No. When the original 1969 Outer Space Treaty was written, the underlying assumption was clearly that only states have the required industrial, economic, and scientific base to launch space missions. Corporations were added into the picture as an afterthought in the 1979 Moon Treaty, but due to other provisions clashing with the era's ideals, that was never widely adopted.

Now, the landscape has changed dramatically, with nation states retreating from space exploration and refocusing resources elsewhere, and corporations (SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, etc.) taking over the industry. These currently operate under very light regulation - basically they only need to register objects launched by them in the national registries, and that's it (note that I'm talking about orbital operations and beyond, the launches themselves may still be regulated by the local aviation authorities due to use of airspace!), and this is a state that cannot go on for long.

Second, the reason these must given a seat at the table is precisely an extension of your reasoning. You say that corporations can "incorporate in whichever nation they think will be the "best" host" - now extend that, and imagine, based on the news coming out of Amazon warehouses, what happens when Blue Origin establishes a Moon base and incorporates there, outside of all terrestrial jurisdiction.
One, Earth corporate law is woefully unprepared to handle this. Two, Earth law as a whole is unprepared for this scenario. Three, you have to face the reality that the future of space exploration is likely in private hands, and it's a lot better if this happens in a regulated, controlled fashion than if you have a repeat of the Robber Barons of the Wild Wild West.
When I say "give them a seat at the table", I don't mean "bow to them", what I mean is that their achievements and role must be acknowledged, and they must be treated as partners rather than enemies and brought into the framework rather than left to act unchecked.

Not quite. Given how quickly the UN moves, I can see that the now-defunct Planetary Resources also factored into the process.

That's actually a good parallel, with one key difference - and I'm saying this with the assumption that the 1969 Outer Space Treaty isn't fully repealed/reworked from scratch -: space and all objects therein is explicitly considered common domain of all mankind. Which makes things a little more challenging.

See, the designation carries with it a restriction that space and all its resources may only be utilized for the betterment of all mankind. And that's as far as the treaty goes, because there's no precedent yet, but here's the NATO stance - which I helped form a loong while back -: because this requirement exists for all of outer space, resources extracted from celestial objects are also subject to this restriction, which means they must be distributed equitably among nations of the world.

Of course, this is obviously stupid, because some nations will have the industrial capacity and technology to utilize, say, an influx of titanium, others won't but will still be allotted an amount because of the equitable distribution. And as you point out, there needs to be an economic return for resource extraction start in the first place, something that's obviously not permitted by the status of outer space as things currently stand.

Overall, here's the deal (which I would have put in my opening comment, but I was in a rush): a ground-up rework of the current space law system is required, one that fulfills a number of criteria:

• Give corporations and non-government entities a seat at the table, because the assumption that only states have the power to achieve spaceflight no longer holds true (which alone would be grounds to declare the treaty void, as the circumstances have materially changed, but let's not give China/Russia ideas)
• Provides a new definition of WMDs, one that encompasses orbital bombardment and directed energy weapons
• Settles the legal state and standing of extraterrestrial resources, before and after extraction, and provides a framework for both fair distribution and fair profit to the extractor

The United Nations sure has its work cut out for it to craft a framework that will stand the test of time...

This is a long-overdue issue, especially with the rise of private/corporate spaceflight. The 1979 Moon Treaty would be a good starting point for these if it weren't so narrowly adopted and lacking in power. They sorely need to settle the status of extraterrestrial colonies, even before the fact, resource extraction, militarization of Earth orbit, space debris ownership and cleanup, and like a million other topics that threaten our current access to space.

That's actually a good point on the type system, but I was aiming for more abstract clarification, along the lines of "So do you want this list sorted or not? And sorted by what exactly?" - those are the kind of questions that come up too late in the development process, and I think are a major contributor to delays and frustration and perceived-or-actual bad code.

To be fair, I don't think either of them know what they really want. Business certainly doesn't, and because they're the ones formulating the specs (if you can call them that, they are usually not at all formal) which are then turned into programs, programmers don't know either.

