Can you explain to me why a "fringe" scientist (err... controversial person...?) shouldn't be allowed to speak on Arxiv? I just find it really curious that you immediately imply it's okay to censor a certain kind of speech you don't personally like. I mean, you're pretty much using the No True Scotsman fallacy right here; if the OP comes up with a name you can just declare him to not be a "real" scientist and you'll never be proven wrong.

You either have an open forum and the idiots that come with that, or you don't. Arxiv would, frankly, do better with natural meritocratic filtering options - like science is meant to be based upon! - than to allow petty bureaucrats to control what is and is not considered science. We already HAVE methods to discard junk science: It's fundamental to how the scientific method works. Censoring people just because they present "controversial" ideas - that isn't science. That isn't just not science, that is pretty much the exact opposite of how science is supposed to work.

Just getting there first isn't good enough - someone drops a bunch of probes on every asteroid and now what - they own all of it?

There's only one option that's going to be true regardless of what you believe, and that's the might makes right point of view: The guy who is actively exploiting the asteroid gets whatever rights he wants with it, whether or not anyone else agrees with that. Whether or not they put a probe on that asteroid or there's a law in the US saying it's illegal.

He's there, and doing something with it. They're not.

To me, it just seems like Microsoft wants to look like they're trying to protect data from the US government's snooping, rather than actually working to protect data from US government snooping.

Germany is one of the last places I'd go to escape US intelligence agencies. Microsoft would've been more believable if they'd partnered up with relatively neutral parties like Iceland or Switzerland.

Funny how the UK police have enough time and resources to create entire new departments for the express purpose of policing the internet - ostensibly to protect the children - and yet they've got such a backlog on actual child abuse investigations that they can't get around to them for years.

I have to wonder if the muzzling will begin again, once the scientists start disagreeing with a liberal party policy? If, for example, it turns out that gun control doesn't actually do anything to stop crime - and that enforcement of it, much like with drugs, is basically wasted money - will the liberal party go, "Oh... I guess we were wrong about that"?

It's all sunshine and roses right now, but the scientists aren't actually saying anything that goes against the liberal party ideology at the moment. The real test of them putting their money where their mouth is, would be when they continue to support open discourse and dialogue even when it disagrees with what the party believes.

I certainly don't disagree with you with respect to conservatives, particularly in the US.

But if you think the liberal parties haven't been doing the exact same thing, particularly in the US, you are out of your mind.

Well, whatever affiliation this group ever had with 4chan has been dead for at least three years.

Take "The allowance of rape culture and lack of any real justice in our courtrooms." as an example from a post further up. This isn't 4chan culture, it's tumblr/SJW culture. And if you don't believe me, feel free to visit 4chan any time and try to argue for that statement/position. You'll be lucky if you don't get a 400 post thread full of people calling you a cuck.

Whoever is organizing this "hacktivist" (ugh) group, it sure as fuck isn't anyone who has anything to do with 4chan.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but doesn't the Canadian Charter include a stipulation in it that essentially says, "The government can ignore any of these rights if they so choose"?

They're doing this because they're worried about the dangers - not from commercial aviation - but from drones being used as assassination tools.

Slap some explosives and shrapnel on a drone, fly it into a press conference, like: This and this. Maybe use a gun, like this.

Why make it easy and effectively untraceable for someone to do this when you can regulate it?
Won't stop someone dedicated, who can learn and make their own drone - but it sure as hell raises the bar on them if they want to stay anonymous.

I think there's a lot of politicians and bigwigs scared shitless over the possibility of citizens circumventing their massive security apparatus with such a simple device. They certainly know damned well just how unpopular they and their policies are, and their existing security just doesn't have any good way of stopping these things - though they're certainly working on it.

Think about what laws and morals even mean:

We can't have a society based on just morality, because when you arrest someone for doing something morally wrong, they're going to say, "Who says what I did was wrong? Whose authority? I don't think what I did was wrong!"; How do you argue with that without essentially stating, "I'm right because I'm right and can enforce my will through violence"? While that threat of violence still rings true, when you argue from this point, you invite rebellion, constantly. We eventually (thousands of years ago) settled on a fairly basic solution to this:

We developed a framework of laws WITH the agreement and acceptance of the society as a whole. By living in that society, you agree to follow its laws and conduct yourself in an appropriate manner.

Tyranny within a society appears when the laws everyone agrees with, suddenly become laws that they, by and large, do not agree with. This is what we are seeing today. The laws being created, and the laws presently existing, have not kept up with the general concepts of morality that the citizens of the state agree with. People see these laws as unjust because they do not see the benefit to the society as a whole - in fact, it has become very obvious that these laws only benefit a select few.

