Already considered and answered here, as well as in Item 8 of the Advice for ATM theory supporters.

Bottom line is, if you've presented an idea, be prepared to defend it. Questions about the idea need to be answered. If you can't answer a question, then the "I don't know." response is of course perfectly fine. But if too many "I don't knows" start to pile up, then it's probably time to reconsider the posting of your idea, with the option of withdrawing it for further work. Items 19 and 21 of the referenced thread are pertinent here:

Remember, if it's your idea, then it's also exclusively your responsibility to explain and defend it.

As Item 1 in the referenced thread says:

The challenge: a question about your idea. The defense: an answer with evidence.

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A person's name, or a mark representing it, as signed personally or by deputy, as in subscribing a letter or other document.

To the best of my knowledge we have only one member who was really involved with changing names at "kilopi".

I support the BA's position re people getting one name and sticking with it.

-Mak (who might have been Catadioptric/Cassegrain/Maksutov by now)

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How about a rule that Glom is allowed to make as many politically inflammatory comments as he likes but no-one is allowed to make them back? What? No? You people are so intolerant.

Okay, about rule 13.

I understand the spirit of this and my concern is probably baseless on this forum, which is a shining beacon of the principles of scientific Enlightenment that have been lost in the world. My concern is that in other places, some people have tried to assert that legitimate arguments have been long debunked when in fact they haven't, based on the notion that supposedly the Establishment does not accept them. I think you all know to what I'm referring. They say the science is settled on something and then say that any further discussion should not be allowed. Of course, I have never experienced anything remotely like this on this forum so I know I have nothing to worry about.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

As long as that's clear, I have no problem with it. I don't think there's anything wrong about tough questioning, in fact I think it's necessary for progress in science, so no argument there. The only thing I'm pointing out is that people should understand that there is a "graceful exit" available, that you are free, upon finding problems, to say, "You're right, I'll have to go back and reconsider things," and that posting a theory which turns out to be flaws doesn't mean banning as long as you are willing to recognize that.

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As above, so below

Yeah, the thing to remember is that in actual practice, this rule has never really kicked in before the 20th-30th page of obstinacy.

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For me, it's not the piling of "I don't knows" that's annoying. It's when people simply dodge all inconvenient questions, by ignoring them or changing the subject.
P.S. But I think this is difficult to legislate.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Michael Mozina, in this ATM thread, commented as follows on the rules (my bold):

This is a fair point. Granted, wiggle room has been allowed in discussions of individuals positing utterly egregious claims (e.g. Lieder, Hoagland, etc.), and in such cases I'd contend harsh criticisms of psuedoscientists have been well-earned. People do need to refrain from ad-hominem attacks, however, no matter how outlandish the subject matter. FWIW, I dispatched a PM the other day to a new user who'd included an ad-hom directed at RCH.

There were three, maybe four if you count someone who changed their name but didn't continue with it. A couple more changed after a couple thousand posts, and many others changed after a significant number of posts.

What's the problem?

Besides Moz doing the usual complaining about how he's a victim?

If he responded to one of the "billion and three pet 'issues'" (good to see he's not exaggerating) with a straightforward, evidence-laden answer, then the discussion might move on.

Instead he retreats into the usual ATM position of being some kind of victim or self-styled martyr (i.e., "anyone and everyone is welcome to throw at me, while I can't ask anyone any questions or expect any answers").

Another typical aspect of the ATM retreat is the claim that "This process looks suspiciously "religious-like" in nature." It's the old "I'm up against dogma/the system/the establishment/"the man" baloney, which is designed to shift the focus from what the ATMer is claiming to how the ATMer is being treated.

This invariably leads to the old "I'm being suppressed and therefore I'm right!" claim. This is usually coupled with comments about the rabble the "advanced thinker" has to deal with.

Same old baloney (no matter how you slice it) that's been going around for decades. Remember the kid in the playground who took his ball home?

