Someone should fork both, and name the Vim fork Kang, and the Emacs fork Kodos.

Very true. The best analogy I have come up with is that regulation is, or should be, analogous to the landmasses and structures that regulate the flow of commerce and prevent problems like resonances, "water hammer"-like events, and obstructions. An even more obscure analogy - regulations can prevent a too-large shark from going upstream, getting stuck, and blocking the flow, swallowing everything, or just dying and stinking up the place. To the extent that government bodies participate in commerce, they become less like the land masses and more like the boats and fish.

I am not a K-fan. But a while back I watched a documentary (I forget the actual topic) that went into the industry that is Kim Kardashian, and how she ran the business. While class is not a term I would use in conjunction with her and the whole 'community' around them, I had to admire the professional way in which she ran the business. She in fact works very hard to provide value given for value received, and to maintain a good relationship with her 'customers' - fans, that receive her tweets, watch her shows, buy stuff she promotes, etc. She really does a good job at being famous, and maintaining that relationship in a way that satisfies her market and makes her a lot of money.

A somewhat related side note - for a long time I pondered the attraction and success of the supermarket tabloids with their gossip and pictures of movie stars and so forth. Then, a decade or so ago, I saw an interesting article about a study of monkey economics. The scientists first established a primitive monetary system, where monkeys could exchange units of juice as a monetary unit, so they could potentially 'buy' and 'sell'. Then the scientists studied what monkeys would buy. It turned out that the two things that monkeys would most happily pay for were pictures of the alpha male and female of their tribe, and naked monkey butts. To me, this explained both People Magazine and Hustler instantly. We now know that it's biology, not culture. ;)

Since this is the second instance of this assertion in the comments, I'll just point out that this is completely absurd, and can only be true among the truly illiterate or those too lazy to learn the language or basic logic. (he says, hoping that's not too strongly put ...) I've never heard _anyone_ misuse copyright in that way. It's reasonably OK to use IP as a generic because you are unsure of whether something is copyright or trademark, but not the converse. Using "copyright" that way is analogous to saying "avocado" instead of "fruit".

Someone above noted that both trademark (the "Grumpy Cat" in general) and copyright (a particular image of the Grumpy Cat) are involved. I didn't RTFA so I dunno.

Ha, you reminded me of the "Dog's rules of ownership" - there are various versions floating around.

You're pretty much right on. Grumpy Cat was a Reddit meme a couple of (several?) years ago, it got popular, companies wanted to use it, the cat's owner "won the lottery". That's all good. IMHO they've got as much right to exploit their good fortune based on the looks of a cat, as some random person who is lucky enough to have a photogenic face.

One thing that many people aren't aware of is that almost _nothing_ in the real marketplace is priced based on cost, nor should it be (there's a lot more to that.) The price is always set by what the market will bear (technically, there is a price/demand curve, and the goal is to maximize the area of a rectangle under a point on the curve), or put another way, according to the value perceived by the buyer. The decision about whether to actually make and market a product is based on whether it can be made and delivered cheaply enough to make that price viable. And manufacturing is likely going to be somewhere under 20% of retail.

Whose incompetence? There were a number of terrorist attacks over the period from 1976 (Carter Administration) through the 1990s (Clinton Administration). Clinton had the opportunity to take out Bin Laden at least once, perhaps twice, but chose not to because we didn't have a 'smoking gun' sufficient to justify - that's an arguable case. 9/11 planning by Bin Laden began in at least 1999, perhaps 1998 - I don't recall. So if you're saying it was Bush incompetence, you're just uninformed. The fact is that Bin Laden (who was a big part of the "Mujahadeen" that we financed to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1970s) dedicated his life to killing infidels at that time if not before.

Afghanistan was not such a bad place prior to the Soviet invasion and removal of the king (not necessarily in that order). I have friends and relatives who worked there and visited there in the early 1970s. But the Russians have wanted a direct route to a warm water port for centuries, and have tried various methods multiple times including overthrowing governments. See also the "Great Game" of the 1800s between Russia, Britain, and China mostly.

It's quite reasonable actually to go back much farther, to the Jefferson Administration, in 1801-1809. See the Tripolitan War or Barbary Coast War, 1801-1815. US merchant shipping in the Mediterranean was being hampered by pirates out of Tripoli (present day Libya), who were seizing the ships and holding the crews and passengers for ransom. For several years the US (like several European nations) was forced to pay as much as $1 million per year to protect our fleets. When the US Ambassador went to Tripoli to negotiate, and find out why they kept attacking, the sultan or whatever said, "Holy Kuran tells us to kill all infidels. The fact that we don't kill your people but only hold them for ransom is merely a sign of our exceeding mercy." This was the motivation for Jefferson to build up the Navy, I think create the Marines but I'm not sure about that, and go to war. This is the basis for the latter part of a line in the Marine Hymn, "From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli."

IOW, the western European and American nations have been dealing with murderous thugs from those areas since the birth of this country.

The designs I'm familiar with are not microwave lasers (technically 'masers', which actually predate lasers), but an extremely diffuse beam that covers dozens of square miles at the surface. OTOH, if we assume that the beam comes from a single source, then the difference is just in the focus, which indeed could be altered at will to form a 'death ray'.

