No CLI needed. Right-click on desktop, select menu item "Create launcher". Enter a "Command:" of "gksu nautilus" and your preferred annotation and icon. Click "Ok". Done. You now have a desktop icon to browse the file system as root and any invoked program will be root also. Keep in mind that this is a security risk.
Ubuntu should've had this icon in the administration menu or panel years ago but they seem to have this strange idea that making system operations obtuse, as distinct from making sure naive users don't do something stupid, is a good thing. Not making icons is a quick and dirty way to block naive user mistakes but they don't seem to appreciate that the ill-will created and wasted time far outweighs any advantage.
I am under no obligation to post anything you write on my site. none whatsoever.
Wrong. You are if you say or imply you will. Promise to in other words.
By providing a means of posting without warning that the post may deliberately going into a black hole, in fact taking measures to hide that fact from them, you are engaged in fraud. If you explicitly warn a "crank" up front that you've decided to no longer accept their posts then no problem. Just because it's easier for you to engage in fraud rather than be up front about it is irrelevant. You don't even need to give a reason though most polite people would.
The only theft of time is YOU stealing it from YOURSELF it trying to cause grief.
Nope, the theft of time and effort you steal from the person you regard as a crank is not justified by the so-called crank's actions unless the crank has engaged in deception also. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Once I see bad behaviour, I can do anything I want with MY SITE.
Yes, as long as you don't act in a deceptive manner worse than the crank.
I hope you can get that through your head.
It's not about the site, it's about the promises you've made on that site.
As far as "lower ethically" please posit the ethical hierarchy you are working in such that someone out to cause trouble has a higher ethical ranking than someone trying to provide a service to the community.
The "lower ethically" is engaging in deception, not in blocking somebody from using your site. Try to keep the difference clear. Just because you think you're providing a service and you think they're "causing trouble" is irrelevant.
Regards.
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
The "information" is from a highly biased source attempting to emotionally manipulate, not inform. Like 99.9% of all unsolicited advertising. It's more likely to be harmful than not.
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
99.9% of real life unsolicited advertising, not the fiction you're spouting, doesn't. It's just spam to get mindshare. In other words repetition to crowd out alternatives.
Very little real life unsolicited advertising informs, it's all just emotional manipulation and has little redeeming value to anybody except the spammer, sorry "advertiser".
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
But, it doesn't stop you from solving the same problem in a different way.
Come back to us when you can define "different" objectively. Until then you're just handwaving.
Two shades of the color orange could be the same or different. The PTO can't even objectively decide that. Whether two ideas are the same or different is a far more complex and infinitely dimensional concept.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
I think you can appreciate that just because innovation *can* happen without patents is not necessarily evidence that they should be abolished.
The patent system is a massive interference in the citizen's business. The onus is on proponents to show that that interference is fully justified at every stage and in every technical area. The onus is not on anybody else to prove a negative.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
Yeah, that's why video codecs et. al., simple algorithms with no specific hardware involved and that can be done by hand, aren't patentable. Not.
You know that. Why are you dishonestly trying to pretend otherwise? People like you really need to start thinking deeply about what a patent is for a change instead of parroting legal dogma.
The patent system is based on very shaky, superficial and inconsistent foundations. The PTO doesn't even have a objective basis for what a distinct idea is, the fundamental basis for a patent system. Without that, the entire patent system is just handwaving for profit.
---
Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
And your general implication that "all code is equally vulnerable" is nonsense.
A nonsense typically promulgated by unethical companies (such as M$, anti-virus companies, even PHP promoters to some extent) trying to cover up the fact that some programming systems are more vulnerable, and more likely to encourage, allow or cause security errors, than others. Any programming system that assumes programmers or users are superhuman and never make mistakes, security or otherwise, is a bad one.
In other words some companies attempt to design and implement security in depth. Other companies just bullshit.
---
Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
Should they be strung up along with the big fish? I don't know.
Like the lawyers say "the responsibility is joint and several". Both are needed for this petty theft to occur.
Being poor may be a mitigating circumstance but it is not an excuse, unless they really are living in third world conditions and it really is a choice between starving and stealing.
But otherwise, you're mostly punishing decent folks trying to make a living.
It's not "a living". Every minute of their "work" is stealing a minute of another person's time. They "work" a 40 hour week? They've stolen 40 hours of other people's time. And the time of our life is the most important thing we have. And that's ignoring the scams they're trying to sell. Almost universally massive ripoffs.
These are not decent people, just petty thieves typically trying to rationalize theft. Being paid doesn't justify theft.
Ah, I see, you missed my point in your need to deride Windows and GUI users.
