Everyone with a brain works incrementally. In a democracy, this is what we call finding common ground and reaching compromises.

I agree with JoshuaZ. I'm an American who is glad there are other voices out there besides our own. America has a lot to offer, but could also learn a lot from other countries if we could just put aside this nutty idea of "American Exceptionalism". Seems like no politician can be elected in America these days who doesn't claim that America is better than everyone else and Americans are just the best of the best.

You seem to be referring to English Law, but even there theft refers to "property", which may be something other than an "object" and the definition of "intention never to return it" is liberal enough to cover cases where the thief changes their mind later and returns the property.
Any law that includes intent is, IMHO, poorly conceived as it requires the prosecution to convince a jury of an internal mental state.
In general, absolute statements like "theft is..." are likely to be incorrect. We're talking legal definition here and specifically, in this case, legal definition in California. Also, laws change so the definition of theft can change, so any such statement needs to be qualified by a time frame.

I would advise a complete newbie to keep it very simple in the beginning.

1. Pick on language and stay with it for a while. I would suggest something like Python, Perl or TCL.

2. Find some kind of text file to work on. Just about anything will do: an HTML file, contact list, ... Anything that you can view with a simple text editor. (Stay away from doc files or anything with a lot of special formatting commands requiring a word process, like Word, to view.)

3. Find out how to read lines from this file and write to standard out (stdout) from your chosen language.

4. Start playing around writing programs to search for text and print things out. Maybe read the file and write it to stdout. Then change some things before writing it back out (like changing all "Bill" to "William"). Just play around and learn how to use the language.

5. When you get tired of this, set up (or get someone else to set up for you) a web server that can support CGI (Common Gateway Interface, NOT Computer Generated Imagery). (You can do this on your own computer. Just point your browser at http://localhost/ This will let you generate simple web pages with the kind of programming you just learned. You write little programs, drop them in the right directory and suddenly you can generate dynamic web pages. This is just to keep it fun. Now you can start learning HTML, which can start out really simple using just 5 or 6 lines of HTML.

At this point you will have the basics down and can start doing more complicated things.
Some other suggestions:

• Keep away from anything Object Oriented at first. You don't need that complication and will appreciate it more later.
• C is a good language for starting out, but it requires a compile and link step that can confuse some beginners. If this doesn't bother you, C is an excellent foundation for anything that will come later, especially C++ (for the MS/Windows world) or Objective C (for Apple Mac, iPhone, iPad).

Giving the inventor a temporary monopoly is not the purpose of patents. The purpose of patents has always been to encourage innovation. The means to that end is to ensure just compensation to inventors. Today so many trivial things are patented that it's almost impossible for the small developer (AKA, software inventor) to be sure they aren't violating someone's software patent.
My favorite example is when Xerox forced Palm to abandon Graffiti because it violated Xerox's Unistrokes patent. It's not that Graffiti represented letters the same way Unistrokes did. But Xerox was granted a patent on the very idea of using a single unbroken stroke for each letter. I would definitely call that anticompetitive.

Gotta wonder what the world would be like if it were not just illegal to steal a car, but also illegal for anyone else to build one.

If Apple can make boatloads of money without having to spend time responding to protests by offended groups, it makes business sense for them to do so. It is unreasonable to expect a for-profit corporation to engage in activity to its own financial detriment just because the public would be better served if they did so. Apple makes some terrific products and deserves the credit for that. However, I do think the public would be better served to have a more open distribution channel for apps and content. I just don't expect that we can get there through corporate distribution channels. Maybe if we had a Newman's Own distribution channel. :-)