He didn't claim it was an analogy. He claimed that one is the other.

Factually incorrect.Copyright infringement and theft have completely different legal definitions and different laws apply to each.

You're starting off on a false premise, and using mathy-looking letter variables doesn't make your logic any less sloppy.

The Voyager craft were intended to operate for many years. The mars rovers weren't. The mars rovers also reside in a much harsher environment than the space probes which float weightlessly in a vacuum at a constant temperature.

There was no reason to design the flash memory to last much longer than the expected lifetimes of the wheel bearings or solar panels. Just because by some miracle those both lasted much longer than expected, it doesn't mean that additional investments of resources into the memory would have been justified.

False. Cars from that era were routinely sent to the scrapyard when they were less than 10 years old because they were rusted beyond repair. Now the average age of US cars is over ten years, twice what it was in the 1960s. Old cars also required constant maintenance of problem-prone mechanical parts such as ignition points and carburetors.

I think that's the vendor which provided the costumes and props for the original "Wizard of Oz" film.

Your repetitive "developed vs 3rd" world red herring is tiresome.

We're talking about future developments that will apply everywhere.

You certainly could get to a point where it's just too much of a bother to even keep track of a low-achieving human employee vs. having a robot do it. Those people could essentially become unemployable. Some people could be encouraged to try harder to achieve, but in many cases you can't get blood out of a turnip. Every year the percentage of people who fail to make the grade could increase as robots gain capabilities.

I'm sure your fine with that because they're receiving what they're worth. But if it's not handled correctly, these hoards of "useless" people could end up stepping out of your little free market box, turning into angry mobs and burning everything down.

If the demand for productive labor can be filled by more robots, the value of human labor can still stay at zero.

What "actual issue"? I just soundly disproved everything you stated.

There must be some kind of vague concept in your head that you can't seem to actually express, but you're just sure that I "don't get it".

The whole point of this topic is that as the supply of labor (provided by workers and/or robots) goes up, the value goes down. Eventually, many people's market value may end up to be essentially zero vs. robots, regardless of what kind of country they live in. You would then probably advocate that we encourage them to work for free; problem solved!

The approaches of the past may not apply it all in the potentially a drastically different future dominated by self-directed automation.

The problem is that median wages have been stagnating for decades.

Your solution to the problem is to lower them further.

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.