I postulate that they would have come about in another manner then. The closest we have to a proper experimental control is industries that lack any IP protection, the fashion industry springs to mind, yet every year designers come up with new designs -and make a fortune out of them.
They simply found OTHER ways to make money out of invention and fund the process. Removing the patent protection does't mean removing the financial incentive from those that want (or need) it, it simply means the methodology by which that incentive is satisfied gets changed.

>Um.. so we are all going to be able to look up our genes online and the information we find will be sufficient for us to make our own tests and treatments?

Perhaps, technology can develop in interesting ways. Right now we have projects like folding@home which has already contributed greatly to medical research very closely related to genetics - how well do you think that would have worked if somebody had thought to patent protein-fold shapes they discovered ? How many people would have participated if the results were going to be patented by some company ?

Whose to say that we will not, quite soon, see a similar crowdsourcing application to discover the purposes of genes ? But it won't happen while genes are patented.

So if I set up a wind turbine on my rooftop (or a solar panel for that matter) hook up a computer to that and mine bitcoins which I then sell on an exchange - I can effectively be turning green energy into money with zero overhead cost (though it could take quite a while to make back the initial investment). While to the best of my knowledge no home-level green generators are a the point where you could economically sell excess to your neighbours without living extremely frugally - this version could actually be a viable small business for somebody.

>The meat is the tissue that supports the organism. Organisms are not going to just evolve giant, hollow shell bodies for no good purpose.

This is not evolution, and there is no adaptation (or claimed adaptation) at play here. When humans take steroids they grow huge muscles (generally at major harm to every other organ) - those muscles are not an evolutionary response to higher testosterone levels, they are a symptom of a chemical imbalance and this is why they harm the rest of the body.
The same happens with the crabs - the carbon dioxide causes their shells to grow huge, but it isn't because it's GOOD for them, it's a side effect of a toxic chemical imbalance.

From the article: these giant crabs put all their energy into growing larger shells and very little into growing anything else, so diners would find that when they crack open a huge crab-shell there is very little meat inside.

Well, maybe.
I've been seeing a children's toy on the shelves recently known as V-drums, basically it's a pair of "drum sticks" that contain simple gyroscopic motion sensors - and produce drum sounds as you swing them around, the programming being made to associate various movements with the locations of your non-existent drums.

I bet that if the choirmaster uses one of these, instead of a baton, with some open-ended headphones for the singer - they'd end up with different drum sounds for the most crucial movements - and the singer could simply learn which ones to listen out for.
This makes perfect sense musically as drums are MEANT to be the lead-sound in most forms of music (indeed, it could be said that in rock and pop the drummer doubles as the band's conductor*) , so while I doubt this toy is good enough for any real drummer to enjoy it may just be good enough to solve this problem, and it's really quite cheap. About 30 USD (at the current exchange rate).

*I am a drummer, so I may be a tiny bit biassed :P

Lucas sold out at least 15 years ago when he started working on Episode 1. Since then he has raped everything Star Wars and even bent poor old Indie over a barrel for a massive royal buttreaming without even the goddamn basic human courtesy of a reach-around (to misquote Full Metal Jacket).

The Disney cash was just the fire sale at the end of a decade-and-a-half of post-sell-out franchise-milking.

Well... he's starship needs a name right ?

>why did he forget about them during his ponder - is he a bit stupid, or something?

Have you ever seen a platypus ? ... Or maybe that just answers the question: "Did God himself actually smoke any of the marijuana he left growing all over the planet..."

>How does thinking they are believing something stupid not mean you think less of them because of it?

Because even smart people are wrong sometimes. Because even a genius can occasionally do or think something stupid.

I know some very religious people who are highly intelligent, caring, charitable and extremely honest people that I have tremendous respect for, I still think their beliefs are stupid though - but I don't think THEY are stupid, I just think nobody is smart enough not to be wrong some of the time.
I have religious friends who respect me, indeed love me, yet they think my lack of religious commitment is stupid. Not all believers make fire-and-brimmstone speeches - not all of them are bigots, likewise not all atheists are bigots regarding religion.

What you believe (or not believe) is a choice, how you treat those who believe something else is also a choice.
Thinking somebody has a stupid belief is guaranteed by the mere existence of the first choice, thinking that this means he cannot be an equal person with equal rights does not follow from that, if you go there, the bigotry is your own responsibility.*

*The one catch is when the former encourages a choice in the latter - e.g. a religion that dictates you treat other religions with bigottry - but I have never encountered a religion among any of the major ones where such a compunction is actually an undeniable part of the system. Many interpret the bible in a way that encourages bigotry - many others interpret it in a way that actively DISCOURAGE bigotry (for example - there are parts that specifically make it wrong to try and enforce your faith onto others with violence or pressure) - how a specific Christian acts is largely a matter of which sections he CHOOSES to focus on and how he personally clarifies the apparent contradiction. The same goes for the Q'uran.

