Uh...perhaps you're unaware all three reactors shut themselves down in response to the quake, just as they were designed to do. The problem wasn't that the reactors didn't shut down; the problem was even a shut down reactor generates significant residual heat for almost a month after it's shut down. This heat may be only 1%-3% of total reactor power, but if not removed it's more than enough to melt the reactor core over time.
Removing this heat is the job of the Residual Heat Removal System, a fancy name for something that essentially just circulates coolant through a shut down reactor. The coolant picks up heat in the reactor, goes to a heat exchanger to get rid of that heat, and repeats the cycle. But these pumps require power, and power was knocked out (a) when the plant shut down, (b) when local utility power was cut due to the quake, (c) when the tsunami destroyed the backup diesel generators, and (d) when the emergency batteries finally ran out of juice.
So, your initial premise that Fukushima was not shut down correctly is...well, incorrect. It was shut down correctly, automatically. The meltdowns occurred not due to human error but due to a disaster that ran the gamut of all the safety systems and backups and contingencies that the plant was designed to handle. When you inflict a situation on an engineered system that exceeds its design specifications, failure is not only likely, it is the expected outcome. Build a higher seawall? There's still a tsunami that could top it, given the proper -- if unlikely -- circumstances. Build it for a 9.0 quake? You could still get a 9.1 quake. And even if you mitigated all of these events, what about asteroid strikes? Space aliens? No matter what you do, it is impossible to eliminate all risk from any complex system. You design for the most probably cases, add in a healthy safety margin, and that's the best you can do.
The first thing would be tougher rules for nuclear site selection.
Perhaps you're unaware that they can't just put these plants anywhere. Plants have to be near large sources of water to cool the (non-nuclear) condensers. They also must be situated relatively closely to where that power will be consumed, otherwise transmission losses will eat you up. They must be in non-active earthquake areas. Transportation to/from the site (for construction and ongoing maintenance) must be available, and able to accommodate the huge equipment needed.
When you get right down to it, there aren't a lot of places that meet the above requirements to begin with. Exactly how much stricter do you think they can get?
Another reason for a genetic lifetime limit could be that, without it, you have the potential for individuals to live forever, hampering the evolution of the species by repeatedly reintroducing obsolete DNA into the gene pool. Over time those species with a built-in age limiter will experience more net genetic drift, allowing them to adapt more quickly to changing conditions.
This assumes we do nothing to *artificially* modify our own DNA outside the normal evolutionary process. Should we engage in full-bore "designer baby" genetic engineering, the hit or miss process of evolution effectively becomes redundant. We can eliminate traits we find undesirable in vitro instead of waiting generations for nature to do it for us. Ditto on enhancing favorable traits. We have the technology in basic form already. If we chose to focus our efforts on it, we could make enormous strides in a very short period of time. The problems facing such a solution are moral, not technological.
You can get around this by using an array of lasers, each of which is individually rather harmless, but focused together would be enough to destroy such a target. The "danger area" would be restricted to the focal point. Anything outside/beyond/inside that point would receive much less laser power and likely escape damage.
Now if your drone is using active terrain masking, that makes it more difficult to hit at range. However, such a system would probably require a human remotely controlling it, making that susceptible to jamming. I don't think automated terrain avoidance (in real time) is practical just yet for anything a non-military entity could get its hands on. And in any event, such a terrain-avoidance system would likely need its own sensors (radar/lidar) which could be detected, jammed, or both.
Or you could have an array of relatively low-powered lasers that focus on a target point to collectively do their damage. Any misses would be harmless due to them being outside/beyond the focal point.
If you shield a drone it becomes heavier and then needs to be bigger. Also at that point the drone needs to either be self guiding or have a communication/control system that won't be knocked out. You get the old little more weight little more propulsion to carry the weight cycle going and all of a sudden your drone isn't small anymore.
So what's your point? That a more capable drone is also bigger? So? So what? That's obvious. Do you think the added size/complexity of such a thing would be any impediment whatsoever to a determined aggressor? If you want to penetrate controlled airspace to do something nefarious, you're perforce going to want something that's difficult to detect, difficult to jam, difficult to shoot down, and has enough payload to carry whatever you need to cause the damage you're looking for.
That seems an incredibly strong statement. So strong that it looks like it doesn't have enough thought behind it.
