ThinkTech and the Hawaii Venture Capital Association are collaborating on another luncheon panel program on April 25th at the Plaza Club. This one is called Hawaii's Growing Financial Connection with Asia - and what we can do to improve our prospects.

Asia has the fastest growing economies in the world, and Hawaii stands on the bridge along the way. But are we diligently pursuing our destiny on that bridge?

Hawaii has great opportunities to connect with Asia's financial markets - for reciprocal investments, for currency, equities and real estate markets; for banking, trading, import-export and professional exchanges; and for ventures, partnerships, jobs and careers, both public and private.

As with other Asia connections, we run the risk of being overflown. Are we seizing the day? What steps are we taking to grow our financial connection with Asia, and how well have we done? What else should we be doing to build a long-term financial relationship with Asia and solidify our position on the bridge?

And what do we, and our best and brightest, have to do to get in on it while the getting's still good.

Come down to our ThinkTech-HVCA luncheon panel program at the Plaza Club on April 25th and find out. Our program will feature an illustrious panel moderated by investment manager Veryan Allen of Merrill Lynch and comprised of:

• Betty Brow - Executive Vice President, International Banking Division, Bank of Hawaii.
• Steven Connell - Chief Investment Officer, Interlaced Investment Advisors.
• David Day - Office of David Day, attorney, specializing in international business practice.
• Roger Epstein - Cades Schutte, attorney specializing in international tax and investment.
• Brad Punu - Principal, Hawaii Office, Urban Capital of America.

For more details or to register, visit hvca.org.

The February 28th ThinkTech-Hawaii Venture Capital Association luncheon panel program will deal with transportation in Hawaii, a subject which is extremely complex and politically sensitive but which has a profound effect on our economy and our quality of life, whether we realize it or not. It’s time we understood it better.

The program is entitled “Transportation in Hawaii, how are we getting around these days,” and will cover what works and what doesn't, and the issues and opportunities in play.

Hawaii is a state of islands separated by great distances and diversities. Statewide, and island-by-island, our transportation has its challenges. How well are we meeting them?

As the 21st century unfolds it's more and more important that we get around quickly, easily and inexpensively. Not only to live, work, learn and play, but for everything. In short, getting around is essential for us to hold our economy together.

We'll have panelists on the evolution of cars and congestion, mass transit, complete streets and the biking alternative, air and sea travel among the islands and city and state plans to improve the systems that were developed before.

Cheryl Soon is our moderator for this important program. The panel will include Dave Rolph on cars, Tim Dick on interisland ferry transportation, Brian Gibson on OMPO, Cliff Slater on the status of rail, Panos Prevedouros on new transportation technologies, and Chad Taniguchi on bicycles and Complete Streets. We also hope to have some legislators who sit on the transportation committees.

The luncheon and panel discussion will be on Thursday, February 28, 2013, at the Plaza Club, 900 Fort Street Mall, 20th Floor. Registration is at 11:30 a.m. and the program will start at noon. Register at hvca.org or call Gail at 382-4638. Space is limited, so sign up early.

Our sponsors are Hawaii Business Magazine, Pacific New Media and the accounting firm of KMH, LLP.

See you there.

It’s nice to hear that the Legislature is testing a pilot project to allow people on the neighbor islands to testify on bills by way of video conferencing. Civil Beat says the project deserves “championing,” but actually it seems rather like a no-brainer that we should have done years ago.

After all, this technology has been mature, inexpensive and readily available for some time. What’s held us up all this time? More than other states, there is a burdensome air travel barrier between the islands, so video conferencing is natural, if not a requirement, for doing government business in Hawaii.

Why didn’t we think of it sooner? DBEDT tried it in the early Lingle-Liu days (actually it was installed by the Cayetano administration) as a way for DBEDT to communicate with other islands, but the Lingle administration didn’t put any energy or money into it and it quickly fell into disuse. Too bad, it could have been great, even then.

One thing was obvious. There are a number of boards and commissions that meet inter-island. That means their members and staff have to travel among the islands every month, or whatever the interval, at a huge airfare cost to the taxpayers. Do the math – half a dozen or more people traveling every month at nearly $300 a pop - an incredible waste. To say nothing of the time they all spend in the air.

Do we really need to spend that much when we have Skype, iChat, Google, or any number of other commercial systems to help us connect? Even after all this time, we do not avail ourselves of any of these fabulous technologies, and the barriers, costs and delays of travel and a misinterpreted sunshine law continue to undermine any possibility of efficiency.

