mail a check to Sophocles every time you read Oedipus Rex, to Shakespeare every time you read Twelfth Night or watch She's All That, and to Aesop every time you read a fable. But please do explain why I'm morally required to do the same.
I should also like to point out that nobody here is arguing for the abolishment of copyright. Copyright was abolished for a time in France, and the result was utter higgly-piggly, publishers going out of business and authors moving to another country. What the people here are arguing for is a limit to copyright terms. Unless you're ready to make philosophy students mail their drachmas to long-dead Aristotle, you don't actually think copyright should last forever. At that point, we're just arguing over terms. So stop pretending that your fellow Slashdotters want to abolish copyright. They don't. Copyright encourages artists, enriches culture, and provides the protections against exploitation that the free software ecology depends on. When abused, it creates a stagnant culture, destroys history by making orphan works rot away when no one knows or can know who owns the rights to them, and cripples technology by making it bow to corrupt interests such as the RIAA.
I'm not sure what you're asking for. I showed you evidence that two chimp chromosomes were tacked together to make one human chromosome. I pointed out the mechanism by which a reduction in chromosome count occurs, and that it actually occurs with surprising frequency. (Though, and I'm reading between the lines of the article here, so I may be very wrong, the mutation is usually not passed on because two people with the same mutation don't usually breed, and viable offspring between a mutant and a non-mutant won't carry it.) Also, the mutation isn't a split, as you put it, but rather a fusion of two chromosomes.
The probabilities you're asking for are in the the article I linked to, as well as in the parent post. Are you sure that you're actually reading? I don't understand what you're asking for that I didn't provide, and that wasn't covered in the linked discussion. If there's something you don't understand, the Wikipedia Reference Desk is usually a good place to start.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. The State doesn't take away a natural right to intellectual property; the State explicity invents a limited-time right in order to provide an incentive to the creative artist. Without the State's intervention, they can make copies to their heart's content. It's only with the intervention of the State that any intellectual property rights appear at all.
Don't pretend the right to intellectual property is the same as the right to physical property; it's not, and it's an important difference.
Yawn. Don't you ever get tired of being wrong? If you want the rich to remain rich and the poor to go fuck themselves, just say so. But don't dress it up in this dishonest crap about helping the poor people.
Well, yes. Yes, copyright does revert to the public domain after a period of time. Says so in the Constitution, and with good reason. If culture can't build on what came before, it's going to be a mightily controlled, impoverished culture. (Lawrence Lessig explains here.)
You're equating intellectual property with actual property, which is a common but unfortunate mistake, encouraged by the dishonest lobbyists we're talking about. See, there's nothing inherently property-ish about knowledge. If I teach you a song, I don't stop knowing it. If I give you my fire, I can still keep my own. Intellectual property is a virtual sort of property, invented specifically to encourage people to create by giving them a government-created monopoly for a limited period of time. There is no natural right to intellectual property; the government is not taking anything away. It is giving the artist a limited-time monopoly, not for the benefit of the artist, but for the benefit of the culture at large. (Really, it's in the Constitution.)
In fact, it's much like patents, which don't last nearly as long as copyrights. In exchange for publicizing the details of your invention, you get a short-term, government-sponsored monopoly on it. Are you saying that the light bulb, the bra, the syringe, the hammer, the bikini, the internal combustion engine, long underwear and a method of making potash would not be part of common cultural knowledge, and we should have to pay the descendants of the inventors who would have every right to not let us manufacture light bulbs, bras, etc.? What, exactly, is the benefit of having our culture's know-how locked up and controlled in that manner?
The fact remains, despite his protestations, that people do in fact continue to work, to produce and so on. If he's really that pissy about it, he can always move to Galt's Gulch with his homies and ride Midas Mulligan's magic railroad 'till the end of time. But he won't, because he doesn't really believe that wealth redistribution entirely removes any incentive to work; he's just bitching. Also, he's completely blind to any form of coercion which doesn't say "the State" on it. Mmm, libertarians.
You seem to have gotten somewhat bogged down in definitions of exactly what the scientific method entails. I think this is a losing strategy, because it's frankly a bit complicated, it's counterintuitive that you can never really be absolutely certain of anything, and epistomology is boring.
You might want to say that common descent is accepted to the same level of confidence as, say, universal gravitation (not "things fall down", but rather, "the force that makes the planets orbit the sun is the same as that which makes an apple fall"), or the germ theory of disease, or special relativity, or plate tectonics. If your creationist is claiming that we can't really know evolution is true, he's right, but then, we can't really know any of those things as well; they're just the best theory we have right now.
Also, a good source you may be interested in is talk.origins's Index to Creationist Claims, which has explanations about some of your creationist's points. (See CB901 "macroevolution has never been observed", and CB902 "macroevolution is distinct from microevolution", for starters.)
In addition, PZ Myers has a pretty fascinating account of how chromosome counts change over time, by a mechanism called Robersonian translocation, an instance of which is described above. One in 900 humans has one of these, and (from the Wikipedia):
I used to wonder about this, too, and was quite pleased when the explanation was this interesting.
So: (a) chromosome number can change without any change in the actual complement of genetic material carried around. (b) It happens all the time.
Happy to help!
I think you missed the sarcasm. I was taking a commonly-held belief here in the States ("life begins at conception, because that's when you first have a genetically unique organism") and taking it to its hilarious logical conclusion. The idea is that if you truly believe that--and the "emergency-contraception is murder!" folks do--you also believe some pretty wacky things.
I'm just sick of hearing criticism and hatred of the current administration interpreted as hate for the nation as a whole. It's a technique I've seen used to deflect criticism of the bozos in charge by moving the focus off of their failings. It is, as it always was, irrelevant.
I made some assumptions based on your use of that argument; sorry if I bit your head off. I sometimes get on a bit of a roll.
In theory, the decomposing shit in the tank is gravity-fed out through your yard, where it makes the grass grow high and mighty. Of course, if you flush things like q-tips and tampon applicators, it'll plug up the tank, and someone will have to go in there and unplug it, discovering a fascinating smell along the way.
The standard response to your assertion is that embryos are genetically unique, and that's when they become people, endowed with immortal souls and whatnot.
So, are identical twins one person? Which one gets the soul? Does it alternate? Do they each get half a soul? What about chimeras--do they have two souls? Do they get to vote twice?
Now, you might be thinking, that's ridiculous! But if you're going to start accepting criteria like sapience or a fully-formed nervous system, then you're back onto the slippery materialist slope and you'll be sucking down delicious baby smoothies within the week. None of that! Like begins at conception, twins share a soul and chimeras have two. If you disagree, you eat babies.
According to the DOE, 2001 energy use was 13,290 billion kWh. Average cost of residential electricity was roughly ten cents per kWh. So the world electric bill was $1.329 trillion, making a lot of assumptions.