Hey, it's the new White Person catchphrase! It used to be "I do not OWN a television," but "that shit's played, yo." It's gotten to the point where no one cares about the endless ranting about how bad TV is and how that particular person is soooo much better for not having one. Now these self-important bastards can do the same thing and keep their smug superior attitude, but still watch Hawaii Five-O!
No, I think the new white person catchphrase is not so much a phrase but more of a "making an off-topic post." Bonus white-points if you make fun of self-important bastards insulting bad TV shows, then subtly insulting a bad TV show yourself.
...is it really necessary to inform everyone in earshot (or everyone reading the comments, in this case) of your preference, despite there being virtually no chance of anyone actually caring?
If you read GGP before reading GP, you'd notice that it was actually germane to the topic.
And yes, I get the hypocrisy of my sig in conjunction with this post... I mod trolls +i, Imaginary.
Your post was a veritable MC escher of hypocrisy. I think it actually canceled itself out at some point, once my head stops spinning I might be able to say for sure.
Because some of us travel to countries/continents where cell service is either at a premium or non-existent but internet service is available by satellite. Try getting a signal in the middle of a jungle in Central America. No. I can't hear you now.
Could you setup a google voice account, have the SMS verification sent over that, and check it online before you login to gmail? Skype? Some other VoIP?
At the very least, you could have gmail forward to another, slightly less secure e-mail account.
I actually do find that slashdot is a good indication as to whether I'm capable of doing something: if I have something on my to do list and put off doing that for most of the day and instead spend my time on slashdot, I conclude I have insufficient motivation to do that task. I put it off until it becomes critical and I'm forced into having enough motivation to do it.
It's an extremely stupid way to do things, but, as we've already covered, I've made some poor life choices to end up in research.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. If you can't cut it doing work in your field, I believe you have no business teaching it.
They're largely different skill sets. Those who "can't" might not be able to design experiments to save their lives, or are terrible at keeping track of their experiments, but do great with understanding the background, or theories.
Do you consider a person from your office who announces they are going to lunch down the street, and you decide to go as well your leader?
They are leading you. If they do it consistently, as I have no doubt some individual participants do, then they are definitely leaders.
And we're not talking about going to lunch here, in some cases we're talking about criminal activity.
If someone blew up the factory that produces your hammers, would you just give up on the concept of the hammer?
I cannot make a hammer. If someone prevented hammers from being made ever again, I'd have my reservations about making something with nails. And again, not what we're talking about. We're not talking a blunt instrument. You can use many things as a hammer. You can't use many things the way LOIC was used.
You also drastically underestimate their numbers. They are hundreds of thousands, even if they don't all participate in raids.
How do you know there are hundreds of thousands?
Sorry kids, you don't really know what you're talking about.
A group of people on the internet hiding behind the mask of anonymity is not a unique, unknowable, mystical thing. They're still just individual people, their group dynamics are the same as any group of people who think they can't be identified.
If you can pay $20k a year to get a degree and make $40,000 a year teaching high school biology, gosh, why would you want to do actual science??
For one thing, science is hard. Many of my grad school classmates have dropped out or "mastered out" as they were tired of research. Others went all the way but knew from the start that research wasn't for them and/or wanted to teach. Most programs require some teaching, many students find they like it much better. For some it's a backup, they finish their degree but aren't good enough at it to do it as a career, or find it pays better than taking a postdoc.
When looking at a postdoc position, spending 60 hours a week in lab, versus less or equal pay teaching for less hours a week with better benefits, they might be swayed.
Lastly, many grad school science programs pay the student to do research, so it's not that they're paying $20k a year, it's that they're getting paid $17k per year to get a degree then moving up to $40k. They might have student loans from undergrad to pay off, but that's true no matter what you're teaching.
No, you do not understand Anonymous. I'm not sure if anyone really does...
What's up with the mysticism? They're just like a large group of people masks. The only new thing about this is that they're on computers.
