Getting robots there is very important, but it is also nice that humans get to go. May be one day all of the heavy-duty space construction will be done in the asteroid belt, where you don't have to climb out of the gravity hole to go anywhere, unless it's to a different star, and even then it's a milder climb than from the Earth's orbit. Without making necessary first steps, humans cannot hope to leave this planet and expand into space. I just can't get enough of ISS: it looks like something out of science fiction, but it's totally real.
If you can't patent it, you are much more likely to hold on to the idea and never tell anyone about it.
The history, both recent and not so much, shows that just the opposite is true. As soon as one patents something truly novel and irreplaceable, one freezes the idea and sits on it for 40 years, all the while not letting anyone else to improve on it. Why would a patent holder do anything else? With a monopoly on something like a steam engine or a life-saving drug, one is set for life without a need to innovate any more, and one MUST prevent other people innovating as well, on pain of having to compete with a superior product. This is the story of Watt's engine (him and Boulton basically set back the innovation by 40 years by suing everyone in sight), and of many a modern drug.
Aside from narrowly conceived examples where the state is low-tech and a given patent law improves the inflow of inventors and craftsmen from abroad, the public does not benefit from any kind of patent. The monopolies on the best ideas are just a tax on everyone besides the patent holders, and they do absolutely nothing good in the Internet society, where the rate of innovation is capped only by our ability to find and comprehend thousands of great new ideas arising naturally every day. This is true for software most of all, as most professional programmers know. But it is also true for other products, even as expensive-to-develop as pharmaceuticals. One glance at the costs of marketing drugs in US should be enough to convince everyone that the research would be a lot cheaper if we simply paid for it in advance, from taxes; as a bonus, the competition in manufacturing will fierce and the life-saving drugs will be available to everyone in the freaking world at the same low price. Holding on to the patents is very expensive and in most cases immoral.
Hahahahahaha, hahahaha... [Hold on, I need a glass of water...] Hahahaha... Seriously though, the answer is "money".
It's a basic competitive market, with your normal supply-demand laws.
This could hardly be more wrong. The market is awash with government-granted monopolies. So a big pharma company with wads of cash can buy a start-up that developed a miracle drug, patent it, and then deliberately murder (albeit indirectly) thousands of people in the US and millions of people worldwide by simply refusing to allow anyone else to produce and sell the same drug at cost. Normal supply-demand laws my ass.
constantly meddling with and attempting to control market forces that it and it's members are incapable of understanding or wanting to understand.
Are you referring to the bank bailouts? Because the government understood too well what it was doing that time: it interfered with the market with a clear intention of taking more money from the poor and helping the largest corporations, and it accomplished just that. The banks can go on scamming people, and their execs are bathing in money. If anything, the US government needs to be more independent from the business interest and more mindful of the public concerns, and that requires a different political process. I believe that a free market is good for the economy, and the only way to keep the market free is by squashing monopolies, and you cannot squash these monopolies if they are the ones who get you elected. The entire election process should be paid for from taxes, and then you may see the government interfering with the economy in a way that does not shaft 95% of the constituency.
No one in the right mind will actually defend an argument that the government should not interfere with the economy. This would mean that we are making a mistake by allowing the government to interfere with our road construction and maintenance, water supply, electric grid, food and drug safety, communication infrastructure, mail delivery, emergency response, national security, environmental protection... You name it. In many other developed countries the government is also regulating health care and insurance, and it seems to be really working out for them, with better outcomes than in US, and for only a half of the price.
Ayn Rand was a fool. Anyone who believes that she understood anything about the economy is not far off.
Witness the Rodney King beatings; By taking the issue public, a massive riot ensued.
Exactly. And your solution, again, is what? To pass a law that (1) will be powerless to prevent videos from being shot and made public (2) will set free the most corrupt and awful cops in the face of public belief that they are guilty of terrible crimes. A good solution would be to make noninvasive recording of public places legal, and that way cops will think twice before abusing their powers in the broad daylight.
So what is your suggestion? Fold over and let them pass another unenforceable law? Because it is already unenforceable, and with technology going where it does, it will be a total joke in some 10 years from now. Everyone will be wearing a camera attached to a general purpose computer, which is attached to the Internet. What is this law gonna do besides generating the public contempt? If you make these recordings inadmissible in court, it will be only a matter of time before someone records a cop committing a first-degree murder, and courts setting the cop free, which will make everyone LOATH the cops and the system that supports them. I don't believe that system will be functional at all.