So we are left with two thoughts: first, in the day of Neil Abercrombie’s new technology initiative, this is low hanging fruit, so why is it a “pilot,” and why do have to “evaluate” it – we should just sail into it right away, like immediately; second, why don’t we adopt it for boards and commissions to avoid the costs of flying people around when they could meet from their desks and smartphones.

In fact, why don’t we use this for all government interisland communications? Industry has been doing that for years, it’s time for our governments, both state and county, to catch up. Let’s just do it.

DSLRs have been in competition with the smaller digital cameras, and in many ways they have lost that competition. This is especially obvious at Christmas time, when so many new cameras get rolled out. The smaller digital cameras, as well as the iPhone and Android smartphones, are cheaper, lighter and have great pictures and functionality, including video, and are easy to put in your pocket and carry around. They take lots of pictures and the batteries last longer than before.

The DSLRs have been larger, heavier and more expensive and not nearly as handy on a trip or in a situation where you can’t lug around a full-size camera. Although they have lost ground to these smaller cameras, they are gaining ground against the larger camcorders. These days the DSLRs are finding a new niche for quality video and for lots of shooters they are replacing dedicated camcorders. Why? It’s because they now have incredible capability in video. Whatever great pictures you can get on a DSLR, you can get video on that DSLR which is just as great, really beautiful. This leaves the smaller cameras and smartphones in the dust.

Where before if you wanted a good camcorder, you’d have to spend thousands on the camera and a backpack of accessories, now you can get a better picture with a cheaper DSLR without so many accessories. For around $1,000, or possibly less, you can get a video DSLR that can take better video than your $2,000+ camcorder. No kidding.

The DSLR will have a bigger sensor and better lenses, and the video pictures will be far better, dollar for dollar. The DSLR will also be lighter to carry than a camcorder with its accessories. And it will take both video and stills with far greater control over the functions and the picture. I predict you will see more and more DSLRs built to take video, and more people switching to them from camcorders, including both hobbyists and professionals. Soon enough, they'll converge and the result will look and operate much more like a DSLR than a camcorder.

That’s not to say that the DSLR technology is fully mature. It’s still improving, and trying to beat challenges on recording time (typically enabled for less than 30 minutes), auto focusing, image stabilization and audio. But these things are better than they were a year ago and they’ll be better again a year from now. It’s a moving target, but at this point any shortfalls are far outweighed by the benefits, so it’s time to make your move.

The good DSLRs come with a built-in microphone and an input port for an external or wireless microphone. The shortfall is that the input is 3.5 mm and doesn’t include adjustable levels, but that’s easily fixed by using a separate audio recorder like a Zoom or Tascam, then synchronizing the audio in post-production. That way you get both great sound and video.

I suppose now after Christmas the prices will come down, so this is a great time to scope out the new video DSLRs. There are lots of new and improved models. Check out the Canon, Sony and Panasonic lines especially. My favorites are the Canon EOS 7D and the new hot Panasonic Lumix GH3, both selling for something over $1,000. Make sure you check them out. You’ll be glad you did, even though it's a little late to call it a Christmas gift.

A friend of mine is moving to Oregon. He has many good reasons. When he got there, he wrote a note saying how great things were, trying to make us eat our hearts out. And he said this:

“People (here) are unbelievably nice and polite. Can you believe, they actually stop and let you change lanes when you put on your signal?“

I guess I knew that, I guess we all did. Over time, driving aloha has given way to something else. People do cut in front of you on a regular basis without signaling and, worse, when you signal they don't let you change lanes, making it unnecessarily hard for you.

In the old days everyone let you in as soon as they saw your signal. We’ve lost that. Aloha no longer prevails, and the loss may be unrecapturable. The police won’t fix this - they leave it to us to be courteous to each other. That's not unreasonable.

How does lane changing change the culture? Well if everyone cuts in and out, and they do, just watch the road, any road, and you will see compulsive lane changing all over town.

It has a lot to do with more cars and congestion. People are frustrated that they’re moving so slowly, so they repeatedly change lanes to see if they can go faster. Lots of those lane changes are unproductive. But that’s their call.

These drivers are impatient to get somewhere, even to the other side of the road, often without signaling. The rest of us get annoyed, and that’s one of the reasons why other drivers get fed up and won’t let the lane changers change. And that unforgiving lack of courtesy is the real rub. It's downright mean.

