"Sorry, my dear Intelligent Kneecap. We've had good times together, but now you know aye too much!"
*BLAM*BLAM*BLAM*
[Drags rest of self away from crime scene.]

'cause they aren't getting our money fast enough yet?

Re #2, Teh Beeb or someone on the telly said that the IPO was already for a front company, 'cause foreigners aren't allowed to own Chinese companies.

Also said some potential investors are shy because it's not clear whether / how long China will tolerate the kind of workaround set up for the IPO.

You beat me to it, 'cause I paused to look it up. He was a woodcutter, not the thieves' leader. The wanted to kill him because he knew how to get their treasure.

Not that that version of the story is particularly reasurring for an IPO either...

Fast mutation does not equal fast evolution. RNA based viruses mutate a lot faster than DNA based organisms because single helix RNA has less error correction than DNA. Single celled organisns mutate more than multicelled organisms that can protect their reproductive cells inside their outher layers, cells with nuclei have lower mutation rates than un-nucleated cells, and there are several other changes in organisms that reduce the mutation rate further which I won't bother to go into. But that doesn't translate to the organisms evolving faster. Any organism that survives to reproduce is pretty close to being a perfect fit for its environment. That's why evolution isn't about big, sudden jumps, A big change positions an organism so that it is much farther from perfectly adapted, and only a small change has any chance of positioning the organism closer to perfectly adapted for its local conditions, without overshooting. Viruses are so simple that just about any change is a big change. If, just for the sake of argument, we say that only 1 in 100 mutations in an 'advanced' organism (i.e. flounder, oak trees or us) is an improvement, then only 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a Million or an even lower ratio of changes is similarly beneficial to a virus.
        Imagine a giraffe, that is within a couple of inches of being the perfect height to reach the highest branches it needs to eat from. Figure that if a single mutation made a difference of 12 feet to that giraffe's height, the mutants would all have tremendous problems with pumping blood up to their brains, and be very unsuccessful. but a girraffe may have 20 different genes that each affect height in a small way, so a mutation can occur that gets that giraffe's descendents those couple of inches that actually count as an improvement, without overshooting wildly. A virus, on the other hand, may have one short gene for making a simple repeating structure that tiles to make its whole outer shell, and any change makes a structure that won't tile at all. The virus can mutate a lot, but every single time it gets any possible mutation on that gene, it dies without reproducing at all. Huge amounts of mutation are possible ,where maybe 20% of each generation dies of that one mutation before final assembly, but no evolution happens at all.

I do like the idea of people choosing to donate for various projects, if they can be confident the government won't transfer the donations to other areas. I think even a system where people have to pay a given amount of taxes, but get to decide how much they want to go to what government projects would be an improvement.

Interesting idea though could create situations where a potential licensee may come along and be faced with potentially bolstering a patent that could be free for them to use in a few months if they don't.

That's an issue that exists in all time-limited systems, though. It's currently hard to license a patent that will expire in a few months. The trick is setting the expiration time long enough that there's an incentive for the licensee to license rather than running down the clock but short enough that there's some urgency to get the damn thing to market.

Several related companies could easily license each other's patents in exchange for licensing eachother's patents just to keep them current.

This is a more interesting problem, but the first regulatory question should be, "So, Mr. Licensee, what product are you using that patent you licensed in?" If somebody tries to sue you over a patent they've been sitting on for 15 years, the first thing you ask is if the patent has been exercised enough to still be valid, and you check to see if the licensees have actually brought it to market in a meaningful way. If not, that's a strong argument that the patent should have been invalidated. It doesn't eliminate the need for courts to deal with the issue, but it does create more of a burden on the patent holder to create a track record of getting the ideas to market. If companies cross-license patents and bring real products to market in order to keep their patents active, I'd argue that it's a win as long as the functionality is actually there and not a sham.

I'd rather see the expiration for patents depend on whether they're actually being implemented or not. Coming up with a new idea is great, but only if something actually comes out of it. If you can't get somebody to license and build it in a reasonable number of years, all the patent is really doing is cluttering up the idea space for companies that are inventing things in-house with the actual intent of building them.

Right now, every time a company comes up with a cool new invention, they have to search through mountains of patents to see if somebody, somewhere has done it before and is just sitting on the patent. A system that puts a greater burden on inventors who bring things to market than on inventors who don't is not balanced correctly. Maintaining a patent monopoly should require continuous effort to put that idea to work in something useful.

Invading a country that doesn't like you if there's a military reason to do it is one thing. Trying to install a friendly government and hoping that everybody just rolls with it is another.

Given that the title of the article is, "Could Tech have stopped ISIS From Using Our Own Heavy Weapons Against Us?" it's a little bit rich to get upset when somebody poses another "what if" scenario. It's not like damn_registrar's suggestions are useless but all of the opinions on kill switches we "should have" added are pure gold for our current situation.

s/customer/consumer/

All missiles have civilian applications: governments can use them to blow up civilians, and malcontent citizens who can get their hands on the can use them to blow up governments.

And other governments are always there to provide missiles to the malcontents.

Once it's built it will probably only employee low-paid assembly line workers and some managers.

(Which isn't STEM, but may still be an improvement on the way the USA has been hedded for the past few decades.)

A factory that makes giants.

Anyone can get a sweetheart deal in Nevada. Microsoft and Amazon are already firmly established their.

Nevada's economy is so weak that there was once serious consideration of reverting its rushed statehood.

Analogies are never exact correspondences. They're simply more or less useful. People who replace 'useful' with 'accurate' in that sentence are like a clown car full of lawyers in a fruit flavored hailstorm.

But dealing with reality is very logical.

If you don't want people to see pictures of you naked, don't take the pictures.
And if you do, don't put them on a computer.
And if you do, don't put them on a computer on the internet.
And if you do, don't put them on someone else's computer on the internet.

If they're out there, someone is going to get them.