Lucas should have sold BEFORE the prequels. Hard to believe he made those classics. Some mentor must have helped Lucas in the past and died a few decades ago...

Gary Kurtz and Larry Kasdan are still very much alive, he just never worked with them again because they occasionally disagreed with him.

He's the biggest SF-tease ever.

Let us not discount the Damon Lindelof phenomenon -- he wrote Prometheus and Cowboys vs. Aliens, and bears most of the responsibility for the Lost storyline. (He's also writing Into Darkness).

Then again, if yo've ever seen J. J. Abrams tell his "Mystery Box" Story it's pretty hard to not come to the conclusion that he's motivated by at least a little contempt for the audience's intelligence.

Please start by dropping the teddybears from 'The Empire Strikes Back'

My fear is that you have about the median level of Star Wars knowledge, and that you're the audience he'll make it for.

Kidding aside, we can note that *nixes do have a reasonable excuse, since they grew from a Ritchie/Kernighan hobby project originally intended as therapeutic relief from working on MULTICS. Unix wasn't designed for long-term success, and it was designed to be hacked as necessary, so this wasn't a case of egregiously stupid design decisions.

At the time K&R wrote it, people didn't use "operating systems" as "platforms" for "applications" as much as they were just the first tape you loaded onto the core in order to boot your one-off payroll application, developed by a hundred contractors at stupendous expense. New computer systems would come out every couple years and ship with completely new OSs -- computer infrastructures that could actually run the same client software on different machines (or even different model numbers of the same machine) were specialist and generally exceptions to the rule until the 70s.

People would keep the OS that shipped with their machine for years and when the time came to buy a new computer, they took for granted that they'd have to significantly rewrite everything and the old computer would have to be kept for several years in order to read the old tapes for audit purposes. The idea that two computer systems, even from the same vendor, would naturally be able to read the same set of tapes or disks was a fantasy, unless you were paying top-dollar for IBM gear.

When people worried about how to store a date in 1970, they were primarily concerned with how many columns of the card they were taking up.

It went without saying that they'd never "warehouse" data for longer than the legal requirement, and in any case the paper printouts of every transaction, boxed and shipped to archives every week, were the actual record that anyone would care about. Nobody searched historical computer records, and nobody expected records from more than 12 months back to be online. The online record held a two-digit year because that's all that needed to be printed on the check, the computer's tapes weren't designed to actually serve as a legal record of anything, most people used their machines as fancy check and bill printers that did some totals for them. The paper these machines emitted was the document. In the 80s this mentality changed completely and the computer record became the document, the paper output merely copies, and that's when people started paying attention -- but the attitude people had toward online record-keeping only changed because vendors made it possible to store records on a medium, go through three buying cycles of computers, and have that medium still be readable.

$0.5M to be air-tight sure that a simple 20 lines of Pascal code doesn't crash one (or more) of the hundreds of A-10s in active service, each one worth $12+M, not to mention keeping those pilots safe.

You can see why people are extremely reluctant to tinker with man-rated systems.

The average age of a commercial Boeing airliner is 14.7 years. Some planes in the Delta/American combined fleet date from the 1960s, and a lot of the 737s you ride in today are 70s-80s vintage.

The inspections and maintenance schedules required to make them as safe as they are have the side-effect of making the last a lot longer than automobiles.

Meanwhile, there have been calls by leglislators to confiscate guns

Who?

In light of all of this, it's hard to see how psychiatry for depression is anything but a scam.

Your argument is that psychiatry is affirmative fraud, that psychiatrists know that their drugs don't work, and that this information is suppressed for the sake of profits -- and you base this all off of one paper, a paper that says nothing about fraud, profits, or suppressed knowledge. Find the paper that proves psychiatrists systematically misreport outcomes, or that they believe drugs don't work, or that they routinely lie in order to sell patients on drugs and services. This is the evidence required to prove a "scam." All you've got now is a reason to go back and check the original studies.

If the tables were turned we'd just be saying "Fuck you, Schusters!" It'd be tough to justify paying these people hundreds of millions of dollars for something their dead grandfather created, and to which they'd contributed no work or creative input to in decades.

We have an historical example of a media franchise owned solely by the original creator, it's called Star Wars, and the results have been rather mixed.

"You also seem to be implying that people aren't mentally capable of using firearms safely and/or defensively."

Where do you get that?