TFA says:
> Hollywood typecasts embodying the hacker stereotype, staring at screens while 1s and 0s quickly stream by, present programming as a mystical, supernatural ability.

He's not wrong, programming is a lot like magic:

1. You use an arcane tongue, incomprehensible to outsiders
2. You manipulate forces infinitely your greater
3. And then a daemon comes and ruins everything...

That won't help when even you don't know what you want to achieve :)

Programming is hard not because of the language, the mathematics of it, or similar factors (though these do contribute); programming is hard because you're talking to a machine, not a fellow human, and unlike a person, the machine won't assume you meant one thing when you said ~your mother~ another, nor will it ask for clarification, so you need to be super precise in telling it what to do, which leads to the difficulties in algorithmics, which is commonly touted as the reason programming is hard. Programming requires you to be exacting and precise to a fault, something that's not demanded of you in everyday conversation, so it naturally feels taxing and hard to do, forcing you to expend additional brain cycles just to formulate a sentence.

Simply put, if you tell the machine via the command prompt to eat its own disk, it won't question you, it will dutifully eat its own disk.

What language you use has very little bearing on how "hard" you'll find programming, I think. Some may be more conducive by virtue of their syntax, but it's not a "make or break" thing.

Worst part, you're not wrong...
It'll also kill the host, but hey, collateral damage, amiright?

With Cyberpunk 2077 dominating popular culture these days (for better or for worse), it certainly looks like we're on track to that world. For better or for worse.

I used to play EVE Online quite a lot, and we had regular outings where me and friends went looking for fights until we got killed. I once lost a high-value ship (a stealth bomber) in what looked like suspicious circumstances, so I appealed the fight at customer support, and while I didn't get my ship returned, I did get an explanation: the opponent's command reached the server 0.1 s before mine, so mine fell into the next tick and was resolved accordingly. Turns out, the guy was a Londoner, and the EVE server is in London as well.

Explanation for the TLDR above.
The stealth bomber in EVE is one of the ships that can fit a Covert Operations Cloaking Device, which is great for heading off an unwanted fight because it allows FTL travel while cloaked (as opposed to normal cloaking devices, which interfere with your warp drive and restrict you to sublight speed, at a 90% velocity penalty). Being cloaked removes you from the game overview, so enemies can't target you unless they approach within 250 meters, which breaks your cloak; but you cannot engage cloaking if you're targeted or are being targeted, which is not an instant action.
The EVE server processes events in one-second "ticks", where a node calculates the state of the entire star system it's running, meaning the position, actions, and movement of every player, NPC, and environmental object in it. At the top of the second, every command received is processed, and the action resolved.
So, when I started moving to head off the fight, and hit my cloak button, the guy has already started scanning me for targeting. If our commands reached the server inside the same second, his attempt would have failed, as cloaking takes precedence over targeting. But because his latency meant his target scan reached the server 0.1 seconds earlier, it was resolved before my cloak, so I got hit with the "You cannot cloak your ship, because you are being targeted by someone." message in my game - the equivalent of "Son, you're shit outta luck!" for any cloak-capable ship.

This leads to a sticky situation for the colony: by declaring their own laws and exercising control over their borders/citizens, they fulfill the criteria of being a state, and at that point, according to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, they are legally barred from owning territory off-planet.

Now granted, the Outer Space Treaty, as well as the adjoining Moon Treaty, are long overdue for a refresh, given that circumstances have changed drastically since their passing, but there seems to be little will in the world to actually make that change and establish a proper legal framework for expansion into space.

You know what? You're right.
I was writing under the possibly-false assumption that the false positive gets fed back into the system to improve the detection rate. If that does not take place, the algorithm will not improve, and you will keep being flagged. Which does get really old really fast.

I believe how both the police and the media frame the tech's deployment is skewing our perception of it. I wouldn't take any offense if the police stopped me for an ID-check with something along the lines of "Excuse me, sir, can we see an ID? You were flagged as a match for a wanted person, and we want to make sure we're looking at the right guy." - it's simple, it's clear, and it's courteous, nothing wrong with a double-check.