So you signal you want to change lanes, and they ignore you. You look at them to give stink eye or to see the kind of person who does this. They know you signaled, and they know you’re looking at them, but they look straight ahead, fixed on some distant horizon, ignoring your glare and adding insult to injury.

What makes people ignore your signal and then ignore you? It’s takes a smoldering anger they may not even realize. They hide behind expensive tinted windows, making believe they can't see you, isolating themselves from decency for snarled hours every day.

Lane changing culture is the measure of a community, or city. If people are proud and happy about their community, they are happy to let you change lanes. If they are frustrated with their community, they ignore your signal and then your glare.

How to change this culture? For me, I let them in even if they are compulsive lane changers. I turn the other cheek, I never get angry and I never say no. And, above all, I never ignore them. I do this because I want to have a nice day and no accident.

On the other hand, when I signal and another driver lets me in, I wave at him with a big shaka, because I know his courtesy is slowly going extinct and because I want to encourage its revival.

If we all did this, life on Hawaii’s congested roads would be easier on everyone.

Kauai County has announced a partnership with catalogchoice.org of Berkeley, California, to stop unwanted mail for people on Kauai. This is all good and the media has picked it up. It limits junk mail, saves on the effort of throwing it out, saves on landfill space and constrains the sale of personal data and identity.

The program, as offered by Catalog Choice, is free and is intended to let participants opt out of mail they don’t want to get, including phone books, catalogs, credit card solicitations and much more. You have to register with Catalog Choice, which contacts the companies that send the mail you don’t want and, on your behalf, asks them to stop sending it.

Kauai is doing this for stated environmental purposes, to save trees and avoid solid waste in the landfill. The web site of the partnership is https://kauai.catalogchoice.org. The main website for Catalog Choice is catalogchoice.org.

Actually, Catalog Choice is not the only one, but it may be the only free one. 41pounds.org, for example, will “take all the necessary steps to dramatically reduce your junk mail.” It’s the same idea but costs $35 for five years of service. I can’t say which one is better, but I’d rather pay nothing than $35.

You may ask why only Kauai. Isn’t the problem just as pronounced and irritating on the other islands? Well, all the other counties could do the same thing and make the same deal with Catalog Choice and there could be a similar Catalog Choice website for every county. On the other hand, you can go directly to catalogchoice.org and have exactly the same benefit without going through any government agency.

But the Postal Service has been delivering junk mail like this, and much more, especially around election time, from the beginning. It’s an industry, and many companies are dependent on junk mail marketing. It’s the American way, almost as if they have a right to do that. It’s not clear what happens if they thumb their noses at kindly requests made through Catalog Choice.org or 41pounds.org.

In any event, email has changed the way we do snail mail. Sure the Postal Service has been taking in all kinds of junk for years, but (a) the junk mail has increased in volume, weight and offensiveness, and (b) unless they are really lonely, most people don’t really want any of it.

Actually, junk mail is a huge nuisance, just as it is on the net because it gets in the way of real mail, the mail we need to get and want to get. So if we can stop or filter email on the web, certainly we should be able to do that for junk snail mail. This junk snail mail model was undoubtedly inspired by the email phenomenon.

I would guess that the Postal Service loses huge amounts of money on delivering the bulky items for bulk rates and they are probably delighted by the Kauai partnership with Catalog Choice. At the same time, they are under political pressure from marketing organizations to continue the status quo.

But it’s more than just environmental and landfill issues and the convenience of the Postal Service. The idea of limiting junk mail is an idea that’s newsworthy because we all realize that it may be over due. It’s the little guys fighting back.

Junk mail is not only annoying, it’s a huge waste. After the letter carrier delivers it to us, we have to go through it and waste our time. So beyond wasted expense to the Postal Service and in the postal rates we pay, we waste our time picking through it and throwing it away.

And it costs something to haul away all the junk from every house on the block. These costs and burdens are completely unnecessary because we don’t want the junk mail in the first place. It’s an insult not only to the mail system but to the economy. We are all paying for a service we never wanted.

The Constitution only says Congress will establish "a Post Office and Post Roads." It doesn’t create inalienable rights for marketers to flood the postal system with junk mail. Congress or for that matter the Postal Service could and should limit the junk mail by barring it on the opt-out basis or if unsolicited or by imposing more expensive rates and more stringent requirements.

