Copyright disallows people from copying ideas that others thought of. Patents disallow people from using ideas even if they thought of them themselves, if someone else thought of them earlier. Some people think that copyright is a moral right. I don't think so. But even if we were to assume that copyright were a moral right, I can't see how anyone could honestly think that patents are. It seems to me that if we accept that people have a right to think of ideas themselves, and also accept that we should not punish people on the mere presumption of guilt (i.e. we shouldn't assume that someone has copied an idea if it's possible they thought of it themselves), then there can be no basis for considering patents as a moral right.

If there is any basis for patents at all, then, it must be, like tax, justified as a democratically agreed upon imposition on liberty as a means for promoting the greater good (even if we assume copyright to be a moral right).

By using clean room design (starting with an empty code base, and ensuring everything added was written in-house), it is possible for a company to ensure that software they produce is not covered by other people's copyrights. This is not the case with patents. The only way to determine that software is not covered by other people's patents is to check every part of it against every patent in existence.

In the case of pharmaceuticals, patents do significantly promote innovation, and a patent search is realistically achievable, so pharmaceutical patents do promote the greater good. In the case of software, patents do not significantly promote innovation, and patent searches are generally impractical, so software patents do not promote the greater good.

What we're seeing here is evidence of the LORD intervening to gently nudge the universe towards the development of goodness.</retard>

You've said people sacrificing themselves to help others in order to propagate shared genes can not be called 'altruistic' because it is selfish, but is this really so? If I sacrifice myself, it doesn't actually help me any (quite the opposite), even if it does help propagate my genes. Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene talks about genes being 'selfish' although people aren't necessarily (AFAIK). And BTW, while you've objected to the use of the term 'altruistic', you've proceeded to use the term 'selfless' in a more objectionable way.

Conclusion? The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be maladjusted.

I think that's the smarter you are if you are above average, or the less smart you are if you are below average.

Or to put it another way, the conclusion is this: The further away you are from average, the less likely you are to fit in.

Oh, you might think you're doing okay, but boy, are you in for a rude awakening. Real soon. Any day now, you mark my words. And when it does happen, I'm going to laugh at your misfortune heartily. In the meanwhile I'll just bide my time saying "Any day now." And if any misfortune comes my way, that's only bad luck, clearly.

If the Christian god exists, and is all powerful, then helping out those who most need and deserve it (like children about to be raped and murdered for instance) would consume an infinitesimal fraction of his effort. If he is all loving, then he surely wouldn't begrudge us that.

You're quite right we all assume the reliability of our memories, as well as that of our senses. (In fact, we may be wrong about these things. People with Alzheimer's disease may have unreliable memories, and people dreaming have unreliable senses.) And yes, we also assume that there was a past, and will be a future.

We start with these beliefs built-in, and a good thing because we couldn't do anything (including build further beliefs) without them. Some of us are also indoctrinated with religious beliefs as children. As adults, we can (hopefully) analyse our beliefs and question them. Nihilists notice none of our beliefs have any ultimate foundation, and therefore doubt them all. But this leads us nowhere. What if nothing exists, or at least nothing can be known? Then there is nothing to think about. We must make a few basic assumptions so we can admit anything as being worth thinking about.

But why make more assumptions than we need to? In particular, why make some specific religious assumptions rather than others? And although we can't hope for any ultimate foundation for our beliefs, we can aim for self-consistency, and Christianity doesn't seem very self-consistent to me.

I said that, if anything, a later meaning is dubious, and specifically in response to the suggestion that an earlier meaning is dubious.

To publish a work is to make it public, hence 'publish'. Copyright laws have historically applied from the time of publication (i.e. from the time that a work is made public), not to works that have not been made public (which are covered by the likes of privacy laws), hence, historically, all works under copyright law would necessarily be in the public domain, regardless of the lack of a public legal right to make copies.

The earlier meaning of 'public domain' is no more dubious than the earlier meaning of 'pirate'. If anything, it is the later meaning which is dubious, and used to confuse the issue to benefit an agenda.

Well... Intellectual works aren't the sort of things that can be public domain or not, but rather they might or might not be in the public domain. However that said, yes, all intellectual works on the web are in fact in the public domain, although what is at issue here is whether or not they are in the public domain in law. Not every road that exists in law exists in fact, and vice versa, and this applies to works being in the public domain too.

There are people in this country that will kill you because you think abortion is okay,

If you're interested in the abortion debate, I'd encourage you to take a look at the abortion debate map at Debategraph (it's kind of like Wikipedia for debates).

If you've got a full meal ahead of you, have a read of The Mind of God by Paul Davies [asu.edu] or Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship by John Polkinghorne [polkinghorne.net] (Physics).

Let's not and say we did. I helped with HTML for a web page that was in to this kind of stuff. They also had an article saying it's narrow minded to not accept that things can be true and false at the same time, and one suggesting that chaos theory disproves entropy, because it shows that order can arise from chaos. It was briefly amusing, but quickly became depressing.

'To remove the perceived stigma, we would need to have more scientists talking openly about issues of religion, where such issues are particularly relevant to their discipline.'"

Which is where, exactly?

Most of the results were uninteresting, but if we look at the 17th run, you'll see here an effect that I suspect was caused by divine intervention.

My take on this story: Give me six lines by the hand of any honest man and I'll show that he's religious.

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but do you essentially mean that everyone is religious, any anyone who says they're not religious is just lying? If that's essentially what you mean, then do you really believe this, or are you just lying?

The top scientists don't have a problem with religion. The most unscientific don't have a problem with religion. It's only those in the middle, those who think they know science but probably don't, which have a problem, statistically speaking.

Really? Where are the statistics for this? Or do you just think you know about this, but probably don't?