Anonymous is engaged in fifty different things on different scales, and that "core group of fanatics" is never the same across all of them....They're a huge, unorganized mass of bored teenagers, for the most part. They don't have a cause... it isn't long before they become bored and move on to something else or internal bickering fractures whatever they're trying to do.
And that is exactly what the groups GP mentioned "wikipedia, or al qaeda, or drug gangs, or a whole set of other movements" are doing. Wikipedians are not all writing the same article. Al Qaeda is not all focusing on the same target at once. Gang members are quite unruly and gangs spiral out of control of their leaders frequently. They also change their goals frequently. Most gang members and al qaeda members are also bored teenagers with little actual "cause" besides they want to feel like part of a group and excitement.
So all the individuals who decided to use LOIC came up with it independently and then used on whatever websites independent of each other? I think not. If anonymous guy 1 who is Steve Smith of Miami Florida says "Hey, lets shut down Bank of America's website for a few minutes because of what they did to wikileaks," that guy is the leader temporarily regardless of whether he's been part of anonymous for 10 minutes or from the beginning. He is responsible for that motion regardless of whether he can or cannot be identified.
and getting rid of them will have no more effect than trying to get rid of a slime mold by digging out its eruptions
There are a finite number of individuals who participate in anonymous. And they're not all equal in capability. Getting rid of the most active and/or technically skilled ones would, in fact, neuter anonymous quite effectively. 100 skilled computer programmers leading 10,000 teenagers sitting at their computers capable of following instructions and not much else is dangerous to some people. The 10,000 teenagers by themselves are substantially less dangerous.
There are no "senior members" of Anonymous.
I'm sure there are in fact people who have been there longer and/or are more of an influence than others. That is/was no way of knowing who those people are doesn't change the fact that they have been there longer or affect the discussion more. Sounds like you're drinking the anonymous koolaid: you're still individuals who participate anonymously. Being unidentifiable does not actually make you all the same any more than a klan hood would.
Turns out that the aforementioned title is a popular romantic fantasy story about a young ex-vampire and the various supernatural girls he meets... Without fansubs, that market simply wouldn't exist and everyone would miss out.
I don't think Americans being unexposed to what sounds like a Japanese version of "Twilight" qualifies as "everyone missing out."
Nothing was showing up, I assumed it was my browser. It was late, so it was only after hitting submit the third time that I thought "Maybe I should just wait a bit."
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
They should be given plane tickets. It should never have come down to a controversy over GPS devices because they should have been deported immediately when it was discovered that their visas were fraudulent. Goodbye, sorry about the scam, enjoy your trip back home, the ticket's on us.
It's the ones under investigation. It would be a bigger crime to round all the students up and put them on a plane, when some of the visas might be valid. Kind of ties into that whole "innocent before proven guilty" thing we like.
Or, perhaps more likely since they're not citizens and we've thrown that out long ago even -for- citizens, it's just that ICE doesn't have the time, money, or competence to put a dozen students on a plane in less than 2 months when there's no actual crime committed and they can't just drive a bus down to Mexico.
Dear leaders! New overlords! Terrorists and warlords! Theocracies which would be more violent, more restrictive on your freedoms, encourage more wars, screw you over figuratively (and literally if you're a woman), and further hurt the very economy you had a revolution to improve, but at least they'll promise that you'll go to heaven if you pay your taxes and be a good little soldier!
Maybe it's my residual American chauvinism, but I just can't imagine any patriotic person anywhere blindly shutting his country totally off of the international computer network, Regardless of what any corrupt 82-year-old man tells them to do. I'd just hem and haw and techno-babble them blind about how it just couldn't be done.
You're not a corporation. I'm guessing Telecom Egypt's board members all gave little speeches about how they wanted to uphold the rights of their customers, but they had obligations to their employees to make sure they weren't punished, and an obligation to the shareholders not to put their equipment and future business at risk, and besides there are other internet providers to choose from, and they aren't actually preventing from people speaking so it's not really violating their free speech, and the terms of service had either explicit or implicit terms about how in times of mass protest, the service could be suspended.