There must be a legal way to filter it out, just as we filter out junk email and spam on every email computer system. Now that we know this can be done for email, if we are to save the postal system we need to do it for snail mail too.

The burden of solving this problem is not just on Kauai, or a well-meaning tech non-profit, it is on the whole country. It’s ultimately a federal problem calling for a federal solution.

Kudos to Kauai and Catalog Choice, but this solution seems so voluntary when limits on junk mail should be mandatory and enforceable. It reminds us of the phenomenon of junk marketing telephone calls, which we all hate to get.

The no-call list program has not been entirely successful, but it was a worthy effort. Now we should also have a no-send list for snail mail and put some teeth in it so there are sanctions on marketers who violate the wishes of their addressees.

If a sender wants to do junk mail, he should be required to respect that no-send list. As the power to proliferate junk robotic telephone calls and bulk junk mail increases with new database technology we really must do something to control it.

If these senders want to communicate with us they can always send email, when thanks to the other end of that technology we can block it.

The Kauai story is a wake up call, waking us up to the fact, if we didn’t already know it, that junk mail gums up the system, that it is a community nuisance, and that it has adverse environmental and economic effects. It’s also a wake up call that we can and should do something about it, whether we deal directly with organizations like Catalog Choice or through local government like Kauai County.

But it’s also a wake up call that a voluntary model like the one used by Catalog Choice may not ultimately do the trick. Once junk mail senders find that there are no meaningful sanctions, they may resume their earlier efforts with new boldness.

While the Kauai story demonstrates the problem, the efficacy of the solution is still in progress. It may ultimately require Congressional action, so this story should be a wake up call for Congress too.

See how technology changes even the traditional things we take for granted. This one-island wake up call is likely to gain attention beyond Hawaii, with positive effects on a growing problem, locally and nationally, that we have hitherto ignored.

Christmas is a time of shopping, that we know so well, and more and more of that is online. But what puts shoppers into their customary feeding frenzy is the prospect of low prices and unbeatable bargains. More than before, those prices are being set by technology.

It’s one thing for a retailer to say we can better the next guy; bring us the best price you can find, and we’ll match it. But computer pricing is taking things way beyond that these days.

We’ve seen this before in air travel. The price you pay is not likely to be the same price the guy next to you paid. You probably don’t want to know what he paid; it would ruin your day.

More and more, retail prices are determined on dynamic factors at a given moment: if you have too much inventory you lower the price; too little and you raise it. If demand is greater, you raise the prices; if demand is less, you lower the prices.

All of that can now happen instantaneously. And consumer software can find you the best price instantaneously too. The whole process is now immediate. The best price on either side of the equation goes to he who is fleet of foot.

Prices on the web change hourly. Merchants watch each other and try to beat each other real time, every hour or every minute, a hundred times a day if you like. The computers don’t mind doing it.

It’s the ultimate free market, and could be great for a smart retailer and a great boon for a smart shopper, as never before. On the converse, the retailer who doesn’t get it can lose big time, and the shopper who is not fleet of foot, who isn’t watching the price wars, can pay multiples more.

We are in a constant state of war on computer pricing, although that is seems to be so more on the web and on the mainland than in Hawaii. Given the success certain retailers are having getting the crowds in the door, what they're learning is likely to proliferate going forward.

Retailers battle to undercut the other guy or force him out of stock. They fight not only to increase sales volume but also to create and improve better franchise as value sellers.

IT companies are writing algorithms that keep track of online and advertised prices, inventory, consumer response and a host of other indicia. All of this converts into sophisticated software that produces dog-eat-dog pricing strategies. Obviously, these change-up algorithms are highly classified secret information for any retailer.

The big retailers have had the advantage of developing this kind of software but they don’t have a lock on it. In the hands of the little guys, it can level the playing field. They can track on what the big guys do and adjust prices too.

Consumers may love this, but it can give them a headache too. They may think they’re getting the best price, but they’re never sure there won’t be a better price ten minutes later. So they have a timing problem too.

Sometimes, a clever seller holds the price steady and then waits for the whites of their eyes and drops his price at a critical market moment to show he’s the go-to guy. People respond to that.

These strategies go beyond anything we’ve seen before. It’s war with high-tech weapons – like computer trading on Wall Street. The manual pricing this country grew up on is over.