No, I didn't miss your bias and your need to deride other products by claiming Windows is somehow superior.
So I shall restate it more simply: Microsoft and Windows offer enterprise-level management features unavailable in other products.
No they don't. They provide a GUI that some marketers claim is superior. People on the ground know better.
No, it's not just that it's harder, or that it requires the command-line to get things done.
It's not harder, it's just different. You're just demonstrating your bias. If what you said was true then systems of similar size based on Windows would require less admin's than systems based on alternatives. If anything, it's the reverse, despite M$' incessant propaganda on the subject.
It's that Microsoft provides capabilities that are plain and simply unavailable in competitor's products. Period.
Bullshit. Only for a marketer's or the willfully ignorant's definition of capabilities. Microsoft provides a GUI and a needlessly complex protection system that allows some limited and predictable classes of software management to be done a little more easily. Good for them. In any real life large scale scenario however, where heterogeneous systems and unusual requirements are the norm and not the exception, M$' network management capabilities are limited.
Any experienced enterprise admin can and does implement and use any and all of the so-called M$-only management capabilities and more. All the usual stuff: protections, security, single signon, separation of responsibility, resource sharing, updates etc. The fact that many M$ admin's are so ignorant that they can't cope with alternative approaches says more about M$, the admin's and bigotry/willful ignorance than anything else.
e.g. group policies, since that's the mantra that M$ marketing usually goes on about. Simple use cases are replaced with Unix groups. More complex use cases are replaced with parallel shell scripts, a powerful tool that is far more flexible than group policies. Amongst other things they can do complex conditional execution, procedure based authentication, work on multiple platforms, do error recovery and verification and do in-place updates impossible for M$ due to M$' borked file sharing semantics. In addition if you really wanted to you could use unix ACL's also, largely equivalent to NTFS security, however most admin's don't bother.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Are you saying that adblock and a do-not-call list could solve all this terrorist shit? Why didn't you speak up before?
I wish. When adblock can deal with TV ads, radio ads, newspaper unclassified ads, magazine unclassified ads, billboards, on-vehicle advertising, junk paper mail, junk phone calls, junk phone messaging, junk instant messaging, unsolicited email, astroturfing, pre-movie advertising, product placement, unskippable pre-DVD advertising, unskippable in-software advertising, in-bar "product ambassadors", advertorials, fake stories, "sponsorship", law manipulation for profit, untruth and deception in advertising, fake scientific journals, targeting of the vulnerable such as children and addiction-prone, deception of the innocent (e.g. privacy invading social networking web sites) and so on then I for one one would be very happy.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
Self publishing and small labels are still a road to obscurity
No. The average return self-publishing is probably significantly greater than spending your life trying get to signed to an RIAA company. An internet web site has global reach, unlike radio stations. And even after signing the odds are pretty grim.
To be a "serious" pop star is a million to one event with a world population of billions and a few hundred "serious" pop stars. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning.
And that's ignoring RIAA company creativeaccounting that drastically lowers the financial return to the artist.
The odds of becoming big are tiny whatever road an artist decides to take.
It removes the possibility of an inventor ever making any money on his invention, so the incentive to invent evaporates.
You are being intellectually dishonest. Read my recent posts.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Fanatics like you need to get out more. I've addressed all your points in previous posts. The fact that you are in denial about that just shows how intellectually impoverished you are.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Why is that necessarily a problem? That's how most business' already operate, that is use best practice (in other words copy their most successful competitors) to efficiently produce good products. We want everybody to use best available practices.
but bring along alot of collateral damage. Perhaps there are better ideas?
Very much so. All "IP" law is just a product of the mind and there are an infinite number of possible alternatives.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
But even if that's true, what if 99% are junk and 1% are legitimate, at least legitimate enough a pro-patent court in Texas will rule in their favor?
What you're ignoring is that VP8 was designed specifically with patents in mind. Depending on how diligent they were in doing this and how much due diligence Google did when purchasing it, it could easily turn out that MPEG-LA has nothing relevant and is just bullshitting. We won't know until more facts emerge.
As is already obvious MPEG-LA will of course be FUD'ing like crazy to try to retain their monopoly however Google is not stupid and I wouldn't count them out just yet.
---
Nothing lasts forever
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
·
· Score: 0, Troll
When even the x264 developers comment that it's very similar to H.264 you can bet that some of the 1000+ patents on H.264 apply.
Most of those "1000+ patents" are likely to be junk. The rest? We'll see.
---
Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
H.264 and VP8 Compared
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I hear people make this sort of claim all the time on Slashdot, and I have yet to see evidence for it.
