JaKiri

Oh please. Using terminology for the ease of understanding is not a particularly arduous task. Isn't you claiming that I introduced the phrase "photons are energy" and having two examples quoted to you where you said that, prior to my posts, a little contradictory?

It's not though; if they want to have the ability to put records into stores, then they need to sign a deal with a publisher, who forbids this kind of behaviour. We've only seen the smallest and the largest (Radiohead being the obvious example) persuing this method of distribution for a reason.

Which is why copyright law exists. "Taking away potential revenue by breaching copyright law" is a breach in copyright law, not theft - otherwise the law wouldn't need to exist. Of course, the reality is more complicated than that - I must point out again that a neutral study (assuming the canadian government is neutral) found that people who downloaded music illegally tended to spend much more on music, and the musicians who explicitly or implictly support filesharing. The first aim of the writer, the musician, the comedian, should be to entertain. File sharing is an excellent way to get your stuff seen, heard or read by as many people as possible!

But the revenue doesn't necessarily exist?

At least he's saying stuff that's by and large true, rather than posting gibberish then running away.

I'm saying it isn't theft. The reason I'm saying it isn't theft is simple: because it isn't theft. Just as "decreasing market value" isn't theft, or even a crime. It's how you decrease market value that is important legally, and if your argument held any water this would not be the case. And, as I have pointed out many times (and you have ignored the same number of times) there is evidence for filesharing increasing the market value rather than decreasing it. Many bands "encourage" filesharing in order to get their music heard, although of course they aren't allowed to say on record because of their contract, so I admit that it's difficult to verify in most cases.

You said that copyright violation was theft because it decreased the market value of the thing being stolen. I pointed out that this was bollocks beacuse: a. decreasing market value isn't theft. and b. copyright infringement doesn't necessarily decrease market value, and there is evidence that it increases it. I notice you only quoted half of my post, by the way.

Why haven't Intel been arrested then? The market value of AMD's recent processors has definitely been decreased by the existance of the Core2Duo. "Taking" potential sales is not theft, especially when there's evidence that people who download music tend to spend much more on music.

He's in the pocket of big shrimp!

I should have used "rights", not "the rights". It doesn't matter what the law is, if someone thinks it's a right then they think it's a right. Copyright violation isn't theft, it's copyright violation.

Evolution assumes (and has evidence for) randomness. Intelligent design assumes design (obviously). They're not compatible. Now, I may just be coming out from a stupid argument about mass, but I think I'm on firmer ground here when I say that you're wrong, although the trouble is I don't really know how to begin. I'll just short circuit the whole thing by saying that this sentence doesn't even make sense to people who know nothing about physics, because the first half implies that of all the fundamental particles we've found none have mass - which means that the second half has already happened.

I don't think you're trying to use it here as such, but this is a common argument used by anti-atheists in order to muddy the waters.

It depends how you define "rights". Certainly the founding fathers stated that the rights existed despite the law. Although I'd use 'rights' for this kind of thing and '"rights"' for things given by law, that's an individual convention and we can't be sure it applies here.

OK right, now we're on the same page. Yes, there is a quantity of mass which is, in terms of energy, equivilent to the energy of a given photon. In my defense, it's very difficult to tell when you're merely communicating badly and when you're doing things like the following: I remember, in my first post in the thread, quoting you saying which was itself a clarification of Confusion abounds! Yep. Stupid meandering over! With that context, what you said earlier was still silly (energy is not photons, the speed of light is not the speed of energy [although you could use this as shorthand for something more correct], it's the inertial mass that stops it reaching c, not the inertia [mass is, in classical mechanics, the restistance to change in inertia, but this is again a problem in terminology] and whatnot. In summation: what you meant is reasonably correct, what you said is nonsensical in places which, coupled with your prose style [which is forgiveable, mine's pretty bad, especially this sentence], made it difficult to understand and therefore I called it gibberish. Your repeated reference to that photoelectric question remains mystifying to me though.)

Life doesn't have a purpose. You could argue that the purpose is to create more life, but I'd say that's part of the definition and so you end up with a circular argument. On a side note, a fair amount of that large quoted post is incorrect, most notably http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning