>You shouldn't have to be able to pony up for a commercial buildout with huge overhead costs in order to have your own business.

It can be even more ridiculous than that, sometimes. A friend of mine started a food-related business that required him to install stainless steel plumbing in his rented commercial space. Fair enough. But he then discovered that tenancy regulations prevented the landlord from "upgrading" only one unit. So, my friend had to pay to to have stainless steel plumbing installed in all the units (a six-figure expense) even though none of the other businesses required or even wanted it.

I don't understand your analogy to Oppenheimer and Truman. My prosecutor's argument is that the monster, as a creation of a person, is a machine and therefore has no conscious, and therefore can't be guilty, so the guilt has to lie with Dr. Frankenstein. (I don't subscribe to this theory, by the way, it's just how I imagine myself as a prosecutor arguing it.) Who is Oppenheimer in your analogy and who is Truman?

In Frankenstein's defense I would argue that the monster has a conscience that's equivalent to an adult human conscience (at least when some of the crimes were committed, if I remember the book correctly), and so the monster is capable of legal guilt. In that scenario, Dr. Frankenstein is akin to the monster's parent. We can decry his actions but, ultimately, it's the monster who's responsible.

In prosecuting Frankenstein I'd argue the opposite: That the monster is merely a machine (albeit a biological machine) and therefore has no conscience. Granted, that argument would have worked better in the late 18th century than today!

What's interesting to me about this question is that it probably won't be much longer before it goes from being hypothetical to being an actual legal case. Presumably, at some point in the not too distant future, a human-created machine with at least the appearance of sentience will harm someone and we'll have to decide, legally, who's responsible. I don't think we know how to determine whether such a machine has a conscience. After all, the consciousness of a human defendant is only a legal presumption. We have no way of knowing it exists. Will we decide to extend that presumption to anything that behaves like it has consciousness? Anything that claims to have consciousness?

Ironically, from an economic perspective a machine civilization has a big problem: Machines are far better at creating than they are at consuming. A machine civilization might well develop into a single machine that can maintain itself. What use would a second machine be?

Hm... I suppose it all hinges on what someone means by "preserving modern civilization." Does civilization being completely taken over by machines constitute "preserving" it? I can see a case either way.

But, yes, assuming we allow a civilization of machines to be consistent with "preserving modern civilization" then, you're right, the answer to the exact question asked would be zero.

I was going to say 100 million, based on Arthur C. Clarke estimate from many years ago. (Which turns out to have been based on an analysis by Fred Hoyle, which I didn't know before today.) But my memory is obviously quite faulty because the Clarke/Hoyle number was 100 thousand, not 100 million! That seems low to me, but the number can certainly be much lower than today's population, once our technology is sufficiently advanced.

I understand how you might see it that way but I don't think I ever did. To me, it's another example of Lizzie understanding Darcy's circumstances in a way other's didn't or wouldn't, which was presumably part of why he was attracted to her. She got right away how annoying it must be to be surrounded by sycophants. She misinterpreted his reactions to those circumstances in the beginning (hence the story), but she "got" the situation.

It was the six nine-letter words with only one syllable that caught my eye.

>There's a perception that you can't just invent a word...

A misperception. Of course you can invent a word, otherwise where would they come from? Not only that, but you can--and do--use existing words in an idiosyncratic way. I would argue that you can't actually use them any other way--at least, not nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. It's important to understand that everyone means something different when they use a word, and conversations can fall apart very quickly if one or another person doesn't understand that.

There's no aerodynamic reason they shouldn't be able to do that. Fighter pilots and aerobatic pilots have been performing maneuvers that involve deliberately stalling the wing since the very early days of flight. But perhaps a description of a very simple form of stalled-wing maneuvering will help you visualize how it works.

The first thing we have to do is correct the commonly held misunderstanding that a stalled with "loses lift." That's a very poor way to describe what happens because a stalled wing still produces lift proportional to the square of airspeed, it just does it with more drag and at a higher AOA. If you doubt that, consider that a paper airplane wing is essentially stalled all the time. A better way to think of it is that stalling the wing results in a sudden shift to a lower lift to drag ratio. The wing can still produce 1 g of lift (or however much lift you want), but at much higher drag than the same wing when it is not stalled, and at higher airspeed.

Probably the easiest stalled-wing maneuver to understand is the technique used by bush pilots to minimize damage in an off-field forced landing. The pilot flies the airplane into a stall and holds it there, with aft stick, while maintaining stability with the rudder (not with the ailerons). This results in a glide with a much steeper than normal descent angle but with a low vertical speed, because the airspeed is low. (Glide angle is inversely proportional to L/D.) The pilot can then fly the airplane to a smaller clear area on the ground than they could hit with a normal glide, because of the steeper glide path. Damage on impact is minimal because of the low airspeed and low vertical speed. In fact, with a good STOL airplane, very short landings can be made on a normal runway with no damage at all. I have done this may times in a Druine Turbi, stopping in well under 200 ft from the runway threshold.

The trick with a fighter jet is to have enough control authority to usefully maneuver the jet in yaw and roll with the wing stalled without having surfaces so large that they compromise un-stalled performance. It's also helpful to have loads of low speed thrust so you don't lose more energy during that maneuver than necessary.