Wrong. The driver's license was not only the first step towards a national ID card, but almost the last necessary one. All they need now is regulations to harmonize the variants between the states... which may include an RFID chip. Because, you know, different states need to store different information, and that way we can include whatever's needed. (Nobody can readily tell what it contains, so it doesn't matter that all it contains is a unique ID # for lookup in a remotely hosted database.)
It's not that they're wildly incompetent. They invest in a thicket of things that are an annoyance to avoid. Most people will slip somewhere. It doesn't matter that you won't slip in this place...or think you won't...they aren't that interested in you. And they could track you by other means if they were.
In many countries, yes, you are required to carry your passport. The US may be one of those countries. (N.B.: Just because you can substitute some other form of ID, e.g. driver's license, doesn't mean that a non-resident can do the same.)
Largely because everybody knows that the computers are underpowered. Progress is being made on pieces of the job. (You didn't think "intelligence" was unitary did you?)
Logical reasoning was easy. Also trivial. Also an extremely small piece of what was needed. (Bayesian probability estimation is interesting, but it's not deeply intelligent.) There's some fancy pattern matching that needs to be implemented, etc. Exactly which pieces are missing depends on your approach. I don't like neural networks because it's too difficult to understand how they're processing the data, but they're needed in certain areas because they can figure out how to classify data without foreknowledge. But you don't want to use them in large areas because they're too inefficient. (They'd probably up the required computations by an order of magnitude...but that's a really wild guess, and others disagree.)
Several people claim to know how to build a general purpose AI, if only they could afford to. And they aren't all impecunious. Massive computation is expensive. And then there's the matter of how to train the AI once you've got it built. Is a simulated world rich enough? The answer isn't clear, but if you've got to build a physical body, then the costs go up by at least double, and probably lots more. So does the time involved.
Personally, I've given up on creating a real AI. I know I'm years behind literally dozens of other people that I know of, and I also don't have the financial resources necessary. Computers are getting cheaper per calculation, but I could stretch to afford something powerful enough to host a chicken equivalent AI...or possibly a sparrow equivalent. (It wouldn't be doing the same things, and I'm presuming that my approach would be lots more efficient than a neural net. So comparisons are only to give one a very rough idea or what I mean. I'm hoping for reasonable language processing, but not for much understanding...not that I've gotten there yet.)
Your argument doesn't sound designed to convince anyone except yourself. If that's your goal, then congratulations, you appear successful. Most people, however, choose a slightly different goal.
To arrive at a simulation of the truth, however, it's generally necessary to define the terms of importance to the discussion and not to overgeneralize. E.g., "neural network" is not a generic term, it's a category, with many differing entities. Many of those differing entities have very different learning patterns. And the magnitude of differing varieties of neural networks is probably as large as (or larger than) all the programs that have ever been written to date. (Rough estimate, and counting all the development patterns from each neural network as being the same network.)
Then there's the question of what's intelligent, and how you would recognize it... Please remember that intelligence generally needs a favorable environment to develop in, or it fails to develop. But what's favorable depends on the details of the learning pattern of the network.
Up to date there have been very few attempts to create a genuinely intelligent entity. The few failures aren't really very significant, except as they are guideposts to where not to make some mistake (usually one obvious in retrospect).
FWIW, I, personally, believe that the amount of intelligence required to interact with people has been grossly overestimated. What I believe to be needed is not primarily intelligence, but rather an extremely large database of "how the world works" and "what's happening here and now". I don't happen to believe that neural nets are the most computationally efficient means of creating intelligence, but they are an effective means of categorizing unstructured data. I think they were chosen because they ere the easiest computational structure to evolve, and once evolved they were "good enough" that no competitor ever became better quickly enough to surpass them.
I have frequently had proprietary applications that I depended on stop being produced. Frequently it wasn't because the company went out of business, even, but merely because they wanted me to buy their latest product.
Now I generally prefer to avoid proprietary products. Moving to Linux has made this practical. This doesn't solve everything (I was appalled when I was switched to KDE4 from KDE3. KDE4 is abysmal by comparison. Fortunately there's Gnome, which while it isn't as good as KDE3 is better than KDE4...except that it install mono by default. But that can be removed without causing problems, to the extent that I wonder what political manuvering was used to get it made a default install. Given that it's pushing MS (an application developed in mono can run on MS without critical problems, and the converse isn't true, because the MSWind developers will use libraries that aren't available elsewhere), I really don't think that it should be pushed by Linux distributions. It's against their best interests. If you need an interpreted cross-platform language, why not use Java. (Or Python, but Java is faster, at least unless you use Swing.)
