Chance of this happening: zero. Politicians brag about their support for special interests. Voters want politicians that cater to special interests.

I remember watching a congressional debate a few years ago. The moderator asked if anyone supported congressional earmarks for special interests. Everyone of them said "no". The moderator then asked if any of them were in favor of continuing the congressional earmark for the local hospital. Everyone of them said "yes".

Too bad we don't have that in America. We could hold a nation-wide referendum, and vote to give Texas back to Mexico.

This is what I love about Slashdot. I can click on one article, and read about how we are doomed because robots will take all our jobs, and there will be no one to buy all the abundance of surplus goods and services. Then I can pop over here and read about how we are doomed because there is not enough workers to produce what we need. At least everyone agrees that we are doomed.

Do you mean these guys?

No. They are identical twins. They have exactly the same genes.

Obvious solution: don't over do it. Some nutrients will increase both plankton and fish. Too much will cause problems. We should run some small scale test projects, and then scale them up as we learn.

This is not true for some proposals. For instance, fertilizing the oceans with trace amounts of iron can drastically increase the amount of CO2 taken up by phytoplankton. But if you stop spraying the fertilizer, the phytoplankton will absorb all the available iron within a few weeks, and then the process will stop. The iron will not only reduce CO2, but will also cause big increases in fish populations, thus relieving pressure from overfishing. Some may say we should leave the oceans alone, but that is silly considering what we are already doing to the oceans today. This could balance out some of the other harm.

Irrelevant. The lifestyle available 200 years ago is still available today. Yet practically no one voluntarily chooses to live that way. You can go out in the woods, build a cabin, and live without electricity or indoor plumbing. You can grow potatoes or mill your own wheat, and learn to shoe a horse. The only thing you can't have is the smallpox.

The ground transmitter and drone will have a line-of-sight connection. So they could use microwave or even visible light. There is plenty of available spectrum for this type of application. Both the ground transmitter and drone could use a narrow directional signal.

Absolute hogwash. Just because something is immoral does not imply that it should be illegal. I personally believe that abortion, gambling, drinking, prostitution, etc. are all immoral. But I don't believe that any of them should be illegal. I have no right, and certainly no obligation, to impose my beliefs onto other people.

Anyway, this is a stupid thread, veering way off-topic, so I am done with it.

Society does not decide what rights people have, only whether those rights are recognized.

In the US, mothers have legal authority to terminate a pregnancy up to 90 days after conception, for any reason. Depending on the state, some restrictions may apply after the first 90 days. Whether this is a "right" or is "moral" is something that people disagree about.

In your opinion. Morality is not something that "society" decides, but rather something that each person decides for themselves. Societies/governments decide what is legal, not what is moral.

It would be a far worse and immoral idea for me to presume that I, or anyone else, has the right to make this decision for other people. It would also be immoral to willfully deprive parents of information about their own child. It should be up to the parents to have the test done or not done, and it should be up to the parents to decide what to do with the results. The bottom line is that if it is not your kid, it is not your decision to make.

It is partly genetic. But the causes of autism are complex and poorly understood. If one identical twin is autistic, the other is likely to be, but not always. So there is a strong genetic component, but that is not the sole cause. Autism is also correlated with low birth weight, and poor prenatal nutrition, such as low levels of folic acid. Autism has been correlated with some drugs, such as prenatal exposure to some anti-depressants. One big problem is that autism appears to be most effected by prenatal conditions very early in the pregnancy, before many women even realize that they are knocked up.

Some things we can do to reduce autism:
1. Obviously, better education. The causes of autism should be taught in high school health and/or biology classes.
2. If women are going to drink soda pop instead of fruit juice, maybe we should put the folic acid in the soda.
3. Provide cheap and widely available pregnancy tests, so women know sooner. The cost of providing these test would be WAY less than the societal costs of dealing with autistic kids.
4. Develop a prenatal test for autism, so parents can have the option to terminate the pregnancy. Social conservatives will love this.

There is strong evidence that it is. Stupid people have stupid kids, and those kids tend to be nearly as stupid even if adopted and raised by someone else.

The salary numbers come from surveys, and the employees surveyed have an obvious incentive to inflate the numbers.