Really? Then let's hear your alternative options. I already covered sensors and weapons, but let's recap. Radar is vulnerable to stealth, so it won't do the job alone. Lidar is too short ranged to do the job alone. Acoustic is even worse. But put together, a web of such sensors would be very difficult to overcome. If there are other sensors out there that are even remotely applicable, please enumerate them.
As for weapons, you have only three options: ballistic, missiles, or directed-energy weapons. Ballistic weapons have all kinds of downsides, from trajectory computation to wind to limited ammo, not to mention the inevitable collateral damage from misses (of which there will be MANY). Missiles have similar downsides. DEW's have (almost) none of these, the sole one being the potential for (minor) collateral damage in the case of a miss. You could even potentially mitigate this by using an array of low-power lasers, individually almost benign, but focused together to take down a drone.
This assumes you can get a good doppler signature on the rotors at all. I'm not an expert on radar/stealth construction, but I know a fair bit about it. A rotor made of radar-transparent (or absorbent) material would make it rather hard to detect, at least until it was well within range to do damage.
So please tell why a radar system would be in some way inadequate to detecting drones, or even operating in an offensive mode to burn out their electrical systems.
Small drones with significant non-metal construction will be more or less indistinguishable from birds. And it's not a stretch to imagine "stealth" drones specifically constructed or modified to mitigate radar.
Using a radar offensively, aka an EMP weapon, is a possibility, but shielding electronics is also a possibility. You'd need a very powerful signal to defeat that, and operating such a thing in a civilian area could lead to all kinds of unintended damage.
Radar, backed up by lidar and acoustic sensors, is the best route. Threat mitigation is best handled by a point defense laser. End of story.
Not to go all Dr. Evil on the subject, but the Navy *does* have some recently-deployed point defense laser technology designed to shoot down incoming cruise missiles. These tiny drones aren't manned and they're violating what might be the most restricted airspace in the country outside of Groom Lake; there's nothing legally preventing them from being shot down by said laser. That's a far better course than trying to do it ballistically or with something like a Stinger missile, both of which would have a hard time hitting something small and have issues with what happens to the round if it misses (i.e. falls on a civilian).
Mars is also a nine-month journey with no practical prospect of a "turn around and go home if something goes wrong" option. The moon is three days away and a free-return abort is built into the flight plan (along with a direct abort if the situation is dire). The scale of the two missions is completely different, with Mars being vastly more difficult mainly due to time.
I'm a big fan of the lunar base idea. Start there and develop -- or re-develop, as the case may be -- the technologies needed to get us reliably to and from the moon. Lunar habitats can be inflatable, or built underground using locally available materials. Hell, we could put robots on the moon to BUILD the habitats before we ever go there in person, making the whole trip a lot safer. And remotely controlling robots on the moon is a helluva lot easier than doing the same on Mars. Water is present on the moon for rocket fuel. Solar power is reasonable, but a small fission reactor would be much better. The escape velocity for the moon is lower than Mars and vastly lower than Earth. And asteroid capture missions could redirect to the moon instead of Earth, where the risk of "losing" and asteroid and having it impact would be negligible compared to aiming one at Earth and hoping you don't hit a populated area.
In short, a sustainable lunar base could be used as a springboard for future manned missions to Mars and the outer planets. The moon is IDEAL for this for every reason except one: it currently has no infrastructure for building or launching anything. Let's remedy that as soon as possible instead of trying to figure out how to haul everything out of Earth's gravity well and dense atmosphere. Grab an asteroid, send it to lunar orbit, smelt it down in orbit and construct your spacecraft THERE instead of on the surface. Complex items that cannot be easily made in orbit can be made on the lunar surface and launched via magnetic catapults into lunar orbit for final assembly. Or, for that matter, a lunar space elevator. The lower gravity and lack of atmosphere means we can construct a lunar space elevator with existing materials RIGHT NOW. Forget the magical unobtanium needed to make one on Earth; we just turn the moon into our launch platform for the solar system. Long term, instead of just redirecting asteroids to the moon, we can get to Saturn and grab a few cubic miles of water ice from its rings. Sent to the moon, it could provide water, breathable oxygen, and fuel for thousands of missions.