I'll stop saying bad things about mono when either of two things happens: 1) I become convinced that it's BOTH a safe and reasonable choice. (So far I don't see either.) 2) It stops being installed by default when I install a Gnome desktop.
Removing it after it's installed appears to me to be legally questionable. You've still installed something you shouldn't have had on your computer, and you don't have any proof that you never used it.
So far it doesn't look like either condition is met. Nobody seems to be able to tell me why C# is better than the other choices, and I'm not convinced that it's safe. (After the promise becomes finalized, this may change...depending on exactly what is said, and exactly who says it.)
OK. Given that the promise turns out to be sufficient when it materializes, and that I'm going to be using gtk for a GUI, what's the advantage of C# over Java or Python?
I.e., I'm already learning as many languages as I can handle, why should I jump into a legal snake-pit? Why is C# better than Java or LISP or D or...
Actually, if there aren't any native libraries to speak of, I think I'd prefer D. And D doesn't come with a built-in snake-pit.
Be very careful here about exactly what is going to be promised. And note that it's forthcoming, not currently in place, so the details may be altered in very significant ways.
I'm going to continue to avoid mono until I get a LOT more convinced. The promise is going to need to be out where I can see it, I'm going to need for lawyers that I trust to tell me what it means, and I've got to see who is actually making the promise. (If it's MS, the company, that's one thing. If, as has happened before, it's some guy in engineering, that's very different.)
I'm not convinced. You'd need to point me to examples of actual working viruses for Linux or BSD (i.e., for a live Unix variant. [I'm including Linux here despite it's independent origins.]) If it were only, say, AIX or HPUX that was immune then I might buy your argument, and I could buy the argument if it were only that there were many fewer viruses on Linux. But the Linux/BSD Unix systems are changed frequently to remove any known security vulnerabilities, so viruses, and even trojans, have a very difficult time. (Note that there ARE trojans for Linux and BSD, but they don't have a long life-span or wide distribution, because the systems are variable, and tend to get patched to make them not work.) There have also been worms on Unix style systems, and various other security vulnerabilities. But security vulnerabilities aren't seen as profit centers by the FOSS software vendors, so they don't hang around.
I think you're worrying about the wrong things. I doubt that abuse is very common (though I'll admit that it's horrific when it occurs). And traffic is actually my major worry by a considerable margin. Drivers seem to have become madmen since cell phones became common. (Pedestrians too, but they mainly endanger themselves.)
The figures I seen say that a driver talking on a cell phone is more dangerous than a drunk driver. Think about it, and count the drivers talking on cell phones. Then realize that one doesn't exclude the other. I don't usually know the reason, but it seems like recently I've seen someone headed the wrong way on a one way street more than twice a week...and it used to be less than once a month.
Things are less safe around here than they were even a decade ago, much less two or three. Partly it's more traffic, partly it's drivers on cell phones, partly it's "other". But it's largely that there aren't any yards to play in. (Interestingly, some of the poorer neighborhoods have much more in the way of yards.)
There seems to be a concerted effort to reduce the size of yards. This isn't really true, but that's the effect. Really it's just people adding onto homes that exist. Eventually they'll actually touch, I feel sure. But there really IS a lot more space inside than outside...of course, the inside space is much more cluttered. (Unless you count bushes clutter.) The outside space is more and more bushes, rock gardens, and other forms that aren't accepting of kids play. That leaves the streets. O, parks exist, but they aren't really close. If you're a pre-teen they're an acceptable choice, and some do make that choice. But it's more frequently parents with very young children.
Part of the change has to do with the very large number of households where both parents are employed full-time. This means that there's nobody to watch the kids, so you need a safe place to park them. Either you have relatives that you can park them with, you can afford a day-care center, or... well, they can either be unsupervised at home or unsupervised outside. And few parents will seriously tell their kids "Go play in the traffic."
That's actually the way I think things should be done. The FDA should have the power to approve or disapprove of drugs...but not to control whether they can be bought or sold. That way people who trust the FDA could use FDA approved drugs, and people with their doubts could use their judgment.
