I believe Luftwaffe General Goring said, “My pilots do not need a cinema on board!” What an oaf! No wonder the RAF and US Army Air Corps kicked his ass.

I'm with Xopher, except we used to say jocose, bellicose, morose, comatose.

Interestingly, the 2001 "weird depiction of exposure to vacuum" was based on best available science at the time, in the mid-1960s. I remember a number of interviews and articles about this. I never read any of the papers involved, I was back in junior high school back then, but a number of NASA scientists did believe that brief exposures to vacuum were survivable and the 2001 episode was based on this.

Fanfic is MUCH older than that. The Dead Sea caves were full of ancient fanfic with what we now consider biblical prayers, stories and psalms repurposed for various deities and hacked and remixed in a variety of creative ways.

When I went to Disneyland several thousand years ago they used those A through E tickets for the different kinds of rides. When you bought your ticket book, you knew you had so many teacup rides for each submarine or river boat. The best part was finding lost coupons under benches or in the shrubbery. My sister and I had several extra rides, even a couple of E rides, thanks to our keen eyesight and childlike willingness to crawl around on the asphalt.

Publicity is a lot of the problem. The railroads don't mind a visitor or two, but if visiting gets popular, then they have a serious problem.

In the charming book, We Swam The Grand Canyon, the authors had found cheap rubber suits and were swimming the canyon with no one bothering them. Then, they dropped by the park HQ and the rangers tried to stop them. Their response was more or less: "We're from California. You stop us, and people find out, then you'll have half of the state in the Colorado River. If we succeed, it becomes less interesting." The rangers were terrified and let them continue.

(It's a neat book. They swam the river before the dam cut the flow.)

I was pretty impressed with Cardiac back in the early 70s. A few years back I put together an emulator for it written in Realbasic. It runs on the Mac, and it might run on the PC.

Use Slow instead of run and you can watch all the hot PC, MAR, MDR register action.

The link is:

http://www.kaleberg.com/software/cardiac/index.html

The original measure-the-aether experiment was back in the late 19th century, and by 1905 Einstein's special theory of relativity put the last stake in the heart of the ether theory. Mind you, some bits and pieces still poke out. For example, when someone talks about "high tension" wires, they are referring to the aether theory of electrical force in which high voltages represent a high tension in the fabric of the ether.

If the Germans were trying to measure the aether in 1932 it was clearly part of the anti-Jewish science movement. Einstein, after all, was Jewish. Luckily, being anti-Jewish doesn't work that well in a technological war. The World War I, from a Jewish scientist's viewpoint, was Fritz Haber versus Chaim Weitzman, both Jewish. Both sides in the war needed fixed nitrogen for explosives, so Haber developed a high pressure process and Weitzman developed a seaweed to acetone process. (Weitzman was later president of Israel).

In World War II, the Nazi effort to develop an atomic bomb was hamstrung by their refusal to accept the Jewish estimate of the capture cross section of graphite, a rather common material. The proper Aryan material for catching neutrons was heavy water, which is relatively rare. As it turned out, neutrons didn't give a damn.

1) Of course we can evolve even if the environment is changing. We evolve for a changing environment.

2) Yes, there was a distinction between the simulated and real in the Stone Age. No, the cave painters didn't think they were painting actual animals on their cave walls.

The fashion industry has been dealing with knock offs since the 17th century when Louis XIV moved competition among his nobles out of the military realm and into showing off at Versailles. The French designers produced a design set of "fashion babies" to show of the years line for copying around Europe. (As printing improved, they moved from doll sized mock ups to fashion plates). Being copied established French designers cachet, which is why we still use a French word to refer to cachet.

The debate is a lot like the debate on movie release dates. How long between the theatre and DVD. How long before cable showings and network showings? These things change, but quite slowly. Too many people are threatened.

One real change is that the knock off artists have cut their cycle time dramatically. Designs are usually introduced almost completely out of seasonal phase so the firms can take orders, produce the goods and then ship them. It takes months to get from runway to rack; modern knock off houses can do it in weeks. They can have their stuff on the shelves before the fashion houses.

I used to follow the fashions a lot more than I do now that I've retired, but I remember that they sold winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter. If I wanted a nice linen shirt, I had to buy it when it was freezing out. If I wanted a cashmere sweater so I could go shopping for a linen shirt in the dead of winter, well, I should have gone shopping in the heat of summer. The business was amazingly consumer unfriendly. (The Ab Fab joke about a photo shot for children's woolies in the Moroccan desert in mid-summer hit home).

Before radio, Tin Pan Alley songs stayed on the best seller list for months. Radio chewed them up in weeks. We are getting something like that change in the clothing business now that the gap between designing and making has been narrowed, but the fashion design houses haven't caught up with this yet.

It's going to be good for the consumer. Imagine being able to buy winter clothes in the winter and summer clothes in the summer. A smart designer will come out with a line of Groundhog day shirts and matching socks and hit the 2/2 mark on the button. The means of production are changing, and the industry will have to change to keep up.