The reason is probably because having a CS Major over qualifies you for most jobs in IT. CS is great if you are going to be designing and building systems, but most jobs in IT are maintenance. The problem is modern governments who think that they need to push more people to get degrees to have highly skilled high tech workers. That makes as much sense as requiring electricians to get degrees in electrical engineering.
Roman wars were generally cheap. At worst the Romans stood to lose some soldiers and their gear. The US and friends knew that they couldn't have a "real war" in Vietnam* and so tried to win with minimal man power** and throwing cash at the problem. In some battles in Vietnam the US dropped more bombs in a few weeks to months then fell on Germany in the entirety of WWII. Doing the war on the cheap also meant the US had to attempt a war of attrition instead of securing the country side and using normal counter-insurgency tactics. Unfortunately for the US and friends Ho Chi Minh and friends where willing to sacrifice every man, woman, and child in Vietnam to achieve victory.
* Due mainly to needing to keep large amounts of forces in Western Europe and not wanting to piss off the Chinese into doing Korea II. ** Refusing to declare a war meant enlistments couldn't be lengthened, which meant people rotated through units on an individual basis. This was devastating for morale and unit effectiveness.
Imagine if all this research went into AIDS or malaria.
Nothing of significance cause I guarantee you that AIDS and malaria research receives more money then one team investigating aspects of how our largest organ works.
Also accusing scientists of not doing "noble enough" research while screwing around on Slashdot is like a fat guy complaining about the form of a sprinter.
How many read that book early on and thought "I can do better than those three rules"...
So you missed the point Asimov was trying to make? Which was that simplistic rules can not control the behaviour of something as intelligent as a human. The Three Laws of Robotics were a plot device for human robot conflict, and it is scary how many geeks don't get that and think they are actually good ideas.
TV signals go a long way because they are coming from 10,000 to 100,000 watt transmitters. 2.4 Ghz signals will also go a long way with that level of power. Most of the deprecated TV spectrum is still well into the VHF band which is only slightly less LOS then the far UHF stuff like WiFi. The GP is exactly right that license exempt spectrum (and especially high power licence exempt) will quickly fill up and render the allocation not useful as the primary form of Internet for rural users.
The reason companies are clamouring for this spectrum is because they have already turned the old license exempt allocations into cess pools. ie instead of running a few feet of cables idiots plug cheap Chinese APs that use unshielded house wiring for a LAN, and then wonder why their other wireless devices seem to now have signal problems (and make it ludicrously easy for crims to monitor their network traffic). Or cheap WiFi routers that just use default channels so your house ends up hearing twenty routers all screaming on the same channel.
I have friends who are teachers in the private sector and either they don't have the same ruling as the public schools or he doesn't care (his students have a fan page for him on Facebook).
This bill seems to be simply to protect one party in the case online relationships between students and teachers become abusive/a threat to privacy
Why not have a law that prevents teachers and students from meeting face-to-face outside school hours except for designated school events?
Oh right because that would be a clear violation of peoples right to freedom of assembly, it is just politicians sometimes forget peoples rights exist online.
This law is about pedo witch hunting. Unfortunately though, sexually abusive teachers existed long before the internet, and using "shotgun" laws like this isn't going to stop them.
P.S. Hell, here in Australia the NSW government tried to remove the right to freedom of assembly from "outlaw" motorcycle club members. Thankfully we have courts to put the politicians back in their place.
I consider people who treacherously steal hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, and those who help them do so while also making those documents available to the regimes in Iran and North Korea to be, indeed, public enemies.
Are you a full time or just part time shill?
Those "sensitive" documents were stolen by one disgruntled Army specialist, one of millions of people who had official access to those documents. If you think the Iranian and North Korean regimes spy agencies didn't already have those documents then why would you think those regimes are a threat? What do their spy agencies use Get Smart re-runs as training tools?
The reason the Pentagon and friends blew their top about the leak was not because "OMG the NorKs will know we aren't really super special pals with our Arab friends!" but because the leaks went public. Opposing spy agencies tend not to announce that they have stolen documents even though it is incredibly common place. Governments care more about their people finding out their dirty little secrets then they do their enemies finding out (eg Nixon wasn't hiding from the North Vietnamese that the US was bombing Cambodia).
