Real enthusiasts have always been the ones that wanted to really work with the hardware, whether the object was a car engine, vacuum-tube TV, or a computer. Fewer kids/adults developed the interest after the rise of "disposable" consumer culture, but from what I've been reading, that trend has slowly reversed as the weak economy started pushing more and more people to fix or improve whatever they can rather than blowing a bunch of cash on a replacement.
Personally, I've learned thus far that working with a soldering iron puts me into a great relaxed 'zen' state, and learning about PCBs & successful practice with the iron are both highly rewarding. If I succeed at fixing what I have on hand, I'll try to learn enough about electronics & programming to build kits, learn to modify them, and generally see how far I can go... As our economy continues to stagnate, more people/kids will find themselves at some point with a "broken" tech item that costs too much to replace at the drop of a hat, at least some will take the same route I have (particularly if they know someone else that already succeeded) and similarly become enthusiasts as well.
Nah, nothing explains something that messed-up -- but it might explain why so many kids thought her TV show & singing was/is awesome. (If the PCBs are found in hairspray, it'd also explain why most of my junior high classmates loved Vanilla Ice and/or New Kids On The Block, come to think of it.)
I interpreted it the same way until I realized that wild songbirds probably aren't spending a whole lot of time around electronics (unless it was exposure to toxins used in creating them). In my defense, I've been spending a lot of time learning about the different components that go onto circuit boards, and how to identify & replace bad parts without destroying anything. (Rule number one seems to be to never, ever use desoldering braid or solder from Radio Shack...luckily I learned it while practicing on a throwaway board, not the things I'm hoping to repair.)
Autism isn't caused by exposure to toxins, and autistics can communicate just fine with other autistics of a similar type as long as neither has had their native nonverbal communication mangled by attempts to force them to hide it & weakly emulate a different type. Also, while auties can often understand their own kind and (with an effort) can usually make sense of neurotypicals, NTs rarely understand autistics, and NT nonverbal language is specific to the individual's socioeconomic background & culture, while autistic native nonverbal language appears to function across those barriers.
Not to say that autistics don't tend to have communication difficulties -- for example, my central auditory processing is weak and it takes an effort to translate my thoughts into words or speak them. I'm just pointing out that it's inaccurate to assume that the inability to communicate natively with the majority must automatically mean the individual is unable to communicate natively with everyone else as well.
There are 2 reasons for that change: 1) Generational dreams change along with technology. Every world-changing invention has gone through an initial several decades of being awe-inspiring (with the periodic tragedy) before it became commonplace enough for rich people to do it for fun. I'm in my mid-late 30s, and that's what manned trips into space have qualified as since I was a little kid: no otherwise-impossible scientific advancements, two full crews of brilliant people killed (one with at least half the country's schoolkids watching) -- and now it's an experience for companies to sell to the ultra-rich.
I mean, if someone came up to you, said "I have a project that won't actually achieve anything we couldn't do otherwise, will get a couple dozen people killed, and the results will primarily become a great way for the ultra-rich to spend their money" would *you* be excited?
2) Most people's interest in devoting money/energy to long-term grand projects tends to fluctuate with their personal circumstances. When they feel they can secure their family's basic comfort long-term, easily pay for necessities & their taxes, and see clear benefits in their community from those taxes, they're *far* more likely to be willing to have some of that tax money go to projects that *might* pay off in a few decades. That's how it was from the 40s through the 70s, and to a lesser extent, in the 80s/90s.
When they're worried about randomly losing their job & not being able to quickly find another, know an unexpected crisis could financially ruin them, have to stretch a bit to pay for necessities plus the taxes, and their community seems to perpetually struggle despite the taxes, they're going to want every dime to go towards either their family's present/future (including entertainment that lets them forget for a few hours each night) or towards community resources their family uses, not projects that *might* pay off in the far future. That's how it has been to varying degrees since the dot-bomb crash, especially since the post-9/11 military/security expansion began.
The Torvalds would likely move back to Finland if the US government attempted to force Linus to compromise his OS. The real question is whether he'd be wise enough to tell the NSA he'd "work on it" and get his family out ASAP (then tell the world what happened once safely out of their reach), or if he'd openly refuse and wind up stranded here on the no-fly list.