The onus is on you to show that this massive interference in the lives of billions of people is justified. The handwaving and wishful thinking that patent proponents usually engage in is not even remotely sufficient.
Creating a new object or technology costs a lot of money.
No it doesn't. Almost all technology development occurs in small increments that is adequately rewarded by first mover advantage. Like almost all business activities. The patent office just arbitrarily claims that some types of ideas can be restricted. e.g. I have the idea of starting hardware store in a growing small town. Why can't I patent that idea and stop any competition? I have never received an adequate answer from any slashdot patent proponent for that question.
Without the enticement of being able to reap the monetary rewards from a temporary, sanctioned monopoly on the invention, where is the motivation?
You are mentally deficient if you are going to seriously claim that a patent is the only motivation for invention. It's a common and typically dishonest claim by patent proponents. You might be able to claim that patents increase the motivation but of course patent proponents never do that because that'd show that the emperor has no clothes and also lay them open to the possibility that they might have to scientifically justify their position rather than handwave.
that intellectual property should not be protected by law just as physical property is.
Circular reasoning. It's property because it's property. Logic fail.
---
I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
After all there are four times as many citizens there than here. Shouldn't they be producing roughly four times the amount of music and movies the United States does?
What for? That'd just be a waste. You're thinking in terms of artificial scarcity.
There's only so many hours in the day and the US alone produces about two movies a day. Do you watch two movies a day? Some Some numbers.
---
Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.
Slashdot Mirror
No CLI needed. Right-click on desktop, select menu item "Create launcher". Enter a "Command:" of "gksu nautilus" and your preferred annotation and icon. Click "Ok". Done. You now have a desktop icon to browse the file system as root and any invoked program will be root also. Keep in mind that this is a security risk.
Ubuntu should've had this icon in the administration menu or panel years ago but they seem to have this strange idea that making system operations obtuse, as distinct from making sure naive users don't do something stupid, is a good thing. Not making icons is a quick and dirty way to block naive user mistakes but they don't seem to appreciate that the ill-will created and wasted time far outweighs any advantage.
---
Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
Bullshit.
Bullshit yourself
I am under no obligation to post anything you write on my site. none whatsoever.
Wrong. You are if you say or imply you will. Promise to in other words.
By providing a means of posting without warning that the post may deliberately going into a black hole, in fact taking measures to hide that fact from them, you are engaged in fraud. If you explicitly warn a "crank" up front that you've decided to no longer accept their posts then no problem. Just because it's easier for you to engage in fraud rather than be up front about it is irrelevant. You don't even need to give a reason though most polite people would.
The only theft of time is YOU stealing it from YOURSELF it trying to cause grief.
Nope, the theft of time and effort you steal from the person you regard as a crank is not justified by the so-called crank's actions unless the crank has engaged in deception also. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Once I see bad behaviour, I can do anything I want with MY SITE.
Yes, as long as you don't act in a deceptive manner worse than the crank.
I hope you can get that through your head.
It's not about the site, it's about the promises you've made on that site.
As far as "lower ethically" please posit the ethical hierarchy you are working in such that someone out to cause trouble has a higher ethical ranking than someone trying to provide a service to the community.
The "lower ethically" is engaging in deception, not in blocking somebody from using your site. Try to keep the difference clear. Just because you think you're providing a service and you think they're "causing trouble" is irrelevant.
Regards.
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
and that's really the best you could ever hope to do with some of these cranks
It's theft of time and lower ethically than the so-called "crank". A forum is going to get sued for that one day.
---
DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
This is not harmful.
The "information" is from a highly biased source attempting to emotionally manipulate, not inform. Like 99.9% of all unsolicited advertising. It's more likely to be harmful than not.
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
Good advertising does both.
99.9% of real life unsolicited advertising, not the fiction you're spouting, doesn't. It's just spam to get mindshare. In other words repetition to crowd out alternatives.
Very little real life unsolicited advertising informs, it's all just emotional manipulation and has little redeeming value to anybody except the spammer, sorry "advertiser".
---
Marketing in a saturated market is a zero-sum game. When one player wins another must lose. In a saturated market; marketing = un-marketing = arms race = parasites.
But, it doesn't stop you from solving the same problem in a different way.
Come back to us when you can define "different" objectively. Until then you're just handwaving.
Two shades of the color orange could be the same or different. The PTO can't even objectively decide that. Whether two ideas are the same or different is a far more complex and infinitely dimensional concept.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
I think you can appreciate that just because innovation *can* happen without patents is not necessarily evidence that they should be abolished.