The DC-X and NASP were cancelled because they were unworkable concepts. The prototypes you saw up until cancellation were about as space-ready as my toaster is. There were too many problems with materials and performance that we do not have the technology to overcome just yet. Boeing recognized this and that's why the ideas were shelved, not some Vast Corporate Conspiracy.
Except for the fact that it does nothing to spread out the human species. Right now, if a calamity befalls Earth such as an asteroid/comet impact, or the explosion of the Yosemite supervolcano, or global thermonuclear war, we get wiped out as a species. In the long run, we MUST leave Earth if for no other reason that to get all our eggs out of one basket.
And, if you want to be REALLY forward thinking, we have to eventually leave this entire solar system, as our Sun will eventually burn out, turn into a red giant, swallow Mercury and Venus, and probably Earth as well if it isn't burned to a cinder already.
So for a return mission we would have to land both a rover AND a rather large rocket to get a sample back.
Why land a rather large rocket? Seriously. This same discussion took place pre-Apollo when engineers thought we'd have to land a large rocket on the moon. Their solution then would work equally well now. Send a lander with a small, lightweight return-to-orbit ascent stage. Leave the Earth-return rocket in orbit awaiting the ascent stage with sample. Your landing/takeoff mass problem is thus solved.
Granted, you now need an automated docking procedure in Mars orbit, but I can't imagine that would be more difficult to engineer than trying to orchestrate a much heavier land-and-return rocket setup.
Remind me again who's been in charge of charge of the House, the Senate, and the White House for most of Obama's tenure? Sure, a Republican was pushing for this pork. But it passed a Senate and a White House both controlled by Democrats, either of which could have easily stopped it. Neither did. In fact, depending upon the timeline (which I'm too busy to fully look up at the moment), it's possible the Democrats were in control of the House as well at the time this was going on. I can't recall exactly when the Republicans took over the House.
The truth here is the entire system is contemptible. Both Republicans and Democrats bear equal responsibility for this debacle. And to suggest there aren't billions and billions of dollars of pork barrel projects championed by Democrats is disingenuous at best.
Like any tool, regulations can be abused. That's why We The People should be especially vigilant in allowing them to be established in the first place. As hard as I might try, I can't find anything in the federal and state Constitution that empowers the government to look out for me making shitty decisions. Therefore, the government has no business saying who can or cannot drive a taxi. If Uber gives shitty service, they will fail because the market will MAKE them fail. It's not the government's job to choose winners and losers when it comes to providing voluntary services.
These regulations are protection rackets, no more, no less.
Come on, man; nobody in the nerderati even knew about taxi regulations until we started talking about Uber.
Actually, anybody who knows anything about how labor unions -- and, in the case of Las Vegas, the spectre of organized crime syndicates -- use their political muscle to destroy free market competition knows pretty much whatever they need to know about this situation. Uber/Lyft represented a threat to the government-enforced near monopoly of the taxi market, using laws created by labor unions and pitched to politicians in concert with generous campaign contributions. Business as usual.
On the flip-side of this though is the MPAA. They are not a government organization, nor are they mandated by the government. They do possess quite the power to stop certain things from being shown in movie theaters though. Plenty of producers have forced the editing of movies so they could avoid certain ratings. And we are not even allowed to know who the people are who produce the ratings, or how they are created. It is a black box that controls what gets shown in theaters. Check out the movie "This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006)" [imdb.com] if you want more details.
Ironically, the MPAA you cite possesses no power that the public doesn't give it voluntarily. The MPAA puts ratings on its movies. Movie theaters show these movies to the public. These theaters are under no obligation to ban unrated movies. That they have collectively decided to do so is a social phenomenon, not a regulatory one.
In this sense, the MPAA has no more power than, say, Consumer Reports Magazine. If I decide to open a theater chain showing any movie, regardless of rating, nobody can stop me. But my success will depend upon the public's willingness to ignore that lack of rating. Honestly, it might make a fun social experiment to see what would happen, but I lack the funds and time to do it. I suspect the results would surprise the MPAA, as social and moral attitudes have changed markedly in the last several decades. I don't think many people really care all that much about ratings anymore. It should be enough to note if a movie contains "adult content" or is "suitable for children" and that's about it.
Can't you be spending your time doing something more productive?