I think it quite reasonable that the FDA have the right to require a warning accompany any sale of a drug WITH IT'S IMPRIMATUR. Or, actually, nearly any other restriction that it feels like. I don't feel that it should have the right to forbid the sale of anything as a drug when the item being sold doesn't represent itself as being FDA approved.
But this isn't the condition we're dealing with. If the FDA doesn't approve it, it can't be sold. A vile situation, but given that as a starting position it's probably reasonable that the FDA require that acetaminophen be sold separately. What's wrong about this is that it requires the FDA's stamp of approval before it can be sold rather than that the FDA has denied it's stamp of approval.
I know you got modded funny, but you deserve insightful. That's a seriously true statement. How many people have EVER read an EULA? Those labels (well, I'm really talking about the mini-pamphlets that come with many drugs) are just as hard to understand, and feature even smaller type.
I always read the damn things. And I can never figure out what the safe dose is. Now I read (above) that even if I *did* understand what they said, I could still damage myself by taking that damn stuff, just following directions, and not even taking more than one kind of medication. (I currently have 5 prescription drugs that I take daily, and a few non-prescription.)
I've read the warnings on the damn drugs, and they seem to be intentionally written to be confusing. They are definitely not written to be understood, especially in how different drugs might interact. Is it safe to take Ibuprofen with Acetaminophen? How should I know? What about Asprin? Again, how should I know?
It's fine to say you should consult an expert, but that's not reasonable advice to give to a person incoherent with pain. It's reasonable to say "check with your doctor", but she's only available sometimes. On weekends, she's not there, and guess when I usually get sick? I had a gall bladder removed recently, and I can guarantee that there isn't anywhere you can get reasonable advice as to what to do for intense pain when you're experiencing it on a weekend. (I couldn't even dial the phone...so I depended on my wife, and she couldn't get answers either.)
My suspicion is that the sanctimonious bastards have made all reasonable pain medication illegal. But I still haven't been able to find out if that's really true. (Until I determine that it's false, though, that's my working belief.)
I'm not really convince that there ARE safe means of disposing of nuclear waste. There are, however, safer means. Vitrifying should be safe enough for most purposes. Or even just mixing into a concrete slurry and waiting for it to harden. Then you could sheathe it in something (wax? lead paint? depends on what's getting emitted) and use it as a heating source somewhere that people don't often get close to it.
That wouldn't be something you'd want to live right next to, but it might be safe if you were, say, 20 yards away. So bury it underground and pump water through it to extract the heat.
Clearly I'm making some assumptions about how radioactive things are, and what's getting emitted, but it should work out pretty well. Cement will contain most radiation pretty effectively, degrading it to heat. Over time it will crumble, of course, but by then most of the high level radiation will have stopped anyway. If the things are too radioactive, either find other uses for them or use less per ton of concrete. And SELL the stuff as self-powered heaters.
While bees and wasps do, indeed, have four wings, two pair are joined rather inseparably. For all significant purposes that's a single pair of wings with a dual control joint at the body.
Flies, however, do only have a single pair of wings. But the remnants of the other pair have become... I think they call them halters... which vibrate while the fly's flying to act as tiny gyroscopes. (I've never investigated the physics, which sounds rather improbable, but that's what I was told.)
This is probably more on the bee or wasp model, as I suspect that they've got a bunch of leverage on just how the wing is oriented.
Then there are grasshoppers. I don't know precisely how they fly, but as I understand it one of their pairs of wings has been turned into a sheath for their other wings, so when flying they are only using one pair of wings, but they have the other pair ridgidly extended. OTOH, grasshoppers always seem reluctant to fly, so that might not be such a good model anyway.
He might not have been advocating it. He might just have been cynical. Unfortunately, given the government we've got (i.e., one eager to increase it's power) he may be right. In fact, there's a fair amount of evidence that it's already happened. One can't be sure, however. The government frequently ignores the constitution when it finds it convenient, and the Supreme Court rarely tells them to stop it, and almost NEVER rolls back something that's been allowed to stand for any period of time. This erosion of rights by creep is perhaps even more serious than the occasional extreme incursion. It's been going on since the Civil War, at least, with very few periods when the most egregious excesses have been trimmed.
Note: The constitution is, as it currently stands, unworkable in the current environment. But it contains within itself the proper means for updating. Just ignoring parts of it because they are inconvenient isn't the "proper means".