We know now that Western intelligence establishments were thoroughly compromised during the Cold War when nuclear annihilation was a risk. These days the Russians probably read diplomatic cables before they get to Washington.
I think Julian Assange is a massive dickhead with a God-complex. The "Collateral Murder" PR stunt pissed me off massively (eg the presentation of it to give the impression the soldiers involved knew they were shooting at journalists and children), and if he isn't technically guilty of rape he has a bad attitude towards women.
However deleting leaks because you don't think Wikileaks is trustworthy is a massive "FUCK YOU!" to the people who leaked the documents and the general public. It is treating the whistle blowers like children who obviously can't be trusted to pick the "right" leaking organisation. And it totally ignores the publics right to know about corruption and illegality because a few agents of those corrupt authorities might get burned.
I have numerous problems with Assange and Wikileaks, but if DDB and friends think this stunt will get people to support OpenLeaks they must be inhaling burning server fumes.
As I mentioned in my post Australia doesn't charge sales tax on imports under $1000 AUD (because it was costing more then it was generating). AFAIK most other countries charge import duties to cover the missing sales tax which the reciever has to pay to get their package.
I would bet Amazon only pays sales taxes to countries where it was a business presence.
They are a huge competitor, and they don't collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage
No Amazon has an "unfair advantage" over an independent book store because: a) It doesn't have sales staff who spend most of their time not actually doing anything. b) Doesn't pay prime commercial rents on its facilities. c) Has a collection so vast that no physical book store could compete. d) Is a huge corporation so purchasing, HR, marketing, shipping etc is amortised by the sheer volume they sell. e) Is a huge corporation and negotiates favourable tax breaks with state and federal authorities.
Amazon doesn't want to pay state taxes not because paying them would make them unprofitable, but because working out the taxes for 50 US states plus all the other countries they ship to (who would probably start demanding tax collection if Amazon caved to the states) is an unholy nightmare.
Bricks-and-mortar stores need to stop whining about on-line businesses not paying sales taxes, and need to start restructuring their businesses to deal with advantages that huge retailers like Amazon have. Here in Australia the b&m retailers are whining that imports under $1000AUD don't pay 10% sales tax, completely ignoring that those goods are generally 30% - 50% cheaper then the same product from a b&m store. A 3% - 5% price increase on those imports isn't going to save b&m stores.
Students are ordered to go to school and told to believe everything that the teacher tells them.
As far as I am aware in the US you still have the right to send your children to private schools or to home school them. An option I suggest you take up if you can't stand the idea that your children might be exposed to the idea that there is a deity or that there isn't*. Additionally if you people really are telling your kids to believe everything the teachers tell them then no wonder the US has gone so far off the rails. Here in Socialist Australia I went to a Catholic school and was taught to weigh what people told me against evidence.
The only thing schools should really be teaching is critical thinking skills. Everything else is just different shades of indoctrination and propaganda.
* Also if the system actually ran the way you want it they would have to ban most literature in US public schools, and nearly all classics, as references to religion are fairly common.
Who cares if the teacher was criticising religion or not. Individual opinion of people who work for the government is not the same as government policy.
Here is the part of the first amendment of the US constitution that is pertinent to the case:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Nope, doesn't say "government workers have to have neutral attitudes towards religion". Members of government, let alone government workers, in the US can be as rapidly pro or anti religious as they like and they won't break the first amendment unless they start making policy that establishes religion or prevents the free exercise thereof.
If the nutjob who sued can't even understand what the first amendment protects, they sure as hell aren't going to distinguish between those who say creationism isn't a science (I say that and I am an evangelical Christian) and straight out attacks against religion.
P.S. I am an Australian and I find it sad that I know more about the US constitution than most Americans and the talking heads on TV.
Only difference is Facebook accounts are not also used for email and other essential services.
And this is the important thing. I couldn't care less if Facebook banned me (no seriously, I use it to chat to one friend in another city who I could just text message or ring), but getting banned from my entire Google account is a serious issue. I heard about people having their Google accounts banned for Google+ ToS violations right when it first come out which is why I haven't signed up.