When somebody is a bigot, blame him for it, not his religion or indeed, his lack of one.

>Relay computers? No, I use crowd computing: A crowd of people physically moves my bits around!

Hah, you youngsters and your hard drives. I got a crowd of illegal immigrants in my basement punching cards !

It works, I saw a legal copy years ago and lost it in the meantime, but I wanted to show my wife something of what I do all day, so I downloaded that torrent a few weeks ago to watch with her.

>Well, that's quite dumb then, since it isn't slavery.
I backed the claim up, you didn't even bother to evaluate the reasoning behind the claim, the idea may have been insightful.

>And they do. Corporate personhood is just a legal fiction to enable that.

Bull. Normal people don't get legal fictions like "limited liability", they aren't legally required to overrule their conscience in the service of shareholders either.

>Get another job, if you don't like the current one. No reason to starve. I find it interesting how you advocate destroying a lot of the legal protections that job creating corporations need in order to function, and then turn around and complain indirectly that it's not convenient enough to find jobs. Well, I suppose it might be a good idea in that light to stop trying to kill the golden goose.

I did nothing of the kind - I called ALL capitalist employment nothing but slavery. If the only freedom we have gained (for the vast majority of people) is the right to choose a different owner, then we have gained no freedom at all.
More-over I don't believe that any of these legal fictions are required for businesses to operate - for a start, they are actually very recent inventions and busineses operated quite well and profitably for centuries before they were there. In fact the corporation as we know it didn't exist until the early 20th century - until then the law (in the USA) stated that corporation could never sign more than one customer contract. A corporation was founded to raise capital for one specific project and one project alone. Upon conclusion of said project it was automatically disbanded.
Granted some other corporations internationally had previously existed for extended periods - but only because they were engaged in very long projects - one of them had it's own army, and ruled over a third of the surface of the planet. Nobody had the rights of citizens, only the duties of an employee - no recourse, no right to change jobs, yet somehow "not slaves" - even as said corporation happily ran one of the largest slave-trading operations in world history (indeed it supplied the vast majority of the slaves the USA was buying).
Nope, corporations don't lay any golden eggs - what they do is to take the efforts of true entrepeneurs, fire them and turn them into an abberation that considers cost-cutting more important than quality, that lie and steal and cheat their customers to the highest extent they can get away with, flaunt the rule of law and buy political power to do it more - and never, ever face any true justice.
Do you know how many Enron executives have served jailtime ? I know. Zero. Not one. The only one who was even formally charged was CEO Ken Lay and he never stood trial because he died before the trial began. The rest got even more lucrative jobs to perform similar scams for other corporations - what they did at Enron was APPEALING to shareholders (even as it drew the hated ire of everybody else).
You know that's not the ugliest of it ? Those Enron executives paid themselves a massive set of massive bonus cheques, out of borrowed money one day... the next day they fired over 1400 workers and announced the bankruptcy of the company - secure in the knowledge that the debt would not have to be repaid thanks to bankruptcy laws and that limited liability would let them keep their bonuses. That right there - is the single largest cash robbery in human history.
Golden eggs my ass. Rent-seeking parasites more-like. And what other corporations get up to are, in general, worse. That wasn't as bad as it gets. Not by a long shot.
Shell oil has been convicted of actually hiring assassins to silence their critics in Nigeria - cold-blooded murder, and nobody faced a criminal charge. The company got a fine, but all the executives who signed off on it got away scott free.

There is no economic benefit from corporations - and indeed every single person employed by one would be living a higher quality life if they were instead employed by a private company doing the exact same business.

One of the most admirable businessmen alive today Richard Branson hates corporations perhaps even more than me - because his company, Virgin -used to be one. Virgin went public in 1999, many people hopefully invested, but sadly so did a lot of the usual people who buy shares only so they can force companies to milk their customers, employees and the environment for all their worth with no regard for long term impacts or costs of their actions. Branson didn't hang around long enough to experience what usually happens with entrepreneurs when their companies go public (96% of them get fired from the companies they started within 3 years) - he realized in just six months that he could not live in good consciences with what these shareholders were demanding he turn his business into, with how they demanded he treat his workers, with how they demanded he gouge and defraud his customers - so he bought the shares back - every last one of them, and took the company private again. For that he has my everlasting respect (and conveniently - he is a lot richer now than he was back then, and also still in charge of his company).
That is the kind of entrepeneur who DOES lay the golden eggs. Corporations ? There is nothing they do that a cooperation cannot have done with less harm and no purpose they serve that is actually beneficial to society.

Assemble all you want as a group of individuals. I'm not intruding on that, hold a shared opinion if you want.
But the moment you are a profit seeking entity - who is seeking to establish contracts - your speech must be truthful because otherwise you are attempting to commit fraud.

The very attempt should be prohibited to protect the much more important freedoms of those with far less power to defend it.