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I have no problem with the rules - I think they are fair and necessary. One thing I would like to comment on is the second paragraph involving warnings:I believe that if any poster violates the rules all warnings should be public. Two reasons. If, for example, I am rude with poster "A," a public warning will most likely nip it in the bud right there. If done via PM, Poster A or others might be inclined to respond to whatever I posted and run the risk of violating the rules themselves. At the very least it could result in the admins/mods getting barraged with people reporting the same infraction. The other reason is education. Wolverine's post regarding ad hominems involving RCH made me reflect on my past use of the term "quack" regarding one pseudoscience promoter in particular. I don't know if "quack" crosses the line or not, but the fact that I'm not so sure now will help me stick to the particular claims and avoid such unnecessary descriptors in the future.

Good points about the usefulness of public notification.

Re "quack", I'd say it's appropriate if the HB/CT/ATMer is ducking the issues.

Concerning RCH and appropriate language, heck, just seeing "Hoagland" in a post is enough to get me giggling.

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I haven't read the rules yet, and only the first 5 posts in
this thread, but I have two observations already:

First, I think it is great than an area for discussion of the
rules is available! That would probably have prevented a
lot of grief in some astronomy/Space discussion forums I
participated in. Which leads to my second observation...

The Fido SPACE echo was run for years by a moderator
who was widely respected. She needed to turn the very
successful echo over to a new moderator. One person
campaigned for the job. I tried to convince the long-time
moderator that the guy who was campaigning was a bad
choice. But his campaign was successful and he won the
position. He immediately installed a way-too-long list of
rules, and enforced them as though enforcing rules was
the ultimate reason for being a moderator. He regularly
chewed out new posters for posting slightly off-topic or
other mistakes that seemed to me to be entirely innocent
in many cases. He knew he was right and wouldn't listen
to backtalk. I was temporarily banned from the echo for
what I said to him in e-mail, complaing about his rules.
The echo quickly tanked. In summary, his main problem
was his personality, which is not a problem here, and his
secondary problem was too many rules.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

Correction, a while later: If I recall correctly, I was
actually banned for complaining about the moderator's
application of the rules to another poster, not about
the rules themselves.

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"The other planets?
Well, they just happen to be there, but the point of rockets is to explore them!"
-- Kai Yeves

First question: Can I take an image (copyrighted or not) from someone’s website, copy it to my web space, and use [IMG] tags? For all practical purposes, let’s say a whole image or part of an image?

Second question: Does CNN, ABCNews, MSNBC, etc, basically all the big News companies, fall into the same league as NASA or an universities realm of big bandwidth (when using [IMG] tags)?

My take: if it's copyrighted, no. Otherwise, okay.

I don't think it's the big bandwidth realm so much as that NASA and universities put out their material deliberately for educational purposes, so any links to their materials (on a site like this, anyway) further their ends.

The commercial sites all pretty much have advertising around the outskirts of their pages. Linking directly to their materials bypasses one of their main ways of making money off their sites, so it's probably not appreciated.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Almost any image is copyrighted. What matters is if you have permission to copy it. If you copy something without permission, it can be criminal to provide links to it. If you do have permission, do whatever you like
IMO, hot-linking is mostly a matter of courtesy. There are two aspects:
1) Bandwidth: You can always provide a link, and then the host will loose the bandwidth either way, although the ratio of those who follow it and people looking at the thread is usually less than 1. If the ratio is expected to be low, it might be wise not to hot-link. Then consider how many views it will have relative to what it has in its original context. At BAUT, maybe it will be shown 1000 times in one day, while maybe a million will see it from CNN. In that case I see no problem. On the other hand, a poor geocities site with limited bandwidth, might suffer badly from hot-linking.
2) Copyright: The owner might not want the image to be shown in other contexts than the original...

In the end of the day, I think it comes down to common sense. Personally I would prefer more hot-linking, since I hate have to follow links everywhere, but that's just me