I have already experienced losing a 10+ year old email account on Yahoo (who inexplicitly reset a whole bunch of Australian users passwords when doing upgrades, unfortunately for me I couldn't remember the answer to secret questions I set a decade ago) and it was a serious annoyance. If I hadn't half-transitioned to Gmail it would have been massively more annoying.
P.S. Anyone wonder when we will start getting "official" email addresses like we have postal addresses?
It is funny how Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex perverting American government in 1961 and was spot on.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Unfortunately the American citizenry turned out to be anything but "alert and knowledgeable". Companies like Lockheed Martin are effectively untouchable, I don't think there has been a major vehicle program since the 70's that wasn't rife with incompetence, distortion, and corruption. Massive naval vessels that aren't sea worthy have been accepted into service because of the collusion between the manufacturers and military officers running the development programs.
You sound like somebody who can afford to drive a car.
Nope. I survive off government welfare (below the poverty line here in Australia).
Right Wing zealot
Yeah, that Gandhi was such a fat cat. What with his monocles and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills. My argument hasn't deviated much from the sorts of arguments he made.
Actually I am mostly on the Left of the political spectrum, but I don't really think the idea of a two dimensional political spectrum is a good one.
You can trash talk all you want, and use logical fallacies to support your arguments
List one of my logical fallacies. Seems to me that you are the one attempting logical fallacies (playing the man not the ball, and straw man) and plain ol' baseless assertions instead of argument.
Mandela accomplished what he set out to, but it basically took him his whole life to do it. And what happens if the people with his level of dedication are executed rather than imprisoned?
Often what has happened is that more come forward to take the martyrs place. Mandela wasn't the first to be imprisoned or killed for his cause. To stop this sort of behaviour you have to go on massive killing sprees to cow the population. That kind of behaviour hasn't been feasible in the West for several centuries, which is why our empires have crumbled and full citizenship rights are pretty much universal.
It works when people take part on a mass scale.
And did I ever deny that? I just pointed out that civil disobedience has rarely just been about people getting a slap on the wrist. In fact when the penalty is just a slap on the wrist it is really hard to get laws thrown out, in those cases the government just tends to stop bothering to enforce the law.
There are undeniably non-frivolous causes worth taking action over that aren't worth going to prison over.
Again, did I ever deny that? What I said/implied was that if a cause isn't worth going to prison for IT ISN'T WORTH COMMITTING AN OFFENCE FOR.
Going to prison for a few years isn't a big deal if it gets "your people" the same rights as the privileged class, or gets rid of a massively unjust law. So why the hell are you trying to make it seem like civil disobedience can't happen with the threat of a few years jail? In fact considering how you have escalated the penalty every time your argument has been demolished I think you are just wedded to the idea that civil disobedience is impossible these days despite all evidence to the contrary.
Hell, your whole attitude is so negative about the possibility of civil disobedience that you may as well be arguing for the status quo.
P.S. People are dying in Syria and Libya right now committing mass acts of civil disobedience. People died in Tunisia and Egypt doing the same things. P.P.S. Plenty of activists have continued to influence the debate and run entire political parties while imprisoned.
Did Rosa Parks not get free legal support? IIRC the various civil rights movements had been waiting for cases like hers and paid for the defence. The same thing that happens today when groups are trying to get laws nullified.
Also most people don't pay tens of thousands of dollars in bail. A bail bondsman or bond agent pays the bail and the cost to the bailee is low unless they decide to skip court. Here in Australia the government are increasingly trying to make certain offences no-bail because getting bailed is so easy.
If that was your main point you made a piss poor attempt at communicating it (Hint: communication does not involve yelling at people if they appear to not understand you).
You raised a valid point about battery firmware being easily writeable*, but look totally ignorant about modern battery technology by questioning the necessity of battery controllers with Lithium chemistry batteries.
* Making it not really firmware as far as I understand the definition. Most re-writeable firmware needs special high voltage lines to do the write, and normally people don't design those into a product.
So the OP was talking about maybe a period 10-20 years after the Civil Rights movement? No, the OP was just ignorant about the subject. If the OP meant "protesting" then yes the response from government is getting harsher in the 21st century. But protesting isn't necessarily civil disobedience.
