I know that they're completely different. Copyright fanbois are the ones who don't realize that copyrights are a ham-fisted attempt to make an infinitely replicable idea seem more like a physical object via creating artificial scarcity through government fiat.

And the differences don't apply to my point: You do some work. You get paid for it. Then you should move on and do more work. Your grandchildren should not be able to charge rents a century down the road based on artificially created scarcity without having to do work themselves. That makes no economic sense.

Indeed those documents were very valuable. Somehow they even got created without the benefit of copyright protection or ownership rights by their authors. How could that be? Maybe it's because copyright is highly overrated in the first place.

Actually, if made it past childhood, life expectancy back then wasn't dramatically less than it is now. It certainly wasn't 5X less, like the copyright terms were.

I can also never figure out why anybody gives a damn about the lifetime of the author. The crew that mudjacked my driveway 20 years ago are probably still alive. None of them are showing up here demanding tips when people park on my driveway.

That's exactly true, and in fact that's the reason that the US Constitution plainly states that copyrights are to be granted only for limited times. The founders of this country clearly wanted the public to profit from the works of others, after as little as 14 years.

If they're able to manufacture more robots, then it's life... but not as we know it.

Why stop there?

They should also add a spell checker and auto-correct to the file system driver just to make sure people haven't made any mistakes.

All the complexity you need to add is:

if (ch <= '\x1f') {
        goto FAIL;
}

How hard is that?

It's a body of methane, not water, and it is chemically much more closely related to oil than water. So it arguably makes more sense to compare it to the amount of oil on earth than to the amount of water.

The conditions species live in aren't constant. Advantages of A and/or B fluctuate over time. If an animal has A, and the environment suddenly favors B, those closer to B win. For a while some animals will have both.

However, every feature comes at an energy cost, so animals quickly let what they don't need atrophy. If in the current environment B beats out A+B minus extra energy to generate both, then they will settle at B only.

At any rate, every organism is a mixture of thousands of features, from A0 to Z99999, many of which get added and deleted all the time, so your whole argument is bogus to begin with.

Look at today's flying squirrels. It's not hard to figure out how you get from walking mammals to this species, nor from flying squirrels to fully winged creatures. Why would it be any harder for insects to follow the same path?

It's not random. The ability for adult insects to fly evolved gradually. That has nothing to do with the fact that insects go through metamorphosis, which most likely evolved independently and prior to the capability of flight

Your argument makes as much sense as saying: "I don't believe evolution because people can talk using air even though they spend 9 months sealed up in a bag of water."

One o the best ways to stay comfortable is to not get your home destroyed by the crazy weather created by your cheap electricity rates.

Yes, it does matter.

Would you care to enlighten us with an example of a popular real-world language that has not had problems with backwards compatiblity?

I can maybe see the life evolving in one of these solar systems after it leaves the black hole area, presuming the atmospheres of planets aren't scoured away by high-speed interactions with the interstellar medium.

However, how could this life "spread"? I don't see how you slow down any complex molecules from these speeds without totally incinerating them.

True, but only as long as all your purposes are restricted to cracking the codes from a particular model of Nazi mechanical encryption device.