Crime is not generally a zero-sum game, it's a -negative- sum game.
A thief stealing your $1000 LCD-TV and selling it to finance his drug-consumption is likely to get a few hundred for it, tops, whereas you are out the full $1000.
Which is why crime doesn't just -redistribute- wealth, it -destroys- wealth.
At which point here did the TV get destroyed ? Because surely whoever bougth it is either going to use it himself, or sell it forward for more money.
Thievery doesn't destroy wealth, as long as whatever was stolen isn't destroyed and the act of thieving itself doesn't cause damage (like broken windows or locks to gain entry).
Sue 'em. Sue the shit out of 'em. It's what it's there for. Lawsuits hit MS a lot harder than 'boycotts' do. You need thousands of successful participants in a boycott, you only need one in a lawsuit.
But you need thousands upon thousands of dollars to sue. Who can afford to lose that much ?
Microsoft will get away with this, no matter what the law says, because the cost of getting justice is simply much too high. But at least the people who got burned with this now know better than to buy music, which helps the cause of the pirate party, even if just a little bit.
So, will this give the deletionists an excuse to go on a rampage, deleting articles they deem unworthy of being included in a dead-tree book ?
"This article is unnotable because it doesn't happen to interest me. Wikipedia is a real encyclopedia, not a collection of random facts, and we can't endanger our chances of getting published by including anything that Encyclopedia Britannica wouldn't. Besides, I'm in a bad mood and a little power trip might cheer me up."
Mod me troll if you will, but it's still true. The Deletionist Scourge will use any excuse. That's why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore: there's no point when the most likely result is to have said contributions deleted because Joe Powertrip hasn't heard of the subject previously.
We exist, and we are alive. A lot of other life exists on this planet, not just us, so the number is already greater than 1.
Chances are that all life in this world shares a common origin, so the number of known life-beginning events is exactly 1.
Mathematically speaking, any fraction of infinity is infinity. In other words, we know for a fact 1 intelligent species exists (us), and that is represented by the fraction 1 out of infinity. 1 divided by infinity is infinity.
Not true. 1/x approaches zero when x approaches infinity. How the heck can anyone conclude that cutting something into more pieces will make each piece larger is beyond me.
"Any fraction of infinity is infinity" means that x/2, x/3, x/4 etc. approach infinity as x approaches infinity. It's the exact opposite of the situation you described - x and the integer are in the opposite sides of the division line.
Basically, it's a general measure of technology, with the assumption that once it is reached, suitable "social enlightenment" also has been, or will be shortly thereafter.
More importantly, once it's reached, they can reach you. Before that they are stuck in their shithole planet, so you can ignore them, since they can't follow you home. Pre-starfaring cultures are like ants in an ant farm to starfaring ones.
Any space culture that does that is no no friend of humanity or justice.
As difficult a concept as it might be to grasp, sometimes others really do know better. Would you give a five year old a loaded gun ?
A fallacious argument. Five year olds lack the physical capacity to handle a loaded gun in a safe way. Their brains simply aren't working well enough yet. On the other hand, an adult of any culture is perfectly capable of handling the gun safely, assuming of course that he has been shown and explained to how it works and what the safety requirements are. Besides, if you try to treat said adult like a five-year old, the chances are you get either a scatching reply or said gun pointed at you - and deservedly so.
Yours is simply a new version of white man's burden, or perhaps the Noble Savage horsehit: the pre-starfaring people are childlike and naive, and can't be expected to live up to civilized standards, so we better watch them from afar, even as they die by millions from diseases and starvation our advanced technology could easily fix, all for their own good of course - we wouldn't want to corrupt their "natural development".
Cultures are not analogous to persons. A primitive culture doesn't mean that it's members are stupid. It simply means that they have less accumulated knowledge than members of a more advanced culture. Given this, the moral thing to do is to give them the option to learn - not forcefeeding, not witholding information. Anything else is condescending.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, because in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Did you actually play WOW? It is teppid. The only story that it has are one paragraph snippets of text that accompany quests, and rare scripted events. Sure there is more storyline than say, a game of pac-man, but you have not played many games if you think there is a detailed storyline there.
He didn't say anything about the storyline of WoW. He was speaking of Warcraft 3. They are different games, you know.
Just because the military is pioneering this research doesn't mean they are going to make it available for free to the young men and women they are responsible for maiming.