Consider that any successful experience in cloning anything adds to our knowledge base about cloning. By perfecting cloning, we can do a lot more than just bring back extinct species. We could, for example, grow entirely new organs cloned from your body to replace damaged or failing ones, organs that could be transplanted into you without fear of tissue rejection. Further, the practice of being able to reliably modify cells at the genetic level can lead to all sorts of other benefits in medicine, biology, and even far-flung fields as nanotechnology when you consider the scale you have to work in.
The whole "can't you spend your time/money better" argument is pretty short-sighted when you consider the enormous ancillary benefits. It's like saying why bother going to the moon when you can spend money on Earth. But without that impetus, we might not have the very computers and Internet you're currently using to read this post, or lasers to correct your vision, or lightweight, strong materials used to make the planes you fly on, or the fuel cells used to power zero-emission vehicles, or...you get the idea.
Stop thinking in checkers. Think chess. It's not the current move that matters; it's the move you make three moves from now that wins the game.
Expect to see them heavily regulated or banned soon.
Exactly how are they going to ban them? Short of banning them completely from stores -- a heavy-handed move that would likely meet significant legal obstacles -- they're going to be out there. You can't control where people fly these things, either. You could try jamming commonly-used RC frequencies to stop people from manually flying them here or there, but you can't stop someone who might pre-program a GPS-guided drone to deliberately go into controlled airspace without also jamming GPS -- and that would piss off too many people. And if that fails, really determined bad guy/idiot could put together an inertial guidance setup and *still* get into your airspace.
The only way to be sure is to shoot them down, but that's also impractical. These things are here to stay. I'm not saying I like it anymore than you because, I agree, some fool is going to fly their shiny quadcopter into the intake of a plane during takeoff and kill a bunch of people. I just don't see a way to stop them that's both legal (i.e. respects the safe, legal use of drones for legitimate purposes) and practical (you can't just shoot them all down).
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Uh...perhaps you're unaware all three reactors shut themselves down in response to the quake, just as they were designed to do. The problem wasn't that the reactors didn't shut down; the problem was even a shut down reactor generates significant residual heat for almost a month after it's shut down. This heat may be only 1%-3% of total reactor power, but if not removed it's more than enough to melt the reactor core over time.
Removing this heat is the job of the Residual Heat Removal System, a fancy name for something that essentially just circulates coolant through a shut down reactor. The coolant picks up heat in the reactor, goes to a heat exchanger to get rid of that heat, and repeats the cycle. But these pumps require power, and power was knocked out (a) when the plant shut down, (b) when local utility power was cut due to the quake, (c) when the tsunami destroyed the backup diesel generators, and (d) when the emergency batteries finally ran out of juice.
So, your initial premise that Fukushima was not shut down correctly is...well, incorrect. It was shut down correctly, automatically. The meltdowns occurred not due to human error but due to a disaster that ran the gamut of all the safety systems and backups and contingencies that the plant was designed to handle. When you inflict a situation on an engineered system that exceeds its design specifications, failure is not only likely, it is the expected outcome. Build a higher seawall? There's still a tsunami that could top it, given the proper -- if unlikely -- circumstances. Build it for a 9.0 quake? You could still get a 9.1 quake. And even if you mitigated all of these events, what about asteroid strikes? Space aliens? No matter what you do, it is impossible to eliminate all risk from any complex system. You design for the most probably cases, add in a healthy safety margin, and that's the best you can do.
Indeed it is, just not what you're expecting.
The first thing would be tougher rules for nuclear site selection.
Perhaps you're unaware that they can't just put these plants anywhere. Plants have to be near large sources of water to cool the (non-nuclear) condensers. They also must be situated relatively closely to where that power will be consumed, otherwise transmission losses will eat you up. They must be in non-active earthquake areas. Transportation to/from the site (for construction and ongoing maintenance) must be available, and able to accommodate the huge equipment needed.
When you get right down to it, there aren't a lot of places that meet the above requirements to begin with. Exactly how much stricter do you think they can get?
Another reason for a genetic lifetime limit could be that, without it, you have the potential for individuals to live forever, hampering the evolution of the species by repeatedly reintroducing obsolete DNA into the gene pool. Over time those species with a built-in age limiter will experience more net genetic drift, allowing them to adapt more quickly to changing conditions.
