They do spread out, but the divergence angle is really small, and it also depends on the type of laser - some of them don't produce very well focused light.

To understand why it helps to look at a simplified laser design, like the one diagrammed here, which uses a crystal rod for the resonating cavity (YAG in the diagram, or ruby in Maiman's original laser). The active medium is pumped by the flash lamp, and photons are generated randomly in the body of the crystal rod. Most of them exit immediately through the sides. Some happen to be emitted almost parallel to the long axis of the rod, and they get reflected by the mirrored ends. Most of those, emitted at a slight angle, end up exiting through the sides as well (maybe after a few reflections). A few happen to be moving very close to parallel to the axis, and get reflected between the mirrors again and again. Those photons cross the active medium many times and generate a lot of other photons with the same wavelength and phase (that's what's called "the LASER effect"). In the end, when some of them exit through the semi-transparent mirror at the end of the rod, they have ALMOST the same direction. That makes the laser ray so collimated, but a very small amount of divergence will still be present.

Well, maybe not so much a classic vacuum tube, since electrons are generated through field electron emission, not thermionic effect. It does look similar to some cold cathode devices though, like neon lamps or maybe plasma display cells. The interesting parts are the very small size and the addition of the gate which allows modulation of the electron flow.

Maybe a bit, but AFAIR electron tunnelling happens at really small scales, in the sub-nanometer range, maybe up to a few nanometers. The gap mentioned in the article is 150 nm, two orders of magnitude above that - which would make the probability of quantum tunnelling through the gap extremely small.

But the real engine for progress is work, not investment money. Capital by itself doesn't do anything without somebody to use it. However, the people actually doing the work are taxed more on their income than the people who provide the capital, even though they're the actual real creators.

Nobody denies investment is necessary. I don't however think it's economically or morally superior to live from investments rather that do good honest work. That's why I think taxing income from investment less than income from work is a bad moral choice, and provides all the wrong incentives for society. I mean, what would happen if capital income would be taxed equally to income from work, or perhaps even more? Would the rich stop investing, would they be, as you say, "discouraged"? This won't happen, or they'll lose their capital to inflation. What will happen is more money would go to the real creators, who would then be able to create more - or maybe some of the formerly idle rich would have to enter the work market themselves and actually become productive. Either way the society would be better off, so I can't really see where the bad part is.

That's completely and utterly false. Look up stateless person. International law has recognized this situation since the time of the League of Nations, long before the existence of the UN. There are a number of UN conventions that deal with stateless persons - see this one, from 1954, or the more specific one, dated 1961 here.

I think the answer has already been given by the SCOTUS in the warrantless GPS tracking case: see here for details. The SCOTUS decided that, even though drivers used public roads, the amount of tracking the police was doing was orders of magnitude above the normal expectation for a public place, both in individual tracking and in the sheer number of trackers that could be active simultaneously. Of course, the decision in this case applies to governments, but I believe the same arguments work identically for the Google car.

Yeah, but who'd want to listen to a cantata named "A Mighty Fortress is Our Random Fluctuation of the Continuum"?

Eh? On the contrary, they sold better than the Mac did. And it was a better deal for the consumer too - you could get a high end UMAX or Tatung Mac clone significantly cheaper than the equivalent Macintosh. That was Jobs' problem, that the Mac was getting commodized, like PCs had, and that would kill his comparably enormous margins, not that the clones sold badly. It even says so in the link you posted: "high-end clones were cannibalizing sales of their own high-end computers, where profit margins were highest"

Heh, it's just simple selection - not Darwinian unless the people reaching those leadership positions mate with each other and have superior offspring. On the other hand, I've been told it's lonely at the top :).

Maybe in technical documents, but that's not true in many cases. It all depends on having the proper context. If somebody asks "how old are you", answering "35" is quite unambiguous, because of the shared context. You don't need to explain what units you're using - nobody would suspect you mean 35 weeks or hours (or if you're Han Solo, parsecs). The Lockheed problem was caused by the existence of 2 different contexts, Imperial and metric, close enough to be easily confused. If the Imperial units weren't ever used, there would have been no problem.

Duh, from the context! If you have any knowledge of a particular field you should understand what units there are, to a precision of at least an order of magnitude. If your technical drawing represents a car, nobody with a brain would suspect the length of "5" may mean 5 kilometers or electronVolts. Ambiguity only arises in parts of the world that still use Imperial, because the difference between comparable units isn't large enough for automatic unit checking to kick in - in my example, both 5 meters and 5 yards are acceptable for a car length.

Consider the technical documents from Lockheed - they did not have units, but were accepted and used, and surprise, surprise, nobody created a pocket-sized rocket because they thought the units were actually millimeters (cue Bloody Stupid Johnson). The resulting product did fly, even if not exactly where Lockheed intended :) If the Imperial system hadn't still hung around, the thing would have worked well, labels or no labels.

But units wouldn't need to be labeled if everybody used the same system. The continued existence of the zombie Imperial system is the root cause of the problem.

Which is why SI has a number of accepted units. You'll note that both the eV and the astronomical unit are there, but not the feet or yards used by Lockheed to send a rocket past Mars.