Only for very wide definitions of "everyone", including VC investment, R&D, government subsidies, international trade, and every other economic influence, many of which are high-risk investments that effectively dump most of their money into lower-risk investment vehicles.

I'm not suggesting that if everyone invested in a widely-diversified portfolio, they'd be rich. That's ridiculous, since that's exactly what banks do with their abysmally low-return (but very safe) accounts.

I'm saying that if someone wants to invest and have a good chance of a good return rate, they have access to such things.

Well, that's nice, but beyond a thinly-veiled insult, do you have a point?

Let's assume that someone without "enough spare income for a whole portfolio" has the desire to invest, and the ambition and effort to do their own research. They'll find a whole class of funds and brokers that will pool several clients' investments into a single security purchase, and those brokers will often accept even a few dozen dollars' investment at a time. Most will also diversify investments appropriately, as well, as a part of their normal business.

Several investment vehicles have purchase minimums. The investment manager doesn't want to deal with the expense of managing accounts for thousands of small-scale clients. However, they'll often happily deal with a single broker purchasing on behalf of his own clients, as long as that broker manages all the busy work of distributing returns appropriately.

The brokers will take their cut from the returns, but it's still usually higher than a bank's low-risk-and-low-reward savings account.

Having worked in finance, I can assure you that pretty much everyone* has access to investment vehicles with a larger return than 2%. The problem is that those investments are significantly more risky than a bank, and losing the investment is unlikely to be catastrophic to someone with a large supply of other diversified assets, but it could be catastrophic to someone with only a weekly paycheck to fall back on.

The solution to that problem is to properly diversify your investments for safety. An investment adviser can help with that, but they'll charge a fee for their work, and many people feel (accurately or not) they can't afford that service. There are books and other resources to assist someone in wisely choosing their own investments, but that requires ambition, effort, and the admission that one is not naturally a financial expert. That last part seems to be the most difficult to come by.

* American, not already in excessive debt, with a stable income... some disclaimers apply, but the vast majority of the American population qualifies, not just those who fall under the "rich" label.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

SpaceX is a young, hip company eager to show that it does things the public likes, including the OSS-loving public of nerds. They're different from existing spaceflight options, and they want the public support to help make those differences look like good things, especially if their business ever falls on the mercy of Congress.

ULA is a partnership of old companies who really don't care what the public thinks of them because they're operating under the status quo. They already have the political clout to be sure that any changes won't be disastrous to their business model, so drumming up public support is a waste of money.

I'd expect that an audit would find comparable uses of OSS, from Linux servers and BSD embedded devices to innumerable copies of PuTTY scattered across workstations.

From my own time working on government contracts, I have a similar experience, but a substantially different perspective.

Often, the most valuable people on the team are the ones who know what to do. Every process is the result of bureaucrats getting their say, so having a manager who knows what the bureaucrats want is a good way to know what to expect. It may be just knowing that eventually you'll need this report, or as intimate as knowing that reviewer will want that level of detail, but knowing the expectations from the other side of the phone call makes every part of the project run more smoothly.

Yes, this is reflected in the buying process as well. If they have a rapport with the contractors, the buyers know that they'll get what they want the first time, rather than waste their own time and money going through several rounds of revisions.

It's not quite that simple. When B purchases the data, the contract between you and A doesn't just disappear. B purchases the data subject to the contract. Since there is no provision in the contract that it's not transferable (at least not on RS's end), that's a normal and acceptable thing to do with a contract. That's not a guarantee that they won't do the most nefarious thing with it that they can get away with, but simply putting up a torrent of it probably won't fly. In fact, that's exactly what the NY AG is talking about here. RS received the data under an agreement. They can't breach that agreement just because they're going bankrupt.

That their culture was steeped in something does not mean that every individual is obsessed with it. American culture is obsessed with a bunch of people named Kardashian, but all I know about them is that there are several of them, and I think one of them is named Kim or something.

And racist or not, yes, Japanese culture was obsessed with killing and torture. It had been for a very, very long time.

