To be fair, it's a lot easier to tell people they're doing it wrong than to tell people the right way to do things.

Wrong. This got serious media attention, and Adam Silver was basically forced to act on it.

I'm not sure why printing would be necessary. If we have the ability to send an organic printer to a nearby star, wouldn't we also be able to send frozen embryos or sperm and eggs?

a billion years is a long time, even on cosmological scales

Who said anything about destroying the original? If you are thinking about murderous clone syndrome (where the clone has an insatiable urge to kill the original), don't worry; you'll be long dead before the printer arrives at the destination.

What happens if the electronics are disrupted by hacking or EMP?

I'm not sure what you mean by real skills. Are you saying it doesn't take real skills to spy on people?

It might have worked in the past, but now the mediocre crapware market for everything is dominated by Chinese companies.

Yes, there will be bugs in the first smart guns. They will improve over time. The question you should ask is not, "are they safe?", but "are they safer?".

These are grade school kids we are talking about. Arithmetic isn't all there is to mathematics, but you have to start somewhere. Do you really expect to go into computer science theory to a bunch of kids?

We should be risk averse when it comes to global, irreparable changes. Maybe global warming will end up helping humans through increases in agricultural yield. Maybe not. At least some of the changes will be bad: flooding of coastal cities, ocean acidification, need to change traditional growing patterns. We don't know what will happen exactly. Isn't it safer to try to limit the change?

But how do you quantify the benefit of freedom versus the costs of people's lives? If you socially engineer everything in terms of number of people saved, then you end up with a full blown nanny state.

Fuck the border. Get rid of visas, and just have open immigration for all. Or are you a faux libertarian, who wants to eliminate regulation that hurts you, but supports a protectionist border?

The libertarian would say, shit happens, welcome to the jungle.

I always thought that taxi regulation had nothing to do with safety or training and everything to do with limiting the supply of taxis.