And then they unanimously voted to shut down for a few days, while they all went on holiday to a more stable country to look at real estate. Just in case.
There was probably a bit of disagreement over whether or not they should and could stop paying their employees (aside from the security guards) during the shutdown.
That third link provided analysis as to how the government shut down most of the internet:
...a government that licenses a mobile authority can threaten violence to individual cell towers or backhaul networks, or to employees working for the carrier. Future license renewals can also be threatened for non-compliance, analysts noted.
I'm going to suggest that maybe Noor figured Mubarak was weak enough to defy. Maybe they figured his security forces were too busy trying to control the country to shut Noor down, and there wasn't much risk of being denied a license renewal because there wasn't much risk of Mubarak being in power a month from now. It appears to have at least partially worked: they lasted longer than anyone else... though I guess that assumes the forced shutdown involved turning off the power and not, say, destroying their equipment and/or executing their employees.
A more cynical take would be that it's good PR for if the revolution succeeded. "We were the only ones supporting the revolution. Customers: you really want to stay with Vodafone after they left you when you needed them the most? New government, you really want to let them back in? We helped you, now how about an exclusive license to operate in, say, everywhere?"
Slashdot Mirror
It's just as well, I hear the camera adds ten pounds, his neck was probably getting tired.
Hey, it's the new White Person catchphrase! It used to be "I do not OWN a television," but "that shit's played, yo." It's gotten to the point where no one cares about the endless ranting about how bad TV is and how that particular person is soooo much better for not having one. Now these self-important bastards can do the same thing and keep their smug superior attitude, but still watch Hawaii Five-O!
No, I think the new white person catchphrase is not so much a phrase but more of a "making an off-topic post." Bonus white-points if you make fun of self-important bastards insulting bad TV shows, then subtly insulting a bad TV show yourself.
...is it really necessary to inform everyone in earshot (or everyone reading the comments, in this case) of your preference, despite there being virtually no chance of anyone actually caring?
If you read GGP before reading GP, you'd notice that it was actually germane to the topic.
And yes, I get the hypocrisy of my sig in conjunction with this post... I mod trolls +i, Imaginary.
Your post was a veritable MC escher of hypocrisy. I think it actually canceled itself out at some point, once my head stops spinning I might be able to say for sure.
Because some of us travel to countries/continents where cell service is either at a premium or non-existent but internet service is available by satellite. Try getting a signal in the middle of a jungle in Central America. No. I can't hear you now.
Could you setup a google voice account, have the SMS verification sent over that, and check it online before you login to gmail? Skype? Some other VoIP? At the very least, you could have gmail forward to another, slightly less secure e-mail account.
I actually do find that slashdot is a good indication as to whether I'm capable of doing something: if I have something on my to do list and put off doing that for most of the day and instead spend my time on slashdot, I conclude I have insufficient motivation to do that task. I put it off until it becomes critical and I'm forced into having enough motivation to do it. It's an extremely stupid way to do things, but, as we've already covered, I've made some poor life choices to end up in research.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. If you can't cut it doing work in your field, I believe you have no business teaching it.
They're largely different skill sets. Those who "can't" might not be able to design experiments to save their lives, or are terrible at keeping track of their experiments, but do great with understanding the background, or theories.
Putting up with relentless tedium IS difficult.
Do you consider a person from your office who announces they are going to lunch down the street, and you decide to go as well your leader?
They are leading you. If they do it consistently, as I have no doubt some individual participants do, then they are definitely leaders. And we're not talking about going to lunch here, in some cases we're talking about criminal activity.
If someone blew up the factory that produces your hammers, would you just give up on the concept of the hammer?
I cannot make a hammer. If someone prevented hammers from being made ever again, I'd have my reservations about making something with nails. And again, not what we're talking about. We're not talking a blunt instrument. You can use many things as a hammer. You can't use many things the way LOIC was used.
You also drastically underestimate their numbers. They are hundreds of thousands, even if they don't all participate in raids.
How do you know there are hundreds of thousands?
Sorry kids, you don't really know what you're talking about.