I mind that we subsidized it for the rest of the world....
We didn't -- read up on Internet History. The original research was done by the UK, USA, and France, then individual countries around the world began building their separate networks & opening them to the public (often via commercial services), then joined up with other networks in their region, their regional networks joined others in that part of the world, and once all parts of the world were finally inter-connected, it met the decade-plus old definition of "an Internet."
supposed to have 1st world guilt over exercising a significant amount of control.
Where on Earth are you getting your news/info?
1) First-world guilt would be feeling bad because we have something that most people in a less-developed nation lack, so that doesn't fit at all.
2) RTFS/RTFA! The problem isn't that we exercised control, it's that our fucked-up NSA intercepted an ally president's communications despite their country having no record of hosting terrorists or having a lot of fundamentalist Muslims, hacked into a major government-owned company's network, and spied on innocent citizens of theirs that trusted US companies to respect their privacy.
3) Nobody is saying we should feel guilt, regardless. People outside the US that don't realize how little control we have are blaming American voters for the atrocious behavior of our corrupt government -- they're saying we should feel angry about our government's behavior and do what's necessary to get it back under control, basically just like a lot of us are saying.
If that was the case, then people with even severe mental illnesses wouldn't be at much greater statistical risk (based on actual cases) of being assaulted and/or killed by everyday "sane" individuals than vice-versa, and the vast majority of violent gang members, rapists, etc. wouldn't similarly be lacking an identifiable mental illness.
While the majority of people in our prisons do have either a psychiatric illness or serious learning disability, they primarily comprise the ranks of people committing non-violent or non-lethal acts of crime out of desperation, caused by poverty (which is often both a cause and result of 'brain' conditions of all kinds) and/or the results of addictions caused by attempting to control their symptoms through drug use.
For Firefox users, Stanford research discovered recently that using a script-blocking extension actually isn't as effective at privacy protection as using privacy & ad-blocking lists with an ad-blocking extension (I use AdBlock Plus). I double-checked the domains you listed, and all of them appeared in at least one of the blocklists, either blocking everything from their sites or blocking things from being executed from another domain.
If you're in Firefox (and have a *lot* of patience/time), you might like another whitelisting-based extension they labeled extremely effective, though: "Request Policy, a Firefox extension, takes the opposite approach: all requests to third-party domains are blocked, save those the user explicitly allows. While Request Policy offers nearly comprehensive protection from third-party tracking, properly configuring it requires substantially greater patience and expertise than the average user can reasonably be expected to possess."
The vast majority of the country is illiterate, so how will they find the educational broadcasts? Their main educational need at this point is to ensure they're allowed to teach one another regardless of gender, and when it comes to basic literacy, being IRL tends to work a whole lot better.
AfghanistanOnLine? Then again, the people everywhere else using the same languages (there are quite a few) might not be terribly thrilled at a Westerner inflicting the equivalent of Eternal September on them.
Only liberals think that some diseases can be "cured" with a healthy dose of education and horizon broadening.
Nah, it's a subset of liberals, mostly the ones young enough to have not had their ideals squashed by reality over-and-over -- it's just that when the Boomers were that age, they garnered so much press with their antics that the whole Left was painted with the reputation long-term. Now the vast majority of liberals know better; we still want to help people, but very few over age 30 still think it's just a matter of setting people straight.
Others of us have, and decided we will resist such temptations, large and small, and speak out against abuses. We call ourselves christians, Buddhists, secular humanists, jedi, whatever. Basically, people who have decided to not be dicks.
I prefer the term "ethical" as it covers the specific individuals that act that way, without including the unethical asshats that also happen to use the other terms for themselves.
Why would it be more fun? Most teens typically have far more trouble coping with such drastic change than little kids, as they have ingrained entertainment/interaction/etc. habits, more complex daily lives, schoolwork requiring a current computer, and a powerful drive to fit in -- so a year of abstaining from modern technology would make them even more rebellious/angsty but not have a lasting impact.
As an example: losing access to my computer & Nintendo as a pre-teen was annoying, as they were my favorite "toys", but losing access to the computer as a teenager (or being offline after age 20) felt catastrophic, as I was no longer as flexible, used to amusing myself or getting work done without it.