Why would a for-profit pharma company ever develop a cure for anything? They are totally set selling you the AIDS relief drugs for the rest of your life. If they make a cure, then AIDS will simply go away and they will loose that entire market.
Polygamy laws won't do much change to the sex distribution. Rich people already have enough money and protection under the law to buy wombs, so you can rest assured that those who want to do it are already doing it. They can simply get young girls knocked up and then pay generous child support. I bet they have a lot of takers.
Just look around you. Everybody is sleeping and having kids with everybody else. The fidelity part of the marriage deal was a total joke since the very moment the law was created. Governors fly to Argentina to run in the forest with pixies.
As long as women are educated and have the same rights as men, they have the capacity to support themselves economically, which opens an opportunity for them to choose other things than money. Things like fame, power, social connections, health, looks, body, smarts, sense of humor, artistic ability - each is coveted by all sorts of people. There are plenty of desirable traits, and they will be chosen over money if a woman is confident that she already has enough to raise a child. However, and very unfortunately for this audience, speaking Klingon is not one of these traits.
We all know that people are free to congregate and exchange information on the Internet, and they cannot stop that. But they can stop cheap drugs from being shipped to a poor country and use patents as an excuse.
Yup. A funny man with crowd-pleasing magic tricks. It was a popular occupation at the time: Acts mention the others going around and casting out demons, and Jesus himself is heard asking "And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?" He is competing directly what Pharisees' sons:)
I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion.
It is difficult to get a straight answer out of anyone, because a church won't tell you, and people outside of a church simply don't care.
But it's pretty clear (to me, at least) what is going on. First of all, the threat is perceived by particular churches first and by religious people later, and only because their church teaches them so. The perception of the threat is most acute in the most powerful organizations, such as major sects in the Abrahamic tradition. This is because they derive their authority to determine ethics mainly from the authority of their Scriptures, and this creates a huge problem: the Scriptures are total trash, as far as ethical standards go, and have been for hundreds of years. For example, using OT or NT as a basis for your moral teaching is almost as retarded as using them for predicting solar eclipses. The books were written 2000 ago in a society we now barely understand, in dialects that were dead for nearly as long now, addressed to specific communities spread all over the ancient world, penned by people of greatly varying skill and learning [*] (who were writing in different places and at different times), and then copied over and over and over again by hand, all the time introducing modifications and meaning-changing errors. This makes for an absolutely tremendous historical source, and some of the books, when translated well, are jewels of mythological fiction, but man, does it SUCK as a manual for life in the modern society.
Evolution is a poster child of the scientific approach and the critical thinking. Evolutionary theory allows us to understand our place on this Earth in a way that is just as awesome and mind-boggling as any creation myth, and also useful for making accurate predictions. Set next to the Darwin's Origin, the Bible is exposed, just by virtue of the stark contrast, as a loose collection of somewhat related fictional stories and records of the ancient law. Seeing it that way, who in the right mind would trust it to teach them anything but history?
And without their precious text to tell them what is good and what is bad, who are they going to cite? The pope? No, the big players, the one who make the most money and have the most power, stand and fall together with their texts. If the Bible judged irrelevant, it will be instantly replaced by a more recent and almost certainly more sensible tradition. But then anyone can teach it, and their authority will be an appeal to the common sense and the facts of life. And so the power hierarchy will crumble. This is how Jesus was able to create a wave: by denouncing [**] a religious law that became increasingly incompatible with basic facts of life in Jewish and Hellenic societies.
[*] I don't want to hear any "true because inspired by God" crap. Says who? Oh, the text itself?...
[**] No, he did not come "to fulfill" it. He just said that. Trust me. If a guy is breaking the law left and right, just to spite the observers, then he didn't actually come "to fulfill" it. It's a joke, laugh.
Some of these things, like the nature of the afterlife, are clearly within the realm of the groundless speculation.
