I think you are perhaps unfamiliar with the early history of the state of Utah, when it was called Deseret, and subsumed most of Nevada and part of Colorado and a corner of Wyoming. The early Mormon/LDS settlers practiced early Communism (early, because it predated Marx et. al., so obviously it wasn't called that yet).

One of the problems was when the kids wanted new pair of dungarees (which is what they were called at the time), they would tend to use a knife sharpening grinding wheel to "age" the cloth past the point of being patched.

They managed to orbit and land Buran. From a technical perspective it did not fail. But it was too expensive to keep using.

Actually the EELVs were a lot cheaper than the Shuttle and the Titan IV they replaced. The problems started when the ULA monopoly was formed.

You also forgot about Energia Buran.

It depends on whether the emails constitute work product or not. Certainly some of the emails which I've seen would not qualify, as they were personal emails. In fact, most of the significantly inflammatory ones were personal emails to business partners and colleagues, rather than business related, other than tangentially. And these are the ones Sony would most want quashed.

For attorney/client communications, it's possible that privilege would attach. Under U.S. law, the attorney would need to be acting as such in connection with the communication in question, and the communication would have had to have been engaged for the purpose of the client seeking legal advice.

Ironically, it would probably take a court to decide whether or not the disclosure of the information to someone who was neither the attorney nor the client would qualify as an exception to privilege. This in turn would likely come down to a matter of due diligence. Even so, if the intent was to commit a crime or a tort (and it's pretty clear some of these emails qualify), then privilege does not attach.

I think the most they can do at this point is assert ownership or get a grant of agency, and issue the DMCA notices, mostly for the scripts and other material, if any, which falls under HIPPA or attorney/client privilege. This will most likely not be very satisfying to Sony, as it will most likely cover material which is being largely withheld anyway.

Yersinia pestis is a bacteria, not a virus. But yes, identifying patient zero is quite important to fighting any disease.

The other thing you should probably have corrected the GP about is that we are not in a position to start any kind of wide-scale immunization program against Ebola, since we don't have a proven vaccine for it yet. It's not like scientists are holding out: we just don't have one.

Rocketry research was mostly done as a hobby by private citizens in the 1930s before WWII came out and their research got picked up by the military in their countries. I am talking about people like Goddard, Obbert, even von Braun.

You've got the wrong handle on DMCA...

1. It criminalizes the creation of software designed to circumvent copyright. That's not happening here.

2. It grants"safe harbor" to ISPs and companies against violations*BY THEIR USERS* so long as the company has a takedown & dispute resolution mechanism. In this case Sony claims copyright, and Twitter can absolve itself of responsibility by leaving the user in question to be the one to file a counterclaim (presumably on fair-use grounds)

Very incorrect, on two counts:

(1) Copyright registration is merely a verifiable record of the date and content, in case of some future claim of plagarism or Copyright infringement by another party. Registration is only required on claims of statutory damages for an infringement suit, and that's valid as long as it occurs within 3 months of publication. For that to be useful to Sony, however, they would have to also establish value for the Copyright work. Since they were able to do this for the "Spectre" script, Twitter took the excerpts down. Email is a different matter.

(2) AT&T USL attempted to pull the "Trade Secret" trick of having their cake and eating it to in the AT&T USL v. The Regents of the University of California at Berkeley. The problem with Trade Secret disclosure is once a secret is disclosed, it's no longer secret. You can Patent something (requires disclosure) or you can Copyright something (also requires disclosure). In exchange for that disclosure, you are then granted certain legal protections, but those protections do not attach to Trade Secrets. For a Trade Secret, in order to collect damages, you, again, have to establish a value for the Secret. But - and this is a big one - you can only collect those damages against the original discloser - you are not permitted to seek out deep pockets. So Sony can take it up with North Korea (or whoever we've decided was responsible this week), but they can't take it up with this Twitter user, unless they can prove he was the disclosing party. So again: any trade secrets in to emails is *gone*.

The other problem is the use of the DMCA in this case: unless you are the Copyright holder, or you are a designated agent acting on behalf of the Copyright holder, you do not have standing, under the law, to assert a DMCA claim on behalf of someone else. This was the problem that a number of the DMCA takedown companies had with their third party takedown notices. This was actually precisely what occurred in the Righthaven v. Wayne Hoehn case.

And what will all our fine corporate interests do when they run out of wage slaves?

Expect a thank you for lifting the undeveloped world out of poverty?

Think about it. Why are people wage slaves? Because they're paid what we in developed nations would consider to be less-than-starvation wages. Why do they stop being wage slaves? Because the industrialization those wage slave jobs brought modernized the country and kick-started their economy, causing wages to rise until they were no longer considered wage slaves.