Fan fiction has been around friggin forever, as a lot of writers start out as kids by making up stories about characters in books/shows/games -- but the community is primarily comprised of fan-fiction writers and is only a tiny fraction of the size of the market/community for commercial fiction, as few people want to trudge through vast slush-piles in order to find 'gems' that are on par with the unedited indie works at Amazon. (Not to mention the countless reasons that the overwhelming majority of writers set their sights on going pro and eventually leave the hobby world behind them.)
"Sacred cow" in that sense is just an idiom implying that someone/something is unreasonably shielded from criticism or question. Hopefully you can see the humor in "sacred cows make the best hamburgers" with that in mind...
Funny thing, most fellow mid & late 90s grads I know are fine with most 80s music -- everything pales in comparison to the embarrassment of having owned MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, or Sir Mix-a-lot albums/tapes.
The vast majority of people can actively enjoy music in the background *and* pay attention to what they're doing -- it doesn't become "white noise" just because we're not focusing all of our attention on it. Music also actually helps us enter the 'zen' state that results in markedly improved performance; at that point, we'll be focused on the task, but fall right back out of the zen state if someone shuts the music off. That's why music is commonly found playing in situations that require a great deal of concentration: performing surgery, playing a tough video game, writing fiction, etc.
It's definitely not "wasted" attention, in other words: it makes use of the unused/left-over attention that otherwise goes unused, and when well-chosen to fit the person's preferences & mood, it brings pleasure, enhances their emotional state, and helps them perform better.
It really sounds like you have to concentrate more than most other people do in order to make sense of certain sensory input. I have that problem when it comes to spoken communication: I must concentrate intensely to understand what's said (a condition known as an auditory processing disorder) or to formulate a spoken response, and I know a few people whose visual processing is so crappy that they have to consciously concentrate in order to drive a car even after 10 years of driving.
You don't need to have it as a hobby. Most people listen by having enjoyable music playing while doing something else, just as friends might hang out bantering while having lunch together, aware of (and taking pleasure from) both how the food tastes *and* what their friends are saying/doing. A few minutes ago, for example, I was rewriting a comment while also enjoying a particular song off Songza and remembering how much fun I had seeing the band at a small benefit concert a few years ago.
if you are concerned about the low number of people protesting or not protesting maybe you should consider that your opinion is not widely shared with the majority.
Based on the people I know, the lack of protests is actually because of two things:
1) They rely on mainstream media outlets for news, and those sources only cover government misbehavior on the late-night news (and then it's often to discredit the opposition), if at all -- they only hype the stuff that will bring them ratings in the short-term, which is primarily entertainment shows like Dancing With The Twats.
2) Most of the people that are aware of it at this point are demoralized and feel hopeless. The past decade has shown us that writing our representatives or peaceful 1-2 day protests will be ignored regardless of size (Iraq War protests), and the OWS protests showed that sit-ins/lie-ins or anything lasting over a day will be met with aggression & violence by police while politicians ignore it & the media discredits the protesters.
So what effective options do we have left? What can we do that will actually make a difference, and not merely result in our faces being pepper-sprayed or bashed in?
Double-check with some extensive web searches, DSLReports, and so forth. A lot of small ISPs still exist, but because they don't advertise on TV or huge billboards, the vast majority of people in the area (including geeks) are only aware of the big-name ISPs in their area and maybe one or two smaller ones at best.
The problem is that we can't agree on who the true allies are. For example, I don't think any politician is an "ally" if they think it's a great idea to do things that history indicates will damage society -- which is primarily the choices that emulate, value, and assist sociopathic corporations instead of a collection of individuals living under an agreed-upon rules to share the burdens & sacrifices to improve quality of life for as many people as possible.
At this point, my idea of a true "ally" in the political world would be somebody that actually consults history, results of policies in other countries, and scientific studies to figure out policy, even if what they discover directly contradicts our judgmental Puritan society's *beliefs* about what works. Based on the research I've done, it'd result in pissing off just about every group in our nation at least once, but if it led to a truly good quality of life, it'd be more than worth it.