Here, fixed. One does not need to be a theologian to make up stuff, one just has to make up stuff and make it stick to other people's minds. A fiction writer (Hubbard), a poet (Muhammad), or a stand-up comedian (Jesus) will almost certainly do a much better job.
the purpose of law (and government) is to create a successful society
If this is not a major goal, then one day your society may find itself at the very end of the pecking order in what now is a world-wide playground. If your country gets into a war and looses badly, or buckles under the economical pressure, or runs out of a vital natural resource, then all of your social welfare proves to be completely useless. You cannot pick up your check if you are dead.
I have to disagree. We are not here to serve 'society', 'society' is here to serve us.
Well, then, we have a huge problem, because the society is a gigantic, super-intelligent hive-like organism. We are like gigantic ants. Your country dwarfs both your intelligence and your power, when considered as a single living entity. If you consider how much smarter an anthill is than a single ant, you will get a fair impression of how much your adversary is ahead of you on every level. The society wants to watch out for its own survival, and the reason is the one I gave above: its own adversaries are not mere individuals, but other societies, and it knows that it cannot rely on just the good will of people like you and me when shit really hits the fan.
We are individuals who agree to participate in 'society' because it serves our own interests.
Society cannot help but feel shortchanged when it hears people say that.. It does, after all, afford to us a lifestyle that any other mammal would literally kill for. And how fair and ethical is it to declare that something that intelligent should be your slave? I think we need to befriend the society and recognize that the right distribution of power is some kind of consensus which makes the society sufficiently strong, autonomous, mentally agile, while keeping all (or as many as possible) individuals reasonably happy.
Holding them financially responsible is an obvious point, but you can't seize assets of the employees (4th Amendment) nor hold them personally responsible unless you can show criminal negligence or that they broke some other law. That is entirely possible for some.
It looks like firms adapted to this challenge and we may indeed need new laws. It may well be impossible to collect enough evidence to convict any single executive because the responsibility was purposefully spread as thin as possible. One guy does buying, another guy does ordering, yet another one does inspection, yet another one is responsible for personnel training, and they all have supervisors of various degree. Any fuckup, no matter how bad, can be ultimately blamed on a failure to get a message through the system, so that no single person can be held responsible.
And I think that holding someone responsible is an obvious point. I mean, it all happened in the broad daylight. They drilled a hole and when it came to the most basic and most predictable kind of contingency, they had no solution for it. The company has to pay, and I just cannot think of a good way to make it pay other than to make the top management pay. This is the only way to make other companies to behave more intelligently. If no one person can be shown criminally negligible, then entire board should pay, each out of their own pocket. If there is no law to make them do that, there should be.
Yeah, and if you compare it to the size of the solar system, it's not even a blip.
How about just the Gulf of Mexico? I get
37'854'117.8 m^3 / 1'600'000'000'000 m^2 = 0.0237 mm
I know little about oil film, but according to this table, it is very, very thick. The highest value in the table is
0.002 mm.
Let's do the world ocean, I am not so sure about your math. I get
37'854'117.8 m^3 / ( 3.61 * 10^14 m^2 ) = 0.000105 mm, which is very close to your value. It is in the table already, and it is at the point where you can see it with an unaided eye.
Does it still seem to you that 10 billion gallons is too small for the ocean? It looks to me like it's just about enough to cover the entire planet with a visible oil film.
Oh my, no. God is better than free. You can wrap God in many other complementary services, package it neatly,
and sell it to suckers all over the world in retail or wholesale. God is almost as good as a money tree.
Suppose that the only way I want to make money is by selling my shit. Suppose further that there is a legal loophole that allows me to sue people for picking up my shit without paying me. Imagine also that I produce so much shit that, for all practical purposes, it's everywhere and there is enough for everyone. What is my alternative? According to your logic, I cannot continue crap in peace until I use that legal loophole and destroy the livelihoods of people who stumbled into my shit.
The real alternative, of course, would involve not applying punitive statutory damages in a civil case.
Slashdot Mirror
lets face it, we ALL wanted to be as cool as Kirk
What's is the point? Just to be eclipsed by Jean-Luc Picard?
Getting robots there is very important, but it is also nice that humans get to go. May be one day all of the heavy-duty space construction will be done in the asteroid belt, where you don't have to climb out of the gravity hole to go anywhere, unless it's to a different star, and even then it's a milder climb than from the Earth's orbit. Without making necessary first steps, humans cannot hope to leave this planet and expand into space. I just can't get enough of ISS: it looks like something out of science fiction, but it's totally real.
