The collectivists think they can and must force the world to be free.

Wikileaks is, in concept, legal. Distributing classified information is not. No indictments have been issued because the Justice Department has an inept ideologue at the Attorney General position.

This project can be summed up quite simply: the military will not allow the future of the US space program to be at the mercy of a fickle political atmosphere.

Our Justice Department is lead by a cowardly ideologue.

It's time for the gloves to come off... These people don't care how many people die as a result of their rampages. The soldier that leaked the documents should be tried for treason and anyone associated with the release of the documents should be charged with espionage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNcyAEtXjyI&feature=related

That's not gonna work. The OP wants the students to be able to remove it.

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand the purpose of the Constitution...

You seem to think the Constitution exists IN SPITE of the government, but to the contrary it exists BECAUSE governments (of all types) push the boundaries and strive for more power.

I don't think the designers appreciate the difficulties what they are proposing.

First they suggest someone could/should have thousands of these autonomous vehicles sitting around (in an operational state) waiting for oil spills (with no auxiliary purpose).

Second they ignore the sheer chaos that would ensue as thousands of small, low-profile vehicles travel in and around other vessels necessary to actually stop/control an oil spill. These things wont show up on radar. They probably can't be seen at night, and are likely difficult or impossible to avoid by the large ships that get called to such oil spill areas. So either you have to drastically rework ship traffic to avoid the robots, maintain exclusion areas around the robots, or banish the robots to areas away from essential ship traffic.

Third, operating autonomous vehicles at sea is very difficult. Doing so on these scales is not only difficult, it's absolutely unheard of. Nigh impossible. Keeping small numbers of autonomous vehicles operational, launching them, and successfully recovering them is no easy task. The only way you can really hope to deploy autonomous vehicles in these numbers is if they are disposable and you have no intention of recovering them.

Finally, what happens when a storm or, God forbid, a hurricane decides to stroll by? Are you supposed to send out crews to wrangle up the 5000 vehicles bobbing around the increasingly rough seas? Do you leave them to their fate/demise?

This whole idea wreaks of idealistic nonsense and poor engineering.

Unfortunately your opinion does not qualify you to dictate what is and is not morally or ethically acceptable behavior (neither does your political affiliation, nor having or not having a uterus, but then again, with simplistic reasoning such as yours, I'm not surprised you've resorted to chauvinism). Saying "it's science" or "it's progress" doesn't answer the question of whether it *SHOULD* be done... Throughout history there have been countless examples of clearly ethically dubious behavior and even blatant atrocities in an attempt to illicit some scientific "advancement" of one form or another. You don't want to debate the morality of the destruction of embryos. You want to castigate anyone who disagrees with you and frame them as somehow anti-Science. It's asinine and you (should) know it.

Yeah, I guess subtlety is not often appreciated around here.

The next time someone at work asks me to do something my response will be "I can't. That's NP."