There is definite active pressure to move genes from the mitochondria to the nucleus. The environment inside the mitochondria is hostile to DNA because of the number of free radicals produced during the construction of ATP. (If I've got that bit wrong, during the release of energy.)
One result of this is that mitochondrial DNA evolves considerably faster than nuclear DNA. (Evolves here just means changes. I think it's usually neutral drift.) This may also be one of the reasons for aging. Too many cells mitochondria accumulate too many mutations, and become ineffective. I hypothesize that this is also one of the reasons for so many miscarriages at a very early stage (i.e., usually before the mother is even aware of anything). This is a remarkably high number that needs some kind of explanation, and this, it seems to me, may be the reason. (In this light it's strange that the mitochondria should be carried by the ova and not by the sperm, which would have a built-in selective mechanism in how efficiently they could generate energy while swimming. OTOH, evolution only has to be "good enough", and perhaps the sperm would find it easy to cheat. Just storing ATP, e.g., rather than generating it en-route.)
I think he's wrong. It's a drunkards walk kind of thing, except the drunk occasionally bifurcates, and the two copies walk in different directions.
OTOH, there are two definite biases in the situation: 1) We are biased in what we notice. If it's larger and lives on top of the ground, e.g., we are more likely to notice it. 2) There's a smallest size. Things can only get so small and remain alive. So that's a boundary of one kind. (There's also a large end boundary...but it's fuzzier, somewhere around the size of a blue whale. Probably nothing larger than twice that size is possible with a standard genome. )
It's worth noting, however, that almost all life on the planet it single cellular...mainly bacteria, blue-green algae, and their kin. Eukaryotes are a minority.
You clearly don't live in a city. It would be nice if nobody needed to, but most people do. Playing outside is... risky. Traffic is only one of the reasons.
I'll agree that staying inside at that age isn't healthy, but neither is being outside and unsupervised. (And, yes, when I was growing up I did that, and it was essentially safe. That doesn't make it safe now.)
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Wrong. The driver's license was not only the first step towards a national ID card, but almost the last necessary one. All they need now is regulations to harmonize the variants between the states... which may include an RFID chip. Because, you know, different states need to store different information, and that way we can include whatever's needed. (Nobody can readily tell what it contains, so it doesn't matter that all it contains is a unique ID # for lookup in a remotely hosted database.)
It's not that they're wildly incompetent. They invest in a thicket of things that are an annoyance to avoid. Most people will slip somewhere. It doesn't matter that you won't slip in this place...or think you won't...they aren't that interested in you. And they could track you by other means if they were.
In many countries, yes, you are required to carry your passport. The US may be one of those countries. (N.B.: Just because you can substitute some other form of ID, e.g. driver's license, doesn't mean that a non-resident can do the same.)
What do you mean? They implemented it didn't they?
You just don't understand(accept?) their motives.
Largely because everybody knows that the computers are underpowered. Progress is being made on pieces of the job. (You didn't think "intelligence" was unitary did you?)
Logical reasoning was easy. Also trivial. Also an extremely small piece of what was needed. (Bayesian probability estimation is interesting, but it's not deeply intelligent.) There's some fancy pattern matching that needs to be implemented, etc. Exactly which pieces are missing depends on your approach. I don't like neural networks because it's too difficult to understand how they're processing the data, but they're needed in certain areas because they can figure out how to classify data without foreknowledge. But you don't want to use them in large areas because they're too inefficient. (They'd probably up the required computations by an order of magnitude...but that's a really wild guess, and others disagree.)
Several people claim to know how to build a general purpose AI, if only they could afford to. And they aren't all impecunious. Massive computation is expensive. And then there's the matter of how to train the AI once you've got it built. Is a simulated world rich enough? The answer isn't clear, but if you've got to build a physical body, then the costs go up by at least double, and probably lots more. So does the time involved.
Personally, I've given up on creating a real AI. I know I'm years behind literally dozens of other people that I know of, and I also don't have the financial resources necessary. Computers are getting cheaper per calculation, but I could stretch to afford something powerful enough to host a chicken equivalent AI...or possibly a sparrow equivalent. (It wouldn't be doing the same things, and I'm presuming that my approach would be lots more efficient than a neural net. So comparisons are only to give one a very rough idea or what I mean. I'm hoping for reasonable language processing, but not for much understanding...not that I've gotten there yet.)