Deserving of suspicion if not outright paranoia as any branch of the US Government might be, I honestly can't think of any reason besides treating their own wounded the US Army could possibly be wanting this technology for.
They could just try and make a profit from it.
Who might ? The US Army is publicly funded and doesn't need to make a profit. Furthermore, AFAIK your typical grunt joins an army to get money for college, so it's not like they could afford to pay much for this regeneration thing. And while there are civilian amputees too, there aren't many and they tend to not be particularly rich, especially since not having a healthy body obviously limits your job opportunities.
But even assuming that this is all part of some particularly stupid conspiracy, it's still research that will propably end up benefiting mankind, so what's the problem ?
Furthermore, 300,000 soldiers are coming back from Iraq with some kind of mental disorder. You can't grow a new happy mind in a petri dish.
Maybe, but getting your arms and legs back is better than nothing, no ?
I think that's my point. That people doing research is good, regardless of whether their world view is correct or not. They might stumble on something that is later useful.
You haven't answered my question: what, exactly speaking, would ID studies study ? What would the ID researchers use the money to ? If an ID researcher gets 100 million dollars, what will he do with the money ? Buy lab time ? A field trip ? What ?
Moving on, if this is indeed legal, all I have to say is: fuck Wizards/Hasbro. The real purpose of this license is to place other RPG companies in subordination to Wizards. This is achieved through putting them on an upgrade treadmill. Each time a new license is released, the small companies have to spend a lot of time and money retooling their products to comply with the new rules. This effectively reduces their profit, meaning they will be less of a threat to Wizards.
Actually, no. This means that those small companies can resell the same content, with small upgrades, again and again as new editions come out. The one screwed is the customer: the purpose of this scheme is to kill the 3rd party market for the 3rd Edition, in order to kill off said edition and force everyone to buy the 4th. Which very likely won't work, since there's already an obscene amount of material for the 3rd, but that's another matter.
Magical Items costing experience (wtf was that about anyway? Nothing irritates me more than the idea that I get dumber by practicing something).
From that, and quite a few other things (such as undead draining levels) it appears that XP in 3rd Edition represented "life force" rather than practice. This makes plenty of sense, actually: how can practice make you able to take more damage (hit points) or more resistant to death magic (saves, especially fort) ? However, while this appears to have been the intention, it was never spelled out or taken to its logical conclusion, leading to a somewhat contradictory and confusing system.
Of course this would then make your typical PC a de facto vampire: a monster who's pumped himself up on the stolen lifeforce of hundreds of victims;).
The sad thing: I've never actually played the game. I simply like reading the rulebooks.
Sorry, 1024's got to be a KiB. No other feasible solution at this point, unless we decide to stop having computers talk to each other...
If it's computers talking to each other, why use the prefix in the first place, rather than the raw byte/bit count ? The prefix exist for the benefit of humans, after all.
I think, for reasons that will hopefully enrage the people doing it, "intelligent design" studies should be publically funded on the off chance that some future mutated version of it becomes useful in some part of science.
I'm a bit uncertain how the claim "some or all aspects of life were designed on purpose by an intelligent being" could be studied. It doesn't make any predictions which could be tested or used as starting points for future avenues of research. The only thing it does predict is that there was pre-human intelligence, but since this intelligence is usually considered to supernatural in nature - a god - it isn't really in the realm of science either.
So, what would the funding be used for, exactly speaking ?
In other news, the officials of $DICTATORSHIP amended their election results to improve them.
Seriously, thought, you should not amend an already-published article. You should instead write a follow-up/errata to it. That would avoid all claims of inappropriateness, since anyone could check the differences themselves.
Chaos != Free Will. You said yourself (basically) that it will react in a certain way, given certain input. Just because it is too wildly changing does not mean it is not predictable; we just haven't the computing power, nor information, to make such predictions.
Nitpick: a chaotic system is one where no leve of detail is insignificant. In order to make predictions arbitrarily far into the future, you have to know the state of the system arbitrarily accurately. However, quantum mechanics forbid you from knowing the state beyond a certain accuracy; consequently, a sufficiently chaotic system is impossible to predict arbitrarily far into the future, and no amount of computing power can change that.
Not that any of this has anything to do with free will. That particular hornet's nest results from trying to apply a philosophical concept into particle physics. That said philosophical concept is ill-defined to begin with certainly doesn't help.
So now children on Facebook will assume that it is safe to give information to a person who poses as a policeman or someone who has a similar logo.