> "google.com#TD(class=leftborder)"
/> /> /> /> /> /> /> />
This did not work for me. I really, really hate the sidebar. I never use it. I don't see a point.
Hey, here's my search page:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 plus MathML 2.0//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Math/DTD/mathml2/xhtml-math11-f.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>search</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"
<meta name="resource-type" content="document"
<meta name="description" content="search page"
<meta name="keywords" content="search"
<meta name="distribution" content="global"
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"
</head>
<body>
<form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">
<p style="text-align: center; margin-top: 13em">
<input type="text" name="q" size="42" maxlength="255" value=""
<input type="submit" value="search"
</p>
</form>
</body>
</html>
Sounds like you need a bigger screen.
Wow, great link.
If you can't patent it, you are much more likely to hold on to the idea and never tell anyone about it.
The history, both recent and not so much, shows that just the opposite is true. As soon as one patents something truly novel and irreplaceable, one freezes the idea and sits on it for 40 years, all the while not letting anyone else to improve on it. Why would a patent holder do anything else? With a monopoly on something like a steam engine or a life-saving drug, one is set for life without a need to innovate any more, and one MUST prevent other people innovating as well, on pain of having to compete with a superior product. This is the story of Watt's engine (him and Boulton basically set back the innovation by 40 years by suing everyone in sight), and of many a modern drug.
Aside from narrowly conceived examples where the state is low-tech and a given patent law improves the inflow of inventors and craftsmen from abroad, the public does not benefit from any kind of patent. The monopolies on the best ideas are just a tax on everyone besides the patent holders, and they do absolutely nothing good in the Internet society, where the rate of innovation is capped only by our ability to find and comprehend thousands of great new ideas arising naturally every day. This is true for software most of all, as most professional programmers know. But it is also true for other products, even as expensive-to-develop as pharmaceuticals. One glance at the costs of marketing drugs in US should be enough to convince everyone that the research would be a lot cheaper if we simply paid for it in advance, from taxes; as a bonus, the competition in manufacturing will fierce and the life-saving drugs will be available to everyone in the freaking world at the same low price. Holding on to the patents is very expensive and in most cases immoral.
May be they are using this law in order to get access to all of the collected data.
They are the greatest heroes of them all.
I grew up in Moscow, and I agree. This thing reminds me of the Diablo II chat gem.
why the heck would they string you along for?
Hahahahahaha, hahahaha... [Hold on, I need a glass of water...] Hahahaha... Seriously though, the answer is "money".
It's a basic competitive market, with your normal supply-demand laws.
This could hardly be more wrong. The market is awash with government-granted monopolies. So a big pharma company with wads of cash can buy a start-up that developed a miracle drug, patent it, and then deliberately murder (albeit indirectly) thousands of people in the US and millions of people worldwide by simply refusing to allow anyone else to produce and sell the same drug at cost. Normal supply-demand laws my ass.
This is not insightful, this is pure tripe.
constantly meddling with and attempting to control market forces that it and it's members are incapable of understanding or wanting to understand.
Are you referring to the bank bailouts? Because the government understood too well what it was doing that time: it interfered with the market with a clear intention of taking more money from the poor and helping the largest corporations, and it accomplished just that. The banks can go on scamming people, and their execs are bathing in money. If anything, the US government needs to be more independent from the business interest and more mindful of the public concerns, and that requires a different political process. I believe that a free market is good for the economy, and the only way to keep the market free is by squashing monopolies, and you cannot squash these monopolies if they are the ones who get you elected. The entire election process should be paid for from taxes, and then you may see the government interfering with the economy in a way that does not shaft 95% of the constituency.
No one in the right mind will actually defend an argument that the government should not interfere with the economy. This would mean that we are making a mistake by allowing the government to interfere with our road construction and maintenance, water supply, electric grid, food and drug safety, communication infrastructure, mail delivery, emergency response, national security, environmental protection... You name it. In many other developed countries the government is also regulating health care and insurance, and it seems to be really working out for them, with better outcomes than in US, and for only a half of the price.
Ayn Rand was a fool. Anyone who believes that she understood anything about the economy is not far off.
Witness the Rodney King beatings; By taking the issue public, a massive riot ensued.