The patent system is a massive interference in the citizen's business. The onus is on proponents to show that that interference is fully justified at every stage and in every technical area. The onus is not on anybody else to prove a negative.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
Software alone is unpatentable
Yeah, that's why video codecs et. al., simple algorithms with no specific hardware involved and that can be done by hand, aren't patentable. Not.
You know that. Why are you dishonestly trying to pretend otherwise? People like you really need to start thinking deeply about what a patent is for a change instead of parroting legal dogma.
The patent system is based on very shaky, superficial and inconsistent foundations. The PTO doesn't even have a objective basis for what a distinct idea is, the fundamental basis for a patent system. Without that, the entire patent system is just handwaving for profit.
---
Some people believe with great fervor preposterous things that just happen to coincide with their self-interest.
-- Judge Frank Easterbrook, Coleman v. CIR (7th Cir 1986) 791 F2d 68 at 69 [and quoted in several subsequent court decisions]
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that giving an old idea a new name somehow makes it a new idea. Why?
Nothing in those claims is new apart from the labels.
SQL injection is completely independent of web server
No it isn't
And your general implication that "all code is equally vulnerable" is nonsense.
A nonsense typically promulgated by unethical companies (such as M$, anti-virus companies, even PHP promoters to some extent) trying to cover up the fact that some programming systems are more vulnerable, and more likely to encourage, allow or cause security errors, than others. Any programming system that assumes programmers or users are superhuman and never make mistakes, security or otherwise, is a bad one.
In other words some companies attempt to design and implement security in depth. Other companies just bullshit.
---
Integrated software = marketing buzzword for "we own all the pieces" = we own you.
Should they be strung up along with the big fish? I don't know.
Like the lawyers say "the responsibility is joint and several". Both are needed for this petty theft to occur.
Being poor may be a mitigating circumstance but it is not an excuse, unless they really are living in third world conditions and it really is a choice between starving and stealing.
---
Marketing = information pollution.
But otherwise, you're mostly punishing decent folks trying to make a living.
It's not "a living". Every minute of their "work" is stealing a minute of another person's time. They "work" a 40 hour week? They've stolen 40 hours of other people's time. And the time of our life is the most important thing we have. And that's ignoring the scams they're trying to sell. Almost universally massive ripoffs.
These are not decent people, just petty thieves typically trying to rationalize theft. Being paid doesn't justify theft.
---
Marketing = information pollution.
Ah, I see, you missed my point in your need to deride Windows and GUI users.
No, I didn't miss your bias and your need to deride other products by claiming Windows is somehow superior.
So I shall restate it more simply: Microsoft and Windows offer enterprise-level management features unavailable in other products.
No they don't. They provide a GUI that some marketers claim is superior. People on the ground know better.
No, it's not just that it's harder, or that it requires the command-line to get things done.
It's not harder, it's just different. You're just demonstrating your bias. If what you said was true then systems of similar size based on Windows would require less admin's than systems based on alternatives. If anything, it's the reverse, despite M$' incessant propaganda on the subject.
It's that Microsoft provides capabilities that are plain and simply unavailable in competitor's products. Period.
Bullshit. Only for a marketer's or the willfully ignorant's definition of capabilities. Microsoft provides a GUI and a needlessly complex protection system that allows some limited and predictable classes of software management to be done a little more easily. Good for them. In any real life large scale scenario however, where heterogeneous systems and unusual requirements are the norm and not the exception, M$' network management capabilities are limited.
Any experienced enterprise admin can and does implement and use any and all of the so-called M$-only management capabilities and more. All the usual stuff: protections, security, single signon, separation of responsibility, resource sharing, updates etc. The fact that many M$ admin's are so ignorant that they can't cope with alternative approaches says more about M$, the admin's and bigotry/willful ignorance than anything else.
e.g. group policies, since that's the mantra that M$ marketing usually goes on about. Simple use cases are replaced with Unix groups. More complex use cases are replaced with parallel shell scripts, a powerful tool that is far more flexible than group policies. Amongst other things they can do complex conditional execution, procedure based authentication, work on multiple platforms, do error recovery and verification and do in-place updates impossible for M$ due to M$' borked file sharing semantics. In addition if you really wanted to you could use unix ACL's also, largely equivalent to NTFS security, however most admin's don't bother.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Are you saying that adblock and a do-not-call list could solve all this terrorist shit? Why didn't you speak up before?