If a policeman is asking you questions, the chances are he's investigating either you or someone you know. Consequently, it is never safe to give information to a policeman, unless you know that they aren't trying to get you or anyone you care about.
The same, of course, goes to anyone and anything that can be rasonably expected to be trying to "catch" people: all intelligence agencies, insurance companies, private investigators, people in the middle of a nasty divorce, etc.
Since this is the British police we're talking about, better include "I shot him without cause" there. And since it's the British police we're talking about, something like "I arrested him and threw him into prison for 20 years for false accusations of membership in IRA, Al-Qaida, or some other shadowy organization" might also be appropriate.
You just have to use it for what it is... It helps you start research. It is a lead generator, or an index. But if you think it actually has answers, or your research can end there, you are an idiot. But you have a lot of company.
Not neccessarily. It depends on what kind of research we are talking about: are you trying to actually find facts, or are you trying to find something to back you in writing a half-baked space-filler column, so you can later blame it all on your "source" if shit hits the fan ?
I write software for a living. If I stop getting paid for it, I'll stop doing it. There won't be any more sunsets, for the ~1,000 people who are dependent on my software.
Even without copyright, nothing stops those 1000 people from paying you to write a new version of that software. In fact, without copyright, they can hire anyone to write the new version, so not only can they have a sunset, but they don't need to beg you for one. I know, it's a revolutionary model, but consider: rather than have the plumbers own the plumbing in your house and have them charge you an annual fee for using it, you could pay them for the act of installing it and then own it afterwards !
And, to stay true to my own principles, I'll let anyone who wants to use this idea - I'll call it "work for hire" or "employment" - for free.
On another note, it doesn't even matter one shit if you have guns or not. If you do not have access to real information (like in China and to some extend rest of the world), you cannot make any decisions anyway. Your guns are useless.
We on the right wing have access to plenty of information. All of our values are in one book and while everything else is of course useful, if one bible, shared among a hundred people, is all we have, it is all we need to tell right from wrong and thus whether to rebel or not.
Wrong. You also need to know what's going on around you - that is, if the actions of your government happen to line up with your book. If said government can hide its actions from you - indeed, if it can control what you know about the world around you - then it can make any action on its part seem moral, according to your system of morals, and any action of its opponents seem immoral by that same system.
Simply knowing your values is not enough; you must also know the situation in order to apply them. There is, after all, a huge difference between whether someone aiming a gun at someone else is trying to arrest a serial killer, or performing an armed robbery. If you don't know which, and the serial killer shouts "Help! I'm being robbed!" and you believe him and confront the gunman, while the killer flees... Congratulations, you've just helped a serial killer get away, all the while thinking that you were stopping a robbery.
So the grandparent poster is right: without a reliable source of information - news, in this context - you can't make informed decisions, and your guns are useless.
Before Communist took over from Taiwan government, Tiber was under slavery. (1954) 95% of people there were slaves. The others were the monks and owners of slaves. Just like USA before the civil war. Under Dalia lama, they can take the skins from the slaves for their religion purpose. They can rape the female slave with their guests, visitors. they can cut the arms and legs from slaves just for fun. The slaves were 95% Tibet people.
Do you have evidence to back these rather heavy accusations ? What is the source of this information ?
Do you want to free Tibet? go ahead. Without the support from Tibet people in China, it can only be a joke.
Are your urging the West to free Tibet by force ? As in (nuclear) war ?
No, because they don't use it anymore. But if you stopped paying but hotwired the meter to get power for free that would be wrong. It would also be a reasonable analogy for downloading a movie for free rather than paying to watch it, unlike yours.
No it wouldn't. Electric energy is a physical, limited thing. If I use some, then the energy company needs to burn more coal to produce that power. Since neither coal nor the equipment needed to produce electric energy with it are free, the power company loses money; not like the copyright cartels, who count "lossses of potential profits" as losses, but as in actually having money and then not having it anymore.
Contrast this with downloading a movie with BitTorrent, where no one has lost anything measurable afterwards.
Physical things with limited quantities and nonphysical things with limitless quantities simply aren't similar, no matter how much the copyright law tries to make the latter into the former.
TV shows have an copyright owner. The copyright owner wants you to pay them in some way to see the show. If you don't want to watch it, that's fine. But if you do watch it for free that's not fine.
Simply because someone wants you to pay them doesn't mean that you have any kind of moral obligation to do so. Nor does stating that something is "not fine" make it so.
