No he earned it by understanding the limits of his knowledge and asking pertinent questions.

Science fiction is however empowered by that very same thing, it sets imagination/targets for the people who will make the next technology.

This is artificial value and scarcity created by limited manufacturing, you'd be reducing that value by copying it. If you're looking for edge cases then 'what if your heavily pregnant wife was ten minutes from giving birth and you were 9 minutes by car away from a hospital.' gives you the opposite moral outcome.

What about unique items, the Mona Lisa ?

Would it be reduced as 'best painting, like ever' if everyone were able to hang an exact copy at home? The original would be worth monetarily much less. The benefits to society of everyone who's interested being able to study the finest first hand would be enormous.

I dislike it, especially when used by intelligent people, as it attempts to construct a hierarchy, ranking multi-faceted people by one characteristic. That characteristic being one the author finds or thinks themselves gifted.

It's like the archetypical 'jock' figure ranking everyone by how much they can bench press, and finding everyone else lacking. They're right, it's true, it's just really not that useful or interesting as nearly anyone can do it if they pick the right scale.

Grouping and naming people for something they do not have is a cruelty.

I have no control over you using whatever words you like, but I stop reading at 'sheeple'.

The problem is that 'sheeple' is a meme, it's a good example of what it describes, quick judgement without evidence or thought.

There's too much to read already. Someone who uses the term sheeple is likely to be going to waste the next two paragraphs and minutes of my life in an ill considered attempt to distinguish themselves by repeating a basic observation in the name of ego.

Most people are less intelligent than someone with above average intelligence.

Well done.

In the UK, a recentish study found alcohol to be much more harmful to you, and to others around you, than tobacco. Alcohol worse even than heroin and crack.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210

Just some medical procedures being too expensive for society to pay for is preferable to ALL medical procedures being too expensive for society to pay for.

That was an outlawing, this article is discussing an excessive consumption tax. If this argument/approach works for food/cigarettes then it will also work for alcohol. ( Alcohol has more societal cost than obesity. )

I'm English, we have a ( far from perfect ) National Health System ( NHS ). To me it seems barbaric that a citizen of a society would be seriously ill/die because they don't have money to access available treatments.

Next up after obese would be alcohol drinkers. Personally I'd rather give up drinking alcohol than smoking.

And is therefore the highest of the arts.

Dropbox takes a hash of the file that you're uploading/storing and if they find they have it already they don't do the transfer over the Internet, they just copy their local file to your account. Machines on local networks sync via LAN not Internet.

For Amazon mp3 purchases from them they copy the file to your account also, just one download for your local copy.
For mp3's ripped and/or bought elsewhere they will probably already have a matching copy, so no transfer will take place.

Certainly the more popular songs I store in my dropbox a/c don't upload. Same for movies.

Also. Please look up 'html line break's, they work in /. posts and would have made yours much more easily readable.

You're forgetting that we'd then have the option of an American free Internet *

* The sound a car alarm blaring outside your bedroom window at 4am makes when it finally stops.

I was educated in the Christian myth as a child, it distinctly states in the bible ( Genesis 1, unsurprisingly ) that God created everything, including specifics on light, earth, animals and the stars.

If we ignore traditional definitions of God then I feel we're in the position of inventing new Gods, or of amending the supposedly inviolate idea of God to fit our current beliefs and knowledge, which to me would be evidence that God is a social phenomenon rather than an entity.

Never again.

War isn't a flashy news item with patriotic missiles gleaming off into the sunset, it's friends and relatives dying horrible, horrible deaths.

To create everything from scratch God would have to at least understand *everything* and so has to be more complex than everything else. Just the knowledge of how to create a universe adds more complexity than a universe which has occurred.

You now have the same problem but one stage worse than the one you started with. 'Where did life/the universe/everything come from vs. where did life/universe/everything/God come from.

Occam's razor for me says if you leave the God part out you're closer to a solution, we have a large & growing set of information for this.

Faith is one word for it. If you'd been randomly allocated birth on a different part of the planet your idea of God would be quite different. If you'd not been taught it at an impressionable age you probably wouldn't have developed the idea yourself, because there is zero evidence.