This assumes we do nothing to *artificially* modify our own DNA outside the normal evolutionary process. Should we engage in full-bore "designer baby" genetic engineering, the hit or miss process of evolution effectively becomes redundant. We can eliminate traits we find undesirable in vitro instead of waiting generations for nature to do it for us. Ditto on enhancing favorable traits. We have the technology in basic form already. If we chose to focus our efforts on it, we could make enormous strides in a very short period of time. The problems facing such a solution are moral, not technological.
You can get around this by using an array of lasers, each of which is individually rather harmless, but focused together would be enough to destroy such a target. The "danger area" would be restricted to the focal point. Anything outside/beyond/inside that point would receive much less laser power and likely escape damage.
Now if your drone is using active terrain masking, that makes it more difficult to hit at range. However, such a system would probably require a human remotely controlling it, making that susceptible to jamming. I don't think automated terrain avoidance (in real time) is practical just yet for anything a non-military entity could get its hands on. And in any event, such a terrain-avoidance system would likely need its own sensors (radar/lidar) which could be detected, jammed, or both.
Or you could have an array of relatively low-powered lasers that focus on a target point to collectively do their damage. Any misses would be harmless due to them being outside/beyond the focal point.
If you shield a drone it becomes heavier and then needs to be bigger. Also at that point the drone needs to either be self guiding or have a communication/control system that won't be knocked out. You get the old little more weight little more propulsion to carry the weight cycle going and all of a sudden your drone isn't small anymore.
So what's your point? That a more capable drone is also bigger? So? So what? That's obvious. Do you think the added size/complexity of such a thing would be any impediment whatsoever to a determined aggressor? If you want to penetrate controlled airspace to do something nefarious, you're perforce going to want something that's difficult to detect, difficult to jam, difficult to shoot down, and has enough payload to carry whatever you need to cause the damage you're looking for.
That seems an incredibly strong statement. So strong that it looks like it doesn't have enough thought behind it.
Really? Then let's hear your alternative options. I already covered sensors and weapons, but let's recap. Radar is vulnerable to stealth, so it won't do the job alone. Lidar is too short ranged to do the job alone. Acoustic is even worse. But put together, a web of such sensors would be very difficult to overcome. If there are other sensors out there that are even remotely applicable, please enumerate them.
As for weapons, you have only three options: ballistic, missiles, or directed-energy weapons. Ballistic weapons have all kinds of downsides, from trajectory computation to wind to limited ammo, not to mention the inevitable collateral damage from misses (of which there will be MANY). Missiles have similar downsides. DEW's have (almost) none of these, the sole one being the potential for (minor) collateral damage in the case of a miss. You could even potentially mitigate this by using an array of low-power lasers, individually almost benign, but focused together to take down a drone.
This assumes you can get a good doppler signature on the rotors at all. I'm not an expert on radar/stealth construction, but I know a fair bit about it. A rotor made of radar-transparent (or absorbent) material would make it rather hard to detect, at least until it was well within range to do damage.
Hell, from an IT perspective you reach the limits of multimode fiber risers pretty quickly.
That's why God invented single mode fiber.
Forget outfitting it with a lawn dart. Any insufficiently powered heavier-than-air craft will BECOME a lawn dart due to that pesky "gravity" thing.
So please tell why a radar system would be in some way inadequate to detecting drones, or even operating in an offensive mode to burn out their electrical systems.
Small drones with significant non-metal construction will be more or less indistinguishable from birds. And it's not a stretch to imagine "stealth" drones specifically constructed or modified to mitigate radar.
Using a radar offensively, aka an EMP weapon, is a possibility, but shielding electronics is also a possibility. You'd need a very powerful signal to defeat that, and operating such a thing in a civilian area could lead to all kinds of unintended damage.
Radar, backed up by lidar and acoustic sensors, is the best route. Threat mitigation is best handled by a point defense laser. End of story.
Use this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DbgNju2wE
Infinite ammo so long as you have power, instant hit, no ballistic fallout if you miss. And it's not like they can't afford it.
Not to go all Dr. Evil on the subject, but the Navy *does* have some recently-deployed point defense laser technology designed to shoot down incoming cruise missiles. These tiny drones aren't manned and they're violating what might be the most restricted airspace in the country outside of Groom Lake; there's nothing legally preventing them from being shot down by said laser. That's a far better course than trying to do it ballistically or with something like a Stinger missile, both of which would have a hard time hitting something small and have issues with what happens to the round if it misses (i.e. falls on a civilian).