A group of people on the internet hiding behind the mask of anonymity is not a unique, unknowable, mystical thing. They're still just individual people, their group dynamics are the same as any group of people who think they can't be identified.
If you can pay $20k a year to get a degree and make $40,000 a year teaching high school biology, gosh, why would you want to do actual science??
For one thing, science is hard. Many of my grad school classmates have dropped out or "mastered out" as they were tired of research. Others went all the way but knew from the start that research wasn't for them and/or wanted to teach. Most programs require some teaching, many students find they like it much better. For some it's a backup, they finish their degree but aren't good enough at it to do it as a career, or find it pays better than taking a postdoc. When looking at a postdoc position, spending 60 hours a week in lab, versus less or equal pay teaching for less hours a week with better benefits, they might be swayed. Lastly, many grad school science programs pay the student to do research, so it's not that they're paying $20k a year, it's that they're getting paid $17k per year to get a degree then moving up to $40k. They might have student loans from undergrad to pay off, but that's true no matter what you're teaching.
No, you do not understand Anonymous. I'm not sure if anyone really does...
What's up with the mysticism? They're just like a large group of people masks. The only new thing about this is that they're on computers.
Anonymous is engaged in fifty different things on different scales, and that "core group of fanatics" is never the same across all of them....They're a huge, unorganized mass of bored teenagers, for the most part. They don't have a cause... it isn't long before they become bored and move on to something else or internal bickering fractures whatever they're trying to do.
And that is exactly what the groups GP mentioned "wikipedia, or al qaeda, or drug gangs, or a whole set of other movements" are doing. Wikipedians are not all writing the same article. Al Qaeda is not all focusing on the same target at once. Gang members are quite unruly and gangs spiral out of control of their leaders frequently. They also change their goals frequently. Most gang members and al qaeda members are also bored teenagers with little actual "cause" besides they want to feel like part of a group and excitement.
Those aren't leaders, there AREN'T any leaders
So all the individuals who decided to use LOIC came up with it independently and then used on whatever websites independent of each other? I think not. If anonymous guy 1 who is Steve Smith of Miami Florida says "Hey, lets shut down Bank of America's website for a few minutes because of what they did to wikileaks," that guy is the leader temporarily regardless of whether he's been part of anonymous for 10 minutes or from the beginning. He is responsible for that motion regardless of whether he can or cannot be identified.
and getting rid of them will have no more effect than trying to get rid of a slime mold by digging out its eruptions
There are a finite number of individuals who participate in anonymous. And they're not all equal in capability. Getting rid of the most active and/or technically skilled ones would, in fact, neuter anonymous quite effectively. 100 skilled computer programmers leading 10,000 teenagers sitting at their computers capable of following instructions and not much else is dangerous to some people. The 10,000 teenagers by themselves are substantially less dangerous.
Seriously? Plurals are not denoted by apostrophes. Apostrophes are for possessives and contractions. 3rd grade stuff, that.
Were you confused as to what was meant? No? Then what does it matter?
There are no "senior members" of Anonymous. I'm sure there are in fact people who have been there longer and/or are more of an influence than others. That is/was no way of knowing who those people are doesn't change the fact that they have been there longer or affect the discussion more. Sounds like you're drinking the anonymous koolaid: you're still individuals who participate anonymously. Being unidentifiable does not actually make you all the same any more than a klan hood would.
Turns out that the aforementioned title is a popular romantic fantasy story about a young ex-vampire and the various supernatural girls he meets... Without fansubs, that market simply wouldn't exist and everyone would miss out.
I don't think Americans being unexposed to what sounds like a Japanese version of "Twilight" qualifies as "everyone missing out."
Nothing was showing up, I assumed it was my browser. It was late, so it was only after hitting submit the third time that I thought "Maybe I should just wait a bit."
Oops.
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
And now I can't post for some reason.
Well, maybe you shouldn't be using an ipad.