Make no mistake - the TTP and TTIP treaties are tyrannical. They are kept secret from the citizens and passed without citizen input. The citizens are even ignored when they complain about the laws.

This is strong evidence that the US government, and the governments of the nations attending to these treaties, are dysfunctional. They no longer represent the will of their citizenry and have begun a slide into despotism.

For some nations, this can be handled and controlled by a totalitarian state - however, the US is unique in this respect: The citizenry is armed. The military chock full of individuals who are more loyal to their fellow citizen and the constitution than to the central government authority. The geopolitical enemies across the world many and varied - Russia would gladly support and arm texan revolutionaries. The infrastructure of the states is extremely vulnerable to sabotage. The cities most likely to stay loyal to the government are separated by vast distances and massive geographical boundaries like major mountain ranges or rivers.

What I'm getting at here is that I'm utterly flabbergasted at what the US government is doing, both at home and abroad. It's like US leadership has gone completely insane, they aren't just shooting themselves in the foot, they're tying the ropes around their own necks. I don't know what exactly the US leadership expects to accomplish with such one-sided pro-corporate, anti-citizen legislation like this, other than securing the eventual collapse of the US government as it loses the popular support of its domestic population.

That's not true though.

The bottled water usually tastes much better than the tap water that's often highly chlorinated, and it's convenient - not just in the sense that it's easy to carry around, but also in that it's easy to find and get access to, because you can buy it pretty much anywhere you go, anytime you want.

If I'm visiting the city, or even out on a beach, I will not be usually be able to find any freely available drinking fountains. Usually the only place I see any at all are gyms, schools, and older parks. If I didn't pack any water with me? Well, too bad for me.

People have more than a few very valid reasons for buying bottled water - if they didn't, they wouldn't buy it. You want to change that, start looking at why people buy it in the first place and start tackling and solving those problems/demands that corporate america saw, exploited, and fixed.

Actually, perhaps you should be the one to ponder on that a moment?

If there are no swimming pools, there cannot be any swimming pool deaths. But people will still die.
If you get rid of guns, you'll reduce the number of firearm homicides, but you won't magically reduce the homicide rate.

There is a reason so many anti-gun statistics start with something like "*Gun-related homicides; *includes suicides, lawful homicide, accidents". It's because they have an agenda to run and don't actually want the facts to get in the way. What effect do guns actually have on the overall homicide rate? No effect. There's no correlation whether you look at gun ownership in US states or the entire world. You find the same thing with violent crime rate and firearm ownership rates.

You know what DOES correlate? Education and socioeconomic levels have a small correlation. Race has a high correlation.
And firearm ownership has no correlation.

I bought Elite Dangerous early on in its development, and much to my chagrin I witnessed it go through beta to full release with nary an inkling of the content I was actually expecting from the advertisements and discussions on the forums.

It is categorically one of the worst games I've ever had the misfortune of purchasing. Made even more unpleasant by the exorbitant price tag I paid for early access. It's the biggest reason I've sworn off ever pre-purchasing or pre-ordering any games in the future. It wasn't the first game I got burned on, but it was the biggest and will be the last.

Frontier Developments is a UK company. How do I get a refund from them without paying 30x as much for the lawyers as I did for the 'game'?

It's not misplaced. Every "compromise" on guns has just been taking more rights away from gun owners. None of them want any more "compromises" because everyone is well aware what is actually wanted isn't "sensible gun control laws" but the removal of guns from society entirely. People stopped believing the "sensible gun control" rhetoric soon after we had senators like Dianne Feinstein outright say things like,

Which is quite an impasse, because gun owners believe the right to self defense is absolute. Guns are necessary for this, in the future it could be something else, but the principle remains the same. A monopoly on violence by the state and private institution is absolutely unacceptable to them, yet that is what those in favor of gun control want: Guns for the state, guns for the rich and powerful, but no guns for the rest of us schmucks unless we want to be criminals.

https://imgur.com/gallery/CLOx...

This covers most of what you'd want to know and look at regarding firearms statistics, both in the US and worldwide. Homicide vs gun ownership, gun assaults vs gun ownership, violent crime vs gun ownership; it compares the states within the US, all the OECD countries, and all countries. It shows what weapon is killing the most people and which people are the ones being killed. It even looks at mass shootings, including per capita rates, and overall number of deaths from mass shootings as a percentage of overall homicides.

Citations are included in most of everything, and numbers are usually taken from government bodies such as the FBI or CDC.