Take that!

I never even said a word about the lawyers making money. Perhaps you meant to reply to someone else?

Everyone needs many lawyers at all stages.

More seriously, a child -- even a stupid child -- could tell that Snowden faces legal threats, among other threats. It's not foolish of him to consult with lawyers. Besides, you think there are no lawyers out to get him?

Who would want a six digit Slashdot ID? How dreadful!

I believe that the episode you're thinking of was Time Flight. They put the TARDIS aboard a Concorde and flew 140 million years into the past.

Plus don't forget that the domestic telephone network exists nationwide. Even if airlines were magically exempt, telephones still could be regulated.

Hey, I'm totally happy with getting rid of as many jobs as possible through automation, so long as people still get paid enough to live comfortably. The leisure society is where it's at.

But ours are all stuck at the bottom of a big gravity well. Materials mined on the moon, or better yet, nearby asteroids, are not. They could be sent down to us as raw materials to be turned into finished goods here, but alternatively we could begin to industrialize space.

There are plenty of plans on the books for building solar power arrays that could send power down to us cleanly, for example. It's too expensive to build them with parts that come from the Earth, but it might be more practical with parts that didn't.

It has plenty of oxygen and aluminum, which would be useful. Near Earth asteroids are probably a better bet, however.

How could that have possibly happened, given that in 1994, a runaway planet hurtled between the Earth and the Moon, breaking the moon into two big chunks, unleashing cosmic destruction, and casting man's civilization into ruin.

And while it would be good to get rid of mining operations on Earth, replacing it with space mining, the main advantage of mining in space is that you do not need to use a giant rocket to get that stuff into space; it's already up there, and can be used for industrial purposes in situ.

Trademarks are fine, of course.

You didn't create the copyright. Everyone else gave it to you (via our servant, the government). We didn't do this out of the kindness of our hearts; we did it out of self interest. And being a deal made out of self interest, and with you having no real alternatives or bargaining power, it should favor us very strongly.

If you don't like it, don't create anything, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Of course there would be a canon. In fact, there might be several different ones. And fans could choose whichever they liked best. God knows this is already common with copyrighted materials.

Not to mention of course that even the Biblical Canon is not universally agreed upon, but somehow the world hasn't ended.

If you could make a DVD sequel to Star Wars in 1982 (remember, you can't use anything added in Empire!) then I'd say that you deserve to make it. Put those Laserdisc and Selectavision guys in their place!

Yes you could; the SPIDER-MAN trademark with regard to comic books and many other goods would become generic. I discussed this in another post in this thread.

It's copyrights that protect characters. Copyrights on the works that the characters appear in. Each trait of the character is protected in the work in which it first appears. So Spider-Man's basic costume, web swinging, origin, etc. all comes from Amazing Fantasy #15. But Peter Parker's sideline of bringing pictures of Spider-Man to J. Jonah Jameson doesn't show up until The Amazing Spider-Man #2, so you'd have to wait for that one to also hit the public domain to introduce that trait.