[Citation needed]

Where do you get the idea that 99% of scientists ever thought the world was flat? Greek philosophers proved it round, and there's plenty of evidence of its roundness. I'd think at least 2% of scientists would have had some clue about the Greeks and why they were right.

Role-players of Florida, beware! Will somebody notice all the time I spent conspiring with others to break into government buildings with the intent of destroying things? Granted, we didn't recognize the Empire as a legitimate government, or Palpatine as Emperor, but it was the de facto government and it was those buildings the Jedi accompanied us into.

Because the first one to name a figure gets their options cut off. If I say "How about $80K?", I've just cut off hope of any higher. They know I'll work for that, so there's no point in offering me more. On the other hand, if I ask for a figure they're not willing to pay, I'm running the risk of being considered too greedy and having an inflated view of myself. If I happen to know their high end, I can start there, but otherwise I'm likely to come out worse. Similarly, if the interviewer suggests $70K, then I know I can rely on that and negotiate up.

If you're a techie, you're probably a worse negotiator than your interviewer, so you're likely to be maneuvered into offering the first figure. Try to avoid that. Something like "I make $70K already, and I'd like an increase" will at least preserve some upward negotiation ability (of course, if the company isn't going to be offering that, you don't get the job, but that's probably what you want at the moment).

I've gotten extremely frustrated with people who want me to help them do X, when it would work far better for them to tell me they have problem or desire Y.

It's not the only one. Ever try to move diagonally in vi? Just because your favorite roguelike does it doesn't mean vi/vim will.

If you're going to punish people for saying apparently stupid things, you're going to cut off a lot of progress and ingenuity.

"You idiot, Altavista etc. have Internet search locked up. You can get a piece of the pie, but you'll be lucky to break even." "Jeez. Why would somebody want to own a computer?" "You dolt, this relativity thing just fails because of the screwy things it says about time." "You're going to bet the company on a new phone?" "Land at Inch'on? Have you seen the terrain? Are you out of your mind?"

And I'm sure Disney will treat Star Wars and Star Trek canon with the exact same painstaking demand for accuracy that they did for, say, Greek mythology in Hercules.

Nope. If I hire somebody to do something and they do it, I legally have to give them the money. If somebody writes a book or song I like, I don't have to give that person anything. The creator is doing that on spec. There is no contract between me and the creator.

In other words, in the theft of services case, I have caused somebody else to do some work for me specifically. That work is generally not transferable, and so whoever it is has done work that will not be recompensed. In the case of copyright, the creator has published something that is not specifically for me, and is hoping for (not contracting for) compensation from the general public.

If I ask a lawyer to do work for me and then don't pay him, I've done him a direct harm. He could have been selling that time to somebody else, or playing World of Warcraft during it, or something else. If I make a copy of a copyrighted work, I've done nobody any direct harm. I haven't caused the creator to work extra at all. To the lawyer, it matters whether I ask him to work for me, but to the creator, it doesn't matter if I make an illegitimate copy. The creator, indeed, is better off selling ten thousand copies and having a million people pirate it, than selling a thousand copies with no piracy.

If you're going to argue in favor of copyrights, you need to understand this. You need to use valid arguments. If you use invalid arguments, and insist on them, it makes it look like there are no valid arguments. Copyright infringement is not theft in any form. It does not deprive anybody of property or time. It may or may not reduce earnings from a creative work.

There are good arguments for copyrights (although not for the current copyright duration). They aren't the same as the ones against theft.

Yeah, but special relativity is conceptually simple and has been exhaustively tested. We already know that causality doesn't apply to everything. Besides, I think time travel would be more fun.

In a more rational world, we'd try to find ways to get low crime rates without spending too much. Imprisoning people is expensive. Other countries seem to get low crime rates while imprisoning many fewer people.

No, Apple wouldn't try to cut you off from Youtube. Remember, Apple is a hardware company, and always has been. They pick up the odd billion or so on iTunes, but that's chump change compared to what they get by selling iStuff. If they make me spend a lot of money on iTunes and then I buy Android rather than the next iPhone, they lose.

FTP clients have uses other than downloading from your site, and they don't have features only useful in downloading stuff without permission. The download ability of MS's app exists specifically to violate Google's TOS. That's the difference.

If you're trying to address copyright issues, why take up so much of your reply with theft of services? The issue is not that you made an illicit copy of the will or song, but that you agreed to pay somebody for producing it, and took the result of their work without paying them. Much like stiffing a teenager who just mowed your grass.

The only relevant thing you said assumes that having free copies available reduces the demand for buying the copyrighted work. We know this is false in some cases, and the evidence for the assumption is spotty at best.

The distance from start to destination would be the same between boat and plane (in whatever measure you wanted, such as meters, nautical miles, or cubits), but the distance traveled would not be since they didn't follow the same path. This is also true whether you use nautical miles, furlongs, or attoparsecs.

The nautical mile is a unit of length. The meter is a unit of length. The nautical mile was derived as a certain fraction of a particular great circle or segment thereof on the earth. So was the meter. In both cases, the units of length wound up with a different definition. What is so hard about this?

Since the comparison is between trying to generally reduce access to firearms and an attempt to reduce drunk driving deaths, the relevant death comparison is all gun deaths and all drunk driving deaths. If the proposal was a general temperance campaign, the number of total alcohol-related deaths would indeed be relevant.

I'm also rather appalled that you consider only bad-guy-on-good-buy deaths the only ones society is concerned about. Society has an interest in preventing unnecessary deaths, from whatever causes, and this includes bad-guy-on-bad-guy murders. Criminals do not in general deserve to be killed, occupational hazard or not, unless they've committed capital offenses.