Well, you could always pay them money. I gather saving lives is considered valuable in some quarters.

Where's the evidence that someone isn't complying with the GPL?

Because a 2 pound drone can cause as much damage as a 25 kiloton atomic warhead!

As to whether these particular people did better than your inflated measure of investment, let's have a look. I don't know about Trump, he seems to have bounced around a lot, including an episode of bankruptcy, but is worth $3 billion now. Romney doesn't appear to have inherited any money from his parents, yet he's still worth somewhere around $200 million. The Koch brothers seem to have done quite well, turning a fortune into a much larger fortune.

Also, it's worth noting here that Trump and the Koch brothers don't have very liquid wealth. They can't just turn around, sell everything they have for near market price instantaneously, and then buy NASDAQ index funds.

They also spend money. Even if they were tied perfectly to a relevant stock index, they would still have lower performance just because they do more with their money than invest it. Fancy homes, yachts, charity donations, whatever. For example, the Koch brothers only were mentioned here because of their spending on various sorts of pie-in-the-sky conservative and libertarian-flavored advocacy. That's not making them bank.

Despite your implications to the contrary, I don't buy that these people are dumb and can't imagine getting out of their little niches into something highly public like stock index funds. It's not like they wouldn't have heard about it.

I am not republican.

And I see you're propagating your own flavor of myths. Someone has a moderately wealthy or positioned dad, then nothing they do can possibly be due to their own merits.

There are lots of bright people out there. But how many people get book deals just because they get a fancy college achievement? Or opportunity after opportunity thrown at their feet? And would people actually have voted for him in 2008, if he was just another white guy? That's why I believe the color of his skin got him where he is now.

Not in terms of the thread. I think it's dishonest to pretend that it's the most important question when no one has even asked it, including you.

And it's worth noting that not even the stocks that comprise the stock indices outperform the stock indices which are significantly inflated by how they rate and derate the components of the indices (there's a bump in price when a stock gets put in a popular index and a corresponding drop when it is removed - both happen in a way that inflates the index since the actions of adding or removing happen before the stock market reacts to it and thus gets added to the index valuation).

Nor do I buy your assertion that the above people didn't outperform the stock indices.

The world exists outside of your limited universe. Remember that?

Let's look at these few, token morsels: his first job as leader of a non profit based on nothing more than having a college degree and a car, getting several book contracts (the first which appears to be just on the basis of him getting elected as editor of the Harvard Law Review), 12 year lightweight gig at the University of Chicago law school, parlaying that community organizer beginning into a considerable bit of wealth (over $7 million last time he reported it), those numerous political positions, and other bits of political grooming (such as being appointed to run relatively high profile projects like Project Vote (Illinois branch) and board of directors for two major non profits in Chicago.

A huge warning sign for me is the near absence of what normally would be considered a real job - working for or managing in a for profit business like most people do. Romney, the Koch brothers, and Trump in particular have all done that. Even G. W. Bush has spent time working in a business. Meanwhile McCain was career military, serving 17 years in the military on top of 6 years as a POW in a nasty Vietnamese prison. I consider these jobs to give life experiences that you just aren't going to get from Obama's fluff of a career.

Sure, there are. There also are degrees of knowledge. I think this failing results in the subsequent argument.

I didn't say "unknown", I said "unknowable". Look at the original premise rather than just misreading what I wrote. Moving on:

Well, here's another case of circular reasoning which starts with the assumption that scientists have no money. Well, they could always use their wealth which for some reason you assumed they didn't have, instead, if they really don't want constraints on what they do.

Unless, of course, new people go there all the time. There is a way to fix that problem.

No. That's not "the" question, not least because no one, including you, has yet to ask it. And the answer, for the people in question, is "Yes" they are doing significantly better than if their parents' wealth was just invested on the stock market.

And yet, he got where he is through the color of his skin and not by his merits. For example, in addition to various political offices, we have plush book deals and academic positions just handed to him.

See where I'm going with this? Having the right parents is not the only way to end a meritocracy. Anything that allows someone to advance without regard to their merits also counts.

In other words, you're just grinding an ideological ax and only accusing the opposition of a much more universal ill. You exhibit the very same hypocrisy that you accuse these "Republicans" of.

Further, if hypocrisy is more important to you than wealth inequality, then why should wealth inequality be important to me. Shouldn't you at least act like these things are important to you?

The poster didn't say that he never followed rules. The previous poster ending a great deal of privacy for people.

I think the previous poster already answered your question about what rules he thinks are unjust.

I find it interesting how we can gloss over the power from being a government agency with access to the data of billions of people and veer right into ZOMG someone's making money! The real story is power without accountability. You could have dropped the first two paragraphs without materially changing a thing.

Motive just isn't that relevant. An organization brutalizing or blackmailing you for your own good is just not that different from one doing it to make a buck. Except that the latter would stop when things start to get unprofitable.

They're sounder than the original circular assertion that scientific knowledge is unknowable until you know it.

Nobody forces them to use other peoples' money with other peoples' strings attached. A huge part of the problem here is that the people getting the funding aren't actually the exhilarating risk takers you make them out to be.

We are fast moving to a system where the person in charge, be it at a company or in government is no longer the most capable, but the one born in third base. Have a look at GW Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Koch brothers, Donald Trump, etc.

Romney, McCain, the Koch brothers, and Trump don't belong on that list. Three of those listed have successfully run businesses in the billions of dollars range. Meanwhile, McCain went from being a cripple in a nasty prison to high political office. That demonstrates a lot of social mobility.

Sure, if you exclude actual demonstrations of doing things of merit, then of course, you won't have a meritocracy.

And notice how all of your targets are all whipping boys for a particular political party? Where's some high profile Democrats like for example, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama? They're shiny examples of the end of meritocracy too. Kerry and Obama have been groomed for higher office, just like George W. Bush. And Clinton got where she was only because she was married to Bill Clinton.

Stuff that is risky, cheap, and has big payoffs has already been done for the most part.

The past twenty years of the internet are a huge counterexample. Even in the relatively staid world of particle accelerators, we are finding substantial room for improvement.

SpaceShipTwo has been test flying since October, 2010.