But watch out. When a retailer thinks he has the market, he’s likely to push prices back up. Just because you see a price war driving prices down, you can’t be sure that the one that was cheapest won’t raise prices back up any time.

Even with these algorithms, in the end pricing needs human affirmation, the retailer who feels the market intuitively and knows when people will open their wallets. Sometimes it’s trial and error to find the sweet spot. Sure it’s a science, but to some degree it’s still also an art.

However thrilling it may be, shopping in the Holiday Season always has its challenges. One thing to watch is whether price wars for what appear to be the same item are really for the same item. You have to check not only the price, but what you are getting for the price. And you have to make sure that breathtaking discounts are not based on inflated prices.

Yes, this year we venture out into a new web of pricing competition, finding the magic of retail going steroid on the magic of technology. Bless the web for that. Things will never be the same, literally. Is it great to be alive this Christmas, or what?

MOOCs (massive online open courses) are going to change higher education and for that matter pubic education around the world.

At least three MOOCs companies have been started in the past five years to offer online courses where students can take the courses for a “certification.” The field is just starting; the opportunities are huge.

Online education is clearly the wave of the future. Once you create a decent course it doesn’t require much to deliver it to thousands or millions of people.

Although brick and mortar education is expensive, MOOCs don’t cost much at all. They democratize education, and provide huge personal leverage for the disadvantaged. Anyone can learn anything.

Now the issue is whether colleges should include those courses for credit. It seems clear that many if not most colleges will ultimately do that. There’s money in it. All you need to do is provide a proctor for the exam.

But this raises the question of whether we really need to limit these courses for credit. No. The idea is to educate people. Must we really have grades? Why not just leave them out there for the public.

Lynda.com teaches software by a series of movies. Click on an element in the course outline and you get to see a 3-minute movie, easy to learn from.

You can take them piecemeal if you like and when you’re done you’ll have a good understanding of the software. Later you can use the outline as a reference. It’s a great model, worth emulating.

Which courses should we reserve for brick and mortar schools and which ones for online? The online universities are proliferating, starting with Phoenix and now hundreds of others worldwide.

If you give a man a fish he can eat, but if you give him a hook he can catch his own fish. Same here. If you give a student the power of learning anything he wants anytime, he can create his own education.

Things are changing. Do I need to go to Harvard or Yale for a great education or will there come a time when I can get one with great MOOCs online. But how can I prove it without having a big degree?

Not impossible. In time, the certifications will become more sophisticated, and techniques will be developed to allow a MOOCs-trained student to show his stuff.

We’re in a new place. The fruit of this tree will be more and more low hanging, and it’s important that Hawaii get in on it, by taking advantage of the courses and maybe even by developing them. Geography is not an obstacle.

What greater gift than lifelong education, cheap. What greater gratification than teaching the world, from Hawaii.

It’s not just that we get email every day, repeatedly, from every candidate. It’s not just that we get social media from them too. It’s that the elections create a thought bubble where people are not only trying to get our attention, but to affect our thought process.

The professionals know that most people don’t read the paper. They know that those who do may be turned off not read about politics. They also know that the political reporting on TV is short and shallow.

At the same time, they know that people watch television as a primary source of information. They know that people can’t escape ads in prime time. They know that people watch those ads, eyes clamped open as in Clockwork Orange.

Citizens United has made it possible to raise obscene amounts of money from undisclosed sources so they can barrage us with ad after ad after ad on TV, penetrating every corner of our brains. Yes, the new system is based on the principle that with the right media buys money can buy votes.

They know that people watch these ads just like they watch commercials, half-believing, but accepting more with repetition. Repetitio mater studiorum, “repetition is the mother of study.” They know if they repeat a phrase 100 times, it starts to sink in. Familiarity breeds belief. Where the individual has made no other analysis, it becomes reality and fills the vacuum.

A prime example would be Linda Lingle’s “you know me.” The implication is that we know her so what she’s telling us is true. She’s saying we need not look further because we “know her.” But a recent piece in Civil Beat points out that if you check out what she’s saying, if you really do know her, you’ll know the ads are misleading and a matrix of campaign psychology.

In short, far too many people get their voting ideas from far too few sources, and that ads like this displace the possibility of critical thinking. It’s subtle, manipulative and scary.

Polls are also very high tech, and part of the arsenal. You can ask a question one way or the other way. It’s an art. A skilled pollster can write questions to achieve a biased agenda. People believe polls and even vote on the basis of polls. And the release of a poll can be gamed for maximum effect on other polls or on the election itself. This is also scary.