This raises an interesting fundamental but not very widely discussed aspect of technological civilization. At every stage of technological advance the amount of economic resources and destructive power available to a single individual increases. At one time not so long ago it was a rare thing for an individual to be able to create or destroy very much - mass killing required at least hiring a bunch of henchmen, and it was a rare individual who was left in control of, say, the lifetime income of a dozen average people. But today, as we are painfully aware, a single individual without any training or much preparation, or money, can kill thousands. And yet we continue to accept individual ownership and control of vehicles that have the capability. Thus civilization always demands ever higher levels of cooperation and self-control of its citizens. We have people (with the appropriate training and evaluation of ability and reliability) driving $100 million aircraft on a regular basis, and entrepreneurs developing what are lineal descendants of ICBMs, for purely commercial purposes. It's not a coincidence that both the US Atlas and Delta, and at least one of the Russian rockets, started out as ICBMs - the military were the first ones willing to pay the costs of 'first mover' development, back when it was a lot harder and more expensive than it is today.

And we are all used to the idea that in general we can depend on others to not use these technologies for ill. If space solar power does get built (I have my doubts for other reasons), it will probably happen after the vehicle launch rate reaches an average of one or more per day, with a significant percentage of those being manned launches. Space will then be mundane, and we will have gotten used to big, visible things flying around in the sky. There will be a significant regulatory and enforcement of rules present in space (a "Space Force", at least for near-Earth activities). By analogy, there was a time when if a very large ship appeared over the horizon, it was almost certainly a military or pirate ship. Today it may be Bill Gates' yacht.

I'm hand-waving the concept here of course, trying to get to a useful conclusion. I suppose the appropriate conclusion is that, human nature being what it is (and that is just 'nature nature' as expressed in humans), the size of the potential catastrophe is going to track the size of the civilization forever. This implies that if we become an interstellar civilization, some idiot at some point really will destroy a planet. I can only hope it will be just one among thousands that are not destroyed.

The Boeing 707 was derived directly from the B52 bomber. It is quite plausible for both the US and USSR to fund a military spaceplane for its own purposes, in the process doing the essential big spend that no commercial company can afford to do. Then out of that work can come a derived fast commercial transport aircraft, providing all the benefits and more of the Supersonic Transport, without the sonic booms. Four hours London to Sidney, or New York to Capetown.

Indeed. It's worth noting that prior to OST, both the US and USSR set off nukes in space.

One of the long term problems of space development is that almost everything in space is a potential weapon. For starters, they are kinetic kill vehicles if just aimed in the "wrong" direction. Then nuclear propulsion and power systems are going to be essential for almost every activity past the orbit of Mars. (I'm hoping for use of Thorium MSRs for most of that, as it removes almost all of the problems associated with Uranium and Plutonium, not only because this almost eliminates nuclear power plants as bomb sources.) For example, the recent Juno probe is the first outer planet probe to use solar panels. The solar power available at that distance is about 4.3% of the power available at one AU.

But despite the difficulties, I expect a lot of in-space mining, refining, and manufacturing to be based on solar power for many reasons, not least being that it's cheap and almost entirely zero maintenance, and you can make a solar power system as large as you need. Perhaps the biggest difficulty will be finding the necessary materials in space to make them out of.

Funny thing - I hear new readers and politicians say 'nukular' all the time. It wasn't that long ago that Bush Jr. got blasted for saying that - even though at least 1/2 of the people back then were saying it that way as well.

I think this would be a suborbital vehicle. It's one thing (and a pretty good approach for fast point-to-point flight) to get out of the atmosphere for a significant part of a flight - this may be the real market for fast trips like London-Singapore. This is hypersonic speeds, plus maybe a bit more. But orbit requires three to five times more velocity, which requires 1/2 MV^2 more energy, which requires that much more fuel, which increases the mass ...

The only plausible SSTO vehicle I am aware of right now is the British project for the Skylon spaceplane that uses the hybrid jet/rocket SABRE engine. While the most critical element of SABRE, the cooler system, has been successfully tested, the first actual running engine is not projected to be until 2020 or 2022.

That wasn't true in 1976, when I was looking into commodities. At the time I could buy a railroad car of honey with delivery in six months for 20% down (I forget the exact margin), in hopes the price would go up. If it went up 5% then I would make 25% on my investment. If it went down, I could lose my shirt.

AFAIK it was never true. The whole point of commodities trading is for companies like General Foods to have a predictable price for their raw materials well in advance of needing them, and farmers to have a predictable price for their crop before it's grown. In between are the market makers and speculators. Overall the commodities market is remarkably good at stabilizing prices for both the materials and the products made from them. Another example - airlines also buy fuel for up to five years in advance.

You can also buy and sell options - I could buy an option to buy the honey, and if the price goes down then all I lost is the price I paid for the option (i.e. I lose 100% of my investment but not more than 100%). If it goes up, I might make eight or 10 times my investment. In 1978 Hillary Clinton, at the time 'First Lady' of Arkansas, famously made out on one of these deals. One of the Clinton buddies was the head of Tyson Foods, the company that pretty much runs Arkansas. One day, HC "on a whim" opened an options account at a commodities trading firm, and a day or two later bought ten options on chicken for $12,000 (even though there was only $1,000 in her account). The trade was closed a few days later for a $6300 profit - i.e. 630% profit in a couple of days. Over the next 10 months this investment, through ongoing trades, magically turned into over $100,000. The guy who ran her trades was an executive at Tyson Foods. Source: Washington Post - note other versions of this story are much less 'soft'.

If you look at the present LISA Pathfinder mission, which involves carrying two small test masses in nearly perfect gravitational free-fall, protected from other influences by the enclosing spacecraft, you'll see that it is possible to remove almost all confounding influences for an experiment like this. While we're probably not there yet, at some point a test in space will be the only true proof of concept. Of course, if somebody manages to build a system with a must higher thrust, say enough to accelerate the test apparatus at 1/1000 G, then I'll be satisfied that it definitely works! :D AFAIK so far nobody has run tests at high power yet - building a system that can accept a megawatt or dozen would definitely make the observations easier.