That doesn't match my experience. The majority of people I've known that were brilliant in general or at their 'calling' were actually less likely to be arrogant or condescending, because they knew that there were plenty of things that they were average or even struggled at. That includes two unbelievably talented internationally famous surgeons (one was the father of fetal surgery, the other his older more-talented partner, who could improvise highly experimental unsuccessful surgery in an emergency and produce the lone survivor out of several dozen patients).
From what I've seen, the people prone to acting superior grew up relatively low in the social pecking order at least part of the time. They usually didn't acknowledge any talents/knowledge much beyond their own specialty as particularly worthwhile (a sadly common attitude on Slashdot), so being better at the few things they had a knack for seemed to translate in their minds to being better, period... It was as if their self-esteem was still so iffy that they had to "prove" whenever possible that they had always been "superior" (one said it outright and admitted he'd bullied other kids lower on the totem pole), and any evidence to the contrary had to be ignored in order to preserve their sense of self-worth.
We can't draw any real conclusions from commercials as they're scripted, and not a hell of a lot more from a subjective top-ten list. Each individual/expert is going to choose substantially different artists based on the genres or styles they enjoy or admire enough to study in-depth: if the person hates a particular subgenre, he/she is unlikely to know much beyond the most commercially successful artists.
I do largely agree with you, though, at least regarding artists that reached stardom after the primary criteria for stardom became sex appeal and, more recently, sex appeal fitting a narrow specific look & sound.
FWIW, I'd question whether Brian Setzer truly qualifies as a rockstar: one of his two commercially successful bands is in a completely different genre (swing revival) and my guess is that the majority of people that weren't fans of his 80s rock band wouldn't be able to tell you which group he was with.
Try using Swiftkey -- I tried it after 3-4 other kb apps as a first-time smartphone owner last January, and it beat the shit out of the others at learning my writing style enough to anticipate the next word(s) and interpret what I really mean when I tap/"flow" over the wrong letters. It's still not as fast as my touch-typing, but it's good enough that I at least don't mind using it, which wasn't the case with the others I tried.
Slashdot Mirror
Real enthusiasts have always been the ones that wanted to really work with the hardware, whether the object was a car engine, vacuum-tube TV, or a computer. Fewer kids/adults developed the interest after the rise of "disposable" consumer culture, but from what I've been reading, that trend has slowly reversed as the weak economy started pushing more and more people to fix or improve whatever they can rather than blowing a bunch of cash on a replacement.
Personally, I've learned thus far that working with a soldering iron puts me into a great relaxed 'zen' state, and learning about PCBs & successful practice with the iron are both highly rewarding. If I succeed at fixing what I have on hand, I'll try to learn enough about electronics & programming to build kits, learn to modify them, and generally see how far I can go... As our economy continues to stagnate, more people/kids will find themselves at some point with a "broken" tech item that costs too much to replace at the drop of a hat, at least some will take the same route I have (particularly if they know someone else that already succeeded) and similarly become enthusiasts as well.
Nah, nothing explains something that messed-up -- but it might explain why so many kids thought her TV show & singing was/is awesome. (If the PCBs are found in hairspray, it'd also explain why most of my junior high classmates loved Vanilla Ice and/or New Kids On The Block, come to think of it.)
I interpreted it the same way until I realized that wild songbirds probably aren't spending a whole lot of time around electronics (unless it was exposure to toxins used in creating them). In my defense, I've been spending a lot of time learning about the different components that go onto circuit boards, and how to identify & replace bad parts without destroying anything. (Rule number one seems to be to never, ever use desoldering braid or solder from Radio Shack...luckily I learned it while practicing on a throwaway board, not the things I'm hoping to repair.)
Autism isn't caused by exposure to toxins, and autistics can communicate just fine with other autistics of a similar type as long as neither has had their native nonverbal communication mangled by attempts to force them to hide it & weakly emulate a different type. Also, while auties can often understand their own kind and (with an effort) can usually make sense of neurotypicals, NTs rarely understand autistics, and NT nonverbal language is specific to the individual's socioeconomic background & culture, while autistic native nonverbal language appears to function across those barriers.
