I'm generally very pro-IP; I certainly don't believe in stealing songs, pirating software, and all those common crimes.

However, I don't think IP should be saleable - licensable, yes, but not wholesale removeable from its creator(s). I have no respect or sympathy for IP dumpster-divers like this company. They produce nothing of value while strangling innovation through extortion and low-merit lawsuits.

Macro, you don't understand the dynamics at issue here. You're making a lot of assumptions which are almost certainly not true.

In the vast majority of these sorts of cases, the people using the patented processes have absolutely no clue a patent is involved until they get sued. Who'd guess there was a patent on MP3's, an ubiquitous format used throughout the public domain? Neither I, nor any company I worked for would have thought of checking such a thing. It would be a full-time job, just to figure out what patents you might be infringing on every time you write a line of code.

In most of these cases, the patents are fundamentally invalid; patents aren't checked very closely before being granted (generally by bureaucrats who are not experts in the field in question). Typically, these junk patents are filed on algorithms that are either patently obvious, pre-existing, or so highly similar to pre-existing systems as to not qualify as novel.

The fact that they're not suing Microsoft indicates pretty clearly that their patent is bunk - either it's too narrow to apply to Windows (in which case it will certainly fail the novelty test - or the underlying software can be trivially re-written, or may very well have been re-written and not infringe the patent at all, as has turned out to be the case in similar suits), or they know they'd lose in court against anyone with the pockets to challenge them.

So, they're picking on weaklings they think they can extort from. Basic lawsuit abuse, happens all the time, morally equivalent to the lunch-money bully in the kindergarten cafeteria.

Does a hospital gown count? Because, y'know, he does have health issues.

No doubt, this will become the next penis size.

" So there’s your areligious Utopia of Reason."

Stalinism had nothing to do with reason; while it was technically atheistic, it shared with religion the worst qualities of blind faith in an impossible paradise to be achieved by any means necessary.

" The Books of Moses are not a history text, they are a morality tale..."

Y'know, genocide as morality is frankly much worse than genocide as history.

" Are there parts of the Five Books that are difficult to understand today? Sure. Allowing slavery, for one. All the stoning for another. The very idea of sacrifice for a third."

Those aren't "hard to understand", they're just evil and wrong. It only becomes "hard to understand" when you try and reconcile them with belief in the goodness of your holy works.

" But here again, I pose the baby/bathwater conundrum. Do you say “The golden rule is crap because a few verses later it talks about stoning someone who works on the Sabbath.”? I would hope not."

What's the big fascination with keeping the bathwater? The baby doesn't need it. You don't need to stone people to follow the golden rule - or do anything else in your book.

" And the manifestation of those values (perhaps modesty, perhaps the aversion of ostentation or gluttony) was in name and/or dress."

(perhaps stoning, perhaps genocide)

" And this points to the larger question that none of the humanists wants to answer: what of the values of kindness, modesty, frugality, sharing, being-thy-brother’s-keeper, humility, acting justly, and studying the world and its wonders is so threatening either to humans or to the world they inhabit?"

The secular humanists embrace such values very specifically and explicitly - that's what humanism means. What we tend to object to are the blind faith, genocide, stoning, and general evil and injustice the religious folk insist on including with their morality.

" Forget for a moment all about God."

Why don't you?

" ...doesn’t it seem antithetical to say that religion is wrong all the time?"

Of course. Nobody argues that all religion is wrong about all things all the time. But it's very insistent about being very wrong about some things some of the time - and it's not going to quit doing that as long as it can truly be called "religion" at all.

" I just don't get it."

That is correct, you do not get it. Your bias is so strong that you see everything from only your own perspective, and cast everything in that light as if it were true rather than just spin.

I say fetus, you say unborn child. Who is correct? Well, "unborn child" refers to every possible child that could ever possibly be born, regardless of its stage of development, existence, or even potential existence. Fetus is a precise term for a specific entity; "unborn child" is spin designed (yes, designed, by a marketeer) to elicit a specific response, and then applied to a single stem cell little different from a cell of anyone's bone marrow.

You claim you'd donate a kidney, but you haven't.

You liken abortion to drop-kicking a held child, apparently in utter ignorance of the chasm between holding a child in your arms and bearing it in the womb. You paint pro-choice proponents as being pro-murder, without even comprehending the fact that they generally don't view it that way at all.

It goes on and on. Meanwhile, you simply ignore the other position as if it didn't exist, and attempt to argue against it as if it were something completely different. Such arguments will always fall flat.

Anyway, if you really hate abortion, you're taking the wrong tack. Laws can never prevent it, nor can law enforcement ever reliably distinguish between abortion and miscarriage. However, technologically, it's fundamentally obsolete.

So support birth control. Or are you against that, too? If so, then we know the hate that's really driving you.