No the more oppressive the regime the MORE resistance needs to be in the open. Oppressive regimes work by making people afraid, especially by making dissidents feel they are alone and isolated. When oppressive regimes fall from internal causes it is nearly always due to people making public stands. The current "Arab spring" is the perfect example of this. Those regimes are only falling because people are marching in the streets and willing to die to see the end of the current regimes.
The problem with modern civil disobedience is that they don't hold you overnight and then let you go anymore, or even charge you with a crime for which the penalty is a $500 fine or 30 days in the county jail.
When did THEY ever do that for real civil disobedience? Now days the worst you are likely to suffer from civil disobedience in the West is a few years in jail. Those fighting for causes such as civil rights for African-Americans or women's suffrage faced being beaten, tortured, and killed. Mandela was in prison for TWENTY-SEVEN years. The whole point of civil disobedience is to show the injustice in something by pointing the public at the disproportionate sentences handed out.
Modern activists are generally a bunch of pussies that scream about the injustice of The System but don't actually want to suffer the losses that an actual fight requires. If a cause isn't worth spending a few years in jail, it isn't worth making a fuss out of at all. People like MLK Jr knew their cause was worth the back-lash.
in response to the arrest of Aaron Swartz for, effectively, downloading too many articles from JSTOR
No, that jackass got arrested for not only hacking MIT systems but physically breaking into equipment cabinets and messing with the hardware. He did this so that he could "effectively download too many articles from JSTOR", but that isn't what he got arrested for.
I am all for civil disobedience when it is merited, but don't go crying when you get arrested and charged for that disobedience. Especially don't go trying to distort the reasons for your arrest to try and trick people into supporting you. There are so many causes I support where I wouldn't be caught seen with the "activists" pushing them because they do bullshit like this.
The problem was market saturation. There was a point where multiple Guitar Hero (not to mention Rock Band) games were coming out a year. With the level of marketing and production that was going on it didn't take long until everyone who wanted Guitar Hero owned it. And as it was mostly a party game you only really sell a few copies to every group of friends instead of most of the group buying it like online multiplayer games.
Most people weren't interested in the new game mechanics, they would buy new copies to get new songs. What they should have done was release a base game every 1 - 2 years and sold extra tracks (fully transferable between versions) from an online store.
That way they would have nursed the brand instead of dressing it in a short skirt and pimping it out on a shady corner. Of course Kotick doesn't know how to do anything but rape franchises.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason is probably because having a CS Major over qualifies you for most jobs in IT. CS is great if you are going to be designing and building systems, but most jobs in IT are maintenance. The problem is modern governments who think that they need to push more people to get degrees to have highly skilled high tech workers. That makes as much sense as requiring electricians to get degrees in electrical engineering.
Roman wars were generally cheap. At worst the Romans stood to lose some soldiers and their gear. The US and friends knew that they couldn't have a "real war" in Vietnam* and so tried to win with minimal man power** and throwing cash at the problem. In some battles in Vietnam the US dropped more bombs in a few weeks to months then fell on Germany in the entirety of WWII. Doing the war on the cheap also meant the US had to attempt a war of attrition instead of securing the country side and using normal counter-insurgency tactics. Unfortunately for the US and friends Ho Chi Minh and friends where willing to sacrifice every man, woman, and child in Vietnam to achieve victory.
* Due mainly to needing to keep large amounts of forces in Western Europe and not wanting to piss off the Chinese into doing Korea II.
** Refusing to declare a war meant enlistments couldn't be lengthened, which meant people rotated through units on an individual basis. This was devastating for morale and unit effectiveness.
Imagine if all this research went into AIDS or malaria.
Nothing of significance cause I guarantee you that AIDS and malaria research receives more money then one team investigating aspects of how our largest organ works.
Also accusing scientists of not doing "noble enough" research while screwing around on Slashdot is like a fat guy complaining about the form of a sprinter.
How many read that book early on and thought "I can do better than those three rules"...
So you missed the point Asimov was trying to make? Which was that simplistic rules can not control the behaviour of something as intelligent as a human. The Three Laws of Robotics were a plot device for human robot conflict, and it is scary how many geeks don't get that and think they are actually good ideas.
