Hiring more staff to handle the load won't get a job done any faster in certain types of industries, because the work being done is intellectually challenging, and not just physical labour. Hiring more people in such cases introduces a great deal of communication overhead which can rapidly outpace any otherwise expected increase in productivity from having more people working on the job.

When the work that is being done is physical labor, hiring more people to get the job done on time makes sense.

There are intellectually demanding jobs such as software engineering where adding more people to a job will not necessarily make it get completed similarly sooner (there are rapidly diminishing returns after only a very small number of engineers on any single project).

Played any computer games lately?

Of course, maybe it's better if every game development studio, including the smaler ones that have no more than a couple of dozen employees, just went under.

What the game depicts is the main character being violent against other characters who are in actuality nothing more than computer generated pixels with particular behavior traits associated with them. Any alleged violence against human beings occurs only in the mind of the player, and not in the game itself. Said computer generated pixels are no more women, or men, than a mannequin or dummy would be.

I might suggest that you may only be correct about your assumptions in that no star which has collapsed has yet turned into a singularity... all that is required for a black hole is sufficiently bending space in the region of a mass such that no straight line near the mass, and where it is within some finite volume as measured from outside of that region, ever leaves said vicinity of the mass. It is entirely possible that the entire universe may be within a black hole, which itself is inside of another, much larger and much older universe.

Not sure that is proof at all, and from what I remember they recently came up with some new theory that said black holes can't exist (not that this new theory is any better)

Yeah... a new theory where instead of going through a thorough peer review process first, the person who came up with it simply had a press release about it, giving the theory loads of disproportionate publicity over time-tested theories that explain what we observe far more readily.

In actuality, that recently announced theory that black holes don't exist, if you actually read carefully what they are really saying, is that it is singularities which are impossible... and they only conclude that black holes are impossible from that by suggesting that any black hole must have a singularity at the center. This is a commonly accepted idea, but it has never been scientifically proven... it is implied only by the fact that we can find no evidence of any force in the universe which could prevent it. There are, however, alternative explanations for how a black hole might not contain a singularity which do not require any particular force to act against the gravitational pull within the event horizon... explanations that the recently publicized theory you mentioned does not even attempt to address.

By its strictest definition, black does not reflect any light either, and so does not qualify as a color either. We can usually see so-called black objects either because they are perhaps just a very dark grey, and are thus still reflecting some amount of light that we can detect, or else in the case of something like Vantablack, because of objects nearby.

Why can't a chimpanzee be taught to read and to write.... to use the ability independently with purposeful and constructive utility, and in particular, be capable of teaching other chimpanzees to do likewise?

Of course, as the common argument against this goes, that you perhaps can find people who may be similarly lacking in cognitive ability, but the reality is that such a lack in human beings is always either directly attributable to physiological abnormalities in the brain of THAT PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL, or else attributable to a lack of education for, again, THAT PARTICULAR INDIVIDUAL, and is not reflective of the cognitive ability of the species as a whole.

With regards to sign language, when has any primate who might have been taught sign language has ever ended up teaching to others such that over the course of generations, they end up utilizing it as an ordinary means of communication because they have discovered, entirely on their own, an increased level of productivity through its use? That is, after all, how humans first acquired language... if primates are so similar, why, even with an initial kick-start of trying to teach them into acquiring communication abilities, do they always just intellectually fall right back down to their baseline if then left to their own devices?

Humans are smart. No primate in existence comes anywhere even close to human levels of reasoning and thinking ability.

And yes... that's the difference.

Because such conditions are reflective of the intelligence level or ability of the *INDIVIDUAL*, and not the species as a whole.

Such inability is reflective of the limitations on that particular individual's education or intelligence, not the species as a whole, and as a member of a species that *IS* capable of doing such, they automatically inherit such rights, even when they may not have acquired the ability to file for them personally.

So basically, a chimpanzee can have such rights not only when it knows how to file for them, but when chimpanzees in general can do so, which would probably entail chimps being taught to read and to write, to independently exercise said ability with purposeful utility, and to pass on this ability to successive generations through teaching.

So probably not in anyone's lifetime that is alive right now.

A lot of people seem so incredulous at the very notion that as far as intelligent life goes (that is, an organism capable of questioning its surroundings and its very existence), human beings are "it". Many suggest that it should be mathematically improbable for such a thing, and yet in reality, we only have a sample size of 1,and have absolutely no way to know how likely such life may actually be anywhere else. Neither, of course, do we have any particular reason to conclude that we *are* actually alone in the universe, but the reality is that if such life didn't actually exist anywhere else, absolutely nothing in our world would be changed by such a revelation, if it were possible to ever know that for certain.

If uniqueness can exist in a domain like mathematics, where actual infinities can be encountered and explained, it seems vastly more likely that in a universe that is quite clearly of finite age, uniqueness would be that much more common.

Actually, that's exactly right... they DON'T have exclusivity when somebody else infringes... Obviously, for any single act of infringement, a relatively small percentage of the overall exclusivity is lost, but it is still lost nevertheless.

What is being "stolen" is the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, which are assigned by virtue of the copyright, to dictate who may copy the work. Exclusive means that nobody else gets to do it, so by the very definition of the term, a copyright infringer is depriving the copyright holder of their exclusivity in that regard.

If anything which has value to someone, and which can be taken away from that person can be stolen, then yes... it definitely qualifies. The fact that what might be getting taken away from the authorized person or persons in this case has no physical representation does not diminish the value that it was legally declared to be The fact that the person who might take it would not gain the same value out of it as the value that the person who took it lost by having it taken does not diminish its value either, any more than the fact that one could steal somebody's money to burn in a campfire does not reduce the value of the money that they stole to that of kindling. Although this factor can easily keep many people from recognizing that value, or respecting it. Once faced with that fact, they will either have to give up piracy, or else more commonly admit that they believe the entire notion of copyright to be an unfair mechanism designed to artificially create exclusivity. The problem with the latter conclusion is that even with all of its problems, copyright is still vastly better system for providing exclusivity than censorship, including self-censorship, which is the only really viable ultimate alternative. Much of the best content that would be publicly available in such a situation would be lost in an endless sea of mediocre tripe that nobody cared enough about to want exclusivity on in the first place.

Of course, you could also just try reprogramming the entire human race to not be greedy or to desire any kind of exclusivity in the first place, but I strongly suspect that you won't accomplish that.

... is not that they reclassified it, per se... but that it can't help but remind of the word "atom", and how at one time it meant "indivisible". And particles smaller than atoms were discovered, they didn't turn around and say that they should change what *they* were called.

How about a little consistency, please?