First, if you have any ferrous content in your bike (or in your backpack / whatever) lower it down to the sensor. Your CroMo frame held away from the sensor by 700c aluminum wheels can probably trigger it, but not from any distance.
Go over and hit the "walk" button. It can't hurt anything and the switch may even be hooked up!
If you were to dismount, you suddenly become a pedestrian walking a bike. Pedestrians have different rules for negotiating intersections.
Use your common sense and you'll usually be fine.

Posting to undo bad mod. Was aiming at insightful. It's hard to argue with the logic of everyday physics...

Where do you live that you have any expectation this would be a constructive course of action? Have you ever called the police for a non-emergency issue? Let's say they immediately show up (hold your breath). If the drone's there what will they do about it? Tase it? Hit it with pepper spray? Verbally order it to stop looking around your back yard? If it's gone, they'll be even LESS effective. Yeah, that hand written incident report will sure stop the drone operator next time. This guy sent a very clear message to the drone operator about weather watching his daughters in his backyard via proxy was OK. He solved the problem quickly, cleanly, and without endangering anyone.

As a member of the public utilizing a public park, he's already GOT a "platform". He's entitled to use it as that's what the word public means. What we're talking about here is the local government actively preventing a member of the public from using a public facility to exercise his free speech rights. Regardless of your opinion of his artistic talents* how can you possibly (I could be wrong) seem to think active censorship by the local government is OK here? Are there other public venues you'd like to see cracked down on or is it just people you don't care for that should be censored?

*"(c)rapper". I see what you did there.

Red herring. You are correct but you'll note nobody was asking the government to "provide a platform". The permit was members of the public calling dibs on using a public place for this show. When someone is exercising their right to free speech in a public place and they are unambiguously stopped by armed government representatives for no clear reason, some people would consider this censorship.

Nitpicking. Ever hear of free speech zones? You're "allowed" to exercise your free speech as many miles away from the venue in question as they feel like putting you. In this case they couldn't move him elsewhere so they forcibly turned him off. It equates to exactly the same thing.

Properly implemented advertising is what makes the internet "free". As with pretty much anything it can be abused or taken too far, but when you visit a page and read the content, that banner ad / sidebar ad(s) you ignore automatically are probably a large part of how that site stays up. At some point someone had to pay (money or time) to make that site, put it on a server and send those bits over the internet.
Weren't we talking about interstitial app offers though? We seem to have gotten a bit off course.

Worst. Video. Game. Ever!

http://xkcd.com/806/

"bad Americans". Like all the ones that use electronic communications, you mean those bad Americans?
Does the fact that China and Russia do something unjust make it OK for America to do that thing to its own citizens?
What if it was ruled illegal in federal court. Would that affect your viewpoint?
I'm not sure you've really thought this through...

Ok:
- Car. In parking lot. Sounds pretty mundane so far. Pretty much they're parked or on the road most of the time.
- Unattended. This is what you do after parking your car. You leave the car unattended.
- Gasoline smell. Near gas powered car in parking lot which may contain other gas powered cars. Occam's razor.
Pressure cooker inside. Are we that far gone we need to fear kitchen cookware? What about a cast iron skillet? Knife set? If your "further action" involves anything more than cooking tips (a pressure cooker is a great cooking tool) then you're jumping at shadows.

People are often irrational.

I keep seeing this come up and I don't think it's as simple as you're making it out to be. If I were to explain to you about my practice of communing with my crystals for wisdom and how the fairies help me out every day, you may reasonably doubt the legitimacy of my views when discussing other topics. Bill Nye did a much better job than I could do in this video where he explains that we need rational, clear thinking children and for that reason we should not inflict religious superstitions on the next generation. It's not necessarily about being superior (though the argument has been made that some beliefs are silly and don't deserve special treatment), it's more about weather someone's belief in talking burning shrubbery and invisible sky wizards should make me take them as seriously as a person with a more rational viewpoint.

The question of guilt or innocence has already been decided at "accused of a crime that you knew they committed". We know they're guilty. At the kid level where mommy and daddy have to stand up for them, the crime in question is probably on the level of "took Jimmy's truck" or "broke Sarah's doll". In the same way a child probably needs to get burned before truly believing a stove is hot and you should listen when you're told not to touch it, an appropriate penalty applied when guilty of a "crime" is important to that child's development. Teaching a child that it's not about right and wrong but rather who had the best lawyer / loudest parent really causes them to miss the point.

Assuming the punishment was just, HELL NO I wouldn't defend them. Children need to learn right from wrong and that bad decisions can have consequences. This is how they learn and grow into good people. Defending a child who did something wrong from the resultant penalties should get you a bad parent award of some sort.