Not to say that autistics don't tend to have communication difficulties -- for example, my central auditory processing is weak and it takes an effort to translate my thoughts into words or speak them. I'm just pointing out that it's inaccurate to assume that the inability to communicate natively with the majority must automatically mean the individual is unable to communicate natively with everyone else as well.
There are 2 reasons for that change:
1) Generational dreams change along with technology. Every world-changing invention has gone through an initial several decades of being awe-inspiring (with the periodic tragedy) before it became commonplace enough for rich people to do it for fun. I'm in my mid-late 30s, and that's what manned trips into space have qualified as since I was a little kid: no otherwise-impossible scientific advancements, two full crews of brilliant people killed (one with at least half the country's schoolkids watching) -- and now it's an experience for companies to sell to the ultra-rich.
I mean, if someone came up to you, said "I have a project that won't actually achieve anything we couldn't do otherwise, will get a couple dozen people killed, and the results will primarily become a great way for the ultra-rich to spend their money" would *you* be excited?
2) Most people's interest in devoting money/energy to long-term grand projects tends to fluctuate with their personal circumstances. When they feel they can secure their family's basic comfort long-term, easily pay for necessities & their taxes, and see clear benefits in their community from those taxes, they're *far* more likely to be willing to have some of that tax money go to projects that *might* pay off in a few decades. That's how it was from the 40s through the 70s, and to a lesser extent, in the 80s/90s.
When they're worried about randomly losing their job & not being able to quickly find another, know an unexpected crisis could financially ruin them, have to stretch a bit to pay for necessities plus the taxes, and their community seems to perpetually struggle despite the taxes, they're going to want every dime to go towards either their family's present/future (including entertainment that lets them forget for a few hours each night) or towards community resources their family uses, not projects that *might* pay off in the far future. That's how it has been to varying degrees since the dot-bomb crash, especially since the post-9/11 military/security expansion began.
The Torvalds would likely move back to Finland if the US government attempted to force Linus to compromise his OS. The real question is whether he'd be wise enough to tell the NSA he'd "work on it" and get his family out ASAP (then tell the world what happened once safely out of their reach), or if he'd openly refuse and wind up stranded here on the no-fly list.
I mind that we subsidized it for the rest of the world ....
We didn't -- read up on Internet History. The original research was done by the UK, USA, and France, then individual countries around the world began building their separate networks & opening them to the public (often via commercial services), then joined up with other networks in their region, their regional networks joined others in that part of the world, and once all parts of the world were finally inter-connected, it met the decade-plus old definition of "an Internet."
supposed to have 1st world guilt over exercising a significant amount of control.
Where on Earth are you getting your news/info?
1) First-world guilt would be feeling bad because we have something that most people in a less-developed nation lack, so that doesn't fit at all.
2) RTFS/RTFA! The problem isn't that we exercised control, it's that our fucked-up NSA intercepted an ally president's communications despite their country having no record of hosting terrorists or having a lot of fundamentalist Muslims, hacked into a major government-owned company's network, and spied on innocent citizens of theirs that trusted US companies to respect their privacy.
3) Nobody is saying we should feel guilt, regardless. People outside the US that don't realize how little control we have are blaming American voters for the atrocious behavior of our corrupt government -- they're saying we should feel angry about our government's behavior and do what's necessary to get it back under control, basically just like a lot of us are saying.
Lack of mental health care is the problem.
If that was the case, then people with even severe mental illnesses wouldn't be at much greater statistical risk (based on actual cases) of being assaulted and/or killed by everyday "sane" individuals than vice-versa, and the vast majority of violent gang members, rapists, etc. wouldn't similarly be lacking an identifiable mental illness.
While the majority of people in our prisons do have either a psychiatric illness or serious learning disability, they primarily comprise the ranks of people committing non-violent or non-lethal acts of crime out of desperation, caused by poverty (which is often both a cause and result of 'brain' conditions of all kinds) and/or the results of addictions caused by attempting to control their symptoms through drug use.
For Firefox users, Stanford research discovered recently that using a script-blocking extension actually isn't as effective at privacy protection as using privacy & ad-blocking lists with an ad-blocking extension (I use AdBlock Plus). I double-checked the domains you listed, and all of them appeared in at least one of the blocklists, either blocking everything from their sites or blocking things from being executed from another domain.