TV signals go a long way because they are coming from 10,000 to 100,000 watt transmitters. 2.4 Ghz signals will also go a long way with that level of power. Most of the deprecated TV spectrum is still well into the VHF band which is only slightly less LOS then the far UHF stuff like WiFi. The GP is exactly right that license exempt spectrum (and especially high power licence exempt) will quickly fill up and render the allocation not useful as the primary form of Internet for rural users.
The reason companies are clamouring for this spectrum is because they have already turned the old license exempt allocations into cess pools. ie instead of running a few feet of cables idiots plug cheap Chinese APs that use unshielded house wiring for a LAN, and then wonder why their other wireless devices seem to now have signal problems (and make it ludicrously easy for crims to monitor their network traffic). Or cheap WiFi routers that just use default channels so your house ends up hearing twenty routers all screaming on the same channel.
I suspect they ignore it.
I have friends who are teachers in the private sector and either they don't have the same ruling as the public schools or he doesn't care (his students have a fan page for him on Facebook).
This bill seems to be simply to protect one party in the case online relationships between students and teachers become abusive/a threat to privacy
Why not have a law that prevents teachers and students from meeting face-to-face outside school hours except for designated school events?
Oh right because that would be a clear violation of peoples right to freedom of assembly, it is just politicians sometimes forget peoples rights exist online.
This law is about pedo witch hunting. Unfortunately though, sexually abusive teachers existed long before the internet, and using "shotgun" laws like this isn't going to stop them.
P.S. Hell, here in Australia the NSW government tried to remove the right to freedom of assembly from "outlaw" motorcycle club members. Thankfully we have courts to put the politicians back in their place.
I consider people who treacherously steal hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, and those who help them do so while also making those documents available to the regimes in Iran and North Korea to be, indeed, public enemies.
Are you a full time or just part time shill?
Those "sensitive" documents were stolen by one disgruntled Army specialist, one of millions of people who had official access to those documents. If you think the Iranian and North Korean regimes spy agencies didn't already have those documents then why would you think those regimes are a threat? What do their spy agencies use Get Smart re-runs as training tools?
The reason the Pentagon and friends blew their top about the leak was not because "OMG the NorKs will know we aren't really super special pals with our Arab friends!" but because the leaks went public. Opposing spy agencies tend not to announce that they have stolen documents even though it is incredibly common place. Governments care more about their people finding out their dirty little secrets then they do their enemies finding out (eg Nixon wasn't hiding from the North Vietnamese that the US was bombing Cambodia).
We know now that Western intelligence establishments were thoroughly compromised during the Cold War when nuclear annihilation was a risk. These days the Russians probably read diplomatic cables before they get to Washington.
I think Julian Assange is a massive dickhead with a God-complex. The "Collateral Murder" PR stunt pissed me off massively (eg the presentation of it to give the impression the soldiers involved knew they were shooting at journalists and children), and if he isn't technically guilty of rape he has a bad attitude towards women.
However deleting leaks because you don't think Wikileaks is trustworthy is a massive "FUCK YOU!" to the people who leaked the documents and the general public. It is treating the whistle blowers like children who obviously can't be trusted to pick the "right" leaking organisation. And it totally ignores the publics right to know about corruption and illegality because a few agents of those corrupt authorities might get burned.
I have numerous problems with Assange and Wikileaks, but if DDB and friends think this stunt will get people to support OpenLeaks they must be inhaling burning server fumes.
Not sales taxes, but large corporations frequently state/country shop to get deals on payroll taxes, corporate taxes, utility pricing and the like.
As I mentioned in my post Australia doesn't charge sales tax on imports under $1000 AUD (because it was costing more then it was generating). AFAIK most other countries charge import duties to cover the missing sales tax which the reciever has to pay to get their package.
I would bet Amazon only pays sales taxes to countries where it was a business presence.
They are a huge competitor, and they don't collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage
No Amazon has an "unfair advantage" over an independent book store because:
a) It doesn't have sales staff who spend most of their time not actually doing anything.
b) Doesn't pay prime commercial rents on its facilities.
c) Has a collection so vast that no physical book store could compete.
d) Is a huge corporation so purchasing, HR, marketing, shipping etc is amortised by the sheer volume they sell.
e) Is a huge corporation and negotiates favourable tax breaks with state and federal authorities.