Your argument doesn't sound designed to convince anyone except yourself. If that's your goal, then congratulations, you appear successful. Most people, however, choose a slightly different goal.
To arrive at a simulation of the truth, however, it's generally necessary to define the terms of importance to the discussion and not to overgeneralize. E.g., "neural network" is not a generic term, it's a category, with many differing entities. Many of those differing entities have very different learning patterns. And the magnitude of differing varieties of neural networks is probably as large as (or larger than) all the programs that have ever been written to date. (Rough estimate, and counting all the development patterns from each neural network as being the same network.)
Then there's the question of what's intelligent, and how you would recognize it... Please remember that intelligence generally needs a favorable environment to develop in, or it fails to develop. But what's favorable depends on the details of the learning pattern of the network.
Up to date there have been very few attempts to create a genuinely intelligent entity. The few failures aren't really very significant, except as they are guideposts to where not to make some mistake (usually one obvious in retrospect).
FWIW, I, personally, believe that the amount of intelligence required to interact with people has been grossly overestimated. What I believe to be needed is not primarily intelligence, but rather an extremely large database of "how the world works" and "what's happening here and now". I don't happen to believe that neural nets are the most computationally efficient means of creating intelligence, but they are an effective means of categorizing unstructured data. I think they were chosen because they ere the easiest computational structure to evolve, and once evolved they were "good enough" that no competitor ever became better quickly enough to surpass them.
Why would we want to say "Java goodbye" in favor of mono? This is something I've never heard properly explained.
I have frequently had proprietary applications that I depended on stop being produced. Frequently it wasn't because the company went out of business, even, but merely because they wanted me to buy their latest product.
Now I generally prefer to avoid proprietary products. Moving to Linux has made this practical. This doesn't solve everything (I was appalled when I was switched to KDE4 from KDE3. KDE4 is abysmal by comparison. Fortunately there's Gnome, which while it isn't as good as KDE3 is better than KDE4...except that it install mono by default. But that can be removed without causing problems, to the extent that I wonder what political manuvering was used to get it made a default install. Given that it's pushing MS (an application developed in mono can run on MS without critical problems, and the converse isn't true, because the MSWind developers will use libraries that aren't available elsewhere), I really don't think that it should be pushed by Linux distributions. It's against their best interests. If you need an interpreted cross-platform language, why not use Java. (Or Python, but Java is faster, at least unless you use Swing.)
I'll stop saying bad things about mono when either of two things happens:
1) I become convinced that it's BOTH a safe and reasonable choice. (So far I don't see either.)
2) It stops being installed by default when I install a Gnome desktop.
Removing it after it's installed appears to me to be legally questionable. You've still installed something you shouldn't have had on your computer, and you don't have any proof that you never used it.
So far it doesn't look like either condition is met. Nobody seems to be able to tell me why C# is better than the other choices, and I'm not convinced that it's safe. (After the promise becomes finalized, this may change...depending on exactly what is said, and exactly who says it.)
OK. Given that the promise turns out to be sufficient when it materializes, and that I'm going to be using gtk for a GUI, what's the advantage of C# over Java or Python?
I.e., I'm already learning as many languages as I can handle, why should I jump into a legal snake-pit? Why is C# better than Java or LISP or D or ...
Actually, if there aren't any native libraries to speak of, I think I'd prefer D. And D doesn't come with a built-in snake-pit.
Be very careful here about exactly what is going to be promised. And note that it's forthcoming, not currently in place, so the details may be altered in very significant ways.
I'm going to continue to avoid mono until I get a LOT more convinced. The promise is going to need to be out where I can see it, I'm going to need for lawyers that I trust to tell me what it means, and I've got to see who is actually making the promise. (If it's MS, the company, that's one thing. If, as has happened before, it's some guy in engineering, that's very different.)
For certain definitions of fair.
I'm not convinced. You'd need to point me to examples of actual working viruses for Linux or BSD (i.e., for a live Unix variant. [I'm including Linux here despite it's independent origins.]) If it were only, say, AIX or HPUX that was immune then I might buy your argument, and I could buy the argument if it were only that there were many fewer viruses on Linux. But the Linux/BSD Unix systems are changed frequently to remove any known security vulnerabilities, so viruses, and even trojans, have a very difficult time. (Note that there ARE trojans for Linux and BSD, but they don't have a long life-span or wide distribution, because the systems are variable, and tend to get patched to make them not work.) There have also been worms on Unix style systems, and various other security vulnerabilities. But security vulnerabilities aren't seen as profit centers by the FOSS software vendors, so they don't hang around.