That's how a market economy eliminates poverty. It interprets low wages in a region as an economic inefficiency, and sends jobs there until the resulting development causes wages to rise to match wages in other regions. A minimum wage works in an already-developed country, but forcing a minimum wage on an undeveloped country just guarantees they'll remain undeveloped until they can lift themselves out of poverty on their own (a process that took hundreds of years in the West). That's why China has been artificially keeping the value of the Yuan low - to effectively lower the wages its citizens are making, which attracts more western investment and development, which helps their economy industrialize and grow even faster. The fact that they're losing jobs to other countries with lower wages means this strategy has worked.

They're more common than you'd think. This isn't the first movie to be sent to North Korea. These groups (many of them staffed and financially backed by North Korean defectors) have been sending a steady diet of South Korean dramas and K-pop to North Korea for several years now. It's actually what convinced many of them to defect - it made them realize their government had been lying to them about South Korea being a pauper nation.

Reporting on the emails is classic fair use.

Not really. The fair use provision here is if the copyrighted work is newsworthy. The fact that the emails have been leaked is big news, but the emails themselves are not necessarily newsworthy.

If the emails are just boring everyday emails of people at work, then copyright would still apply. Ironically, if the email were scandalous or embarrassing to Sony, then it would be fair use to publish them because the revelation would be newsworthy. So all a DMCA notice accomplishes is forcing people to dig through the emails for dirt before publishing. Not necessarily the effect Sony wants.

You clearly know nothing about economics. If pay decreased because of scarcity, so would the price of things you spent your pay on. It's a complete myth that currency has to expand with the economy. Before modern fiat currencies when gold was money the economy out grew the mining of gold, wages deceased and goods decrease in price, economic growth continued. Modern fiat currencies require no deflation because the currency is not moved but created as debt.

Actually, economic growth slowed greatly when gold got hard to find. The economy is not about money. It's about the movement of money. A strong economy is one where money is moving around.

Deflation makes economic activity halt. If something you want is going to be cheaper tomorrow, will you buy it today, or tomorrow? Sure, some items will have to be bought - there are certain necessities to life after all. However, you can bet big time that alternatives to spending money in a deflationary cycle will happen - if the good is food, people will grow their own or form community gardens and try to avoid spending as much as possible (because it gets cheaper tomorrow).

Or if that's too foreign, perhaps you had to talk to someone about getting say, a computer. Or other advanced tech product. They'll say "well, tomorrow a new model is coming out" or "next year will have a better model" and the end result is... no purchase. Because something better is around the corner and they're not willing to commit and lose out on that something better.

So in a deflationary cycle, hoarding or saving of money is the name of the game because it'll always be cheaper tomorrow.

That's why we moved to fiat currencies - economic growth was being limited by the available supply of gold - if we couldn't mine more, we couldn't pay people more, so existing stock got more valuable and people stopped spending, stalling out the economy.

That said, inflationary economies aren't good either - too much inflation and people get paid less and less - see Zimbabwe.

So one needs to balance inflation - not too much, but not too little that you risk going into a deflationary cycle which will not just stall any economic recovery, but completely bury it because people immediately stop spending when they know goods tomorrow are cheaper.

They try to spin it as so malicious, including:

This is at least the second time a U.S. warrant has been served at Google for data from someone connected to WikiLeaks. A sealed warrant was served to Google in 2011 for the email of a WikiLeaks volunteer in Iceland.

Right, it's not like they had any probable cause of illegal activity back in 2011, no sirree.... You've got a Wikileaks volunteer who was at the time acting as an unofficial spokeman for the organization in the news, voluntarily coming up to them and telling them that Assange is working with Anonymous and LulzSec and ordering hacks and spying, including against US targets, and providing troves of data - are they supposed to just ignore that?

Nor have they "egotistically proclaim[ed] that they alone can solve mankind's problems, from aging to space travel." Nor "all the talk of exploration." Nor "shoot endangered animals on safari".

Seriously, the guy is nothing but a walking strawman.

There's plenty of things you can criticise the "PayPal mafia" and NewSpace over, especially Thiel and Branson respectively, but nothing that the Professor is going on about even comes close to a valid criticism. (Or even something that has anything to do with reality.) It's bizarre that someone would say it, but crazy that a major newspaper would actually publish it.

A) "recently", for something that's over a decade old, suggests that he's only just heard about it and because he only just heard about it, thinks it's new.

B) "fleets of rocket ships" is how a child would see it. Suggesting the guy is not only ignorant, but is surrounded by ignorant people.

VG won't be doing anything special, (although even a private sub-orbital system is new; nothing like SS2 exists. X-15 with passengers and open space.)

But Musk already has the cheapest launcher on the market (perhaps ignoring a few micro-launchers), is about to develop fly-back first stage (something the industry has been wishing for since the early sixties), and is developing a private manned capsule, and is developing a heavy lift launcher that costs less than any other medium-lift launcher on the market even if they doesn't achieve reusability, and he's working with NASA to develop a Saturn V F1-class engine for a Saturn V class launcher, and he wants to go to Mars.

Not breaking new ground? What the fuck does this idiot want from them, a warp drive?

SHARP (Slender Hypervelocity Aerothermodynamic Research Probe) materials i.e. ultra-high temperature ceramics.