When you asked your work's IT department why your work has chosen to block BitTorrent Sync traffic and has chosen not to block Dropbox traffic, what reply did you get?

Some people believe the planet is already over its long-term carrying capacity and some humans will end up starving anyway.

You could always do work on X11/Linux and "strategy or point and click adventure games" on Android/Linux.

So what should a newcomer to a creative field do to avoid being blindsided and bankrupted by incumbent owners of exclusive rights? If there are no good steps that a newcomer can take, then this impossibility has a chilling effect on people even trying to become a newcomer to a creative field.

What kind of search?

This is a form of creativity of which society currently disapproves through its elected representatives. How does it benefit society for society to disapprove of this?

Why the subject-verb disagreement? Are you quoting (or paraphrasing) a work of which I am not aware? Even so, I don't understand how to ensure that I avoid attorney's fees, statutory damages, and other ways of losing even more than the sweat equity that I had invested.

So what should Harrison have done instead to ensure that he realized his having accidentally made such a blatant ripoff before publishing it and thereby opening himself to infringement lawsuits?

Why does the PowerShell equivalent of sudo su - require so much typing (namely Start-Process powershell -Verb runAs according to this page?) And unlike Ubuntu, which installs man pages by default, Windows requires users to remember to run Update-Help as administrator while online before taking the computer offline.

In Control Panel in Windows 8.1, you can "Change your account name" or "Change your account type" (whether user is an administrator or not). To do anything else, you need to "Make changes to my account in PC settings", which opens "the tablet-PC nonsense". To create an account, you need to click "Manage another account" and then "Add a new user in PC settings", which also opens "the tablet-PC nonsense".

Then how do you tell when it's about to change? And who goes during a power outage? And how do you tell "on" from "sun reflecting off the lens"?

Administration UI not changing is important for people who need to walk other people through PC administration over the telephone.

Is that so? I thought Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Wii was modded to hell and back.

OS X? It's been that way since OS VI. System 6 had a desk accessory called "Control Panel" that would load "cdev" applets. System 7 shifted the cdev loader to Finder, but otherwise they worked similarly. Microsoft has had a long time to copy this stuff.

You could always do work on X11/Linux and game on PlayStation.

The format for each of the various system config files in $etc and the various user config files in $HOME differs from program to program.

In Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, administrators already cannot create or modify a user account inside Control Panel. They have to make changes "in PC settings", which is code-word for "click here to open the tablet-PC nonsense".

A "work" is a piece of human expression fixed in a tangible medium. The first work was built on oral tradition. Oral tradition in turn was based on whatever preceded behaviorally modern humans' language, and science currently has no answers for that.

So what can a composer of music do to determine whether or not he is accidentally infringing or plagiarizing? George Harrison got bit by this (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case).

Let me rephrase the question: How can someone starting out in the business determine what is original?