"to holy hell" is perhaps excessive. And a bit vague. Certainly there shouldn't be any incentive to avoid quality control.
I think you're worrying about the wrong things. I doubt that abuse is very common (though I'll admit that it's horrific when it occurs). And traffic is actually my major worry by a considerable margin. Drivers seem to have become madmen since cell phones became common. (Pedestrians too, but they mainly endanger themselves.)
The figures I seen say that a driver talking on a cell phone is more dangerous than a drunk driver. Think about it, and count the drivers talking on cell phones. Then realize that one doesn't exclude the other. I don't usually know the reason, but it seems like recently I've seen someone headed the wrong way on a one way street more than twice a week...and it used to be less than once a month.
Things are less safe around here than they were even a decade ago, much less two or three. Partly it's more traffic, partly it's drivers on cell phones, partly it's "other". But it's largely that there aren't any yards to play in. (Interestingly, some of the poorer neighborhoods have much more in the way of yards.)
There seems to be a concerted effort to reduce the size of yards. This isn't really true, but that's the effect. Really it's just people adding onto homes that exist. Eventually they'll actually touch, I feel sure. But there really IS a lot more space inside than outside...of course, the inside space is much more cluttered. (Unless you count bushes clutter.) The outside space is more and more bushes, rock gardens, and other forms that aren't accepting of kids play. That leaves the streets. O, parks exist, but they aren't really close. If you're a pre-teen they're an acceptable choice, and some do make that choice. But it's more frequently parents with very young children.
Part of the change has to do with the very large number of households where both parents are employed full-time. This means that there's nobody to watch the kids, so you need a safe place to park them. Either you have relatives that you can park them with, you can afford a day-care center, or... well, they can either be unsupervised at home or unsupervised outside. And few parents will seriously tell their kids "Go play in the traffic."
That's actually the way I think things should be done. The FDA should have the power to approve or disapprove of drugs...but not to control whether they can be bought or sold. That way people who trust the FDA could use FDA approved drugs, and people with their doubts could use their judgment.
I think it quite reasonable that the FDA have the right to require a warning accompany any sale of a drug WITH IT'S IMPRIMATUR. Or, actually, nearly any other restriction that it feels like. I don't feel that it should have the right to forbid the sale of anything as a drug when the item being sold doesn't represent itself as being FDA approved.
But this isn't the condition we're dealing with. If the FDA doesn't approve it, it can't be sold. A vile situation, but given that as a starting position it's probably reasonable that the FDA require that acetaminophen be sold separately. What's wrong about this is that it requires the FDA's stamp of approval before it can be sold rather than that the FDA has denied it's stamp of approval.
I know you got modded funny, but you deserve insightful. That's a seriously true statement. How many people have EVER read an EULA? Those labels (well, I'm really talking about the mini-pamphlets that come with many drugs) are just as hard to understand, and feature even smaller type.
I always read the damn things. And I can never figure out what the safe dose is. Now I read (above) that even if I *did* understand what they said, I could still damage myself by taking that damn stuff, just following directions, and not even taking more than one kind of medication. (I currently have 5 prescription drugs that I take daily, and a few non-prescription.)
I've read the warnings on the damn drugs, and they seem to be intentionally written to be confusing. They are definitely not written to be understood, especially in how different drugs might interact. Is it safe to take Ibuprofen with Acetaminophen? How should I know? What about Asprin? Again, how should I know?
It's fine to say you should consult an expert, but that's not reasonable advice to give to a person incoherent with pain. It's reasonable to say "check with your doctor", but she's only available sometimes. On weekends, she's not there, and guess when I usually get sick? I had a gall bladder removed recently, and I can guarantee that there isn't anywhere you can get reasonable advice as to what to do for intense pain when you're experiencing it on a weekend. (I couldn't even dial the phone...so I depended on my wife, and she couldn't get answers either.)
My suspicion is that the sanctimonious bastards have made all reasonable pain medication illegal. But I still haven't been able to find out if that's really true. (Until I determine that it's false, though, that's my working belief.)