It's just like Linux. It is protected by copyright. If you want to use it there is a copyright license which forces you to keep forks open source.
Actually, the GPL only takes effect when you distribute the code, not when you merely use it. But in any case, I'm fine with abolishing all copyright, including the ones on Linux kernel.
And that's legally not fine in most countries, quite apart from the moral issues.
I have never argued that ignoring copyright is legal. I've merely argued against your claim that it is "not moral".
In the US, Copyright is actually in the constitution. So don't expect it to go away soon.
Perhaps the US could introduce "Copyright Zones", where the copyright is in effect ? You know, in teh spirit of Free Speech Zones ?
Really, copyright is in the interests of some large corporations; that is why it won't be going away anytime soon.
That's very poetic. But what if you were someone who lived by selling your ideas?
Well, if people aren't willing to pay for your current job, you need to find another one. Why should being in the "creating" business make you immune to the threat of outsourcing/obsolescence the rest of us face ?
That's 1 euro, please.
For the record, I draw as a hobby, and sometimes upload my drawings into various web forums. If I ever found copies of my works floating around the InterWebs, I would consider myself a Real Artist. And if they ended up in a popular torrent site with hundreds of leechers, I would print the page and arhive it, just in case I ever looked for a job where it might be useful in my CV.
Losers complain that their stuff ends up being copied by thousands; winners point at it and say: "Look! My content is popular! Let's talk about publishing and advertizing deals."
Sharing is moral if you own something. Sharing some you don't own and who's owner doesn't want it shared because they want to charge people for using it is not moral.
No one owns television shows. The media corporations have copyrights to them. The concept of property is simply not applicable here. Consequently, the "something" doesn't have an owner, and sharing it is thus moral.
How would you feel if technology made it possible for people to share for free something you used to sell to them individually?
Are you suggesting we need to pay people because they feel bad if we don't ? Or are you trying to say that people who install solar panels on their roofs need to keep paying their former power company despite not needing it anymore ? How about, if I move back to my hometown, do I owe the phone company money because I can now talk to my friends face-to-face rather than use the phone - you know, share a communication channel for free instead of paying a fee for one ?
But the real scumbag is the guy who digs a well in his backyard, especially if he gives water to his neighbors for free; he should be hanged for depriving the water company of profit !
Slashdot Mirror
At which point here did the TV get destroyed ? Because surely whoever bougth it is either going to use it himself, or sell it forward for more money.
Thievery doesn't destroy wealth, as long as whatever was stolen isn't destroyed and the act of thieving itself doesn't cause damage (like broken windows or locks to gain entry).
But you need thousands upon thousands of dollars to sue. Who can afford to lose that much ?
Microsoft will get away with this, no matter what the law says, because the cost of getting justice is simply much too high. But at least the people who got burned with this now know better than to buy music, which helps the cause of the pirate party, even if just a little bit.
So, will this give the deletionists an excuse to go on a rampage, deleting articles they deem unworthy of being included in a dead-tree book ?
"This article is unnotable because it doesn't happen to interest me. Wikipedia is a real encyclopedia, not a collection of random facts, and we can't endanger our chances of getting published by including anything that Encyclopedia Britannica wouldn't. Besides, I'm in a bad mood and a little power trip might cheer me up."
Mod me troll if you will, but it's still true. The Deletionist Scourge will use any excuse. That's why I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore: there's no point when the most likely result is to have said contributions deleted because Joe Powertrip hasn't heard of the subject previously.
Chances are that all life in this world shares a common origin, so the number of known life-beginning events is exactly 1.
Not true. 1/x approaches zero when x approaches infinity. How the heck can anyone conclude that cutting something into more pieces will make each piece larger is beyond me.
"Any fraction of infinity is infinity" means that x/2, x/3, x/4 etc. approach infinity as x approaches infinity. It's the exact opposite of the situation you described - x and the integer are in the opposite sides of the division line.
More importantly, once it's reached, they can reach you. Before that they are stuck in their shithole planet, so you can ignore them, since they can't follow you home. Pre-starfaring cultures are like ants in an ant farm to starfaring ones.
A fallacious argument. Five year olds lack the physical capacity to handle a loaded gun in a safe way. Their brains simply aren't working well enough yet. On the other hand, an adult of any culture is perfectly capable of handling the gun safely, assuming of course that he has been shown and explained to how it works and what the safety requirements are. Besides, if you try to treat said adult like a five-year old, the chances are you get either a scatching reply or said gun pointed at you - and deservedly so.
