Originally Susan Richards' powers were turning invisible and creating a force shield around herself. This wasn't for doing cool things, it was for staying safely out of the way while the boys did the fighting. By the mid 70s when I was buying comic books her purely defensive powers were upgraded to being able to produce a shower of spherical force bubbles, which on the offensive force scale was about one step up the awesomeness scale from telekinetically throwing couch pillows.

I don't think the reason for this change was to throw a sop to feminists, or because fans were demanding strong female characters. In either case she'd have got a more impressive upgrade. I think it was simply upgraded storytelling. A character that can basically hide and shield herself is not as versatile as a character than can do useful things. So this kind of incremental upgrading naturally gave her more of a swiss-army knife skillset.

As for modern superheroines having multiple, I have not much to add, other than an observation. This multiple super-power thing kind of mirrors what we expect women to be like today. We expect them to be able to multitask, to juggle several very different roles on our teams. Versatility has become a cultural expectation for women, so it might not be coincidental that female superheroes get more of toolkit rather than one very big hammer.

A second assumption is that parties don't reinvent themselves. Of course they do; if they're to last they have to reinvent themselves every generation or two. Go back through the history of both parties since the 1850s; ideological continuity in both cases is a fiction that papers over a series of opportunistic shifts in focus.

An empty shell of a party in a two-party system is like the shell of an abandoned building in Manhattan; the real estate is too valuable to remain unoccupied. So some time in the next twenty years as its demographics becomes untenable the Republican party will radically shift focus, with some kind of face-saving formulation that presents the fiction of continuity, or even a return to longstanding principles. This is just like the post-Reagan rightward shift in the Democratic party as the DLC became dominant in national Democratic politics. The old style social democratic (using European terminology) FDR Democrats remained with the party because they had no place else to go in a two party system.

Likewise the rump of the current social conservative and Evangelical Republican party will be made a welcome but impotent minority in the new Republican party. They'll get occasional lip service at in-party functions but they won't be allowed near the mic lest they spout what sounds like grandpa's crazy talk -- pretty much like the FDR style Democrats were treated by their party in the 90s and 00s.

This kind of presumes reason is the basis of our drug laws.

Easy-peasy. I don't even have to google it. The Interstate Commerce Clause. All you have to do is find some pretext that says the regulation affects interstate commerce in some way and the feds can quash it.

In this case the issue to use is plain as a pikestaff. By preventing municipalities from providing high quality internet service the state is hinder access by out-of-state vendors to consumers in that community. That justification is WAAY stronger than other that have held up to scrutiny.

Sure, but the laser beam itself is less than ideal too, as it its targeting. We're talking about hitting a moving target from another moving target with a less than perfect beam dispersed through whatever's in the atmosphere between them. Adding reflected waste energy to that equation and mirroring might not be perfect protection, but I'd bet it could make the attacker's job a lot tougher.

I have no doubt that at short range under laboratory conditions lasers can burn through any mirror conceived by the mind of man. In real world conditions I suspect it'd be a lot harder to get to work even without an intelligent enemy dreaming up countermeasures.

Why not? The point seems to be that a people's view of their constitution is a myth-making process. This idea is of course anathema to Americans, although clearly long-held interpretations of the US Constitution certainly color what we see as the "plain meaning" of the document.

But you can see see this consensus myth thing clearly over in Britain, which doesn't have a written constitution. That doesn't mean they don't have a constitution; it's in what nearly everyone agrees traditionally can or cannot be done. The Queen can't veto a law by withholding her assent, because it's just not done.

My wife was at the Woods Hole Oceanographic when Bobby Ballard found the Titanic. You know what his colleagues there talked about? How he wore a baseball cap on TV to hide his bald spot.

I'll bet it costs a bundle to make sure it works as well as it is politically necessary for it to work. It's a matter of marginal costs and benefits. Train travel is already extremely safe; adding safety measures to an already safe mode of travel is bound to be challenging.