I call BS. Before the atomic bombs, Japan's strategy was to basically arm every citizen and make the invasion of the mainland such a bloody, costly quagmire for the Allies that they would negotiate favorable peace terms. Even the Wikipedia article on Surrender of Japan has a deeper understanding of the issue than whatever you're making up. Even after Hiroshima, the Supreme Council voted against surrender. They thought that maybe the U.S. only had one bomb, or that it lacked the will power to use it again. After Nagasaki (and the Soviet invasion), the Supreme Council still didn't want to surrender, so they tortured a captured U.S. P-51 pilot, and he told them that the U.S. had at least 100 atomic bombs (he was lying). But the cabinet still split on whether to surrender. It took the emperor basically begging the cabinet, for the sake of the millions who were about to be slaughtered, to persuade them to vote in favor of surrender.

Modern navel-gazing revisionist historians really don't appreciate how truly warlike and blood-soaked the entire Japanese culture was before 1945. They were obsessed with killing and torture. The Japanese surrender and subsequent disarmament fundamentally transformed the entire nation.

It's U.S. Patent 8,981,261, issued Mar. 17, 2015. It is an "actual patent."

No, they aren't. (See part II, perpetual motion machines lack utility.) So you are partly wrong and partly right. You absolutely do not need a working prototype to get a patent. Many, many patents are issued without a prototype. But there is a specific basis for rejecting perpetual motion machines. (And yes, I am an actual, honest-to-goodness patent attorney, so I am not just making stuff up. I have filed many applications without a working prototype, and have turned away inventors when they have brought me what amounted to perpetual motion machines.)

That's not the point.

Terrorism isn't about making the statement "We can hurt easy targets". It's about the statement "we can hurt any target."

The World Trade Center was a giant building. With control of a plane, it would have been easy to hit. The terrorist aspect is that the hijackers interrupted a regular normal daily routine to commit their chosen atrocity. Now, it's doxing. ISIS is claiming that they have supporters in the US who are willing to kill anyone with a name and an address.

Sure, they've picked a few soldiers now, but the subtext is that their targets could be anyone. A few articles later on the front page, there's discussion of video gamers calling in SWAT raids. 4Chan makes a point of identifying anyone for any reason for the fun of it. Anyone paying enough attention to understand what ISIS is threatening today knows that they could end up a target next week, and it's probably too late to scrub their records from public systems. There is no defense against the doxing, and if ISIS really does have a hidden network of bogeymen in the United States, there's nowhere to hide.

That's the real message ISIS is saying here: You could be next if you piss us off. Bow in fear, praise our particular flavor of deity, surrender all of your free will to our self-interested leader, and so on and so forth.

I'm pretty sure this predates Red Dwarf.

Your "gut feeling" is also often wrong, but you don't notice because of your confirmation bias.

The paranoia's adorable, but here in the real world, everything I do is a balance between risk and reward.

Sure, our data could be sold off, but that's what contract lawyers are for, just like any other business deal. Sure, I risk a malevolent company holding my data hostage, but even at increased prices, it's still cheaper than handling the data myself. Sure, I could be using the same rack a terrorist uses, but he could also be renting office space in the same building we use.

My company could, of course, buy its own building, own its own servers, manage all of its own data, and run all of its own processing... and then promptly go bankrupt, because the cost to do that is too high for the extremely limited benefit.

Well, yes...

The problem is that we don't know what the problems will be. Today, Network neutrality is the hot-button issue the FCC is finally forced to deal with, but tomorrow, who knows? Maybe we'll have to have regulations on compliance (or not) with encryption-busting wiretaps, DNS hijacking, advertisement injection, or something completely different.It's taken long enough for the FCC to move on this that we've already had a few cases of effective extortion by an ISP, and maybe those issues will be even more problematic.

The solution, then, is to bring the FCC in as an advocate for the American citizen, since that's pretty much the government's primary job. This establishes a process where the FCC can say "You're not breaking rules now, but you're getting really close" and give the ISPs a chance to avoid sinking investment capital into systems that will be outlawed as soon as people notice. Cooperating with regulators, especially by asking permission rather than forgiveness, is also a great way to reduce future penalties if the FCC's policies do turn against them.

If the ISPs' new business models don't piss off the FCC, then they don't have to worry about new regulation in the short term. Only ISPs with predatory business models to hide should be worried.

Not quite the same ring to it...