Yours is simply a new version of white man's burden, or perhaps the Noble Savage horsehit: the pre-starfaring people are childlike and naive, and can't be expected to live up to civilized standards, so we better watch them from afar, even as they die by millions from diseases and starvation our advanced technology could easily fix, all for their own good of course - we wouldn't want to corrupt their "natural development".
Cultures are not analogous to persons. A primitive culture doesn't mean that it's members are stupid. It simply means that they have less accumulated knowledge than members of a more advanced culture. Given this, the moral thing to do is to give them the option to learn - not forcefeeding, not witholding information. Anything else is condescending.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, because in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
He didn't say anything about the storyline of WoW. He was speaking of Warcraft 3. They are different games, you know.
And Warcraft 3 did, in fact, have a good story.
Deserving of suspicion if not outright paranoia as any branch of the US Government might be, I honestly can't think of any reason besides treating their own wounded the US Army could possibly be wanting this technology for.
Who might ? The US Army is publicly funded and doesn't need to make a profit. Furthermore, AFAIK your typical grunt joins an army to get money for college, so it's not like they could afford to pay much for this regeneration thing. And while there are civilian amputees too, there aren't many and they tend to not be particularly rich, especially since not having a healthy body obviously limits your job opportunities.
But even assuming that this is all part of some particularly stupid conspiracy, it's still research that will propably end up benefiting mankind, so what's the problem ?
Maybe, but getting your arms and legs back is better than nothing, no ?
You haven't answered my question: what, exactly speaking, would ID studies study ? What would the ID researchers use the money to ? If an ID researcher gets 100 million dollars, what will he do with the money ? Buy lab time ? A field trip ? What ?
Actually, no. This means that those small companies can resell the same content, with small upgrades, again and again as new editions come out. The one screwed is the customer: the purpose of this scheme is to kill the 3rd party market for the 3rd Edition, in order to kill off said edition and force everyone to buy the 4th. Which very likely won't work, since there's already an obscene amount of material for the 3rd, but that's another matter.
From that, and quite a few other things (such as undead draining levels) it appears that XP in 3rd Edition represented "life force" rather than practice. This makes plenty of sense, actually: how can practice make you able to take more damage (hit points) or more resistant to death magic (saves, especially fort) ? However, while this appears to have been the intention, it was never spelled out or taken to its logical conclusion, leading to a somewhat contradictory and confusing system.
Of course this would then make your typical PC a de facto vampire: a monster who's pumped himself up on the stolen lifeforce of hundreds of victims ;).
The sad thing: I've never actually played the game. I simply like reading the rulebooks.
Well, how could he, when it has such fantastical creatures as a Scotch man ? Everyone knows they all wear skirts there.
If it's computers talking to each other, why use the prefix in the first place, rather than the raw byte/bit count ? The prefix exist for the benefit of humans, after all.
I'm a bit uncertain how the claim "some or all aspects of life were designed on purpose by an intelligent being" could be studied. It doesn't make any predictions which could be tested or used as starting points for future avenues of research. The only thing it does predict is that there was pre-human intelligence, but since this intelligence is usually considered to supernatural in nature - a god - it isn't really in the realm of science either.
So, what would the funding be used for, exactly speaking ?
In other news, the officials of $DICTATORSHIP amended their election results to improve them.
Seriously, thought, you should not amend an already-published article. You should instead write a follow-up/errata to it. That would avoid all claims of inappropriateness, since anyone could check the differences themselves.
Nitpick: a chaotic system is one where no leve of detail is insignificant. In order to make predictions arbitrarily far into the future, you have to know the state of the system arbitrarily accurately. However, quantum mechanics forbid you from knowing the state beyond a certain accuracy; consequently, a sufficiently chaotic system is impossible to predict arbitrarily far into the future, and no amount of computing power can change that.
Not that any of this has anything to do with free will. That particular hornet's nest results from trying to apply a philosophical concept into particle physics. That said philosophical concept is ill-defined to begin with certainly doesn't help.
If a policeman is asking you questions, the chances are he's investigating either you or someone you know. Consequently, it is never safe to give information to a policeman, unless you know that they aren't trying to get you or anyone you care about.
The same, of course, goes to anyone and anything that can be rasonably expected to be trying to "catch" people: all intelligence agencies, insurance companies, private investigators, people in the middle of a nasty divorce, etc.