Imagine a world where half the train engineers were stoned out of their mind,and train derailments were an everyday occurrence. It would be cheap to design and install a safety system that would be a huge success by cutting down derailments from a twice a day occurrence to a once-a-month thing. But we live in a world where passenger train derailments, though terrible, are exceedingly rare. They're not even a once-a-year occurrence. This is the first time in a very long time an Amtrak train has derailed for speed. In the past five years the vast majority of Amtrak accidents have been things on the tracks that shouldn't be there or freight trains colliding with Amtrak trains. The last accident a system like the one we're talking about would likely have prevented was in 2011, when an Amtrak train went through a red signal and collided with another Amtrak train.

In our hypothetical scenario if the new system caused one accident a year that'd be a non-concern because of the hundreds of crashes it prevented. But in real life if the system caused just one accident a year that'd represent a tripling of the accident rate ove no system.

You have to have confidence that an automatic system outperforms humans by an order of magnitude before it is accepted by the public, underwriters, investors etc. Otherwise self-driving cars would be a commonplace option already. They already work, probably better than drivers and certainly better than some.

OK, here's the author's analogy. A PC was hardware that ran software. By choosing a third party operating system, the IBM PC's designers turned it into an interchangeable commodity.

These days a car is a hardware that runs software too. By choosing third party dashboard OSs, the manufacturers are turning them into interchangeable commodities.

Really? If the same dashboard OS ran in a Mercedes C class and a Ford Fiesta, they'd become interchangeable?

I take your point, but I'm addressing the attitude that because Muslim countries are different from us that must mean they're incapable of doing impressive things. That's just wishful thinking.

Of course "formidable" is a relative term. Iran's industrial capability isn't formidable compared to Germany, but it sure is compared to Iraq. Their automotive industry builds over a million cars a year.

Because you brought up automobile design.

And how do you know they have "zero know how"? Know how isn't a property of nations, it belongs to individuals who can be hired for a reasonable price.

If you mean "zero indigenous know how" that's something we can't take for granted either. The UAE is small (9 million -- just a bit larger than Switzerland), but it is very rich and no doubt has its share of talented individuals. What's more if they reached out to other Arab countries (as well as hiring a few key non-Arab personnel -- like we had Germans in the 50s and 60s), I don't doubt they could put together a reasonably "Arab" space program, which I see as a positive development. Such a program wouldn't build every jot and tiddle of their hardware right down to the nuts and bolts, but then we don't do that either.

Thought experiment. Suppose you're in charge of setting up a UAE and they give you a huge wad of cash to set up a space program. How would *you* go about doing it to maximize national scientific prestige?

Sure, but you've heard of King Saud University, right?

Really? You've never heard of Beijing University? Or the University of Heidelberg? Does "Max Planck Institute", "Moscow State University", or "Tel-Aviv University" ring a bell? Well then why not "King Saud University" or "Cairo University"?

As for the production of cars, that's not a measure of a country's intellectual attainment; it's a measure of a country's industrialization. Show me *any* region that has a resource extraction dominated economy that designs automobiles. I can name just *one* off the top of my head, and that's Iran.

There's an automatic assumption people make that when others disagree with them it's because they're stupid or ignorant. You can see that in the recent debate over the Iranian nuclear deal. There's an implicit assumption that the Iranian government is a bunch of uneducated, provincial hicks. Now I think Ali Khamenei is a terrible person, but it's not because he's ignorant. He is, in fact, superbly educated by any reasonable standard. As are many leaders in the Iranian government and opposition. The Iranian foreign minster Dr. Zarif holds three advanced degrees from US universities.

This kind of bigoted thinking is going to get us into trouble. Iran is not an Arab country, but it gets lumped in with Arab countries in American perception as an intellectually backward Muslim backwater. This is a dangerous attitude to take. Iran has substantial intellectual and technological resources to draw upon. Despite their names differing by only one letter, Iran is not Iraq. While Sadaam wasted his money on showy wonder-weapons like super-guns, the Iranians have built a fleet of advanced diesel subs that can operate in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. They have formidable industrial capability, including indigenous aerospace, automotive and electronic industries. While there is little doubt we would win in an invasion of Iran, it's far from clear it'd be the kind of cakewalk we had in the Iraq invasion.

Americans need to write this down and paste it in their hats: just because someone doesn't think like you doesn't guarantee he's ignorant or stupid.

Seriously. Good for you.

It sounds like you've got really interesting research goals for this mission, and I wish you great success.