If you're in Firefox (and have a *lot* of patience/time), you might like another whitelisting-based extension they labeled extremely effective, though:
"Request Policy, a Firefox extension, takes the opposite approach: all requests to third-party domains are blocked, save those the user explicitly allows. While Request Policy offers nearly comprehensive protection from third-party tracking, properly configuring it requires substantially greater patience and expertise than the average user can reasonably be expected to possess."
The vast majority of the country is illiterate, so how will they find the educational broadcasts? Their main educational need at this point is to ensure they're allowed to teach one another regardless of gender, and when it comes to basic literacy, being IRL tends to work a whole lot better.
AfghanistanOnLine? Then again, the people everywhere else using the same languages (there are quite a few) might not be terribly thrilled at a Westerner inflicting the equivalent of Eternal September on them.
Only liberals think that some diseases can be "cured" with a healthy dose of education and horizon broadening.
Nah, it's a subset of liberals, mostly the ones young enough to have not had their ideals squashed by reality over-and-over -- it's just that when the Boomers were that age, they garnered so much press with their antics that the whole Left was painted with the reputation long-term. Now the vast majority of liberals know better; we still want to help people, but very few over age 30 still think it's just a matter of setting people straight.
Others of us have, and decided we will resist such temptations, large and small, and speak out against abuses. We call ourselves christians, Buddhists, secular humanists, jedi, whatever. Basically, people who have decided to not be dicks.
I prefer the term "ethical" as it covers the specific individuals that act that way, without including the unethical asshats that also happen to use the other terms for themselves.
Why would it be more fun? Most teens typically have far more trouble coping with such drastic change than little kids, as they have ingrained entertainment/interaction/etc. habits, more complex daily lives, schoolwork requiring a current computer, and a powerful drive to fit in -- so a year of abstaining from modern technology would make them even more rebellious/angsty but not have a lasting impact.
As an example: losing access to my computer & Nintendo as a pre-teen was annoying, as they were my favorite "toys", but losing access to the computer as a teenager (or being offline after age 20) felt catastrophic, as I was no longer as flexible, used to amusing myself or getting work done without it.
Fan fiction has been around friggin forever, as a lot of writers start out as kids by making up stories about characters in books/shows/games -- but the community is primarily comprised of fan-fiction writers and is only a tiny fraction of the size of the market/community for commercial fiction, as few people want to trudge through vast slush-piles in order to find 'gems' that are on par with the unedited indie works at Amazon. (Not to mention the countless reasons that the overwhelming majority of writers set their sights on going pro and eventually leave the hobby world behind them.)
"Sacred cow" in that sense is just an idiom implying that someone/something is unreasonably shielded from criticism or question. Hopefully you can see the humor in "sacred cows make the best hamburgers" with that in mind...
Funny thing, most fellow mid & late 90s grads I know are fine with most 80s music -- everything pales in comparison to the embarrassment of having owned MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, or Sir Mix-a-lot albums/tapes.
The vast majority of people can actively enjoy music in the background *and* pay attention to what they're doing -- it doesn't become "white noise" just because we're not focusing all of our attention on it. Music also actually helps us enter the 'zen' state that results in markedly improved performance; at that point, we'll be focused on the task, but fall right back out of the zen state if someone shuts the music off. That's why music is commonly found playing in situations that require a great deal of concentration: performing surgery, playing a tough video game, writing fiction, etc.
It's definitely not "wasted" attention, in other words: it makes use of the unused/left-over attention that otherwise goes unused, and when well-chosen to fit the person's preferences & mood, it brings pleasure, enhances their emotional state, and helps them perform better.
It really sounds like you have to concentrate more than most other people do in order to make sense of certain sensory input. I have that problem when it comes to spoken communication: I must concentrate intensely to understand what's said (a condition known as an auditory processing disorder) or to formulate a spoken response, and I know a few people whose visual processing is so crappy that they have to consciously concentrate in order to drive a car even after 10 years of driving.