I wish. When adblock can deal with TV ads, radio ads, newspaper unclassified ads, magazine unclassified ads, billboards, on-vehicle advertising, junk paper mail, junk phone calls, junk phone messaging, junk instant messaging, unsolicited email, astroturfing, pre-movie advertising, product placement, unskippable pre-DVD advertising, unskippable in-software advertising, in-bar "product ambassadors", advertorials, fake stories, "sponsorship", law manipulation for profit, untruth and deception in advertising, fake scientific journals, targeting of the vulnerable such as children and addiction-prone, deception of the innocent (e.g. privacy invading social networking web sites) and so on then I for one one would be very happy.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
If there's one thing Microsoft does exceedingly well, it's centralized management like this.
Not really. All large networks are heterogeneous, and M$ does that exceedingly badly.
Even when a network is heterogeneous many people confuse "having a GUI" with "doing it well".
If a GUI writer doesn't anticipate what you want to do, and in the real world that is frequently the case, then you're stuffed.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
It just so happens that we're apparently civilised now, and no longer foist our religion upon others.
Actually we do. The religion is called capitalism and unsolicited marketing is foisting it on others.
That's in large part what many middle-east and other terrorists are objecting to.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
Self publishing and small labels are still a road to obscurity
No. The average return self-publishing is probably significantly greater than spending your life trying get to signed to an RIAA company. An internet web site has global reach, unlike radio stations. And even after signing the odds are pretty grim.
To be a "serious" pop star is a million to one event with a world population of billions and a few hundred "serious" pop stars. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning.
And that's ignoring RIAA company creative accounting that drastically lowers the financial return to the artist.
The odds of becoming big are tiny whatever road an artist decides to take.
---
Who owns the copy?
It removes the possibility of an inventor ever making any money on his invention, so the incentive to invent evaporates.
You are being intellectually dishonest. Read my recent posts.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Fanatics like you need to get out more. I've addressed all your points in previous posts. The fact that you are in denial about that just shows how intellectually impoverished you are.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Patents are one way to prevent that problem,
Why is that necessarily a problem? That's how most business' already operate, that is use best practice (in other words copy their most successful competitors) to efficiently produce good products. We want everybody to use best available practices.
but bring along alot of collateral damage. Perhaps there are better ideas?
Very much so. All "IP" law is just a product of the mind and there are an infinite number of possible alternatives.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
There's prior art.
There's no prior art for opening a hardware store in that particular town. That's part of the point.
You have arbitrarily decided that any town is equivalent to that particular town when they all have differences. Geographical location for a start.
---
Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
But even if that's true, what if 99% are junk and 1% are legitimate, at least legitimate enough a pro-patent court in Texas will rule in their favor?
What you're ignoring is that VP8 was designed specifically with patents in mind. Depending on how diligent they were in doing this and how much due diligence Google did when purchasing it, it could easily turn out that MPEG-LA has nothing relevant and is just bullshitting. We won't know until more facts emerge.
As is already obvious MPEG-LA will of course be FUD'ing like crazy to try to retain their monopoly however Google is not stupid and I wouldn't count them out just yet.
---
Nothing lasts forever
When even the x264 developers comment that it's very similar to H.264 you can bet that some of the 1000+ patents on H.264 apply.
Most of those "1000+ patents" are likely to be junk. The rest? We'll see.
---
Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?
I hear people make this sort of claim all the time on Slashdot, and I have yet to see evidence for it.
The onus is on you to show that this massive interference in the lives of billions of people is justified. The handwaving and wishful thinking that patent proponents usually engage in is not even remotely sufficient.
Creating a new object or technology costs a lot of money.
No it doesn't. Almost all technology development occurs in small increments that is adequately rewarded by first mover advantage. Like almost all business activities. The patent office just arbitrarily claims that some types of ideas can be restricted. e.g. I have the idea of starting hardware store in a growing small town. Why can't I patent that idea and stop any competition? I have never received an adequate answer from any slashdot patent proponent for that question.
Without the enticement of being able to reap the monetary rewards from a temporary, sanctioned monopoly on the invention, where is the motivation?
You are mentally deficient if you are going to seriously claim that a patent is the only motivation for invention. It's a common and typically dishonest claim by patent proponents. You might be able to claim that patents increase the motivation but of course patent proponents never do that because that'd show that the emperor has no clothes and also lay them open to the possibility that they might have to scientifically justify their position rather than handwave.
that intellectual property should not be protected by law just as physical property is.
Circular reasoning. It's property because it's property. Logic fail.
---
I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
After all there are four times as many citizens there than here. Shouldn't they be producing roughly four times the amount of music and movies the United States does?
What for? That'd just be a waste. You're thinking in terms of artificial scarcity.
There's only so many hours in the day and the US alone produces about two movies a day. Do you watch two movies a day? Some Some numbers.
---
Copyright rewards distributors (copiers) far more than creators.