Exactly. And your solution, again, is what? To pass a law that (1) will be powerless to prevent videos from being shot and made public (2) will set free the most corrupt and awful cops in the face of public belief that they are guilty of terrible crimes. A good solution would be to make noninvasive recording of public places legal, and that way cops will think twice before abusing their powers in the broad daylight.
So what is your suggestion? Fold over and let them pass another unenforceable law? Because it is already unenforceable, and with technology going where it does, it will be a total joke in some 10 years from now. Everyone will be wearing a camera attached to a general purpose computer, which is attached to the Internet. What is this law gonna do besides generating the public contempt? If you make these recordings inadmissible in court, it will be only a matter of time before someone records a cop committing a first-degree murder, and courts setting the cop free, which will make everyone LOATH the cops and the system that supports them. I don't believe that system will be functional at all.
Why would a for-profit pharma company ever develop a cure for anything? They are totally set selling you the AIDS relief drugs for the rest of your life. If they make a cure, then AIDS will simply go away and they will loose that entire market.
Polygamy laws won't do much change to the sex distribution. Rich people already have enough money and protection under the law to buy wombs, so you can rest assured that those who want to do it are already doing it. They can simply get young girls knocked up and then pay generous child support. I bet they have a lot of takers.
Just look around you. Everybody is sleeping and having kids with everybody else. The fidelity part of the marriage deal was a total joke since the very moment the law was created. Governors fly to Argentina to run in the forest with pixies.
As long as women are educated and have the same rights as men, they have the capacity to support themselves economically, which opens an opportunity for them to choose other things than money. Things like fame, power, social connections, health, looks, body, smarts, sense of humor, artistic ability - each is coveted by all sorts of people. There are plenty of desirable traits, and they will be chosen over money if a woman is confident that she already has enough to raise a child. However, and very unfortunately for this audience, speaking Klingon is not one of these traits.
We all know that people are free to congregate and exchange information on the Internet, and they cannot stop that. But they can stop cheap drugs from being shipped to a poor country and use patents as an excuse.
Yup. A funny man with crowd-pleasing magic tricks. It was a popular occupation at the time: Acts mention the others going around and casting out demons, and Jesus himself is heard asking "And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?" He is competing directly what Pharisees' sons :)
I never understood why evolution is such a threat to religion.
It is difficult to get a straight answer out of anyone, because a church won't tell you, and people outside of a church simply don't care.
But it's pretty clear (to me, at least) what is going on. First of all, the threat is perceived by particular churches first and by religious people later, and only because their church teaches them so. The perception of the threat is most acute in the most powerful organizations, such as major sects in the Abrahamic tradition. This is because they derive their authority to determine ethics mainly from the authority of their Scriptures, and this creates a huge problem: the Scriptures are total trash, as far as ethical standards go, and have been for hundreds of years. For example, using OT or NT as a basis for your moral teaching is almost as retarded as using them for predicting solar eclipses. The books were written 2000 ago in a society we now barely understand, in dialects that were dead for nearly as long now, addressed to specific communities spread all over the ancient world, penned by people of greatly varying skill and learning [*] (who were writing in different places and at different times), and then copied over and over and over again by hand, all the time introducing modifications and meaning-changing errors. This makes for an absolutely tremendous historical source, and some of the books, when translated well, are jewels of mythological fiction, but man, does it SUCK as a manual for life in the modern society.
Evolution is a poster child of the scientific approach and the critical thinking. Evolutionary theory allows us to understand our place on this Earth in a way that is just as awesome and mind-boggling as any creation myth, and also useful for making accurate predictions. Set next to the Darwin's Origin, the Bible is exposed, just by virtue of the stark contrast, as a loose collection of somewhat related fictional stories and records of the ancient law. Seeing it that way, who in the right mind would trust it to teach them anything but history?
And without their precious text to tell them what is good and what is bad, who are they going to cite? The pope? No, the big players, the one who make the most money and have the most power, stand and fall together with their texts. If the Bible judged irrelevant, it will be instantly replaced by a more recent and almost certainly more sensible tradition. But then anyone can teach it, and their authority will be an appeal to the common sense and the facts of life. And so the power hierarchy will crumble. This is how Jesus was able to create a wave: by denouncing [**] a religious law that became increasingly incompatible with basic facts of life in Jewish and Hellenic societies.
[*] I don't want to hear any "true because inspired by God" crap. Says who? Oh, the text itself? ...
