I'm an old and obnoxious astronomer so I'm going to make the obligatory complaint about the oxymoronic term "radio telescope". "Tele" refers to the visual spectrum of light, not radio. The MeerKAT is, in fact, a radio interferometer.

Please proceed to contradict and/or down vote this post. Your cooperation is assumed.

On the contrary: Equally large amounts of false negatives and false positives is exactly the same as random guessing. [Shannon, 1948]

Not true in general. For example, a system that yields 1% false negatives and 1% false positives is still 98% reliable, and much better than random guessing.

I see you have a fine intuitive understanding of the American political system.

That law, as questionable as it is, doesn't criminalize anything retroactively. It just imposes certain registration requirements on certain individuals, that must be carried out after the law was passed. As such, it would probably pass constitution muster, at least as far as the clause you quoted was concerned. (But then again, I'm not a lawyer, so this is just a personal opinion and not a legal one.)

It is the retailer's choice to offer a "no questions asked" return policy. It is irrelevant that many customers abuse such a policy. When the store offers such a policy, it assumes the all risks involved because of "no questions asked". It is unethical (and also illegal) for them to pawn off that risk on unsuspecting customers who are paying full retail price and expecting new products.

What they should have done is to refurbish the goods (add new shrink-wrap, reformat memory sticks and hard drives, reset phones to factory defaults, etc.) and offer them for sale as-is at a discount. That they didn't even try to refurbish media before re-selling it as new shows that not only are they unscrupulous, they're also stupid.

I highly recommend reading an article titled Groupon is Effectively Insolvent in which the author draws a compelling parallel between Groupon and a Ponzi scheme.

That depends on where you live. See The Great Pop vs. Soda Controversy page for details. It's surprisingly interesting. To offset that OT comment I will now sheepishly admit that Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is my favourite of all the Star Wars movies and yes, I will go see it again in 3D.

If they are free to walk out at any time, why is the capsule locked? (No, seriously.) The other thing that jumps out at me is the duration of the trips but the relatively short amount of time (two days) spent on 'Mars'. Surely a mission to Mars would include more time on the planet? The time spent on the planet would be more intellectually stimulating than the spaceflight (one presumes) and might offer relief/reward from the journey to Mars and better prepare the crew psychologically for the return mission. I wonder why that wasn't factored in. The difficulty of simulating the on-planet experience perhaps?

Bonus question: Would an actual mission to Mars pay astronauts more than $70,000 per year?

Excellent ST:TNG reference. Well done, sir. I fear, however, it was too subtle for those with mod points.

This will inevitably lead to a new brand of vodka advertised as being made with "14 million year old, subglacial, super-oxygenated water".

While it leaves many (mostly technical) questions unanswered, I found the this article to be an interesting and informative description of what happened.

One lesson that comes to mind is that you shouldn't refer to your website's participants as "peasants".

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." - blue_beetle (quotation taken from here)

I would gladly submit to detention and interrogation for five hours if I were guaranteed some ice cream and a blow job in return. Given that fact, much like liberty and safety, I probably don't deserve either.

A solution I don't want to a problem I don't have from a company I don't trust. Great.