Looks like some of the anti-pirates made it to slashdot already.

They do still have launch issues; the GP and I would argue that the issues are engineering related; orbital mechanics and fluid dynamics, for instance, are not being revised after these issues occur. In other words, the science is solid and the engineering is evolving to avoid future issues.

IMO, it is not entirely inappropriate to let private industry discover new sciences and engineering philosophies, even as it would pertain to space travel. It's great to see competitions like X-Prize, but it's easy to feel that private sector approaches have been hamstrung with respect to NASA development.

The GP would likely agree with your assessment of NASA's experience and knowledge, and [s]he even explicitly suggests that they should use that knowledge for the "rocket science business - deep space, new technologies, etc."

R. Kelly reads Slashdot?

Right; I rushed through this "research" and missed the part that said "... no licensing or permit to purchase is required for long guns." My mistake.

The quote from Andrew Ford is misleading for today's gun control. From gun violence statistics and gun laws, leaders in per capita gun homicides, such as Maryland, Arkansas, California, parts of Nevada, and Michigan, require no such permit to purchase firearms.

IP-for-profit is all about controlling the rights to distribution. It's nice that distribution used to be a great avenue for revenue to compensate the research and development (contrary to your claim that reproduction always has been effortless), but yes, distribution is now effortless. Even though the business models of both buggy whips and IP differ tremendously, they're still ineffective, hence the analogy.

Also, there is a brave new industry making something better than what the [IP-holding-to-generate-revenue] software makers are making now: the free, open source software industry. Here, people have realized that not only is distribution effortless, they can do development in a shared and peer-reviewed environment [financially] effortlessly, although the product likely will not be created instantly.

And, is software piracy (other than copies of Microsoft Windows, Adobe CS3, and video games) really that rampant anymore? Do I just live in an alternate universe where open source software is abundant, accessible, and available for all of my platforms? If anything, I think most of us can safely agree that the rate of software piracy is declining because of the availability of open source.