Polls are an inside tool also. Candidates use them to see how many percentage points a hit piece has nicked away from the opponent. If it works, they’ll repeat it, even if it’s false or misleading. This is useful for negative campaigning. Win at all costs.

Is the public sophisticated enough to see through these machinations? Some may see what’s going on, but many don’t, and get duped on the way to the ballot box. It’s all very scientific and calculating, made possible by our highly programmed data-driven 21st Century campaigning systems. It wasn’t as bad before Citizens United, but this year it’s noticeably worse.

Some say these are just the new tools of modern Democracy, but what’s happening is certainly not what our Founding Fathers had in mind for the selection of our elected leaders. Can we, the electorate, make good choices in this environment? Can we be confident about how those choices are being made? Does the new system work or is it undermining the principles of the Republic?

Last week, the Israelis shot down a drone that flew into their airspace from over the Gaza Strip. It’s not the first time this has happened. There have been other drones shot down by Israel. None of these are Israeli or U.S. drones. They're made and sent by someone else. Not good.

Drones, as we saw argued in the New York Times a few weeks ago, should be of some concern. They are being used to assassinate people. Sometimes they assassinate the wrong people. High tech or not, they can be made into assassination machines. In that, they can fly in any direction.

As we saw in the “spring gun” court decisions 100 years ago, the American rule is that killing or injuring someone by a remote control device is wrongful, even if that person has been engaged in a wrongful act himself. It’s not clear that automated assassination meets the morality standard.

Maybe we thought we had a monopoly on drones. We thought that our military technology could invent and deploy drones with impunity, and that although everyone could see how they operate and what deadly things they can do, no one could actually imitate and emulate them.

Not true. This is a world where anyone can do research. If you’re not concerned about IP rights, it’s not so hard to emulate what someone else’s device is doing. The Internet answers so many tech questions and reveals so many secrets. So the way drones work is no longer a mystery.

You could learn the ABCs of drone making at any engineering school in the world. You could learn how to design and fabricate one, fly it, navigate it, manage it, take pictures from it and for that matter make it into a killing machine. These days, it’s not exactly rocket science.

Do you recall when we were losing drones over Central Asia because the enemy had found that $50 software off the Internet could block their high tech navigation systems? That was embarrassing, but we were still in charge, the only ones actually sending them into the air.

Now it's different, and worse, in the sense that others are also making drones just like we make drones. It doesn't take a big factory to make a drone; a relatively small machine shop could suffice. Just as they are small, he space in which they are fabricated can be small, and secret

And the same rules apply to deploying them. It doesn’t take an airfield or runway to launch them. You can carry them around in an everyday backpack and launch them, well, nearly anywhere. And they’re not that easy to see when they’re flying overhead because they’re small.

But even with a small package, there can be a big payload, like high definition photography or video, pinpoint sniper firing devices and of course powerful lightweight explosives. Have you heard of the “humming bird” devices that hover over a crowd and take pictures of protestors?

The revelation in the news is that we don’t have an exclusive on drones anymore. Other people are designing, making and using them, over Israel and who knows where else. They can be carried anywhere and flown high enough not to be noticed, internationally or domestically.

It goes beyond the anonymity of backpacks. They can be fabricated from small parts that come separately, none of which is particularly noticeable. Suffice to say we'll see more drones. In the years and semi-wars of the future, we'll see them all over the place, and in greater sophistication.

We have reconnaissance drone makers here in Hawaii and in fact they make very good ones. The School of Engineering builds underwater vehicles as well as air borne drones. And for $300, you can buy a super-lightweight radio-controlled photo helicopter at the Sharper Image.

When we started using them in the Middle East, it seemed like a good idea. We had the edge, and once you get past the moral issues you could say they’ve been quite effective. It’s the miniaturization of war. I suppose you could argue it’s better to have a little one than a big one.

But like the nuclear bombs of World War II, the cat's out of the bag. It didn't take very long for our enemies and not-so-friendly friends to get their hands on some and otherwise learn how to make and improve on them and then use them against us, and now we'll pay another price.

Maybe this is something already engrained in the 21st century, but at the same time maybe we should consider our experience so far the next time we think about rolling out a disruptive weapon of this kind, and maybe that'll make us a little more cautious about the implications.