Mars is also a nine-month journey with no practical prospect of a "turn around and go home if something goes wrong" option. The moon is three days away and a free-return abort is built into the flight plan (along with a direct abort if the situation is dire). The scale of the two missions is completely different, with Mars being vastly more difficult mainly due to time.
I'm a big fan of the lunar base idea. Start there and develop -- or re-develop, as the case may be -- the technologies needed to get us reliably to and from the moon. Lunar habitats can be inflatable, or built underground using locally available materials. Hell, we could put robots on the moon to BUILD the habitats before we ever go there in person, making the whole trip a lot safer. And remotely controlling robots on the moon is a helluva lot easier than doing the same on Mars. Water is present on the moon for rocket fuel. Solar power is reasonable, but a small fission reactor would be much better. The escape velocity for the moon is lower than Mars and vastly lower than Earth. And asteroid capture missions could redirect to the moon instead of Earth, where the risk of "losing" and asteroid and having it impact would be negligible compared to aiming one at Earth and hoping you don't hit a populated area.
In short, a sustainable lunar base could be used as a springboard for future manned missions to Mars and the outer planets. The moon is IDEAL for this for every reason except one: it currently has no infrastructure for building or launching anything. Let's remedy that as soon as possible instead of trying to figure out how to haul everything out of Earth's gravity well and dense atmosphere. Grab an asteroid, send it to lunar orbit, smelt it down in orbit and construct your spacecraft THERE instead of on the surface. Complex items that cannot be easily made in orbit can be made on the lunar surface and launched via magnetic catapults into lunar orbit for final assembly. Or, for that matter, a lunar space elevator. The lower gravity and lack of atmosphere means we can construct a lunar space elevator with existing materials RIGHT NOW. Forget the magical unobtanium needed to make one on Earth; we just turn the moon into our launch platform for the solar system. Long term, instead of just redirecting asteroids to the moon, we can get to Saturn and grab a few cubic miles of water ice from its rings. Sent to the moon, it could provide water, breathable oxygen, and fuel for thousands of missions.
The DC-X and NASP were cancelled because they were unworkable concepts. The prototypes you saw up until cancellation were about as space-ready as my toaster is. There were too many problems with materials and performance that we do not have the technology to overcome just yet. Boeing recognized this and that's why the ideas were shelved, not some Vast Corporate Conspiracy.
Except for the fact that it does nothing to spread out the human species. Right now, if a calamity befalls Earth such as an asteroid/comet impact, or the explosion of the Yosemite supervolcano, or global thermonuclear war, we get wiped out as a species. In the long run, we MUST leave Earth if for no other reason that to get all our eggs out of one basket.
And, if you want to be REALLY forward thinking, we have to eventually leave this entire solar system, as our Sun will eventually burn out, turn into a red giant, swallow Mercury and Venus, and probably Earth as well if it isn't burned to a cinder already.
So for a return mission we would have to land both a rover AND a rather large rocket to get a sample back.
Why land a rather large rocket? Seriously. This same discussion took place pre-Apollo when engineers thought we'd have to land a large rocket on the moon. Their solution then would work equally well now. Send a lander with a small, lightweight return-to-orbit ascent stage. Leave the Earth-return rocket in orbit awaiting the ascent stage with sample. Your landing/takeoff mass problem is thus solved.
Granted, you now need an automated docking procedure in Mars orbit, but I can't imagine that would be more difficult to engineer than trying to orchestrate a much heavier land-and-return rocket setup.
Remind me again who's been in charge of charge of the House, the Senate, and the White House for most of Obama's tenure? Sure, a Republican was pushing for this pork. But it passed a Senate and a White House both controlled by Democrats, either of which could have easily stopped it. Neither did. In fact, depending upon the timeline (which I'm too busy to fully look up at the moment), it's possible the Democrats were in control of the House as well at the time this was going on. I can't recall exactly when the Republicans took over the House.
The truth here is the entire system is contemptible. Both Republicans and Democrats bear equal responsibility for this debacle. And to suggest there aren't billions and billions of dollars of pork barrel projects championed by Democrats is disingenuous at best.