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
Can we get the actual paper(s) linked to in the summary rather than just this "Scientists somewhere found something cool and that's about all we'll tell you" crap? Occasionally, I'm interested in details that are lacking. For anyone interested, Trippe et al 2011 J neurosci and Mix et al Euro J neurosci seem to be the articles they're talking about.
Having said that, they're behind paywalls, and people understandably hate that too...
I've seen a few papers like this one that suggests magnetic fields cause new neurons to form in rats. The research here suggests it "modifies electric activity and protein expression in the rat neocortex." I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive when it comes to learning in the short term, but I'd also be interested in what the longer term effects are. Skimming over the newer article, it only tracked the rats 7 days, the paper about neurogenesis seems to show effects after nine weeks.
As I said, I only skimmed the articles, and I don't really have a clear understanding of the brain architecture, but it will be interesting if this treatment proves to have short and long term beneficial effects, or at least good short term effects and no bad effects from the increased neurons in the brain.
If this turns out to be a "flowers for algernon" situation though, I've read that book, it's sad, and I want no part of it.
having their heads repeatedly smashed in by a circa-1995 Cisco router.
We're gonna need a lot more circa-1995 cisco routers...
They should be given plane tickets. It should never have come down to a controversy over GPS devices because they should have been deported immediately when it was discovered that their visas were fraudulent. Goodbye, sorry about the scam, enjoy your trip back home, the ticket's on us.
It's the ones under investigation. It would be a bigger crime to round all the students up and put them on a plane, when some of the visas might be valid. Kind of ties into that whole "innocent before proven guilty" thing we like.
Or, perhaps more likely since they're not citizens and we've thrown that out long ago even -for- citizens, it's just that ICE doesn't have the time, money, or competence to put a dozen students on a plane in less than 2 months when there's no actual crime committed and they can't just drive a bus down to Mexico.
Down with the dictators!
And up with ... what?
Dear leaders! New overlords! Terrorists and warlords! Theocracies which would be more violent, more restrictive on your freedoms, encourage more wars, screw you over figuratively (and literally if you're a woman), and further hurt the very economy you had a revolution to improve, but at least they'll promise that you'll go to heaven if you pay your taxes and be a good little soldier!
My but I'm cynical today...
Maybe it's my residual American chauvinism, but I just can't imagine any patriotic person anywhere blindly shutting his country totally off of the international computer network, Regardless of what any corrupt 82-year-old man tells them to do. I'd just hem and haw and techno-babble them blind about how it just couldn't be done.
You're not a corporation. I'm guessing Telecom Egypt's board members all gave little speeches about how they wanted to uphold the rights of their customers, but they had obligations to their employees to make sure they weren't punished, and an obligation to the shareholders not to put their equipment and future business at risk, and besides there are other internet providers to choose from, and they aren't actually preventing from people speaking so it's not really violating their free speech, and the terms of service had either explicit or implicit terms about how in times of mass protest, the service could be suspended.
And then they unanimously voted to shut down for a few days, while they all went on holiday to a more stable country to look at real estate. Just in case.
There was probably a bit of disagreement over whether or not they should and could stop paying their employees (aside from the security guards) during the shutdown.
That third link provided analysis as to how the government shut down most of the internet:
...a government that licenses a mobile authority can threaten violence to individual cell towers or backhaul networks, or to employees working for the carrier. Future license renewals can also be threatened for non-compliance, analysts noted.
I'm going to suggest that maybe Noor figured Mubarak was weak enough to defy. Maybe they figured his security forces were too busy trying to control the country to shut Noor down, and there wasn't much risk of being denied a license renewal because there wasn't much risk of Mubarak being in power a month from now. It appears to have at least partially worked: they lasted longer than anyone else... though I guess that assumes the forced shutdown involved turning off the power and not, say, destroying their equipment and/or executing their employees.
A more cynical take would be that it's good PR for if the revolution succeeded. "We were the only ones supporting the revolution. Customers: you really want to stay with Vodafone after they left you when you needed them the most? New government, you really want to let them back in? We helped you, now how about an exclusive license to operate in, say, everywhere?"