As for being a muppet, you lose. I DID come up with counter arguments. Your refusal to acknowledge them shows the paucity of your imagination and your argument. Stick to your insults, you're better at that.

Trademarks first: they are unnecessary. Trying to pass off your product as someone else's is fraud, theft, whatever you want to call it. Publish someone else's book under your name? Fraud. Publish your content under a famous author's name? Fraud.

Trademark is just typical statist control freakery overkill. It adds nothing.

I did once work up an idea for radical patent reform. A fun project. This is from memory and may be wrong in details.

A patent application includes several things:

* A complete description of how to make the product.

* A deadline for reproduction; the patent is valid at least this long.

* The royalty schedule.

If no one can reproduce the product by the deadline, there is no patent. If someone does make a copy, the time it took is multiplied by some factor to set the patent duration.

So the patent holder's incentive is to specify the recipe so well that it can be reproduced by the deadline, otherwise there will be no patent and no royalties. At the same time, the product must be advanced enough that it can't be reproduced so quickly that the patent expires too soon to collect any significant royalties. And furthermore, if it is too simple, copycats might just keep their reproduction private and wait for the deadline to ex[ire the patent, then jump into production without royalties.

The copycats have two choices: rush to be first to reproduce the product, both for market share and to keep the patent as short as possible; or reproduce the product but keep it private so the patent expires unless some other copycat shows up, in which case the first copycat can enter the market right on their heels.

The parameters make a difference.

* If the maximum deadline is too long, it will discourage copycats.

* If the time-to-reproduction multiplication factor is too short; it will reduce royalties and (allegedly!) discourage innovation. If the factor is too big, it will discourage copycats.

There used to be that phrase, something like "not obvious to those skilled in the arts". I have worked with people who had electrical engineering patents, and they were just ordinary work results. Even I understood them, in their basic aspects. I have read that a lot of metallurgy is just routine experimentation with slightly different ratios of chromium and nickel and other materials, and when one pans out, they patent. Nothing groundbreaking, just routine work.

But that's a pretty small sample size. It would be interesting to know more about patents overall.

Pathetic partisanship. Obama intentionally executed American citizens by drone without criminal charges or trials. Biden doubled down on Trump 1.0's tariffs, and no one knows who was actually running things for at least his last several years of senility. Bush Jr. started two wars for no reason. Clinton had his own little military adventures. It goes on as far back as you want.

You're first statement is false, in theory and in practice. There are only a limited number of ways to differentiate shapes within the manufacturing tolerances available, for starters. In the real world, designs which differ by the minimum possible manufacturing tolerances are not visibly different to people. In the real world, most theoretically possible designs are impractical. No one's going to buy or make phones with the fingerprint sensor in corners, or with cameras on the side. No one's going to buy or make triangular phones, or circular phones, or cubical phones.

So much for your expertise.

And that goes to the key of my argument. You may as well patent bicycle geometry as patent rounded corners or how to display apps on a phone. Or speaking of geometry, you may as well try to claim copyright infringement for using similar words to describe the basic geometry axioms, or the laws of thermodynamics or relativity.

You are also wrong about encouraging good design. Only a damned fool could imagine a business refusing to improve designs and attract customers for fear some other company might copy them. All it takes is one company to improve their design and eat the others' lunch. You can't have it both ways. Either all companies would refuse to innovate and progress would slow to a crawl, or all would copy each other and race to find new designs before the others.

Three incredibly dynamic industries are unprotected by patents and copyrights, yet thrive so much that people joke about them changing too much: fashion, restaurant meals, and sportsball tactics. If your arguments were true, all would be suffocating from a lack of innovation.

Patents and copyrights are supposed to encourage innovation and progress. 7-year lawsuits costing hundreds of millions of dollars do not encourage innovation or progress. They enrich lawyers and corrupt the legal system.

You buttress my case. All that shows the absurdity of all patents, including design patents, that such trivial features are considered worthy of patent protection. There are only so many ways you can design a slab phone. When the degree of roundness and all those other trivial features become worthy of patents, and all those lawyers and such lengthy and inconclusive and partisan trials (7 years! Supreme Court! Opposite results in the US and South Korea!) Nothing was gained except enrichment of lawyers.

Lawyers suck. Design patents suck. All those words you write prove it.

Taction probably is a troll, but ever since Apple sued Samsung for round corners design patent infringement, I figure that made Apple a patent troll too, and every patent fight they lose is karma. I'm on Taction's side for that reason alone.

"approximately 300,000 Facebook users took an online personality quiz, only to have the app that hosted the quiz harvest data from tens of millions of their "friends.""

Why do people believe such promises? For instance, every request to click a link and take an anonymous survey -- look at the URL. Does it include random numbers to identify the source of the URL? Then don't take it. Ignore it, or if you really want to participate in the survey, trim off all that identify cruft. Takes 5 seconds, which is nothing if you intend to take the survey.

The survey people will claim it's to prevent someone taking the survey multiple times. Easy to solve -- set a cookie, and don't let the survey proceed if the cookie can't be set. Anyone so eager to bias the survey results that they delete cookies, well, that's a vanishingly small number of people. There are more people who will lie or make up answers than who will take the time to delete cookies over and over.

...Modern ejector seats cause spinal injuries from which full recovery is "unusual". Smashing the spines of pilots might not be the most effective way to boost morale.

$22,000 per hour. The F35 will be nearer $42,000 per hour. These are under-estimates, as they do not include price hikes, crashes that close businesses, crashing into businesses, crashing into heavily-populated sports centres, etc.

I think you responded to someone else's comment.

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

I'm going to argue with that: No, the UN is not the "set of governments". That implies some hierarchical authority. You can say the US is a "set of state governments", but not the UN. The UN is also an incomplete set; it excludes Taiwan, for instance, because China had a civil war and the mainland winner threw a tantrum and still won't let the losing remnant join, 80 years later.

The UN can't enforce peace because it is not a cohesive set. If the US were organized like the UN is, individual states could block the US from doing anything.

At best, you can lump the five "founding" nations together, the ones with the security council vetoes, but then you have to explain why Taiwan is not even a member of the organization, let alone the security council with its own veto; and you have to explain why all the USSR's individual SSR remnants are not part of the security council with their own vetoes.

I'd much rather the UN wasted their time doing nonsense like this than trying to tame the boiling oceans. It would be even better if they tried to enforce peace, but that's not important enough for them.