I'm not really convince that there ARE safe means of disposing of nuclear waste. There are, however, safer means. Vitrifying should be safe enough for most purposes. Or even just mixing into a concrete slurry and waiting for it to harden. Then you could sheathe it in something (wax? lead paint? depends on what's getting emitted) and use it as a heating source somewhere that people don't often get close to it.
That wouldn't be something you'd want to live right next to, but it might be safe if you were, say, 20 yards away. So bury it underground and pump water through it to extract the heat.
Clearly I'm making some assumptions about how radioactive things are, and what's getting emitted, but it should work out pretty well. Cement will contain most radiation pretty effectively, degrading it to heat. Over time it will crumble, of course, but by then most of the high level radiation will have stopped anyway. If the things are too radioactive, either find other uses for them or use less per ton of concrete. And SELL the stuff as self-powered heaters.
While bees and wasps do, indeed, have four wings, two pair are joined rather inseparably. For all significant purposes that's a single pair of wings with a dual control joint at the body.
Flies, however, do only have a single pair of wings. But the remnants of the other pair have become ... I think they call them halters ... which vibrate while the fly's flying to act as tiny gyroscopes. (I've never investigated the physics, which sounds rather improbable, but that's what I was told.)
This is probably more on the bee or wasp model, as I suspect that they've got a bunch of leverage on just how the wing is oriented.
Then there are grasshoppers. I don't know precisely how they fly, but as I understand it one of their pairs of wings has been turned into a sheath for their other wings, so when flying they are only using one pair of wings, but they have the other pair ridgidly extended. OTOH, grasshoppers always seem reluctant to fly, so that might not be such a good model anyway.
He might not have been advocating it. He might just have been cynical. Unfortunately, given the government we've got (i.e., one eager to increase it's power) he may be right. In fact, there's a fair amount of evidence that it's already happened. One can't be sure, however. The government frequently ignores the constitution when it finds it convenient, and the Supreme Court rarely tells them to stop it, and almost NEVER rolls back something that's been allowed to stand for any period of time. This erosion of rights by creep is perhaps even more serious than the occasional extreme incursion. It's been going on since the Civil War, at least, with very few periods when the most egregious excesses have been trimmed.
Note: The constitution is, as it currently stands, unworkable in the current environment. But it contains within itself the proper means for updating. Just ignoring parts of it because they are inconvenient isn't the "proper means".
There is definite active pressure to move genes from the mitochondria to the nucleus. The environment inside the mitochondria is hostile to DNA because of the number of free radicals produced during the construction of ATP. (If I've got that bit wrong, during the release of energy.)
One result of this is that mitochondrial DNA evolves considerably faster than nuclear DNA. (Evolves here just means changes. I think it's usually neutral drift.) This may also be one of the reasons for aging. Too many cells mitochondria accumulate too many mutations, and become ineffective. I hypothesize that this is also one of the reasons for so many miscarriages at a very early stage (i.e., usually before the mother is even aware of anything). This is a remarkably high number that needs some kind of explanation, and this, it seems to me, may be the reason. (In this light it's strange that the mitochondria should be carried by the ova and not by the sperm, which would have a built-in selective mechanism in how efficiently they could generate energy while swimming. OTOH, evolution only has to be "good enough", and perhaps the sperm would find it easy to cheat. Just storing ATP, e.g., rather than generating it en-route.)
I think he's wrong. It's a drunkards walk kind of thing, except the drunk occasionally bifurcates, and the two copies walk in different directions.
OTOH, there are two definite biases in the situation:
1) We are biased in what we notice. If it's larger and lives on top of the ground, e.g., we are more likely to notice it.
2) There's a smallest size. Things can only get so small and remain alive. So that's a boundary of one kind. (There's also a large end boundary...but it's fuzzier, somewhere around the size of a blue whale. Probably nothing larger than twice that size is possible with a standard genome. )
It's worth noting, however, that almost all life on the planet it single cellular...mainly bacteria, blue-green algae, and their kin. Eukaryotes are a minority.
You clearly don't live in a city. It would be nice if nobody needed to, but most people do. Playing outside is ... risky. Traffic is only one of the reasons.
I'll agree that staying inside at that age isn't healthy, but neither is being outside and unsupervised. (And, yes, when I was growing up I did that, and it was essentially safe. That doesn't make it safe now.)