Amazon doesn't want to pay state taxes not because paying them would make them unprofitable, but because working out the taxes for 50 US states plus all the other countries they ship to (who would probably start demanding tax collection if Amazon caved to the states) is an unholy nightmare.
Bricks-and-mortar stores need to stop whining about on-line businesses not paying sales taxes, and need to start restructuring their businesses to deal with advantages that huge retailers like Amazon have. Here in Australia the b&m retailers are whining that imports under $1000AUD don't pay 10% sales tax, completely ignoring that those goods are generally 30% - 50% cheaper then the same product from a b&m store. A 3% - 5% price increase on those imports isn't going to save b&m stores.
Students are ordered to go to school and told to believe everything that the teacher tells them.
As far as I am aware in the US you still have the right to send your children to private schools or to home school them. An option I suggest you take up if you can't stand the idea that your children might be exposed to the idea that there is a deity or that there isn't*. Additionally if you people really are telling your kids to believe everything the teachers tell them then no wonder the US has gone so far off the rails. Here in Socialist Australia I went to a Catholic school and was taught to weigh what people told me against evidence.
The only thing schools should really be teaching is critical thinking skills. Everything else is just different shades of indoctrination and propaganda.
* Also if the system actually ran the way you want it they would have to ban most literature in US public schools, and nearly all classics, as references to religion are fairly common.
Who cares if the teacher was criticising religion or not. Individual opinion of people who work for the government is not the same as government policy.
Here is the part of the first amendment of the US constitution that is pertinent to the case:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
Nope, doesn't say "government workers have to have neutral attitudes towards religion". Members of government, let alone government workers, in the US can be as rapidly pro or anti religious as they like and they won't break the first amendment unless they start making policy that establishes religion or prevents the free exercise thereof.
If the nutjob who sued can't even understand what the first amendment protects, they sure as hell aren't going to distinguish between those who say creationism isn't a science (I say that and I am an evangelical Christian) and straight out attacks against religion.
P.S. I am an Australian and I find it sad that I know more about the US constitution than most Americans and the talking heads on TV.
Only difference is Facebook accounts are not also used for email and other essential services.
And this is the important thing. I couldn't care less if Facebook banned me (no seriously, I use it to chat to one friend in another city who I could just text message or ring), but getting banned from my entire Google account is a serious issue. I heard about people having their Google accounts banned for Google+ ToS violations right when it first come out which is why I haven't signed up.
I have already experienced losing a 10+ year old email account on Yahoo (who inexplicitly reset a whole bunch of Australian users passwords when doing upgrades, unfortunately for me I couldn't remember the answer to secret questions I set a decade ago) and it was a serious annoyance. If I hadn't half-transitioned to Gmail it would have been massively more annoying.
P.S. Anyone wonder when we will start getting "official" email addresses like we have postal addresses?
It is funny how Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex perverting American government in 1961 and was spot on.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Unfortunately the American citizenry turned out to be anything but "alert and knowledgeable". Companies like Lockheed Martin are effectively untouchable, I don't think there has been a major vehicle program since the 70's that wasn't rife with incompetence, distortion, and corruption. Massive naval vessels that aren't sea worthy have been accepted into service because of the collusion between the manufacturers and military officers running the development programs.
You sound like somebody who can afford to drive a car.
Nope. I survive off government welfare (below the poverty line here in Australia).
Right Wing zealot
Yeah, that Gandhi was such a fat cat. What with his monocles and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills. My argument hasn't deviated much from the sorts of arguments he made.
Actually I am mostly on the Left of the political spectrum, but I don't really think the idea of a two dimensional political spectrum is a good one.
You can trash talk all you want, and use logical fallacies to support your arguments
List one of my logical fallacies. Seems to me that you are the one attempting logical fallacies (playing the man not the ball, and straw man) and plain ol' baseless assertions instead of argument.
If a person goes to jail, then they already lost.
Like Mandela and Gandhi?
Mandela accomplished what he set out to, but it basically took him his whole life to do it. And what happens if the people with his level of dedication are executed rather than imprisoned?
Often what has happened is that more come forward to take the martyrs place. Mandela wasn't the first to be imprisoned or killed for his cause. To stop this sort of behaviour you have to go on massive killing sprees to cow the population. That kind of behaviour hasn't been feasible in the West for several centuries, which is why our empires have crumbled and full citizenship rights are pretty much universal.
