Laws don't separate good from evil. They serve to legitimize (think of the root of that word) the exercise of certain behavior. But there can be good laws and evil laws. If you have trouble understanding this point, look at another country besides the US when thinking about it.

Heh, "Look at the laws in the US when thinking about it" would be more appropriate.

> If you have trouble understanding this point, look at another country besides the US when thinking about it.

More than a little patronising, and also: really??

It wasn't a dig at the US, rather the opposite. Looking at say North Korea, or Nazi Germany, or any place where slavery was legal...might make it easier to see laws that were divorced from what is good/bad.

Many people have trouble thinking about the category of evil laws. It's not what they learned in junior high school! It's helpful to inspire thinking about categories that asymptotically approach the categories that are difficult to conceptualize directly.

> Sure you can. This is the purpose of laws and law enforcement. Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you.

There are lots of drones in the Middle East killing people with much more dangerous weapons than knives.

> Both Antarctica and outer space are military-weapons-free

This is a fairly academic point given the US is capable of nuking anywhere on earth that anyone could possibly want to nuke. There aren't weapons in space because the purposes of putting weapons in space are achieved by other means.

I thought about importing drones into Sao Paulo to do 'in-window' sushi delivery (it's popular here for 25-35 y/o's).

Then i put on my black hat thought about it some more. Asking the question "what could i do with this if i were an asshole?"

I was speaking with a guy Yakuza ties when the idea came to me, so we both quickly thought of how drug dealers could use it for their deliveries and stuff. Then, the next logical conclusion: their drug wars, so assasinations. Another bad consequence: Carrefour getting a hold of it, thereby normalizing it through ubiquity, sliding it right in on claims of 'convenience,'

Before you know it, spooks, whose surveillance state currently requires one to be within physical range of a chipboard, can now do a whole lot more (like puts on tin-foil hat aerosol delivery inside my 20th floor 'weatherized' studio apartment, "just leave the window open so wal-mart's drones can get in and bring you your socks and sushi!").

Everyone mentions big brother, but i find the silicon valley commentary on "big mother" equal parts hilarious and frightening.

So, drones, not a good idea here, since we live under a silent and (mostly) non-violent dictatorship on the federal level, with buy-in from the elected municipal and state executive governments.

Needless to say I scrapped the idea. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Ya dig?(=

The ISS never had a gun; it stayed in the Soyuz.

Supposedly, the gun has not been included in recent missions.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/space-flight/h...

For the intent of drama, it can be considered accessible from the ISS :-)

Thanks for the link, that's good to know, no more weapons in space!

> Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you

Unless it's the people doing the destroying and arresting who are flying the knife drone. In that case, they'll be celebrated as patriotic heroes and you as a terrorist deserving of death.

Nothing is stopping you from doing it. You're talking about the consequences of doing it after the fact.

Laws are like coupons: you can redeem them, but no coupon redeems itself without a redeemer.

You seem to imply that the government and laws cannot be evil and enforce evil policies.

Indeed. Not in a sane, functioning democracy guided by en educated electorate.

Normally I appreciate irony but this is too on-the-nose.

There was a gun on the Almaz [0] space station.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almaz

>they do have a valid excuse for that handgun on the ISS

The kind of cosmonauts that can fight a bear hand to hand don't physically fit in the Soyuz capsule.

It's a shame it would be a NFA headache to make but it would be really cool to have a replica of one of these guns for hunting. Integrate it with an over/under 12ga, full power rifle on one side, full power handgun on the other and you've got a load for basically anything you could run across. The block of steel you've have to start with would be $$$ though.