You don't need to have it as a hobby. Most people listen by having enjoyable music playing while doing something else, just as friends might hang out bantering while having lunch together, aware of (and taking pleasure from) both how the food tastes *and* what their friends are saying/doing. A few minutes ago, for example, I was rewriting a comment while also enjoying a particular song off Songza and remembering how much fun I had seeing the band at a small benefit concert a few years ago.
if you are concerned about the low number of people protesting or not protesting maybe you should consider that your opinion is not widely shared with the majority.
Based on the people I know, the lack of protests is actually because of two things:
1) They rely on mainstream media outlets for news, and those sources only cover government misbehavior on the late-night news (and then it's often to discredit the opposition), if at all -- they only hype the stuff that will bring them ratings in the short-term, which is primarily entertainment shows like Dancing With The Twats.
2) Most of the people that are aware of it at this point are demoralized and feel hopeless. The past decade has shown us that writing our representatives or peaceful 1-2 day protests will be ignored regardless of size (Iraq War protests), and the OWS protests showed that sit-ins/lie-ins or anything lasting over a day will be met with aggression & violence by police while politicians ignore it & the media discredits the protesters.
So what effective options do we have left? What can we do that will actually make a difference, and not merely result in our faces being pepper-sprayed or bashed in?
Double-check with some extensive web searches, DSLReports, and so forth. A lot of small ISPs still exist, but because they don't advertise on TV or huge billboards, the vast majority of people in the area (including geeks) are only aware of the big-name ISPs in their area and maybe one or two smaller ones at best.
The problem is that we can't agree on who the true allies are. For example, I don't think any politician is an "ally" if they think it's a great idea to do things that history indicates will damage society -- which is primarily the choices that emulate, value, and assist sociopathic corporations instead of a collection of individuals living under an agreed-upon rules to share the burdens & sacrifices to improve quality of life for as many people as possible.
At this point, my idea of a true "ally" in the political world would be somebody that actually consults history, results of policies in other countries, and scientific studies to figure out policy, even if what they discover directly contradicts our judgmental Puritan society's *beliefs* about what works. Based on the research I've done, it'd result in pissing off just about every group in our nation at least once, but if it led to a truly good quality of life, it'd be more than worth it.
That doesn't match my experience. The majority of people I've known that were brilliant in general or at their 'calling' were actually less likely to be arrogant or condescending, because they knew that there were plenty of things that they were average or even struggled at. That includes two unbelievably talented internationally famous surgeons (one was the father of fetal surgery, the other his older more-talented partner, who could improvise highly experimental unsuccessful surgery in an emergency and produce the lone survivor out of several dozen patients).
From what I've seen, the people prone to acting superior grew up relatively low in the social pecking order at least part of the time. They usually didn't acknowledge any talents/knowledge much beyond their own specialty as particularly worthwhile (a sadly common attitude on Slashdot), so being better at the few things they had a knack for seemed to translate in their minds to being better, period... It was as if their self-esteem was still so iffy that they had to "prove" whenever possible that they had always been "superior" (one said it outright and admitted he'd bullied other kids lower on the totem pole), and any evidence to the contrary had to be ignored in order to preserve their sense of self-worth.
We can't draw any real conclusions from commercials as they're scripted, and not a hell of a lot more from a subjective top-ten list. Each individual/expert is going to choose substantially different artists based on the genres or styles they enjoy or admire enough to study in-depth: if the person hates a particular subgenre, he/she is unlikely to know much beyond the most commercially successful artists.
I do largely agree with you, though, at least regarding artists that reached stardom after the primary criteria for stardom became sex appeal and, more recently, sex appeal fitting a narrow specific look & sound.
FWIW, I'd question whether Brian Setzer truly qualifies as a rockstar: one of his two commercially successful bands is in a completely different genre (swing revival) and my guess is that the majority of people that weren't fans of his 80s rock band wouldn't be able to tell you which group he was with.
Try using Swiftkey -- I tried it after 3-4 other kb apps as a first-time smartphone owner last January, and it beat the shit out of the others at learning my writing style enough to anticipate the next word(s) and interpret what I really mean when I tap/"flow" over the wrong letters. It's still not as fast as my touch-typing, but it's good enough that I at least don't mind using it, which wasn't the case with the others I tried.