Since knowledge creation and nuclear weapons are both examples of things which the public pays for, I defend the comment as it stands. The distinction between IP and physical property does not enter into the claim.

When a person makes a claim like "All X's are Y's" then it is sufficient to provide a single example of an X which isn't a Y to demonstrate that the claim is false. The example is referred to as a counter example.

[THE CONTEXT]

The most reasonable interpretation of the previous commenter which I could identify was:

"When the public pays for knowledge to be created, it should be that the public owns the knowledge it paid for...[but it is expect that] the public that paid for it, [must] pay more and more [to use it]."

To restate this in the counterexample language

(1) 'All [things which the public pays for] are [things which the public owns]'

(2) 'All [things which the public owns] are [things which the public should be able to freely access and use]'

Which combine to produce the claim

(3) 'All [things which the public pays for] are [things which the public should be able to freely access and use]'

with "knowledge" being one of the things which the public pays for and so "knowledge" being one of the things which the people should be able to freely access and use.

[MY ARGUMENT]

In order to demonstrate the flaw in this claim as just presented#, I brought up nuclear weapons as a counter example. It is an instance of something which the public pays for but of which the public shouldn't have free access to and use of.

[MY POINT]

In order to maintain the truth of the claim the previous commenter must show that my example is not a counter example by arguing that the public should have access to/use of nuclear weapons.

Alternatively, they can agree that the claim as presented is false, and then perhaps provide a different argument for the conclusion that 'the public should get use of the knowledge created.'

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I hope this clarifies the point which I am trying to make. Regretfully, the hyperbolic inclusion of nuclear weapons plays a key role my argument and so I did not remove it.

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# I acknowledge that my interpretation of the claim may not have been what the author intended. Statement (1) seems to be strongly implied by the author, but (2) is inferred. The role of the questions in my original reply was to draw out a precise explanation of what ownership entails. But certainly in the case of "knowledge" the person want to be able to access and use the knowledge.

(that does not mean that Norvig may be wrong and Chomsky right on that point you are quoting. It seems you're suggesting that Chomsky is not a great linguist because he disagress with Norvig - that would be a mistake).

But Chomsky's contribution to linguistics in general and computational linguistics in particular goes well beyond anything like that, e.g. [1]. I'm not sure, but I suspect that linguistics and computational linguistics where unrelated fields before Chomsky tied them together.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

Later on, something happens that forces him to wear clothes like everyone else is wearing. And how people react to him changes completely. All his testing proved that people react one certain way, but he didn't understand why so he didn't realize what his testing had showed was actually just a small subset of the actual behavior and was actually an extremely rare case.

The second paragraph was me trying to, very briefly, sum up the consequences of positivist epistomology. The alternative that Chomsky proposes is that observational knowledge can only describe the things that are true given the process that generates the interactive behaviors we observe. This applies to everything from humanities and linguistics to physical interactions (which is why people have such difficulty explaining quantum physics). Consider, for example, the idea that computers think in zeros and ones: it is usually plenty accurate, even though it is really an abstraction of high/low voltage signal. But if we encounter random bit flips it may be helpful to know that actually we are working with high/low signal and so a cosmic ray interacting with our RAM could produce a flip. Equally, we write programs in higher level languages without worrying that loops aren't an inherent property of the computer. "Loops" aren't a lie, but they also aren't a fact: they are useful knowledge.

Most knowledge falls into this area, of being the product of current, generative interactions. In this world it is possible to say that some statement isn't supported by evidence, so we can still have science based on falsifiablity. We can even fully describe the observed behavior of some system under a set of conditions. That knowledge is likely to be useful, even. But it is incomplete, and shouldn't be elevated to a place of infallible "fact" lest we miss the additional capabilities we might acquire by manipulating those assumptions.