The people trying to make money from content will deploy whatever technology best enables them to do so. Not enabling your technology to meet this need will simply ensure that they use something else. That something else may not be as good as your solution could have been.

The issue here is not looking 'beyond money' but setting the right time horizon. China's activities make perfect economic sense when you properly consider how long it takes to build / extend / upgrade energy infrastructure and how long the components tend to last for. You don't get off of fossil fuels in months or years, but decades.

Why should you have any right to say what others do and do not do with the software that you write? Under the GPL, someone could add something relatively simple and then sell the software, they would just need to adhere to the requirements of the GPL in the process.

I wonder if someone will get caught stealing unlicensed software hosted on places like GitHub, leading to some kind of a case in which an implied license is discussed. Furthermore, I wonder what kind of license they would decide is implied in that situation (if they decided that there were one) - BSD style, or GPL style?

"you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories." Sounds pretty permissive to me.

In a "GPL-Only" world, interpreting that as all software must comply with the terms of the GPL license, the concepts of 'ownership' and 'property' would not apply to software. There is a philosophical case to be made (but perhaps, not a practical one) that all scarcity in software is artificial and that notions of property are applied to it not validly but regressively.

Doesn't that apply if you are processing credit card transactions? In this case, the person selling the app is not actually doing that, only Google is.

They probably couldn't do that even if they wanted to. Some of the documents likely contain business records that can't just be 'sold to the highest bidder' (imagine how bad such a scheme would be for the consumer!) The costs associated with sorting the stuff they could sell from the stuff they couldn't would likely exceed whatever you're all willing to pay for them. Then you know, plus shipping...

Morally right / wrong with "copying" products is not so black and white. What one person would call "copying" another would call "competition." Competition is a good thing and should be encouraged as much as possible. I would even expect many in the Slashdot crowd to argue that current legal intellectual property protections should be weakened specifically to encourage innovation and lower prices - both of which are good for consumers. If the firm in question did not develop any technology that couldn't be reproduced by a team of smart people for less than it would cost to acquire it, buying the firm would be technically irrational.

Perhaps this content from Wikipedia will help sort out any remaining confusion.

One use of the term “display resolution” applies to fixed-pixel-array displays such as plasma display panels (PDPs), liquid crystal displays (LCDs), digital light processing (DLP) projectors, or similar technologies, and is simply the physical number of columns and rows of pixels creating the display (e.g., 1920 × 1080). A consequence of having a fixed-grid display is that, for multi-format video inputs, all displays need a "scaling engine" (a digital video processor that includes a memory array) to match the incoming picture format to the display.

Note that the use of the word resolution here is a misnomer, though common. The term “display resolution” is usually used to mean pixel dimensions, the number of pixels in each dimension (e.g., 1920 × 1080), which does not tell anything about the resolution of the display on which the image is actually formed: resolution properly refers to the pixel density, the number of pixels per unit distance or area, not total number of pixels. In digital measurement, the display resolution would be given in pixels per inch. In analog measurement, if the screen is 10 inches high, then the horizontal resolution is measured across a square 10 inches wide. This is typically stated as "lines horizontal resolution, per picture height;"[1] for example, analog NTSC TVs can typically display about 340 lines of "per picture height" horizontal resolution from over-the-air sources, which is equivalent to about 440 total lines of actual picture information from left edge to right edge.[1]

source

That's a bit of a stretch. In this case even the upstream article introduced the concept as "TV with 16 times the resolution of HDTV." You are technically correct of course, but you have to acknowledge that the common use of the term and the technical use of the term "resolution" with regards to televisions have evidently diverged. 8-bit vs. 16-bit color having half the number of colors is just patently absurd.

You're right, I meant 720/24p. The use of the word "broadcast" was also careless on my part in this situation.

As you've pointed out it really comes down to terminology.

Pixels per inch depends on the "resolution" of the display standard, and the size of the display. a 40" 1080p display and a 90" 1080p display have the same number of pixels, but wildly different pixel per inch values.

None of these standards say anything in terms of pixels per inch - just number of pixels overall. "resolution" in this context can only mean the total number of pixels. 4k has 4x the number of pixels that 1080p has, and 8k has 16x the pixels.

It really depends on what it is that you are encoding. p will do a lot better if you have a lot of motion in the video.