[**] No, he did not come "to fulfill" it. He just said that. Trust me. If a guy is breaking the law left and right, just to spite the observers, then he didn't actually come "to fulfill" it. It's a joke, laugh.
Some of these things, like the nature of the afterlife, are clearly within the realm of the groundless speculation.
Here, fixed. One does not need to be a theologian to make up stuff, one just has to make up stuff and make it stick to other people's minds. A fiction writer (Hubbard), a poet (Muhammad), or a stand-up comedian (Jesus) will almost certainly do a much better job.
I kind of agree with GP.
the purpose of law (and government) is to create a successful society
If this is not a major goal, then one day your society may find itself at the very end of the pecking order in what now is a world-wide playground. If your country gets into a war and looses badly, or buckles under the economical pressure, or runs out of a vital natural resource, then all of your social welfare proves to be completely useless. You cannot pick up your check if you are dead.
I have to disagree. We are not here to serve 'society', 'society' is here to serve us.
Well, then, we have a huge problem, because the society is a gigantic, super-intelligent hive-like organism. We are like gigantic ants. Your country dwarfs both your intelligence and your power, when considered as a single living entity. If you consider how much smarter an anthill is than a single ant, you will get a fair impression of how much your adversary is ahead of you on every level. The society wants to watch out for its own survival, and the reason is the one I gave above: its own adversaries are not mere individuals, but other societies, and it knows that it cannot rely on just the good will of people like you and me when shit really hits the fan.
We are individuals who agree to participate in 'society' because it serves our own interests.
Society cannot help but feel shortchanged when it hears people say that.. It does, after all, afford to us a lifestyle that any other mammal would literally kill for. And how fair and ethical is it to declare that something that intelligent should be your slave? I think we need to befriend the society and recognize that the right distribution of power is some kind of consensus which makes the society sufficiently strong, autonomous, mentally agile, while keeping all (or as many as possible) individuals reasonably happy.
Holding them financially responsible is an obvious point, but you can't seize assets of the employees (4th Amendment) nor hold them personally responsible unless you can show criminal negligence or that they broke some other law. That is entirely possible for some.
It looks like firms adapted to this challenge and we may indeed need new laws. It may well be impossible to collect enough evidence to convict any single executive because the responsibility was purposefully spread as thin as possible. One guy does buying, another guy does ordering, yet another one does inspection, yet another one is responsible for personnel training, and they all have supervisors of various degree. Any fuckup, no matter how bad, can be ultimately blamed on a failure to get a message through the system, so that no single person can be held responsible.
And I think that holding someone responsible is an obvious point. I mean, it all happened in the broad daylight. They drilled a hole and when it came to the most basic and most predictable kind of contingency, they had no solution for it. The company has to pay, and I just cannot think of a good way to make it pay other than to make the top management pay. This is the only way to make other companies to behave more intelligently. If no one person can be shown criminally negligible, then entire board should pay, each out of their own pocket. If there is no law to make them do that, there should be.
Yeah, and if you compare it to the size of the solar system, it's not even a blip.
How about just the Gulf of Mexico? I get
37'854'117.8 m^3 / 1'600'000'000'000 m^2 = 0.0237 mm
I know little about oil film, but according to this table, it is very, very thick. The highest value in the table is 0.002 mm.
Let's do the world ocean, I am not so sure about your math. I get
37'854'117.8 m^3 / ( 3.61 * 10^14 m^2 ) = 0.000105 mm, which is very close to your value. It is in the table already, and it is at the point where you can see it with an unaided eye.
Does it still seem to you that 10 billion gallons is too small for the ocean? It looks to me like it's just about enough to cover the entire planet with a visible oil film.
God is free.
Oh my, no. God is better than free. You can wrap God in many other complementary services, package it neatly, and sell it to suckers all over the world in retail or wholesale. God is almost as good as a money tree.
Suppose that the only way I want to make money is by selling my shit. Suppose further that there is a legal loophole that allows me to sue people for picking up my shit without paying me. Imagine also that I produce so much shit that, for all practical purposes, it's everywhere and there is enough for everyone. What is my alternative? According to your logic, I cannot continue crap in peace until I use that legal loophole and destroy the livelihoods of people who stumbled into my shit.
The real alternative, of course, would involve not applying punitive statutory damages in a civil case.