Yeah, just like Prometheus was the "best ever" sequel to Alien!
Regulations can suck, but they don't -have- to.
Like any tool, regulations can be abused. That's why We The People should be especially vigilant in allowing them to be established in the first place. As hard as I might try, I can't find anything in the federal and state Constitution that empowers the government to look out for me making shitty decisions. Therefore, the government has no business saying who can or cannot drive a taxi. If Uber gives shitty service, they will fail because the market will MAKE them fail. It's not the government's job to choose winners and losers when it comes to providing voluntary services.
These regulations are protection rackets, no more, no less.
Come on, man; nobody in the nerderati even knew about taxi regulations until we started talking about Uber.
Actually, anybody who knows anything about how labor unions -- and, in the case of Las Vegas, the spectre of organized crime syndicates -- use their political muscle to destroy free market competition knows pretty much whatever they need to know about this situation. Uber/Lyft represented a threat to the government-enforced near monopoly of the taxi market, using laws created by labor unions and pitched to politicians in concert with generous campaign contributions. Business as usual.
Next up, Halo light bridges!
On the flip-side of this though is the MPAA. They are not a government organization, nor are they mandated by the government. They do possess quite the power to stop certain things from being shown in movie theaters though. Plenty of producers have forced the editing of movies so they could avoid certain ratings. And we are not even allowed to know who the people are who produce the ratings, or how they are created. It is a black box that controls what gets shown in theaters. Check out the movie "This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006)" [imdb.com] if you want more details.
Ironically, the MPAA you cite possesses no power that the public doesn't give it voluntarily. The MPAA puts ratings on its movies. Movie theaters show these movies to the public. These theaters are under no obligation to ban unrated movies. That they have collectively decided to do so is a social phenomenon, not a regulatory one.
In this sense, the MPAA has no more power than, say, Consumer Reports Magazine. If I decide to open a theater chain showing any movie, regardless of rating, nobody can stop me. But my success will depend upon the public's willingness to ignore that lack of rating. Honestly, it might make a fun social experiment to see what would happen, but I lack the funds and time to do it. I suspect the results would surprise the MPAA, as social and moral attitudes have changed markedly in the last several decades. I don't think many people really care all that much about ratings anymore. It should be enough to note if a movie contains "adult content" or is "suitable for children" and that's about it.
Can't you be spending your time doing something more productive?
Consider that any successful experience in cloning anything adds to our knowledge base about cloning. By perfecting cloning, we can do a lot more than just bring back extinct species. We could, for example, grow entirely new organs cloned from your body to replace damaged or failing ones, organs that could be transplanted into you without fear of tissue rejection. Further, the practice of being able to reliably modify cells at the genetic level can lead to all sorts of other benefits in medicine, biology, and even far-flung fields as nanotechnology when you consider the scale you have to work in.
The whole "can't you spend your time/money better" argument is pretty short-sighted when you consider the enormous ancillary benefits. It's like saying why bother going to the moon when you can spend money on Earth. But without that impetus, we might not have the very computers and Internet you're currently using to read this post, or lasers to correct your vision, or lightweight, strong materials used to make the planes you fly on, or the fuel cells used to power zero-emission vehicles, or...you get the idea.
Stop thinking in checkers. Think chess. It's not the current move that matters; it's the move you make three moves from now that wins the game.
Expect to see them heavily regulated or banned soon.
Exactly how are they going to ban them? Short of banning them completely from stores -- a heavy-handed move that would likely meet significant legal obstacles -- they're going to be out there. You can't control where people fly these things, either. You could try jamming commonly-used RC frequencies to stop people from manually flying them here or there, but you can't stop someone who might pre-program a GPS-guided drone to deliberately go into controlled airspace without also jamming GPS -- and that would piss off too many people. And if that fails, really determined bad guy/idiot could put together an inertial guidance setup and *still* get into your airspace.
The only way to be sure is to shoot them down, but that's also impractical. These things are here to stay. I'm not saying I like it anymore than you because, I agree, some fool is going to fly their shiny quadcopter into the intake of a plane during takeoff and kill a bunch of people. I just don't see a way to stop them that's both legal (i.e. respects the safe, legal use of drones for legitimate purposes) and practical (you can't just shoot them all down).