Since this is the British police we're talking about, better include "I shot him without cause" there. And since it's the British police we're talking about, something like "I arrested him and threw him into prison for 20 years for false accusations of membership in IRA, Al-Qaida, or some other shadowy organization" might also be appropriate.
Not neccessarily. It depends on what kind of research we are talking about: are you trying to actually find facts, or are you trying to find something to back you in writing a half-baked space-filler column, so you can later blame it all on your "source" if shit hits the fan ?
Even without copyright, nothing stops those 1000 people from paying you to write a new version of that software. In fact, without copyright, they can hire anyone to write the new version, so not only can they have a sunset, but they don't need to beg you for one. I know, it's a revolutionary model, but consider: rather than have the plumbers own the plumbing in your house and have them charge you an annual fee for using it, you could pay them for the act of installing it and then own it afterwards !
And, to stay true to my own principles, I'll let anyone who wants to use this idea - I'll call it "work for hire" or "employment" - for free.
Wrong. You also need to know what's going on around you - that is, if the actions of your government happen to line up with your book. If said government can hide its actions from you - indeed, if it can control what you know about the world around you - then it can make any action on its part seem moral, according to your system of morals, and any action of its opponents seem immoral by that same system.
Simply knowing your values is not enough; you must also know the situation in order to apply them. There is, after all, a huge difference between whether someone aiming a gun at someone else is trying to arrest a serial killer, or performing an armed robbery. If you don't know which, and the serial killer shouts "Help! I'm being robbed!" and you believe him and confront the gunman, while the killer flees... Congratulations, you've just helped a serial killer get away, all the while thinking that you were stopping a robbery.
So the grandparent poster is right: without a reliable source of information - news, in this context - you can't make informed decisions, and your guns are useless.
Do you have evidence to back these rather heavy accusations ? What is the source of this information ?
Are your urging the West to free Tibet by force ? As in (nuclear) war ?
No it wouldn't. Electric energy is a physical, limited thing. If I use some, then the energy company needs to burn more coal to produce that power. Since neither coal nor the equipment needed to produce electric energy with it are free, the power company loses money; not like the copyright cartels, who count "lossses of potential profits" as losses, but as in actually having money and then not having it anymore.
Contrast this with downloading a movie with BitTorrent, where no one has lost anything measurable afterwards.
Physical things with limited quantities and nonphysical things with limitless quantities simply aren't similar, no matter how much the copyright law tries to make the latter into the former.
Simply because someone wants you to pay them doesn't mean that you have any kind of moral obligation to do so. Nor does stating that something is "not fine" make it so.
Actually, the GPL only takes effect when you distribute the code, not when you merely use it. But in any case, I'm fine with abolishing all copyright, including the ones on Linux kernel.
I have never argued that ignoring copyright is legal. I've merely argued against your claim that it is "not moral".
Perhaps the US could introduce "Copyright Zones", where the copyright is in effect ? You know, in teh spirit of Free Speech Zones ?
Really, copyright is in the interests of some large corporations; that is why it won't be going away anytime soon.
Well, if people aren't willing to pay for your current job, you need to find another one. Why should being in the "creating" business make you immune to the threat of outsourcing/obsolescence the rest of us face ?
That's 1 euro, please.
For the record, I draw as a hobby, and sometimes upload my drawings into various web forums. If I ever found copies of my works floating around the InterWebs, I would consider myself a Real Artist. And if they ended up in a popular torrent site with hundreds of leechers, I would print the page and arhive it, just in case I ever looked for a job where it might be useful in my CV.
Losers complain that their stuff ends up being copied by thousands; winners point at it and say: "Look! My content is popular! Let's talk about publishing and advertizing deals."
No one owns television shows. The media corporations have copyrights to them. The concept of property is simply not applicable here. Consequently, the "something" doesn't have an owner, and sharing it is thus moral.
Are you suggesting we need to pay people because they feel bad if we don't ? Or are you trying to say that people who install solar panels on their roofs need to keep paying their former power company despite not needing it anymore ? How about, if I move back to my hometown, do I owe the phone company money because I can now talk to my friends face-to-face rather than use the phone - you know, share a communication channel for free instead of paying a fee for one ?
But the real scumbag is the guy who digs a well in his backyard, especially if he gives water to his neighbors for free; he should be hanged for depriving the water company of profit !
Tragic. My heart bleeds for them. I'm crying, I'm crying like a baby.
Arrr ! Hoist the Jolly Roger ! Death to the copyright lobby !