It works when people take part on a mass scale.
And did I ever deny that? I just pointed out that civil disobedience has rarely just been about people getting a slap on the wrist. In fact when the penalty is just a slap on the wrist it is really hard to get laws thrown out, in those cases the government just tends to stop bothering to enforce the law.
There are undeniably non-frivolous causes worth taking action over that aren't worth going to prison over.
Again, did I ever deny that? What I said/implied was that if a cause isn't worth going to prison for IT ISN'T WORTH COMMITTING AN OFFENCE FOR.
Going to prison for a few years isn't a big deal if it gets "your people" the same rights as the privileged class, or gets rid of a massively unjust law. So why the hell are you trying to make it seem like civil disobedience can't happen with the threat of a few years jail? In fact considering how you have escalated the penalty every time your argument has been demolished I think you are just wedded to the idea that civil disobedience is impossible these days despite all evidence to the contrary.
Hell, your whole attitude is so negative about the possibility of civil disobedience that you may as well be arguing for the status quo.
P.S. People are dying in Syria and Libya right now committing mass acts of civil disobedience. People died in Tunisia and Egypt doing the same things.
P.P.S. Plenty of activists have continued to influence the debate and run entire political parties while imprisoned.
Did Rosa Parks not get free legal support? IIRC the various civil rights movements had been waiting for cases like hers and paid for the defence. The same thing that happens today when groups are trying to get laws nullified.
Also most people don't pay tens of thousands of dollars in bail. A bail bondsman or bond agent pays the bail and the cost to the bailee is low unless they decide to skip court. Here in Australia the government are increasingly trying to make certain offences no-bail because getting bailed is so easy.
If that was your main point you made a piss poor attempt at communicating it (Hint: communication does not involve yelling at people if they appear to not understand you).
You raised a valid point about battery firmware being easily writeable*, but look totally ignorant about modern battery technology by questioning the necessity of battery controllers with Lithium chemistry batteries.
* Making it not really firmware as far as I understand the definition. Most re-writeable firmware needs special high voltage lines to do the write, and normally people don't design those into a product.
So the OP was talking about maybe a period 10-20 years after the Civil Rights movement? No, the OP was just ignorant about the subject. If the OP meant "protesting" then yes the response from government is getting harsher in the 21st century. But protesting isn't necessarily civil disobedience.
No the more oppressive the regime the MORE resistance needs to be in the open. Oppressive regimes work by making people afraid, especially by making dissidents feel they are alone and isolated. When oppressive regimes fall from internal causes it is nearly always due to people making public stands. The current "Arab spring" is the perfect example of this. Those regimes are only falling because people are marching in the streets and willing to die to see the end of the current regimes.
The problem with modern civil disobedience is that they don't hold you overnight and then let you go anymore, or even charge you with a crime for which the penalty is a $500 fine or 30 days in the county jail.
When did THEY ever do that for real civil disobedience? Now days the worst you are likely to suffer from civil disobedience in the West is a few years in jail. Those fighting for causes such as civil rights for African-Americans or women's suffrage faced being beaten, tortured, and killed. Mandela was in prison for TWENTY-SEVEN years. The whole point of civil disobedience is to show the injustice in something by pointing the public at the disproportionate sentences handed out.
Modern activists are generally a bunch of pussies that scream about the injustice of The System but don't actually want to suffer the losses that an actual fight requires. If a cause isn't worth spending a few years in jail, it isn't worth making a fuss out of at all. People like MLK Jr knew their cause was worth the back-lash.
in response to the arrest of Aaron Swartz for, effectively, downloading too many articles from JSTOR
No, that jackass got arrested for not only hacking MIT systems but physically breaking into equipment cabinets and messing with the hardware. He did this so that he could "effectively download too many articles from JSTOR", but that isn't what he got arrested for.
I am all for civil disobedience when it is merited, but don't go crying when you get arrested and charged for that disobedience. Especially don't go trying to distort the reasons for your arrest to try and trick people into supporting you. There are so many causes I support where I wouldn't be caught seen with the "activists" pushing them because they do bullshit like this.
The problem was market saturation. There was a point where multiple Guitar Hero (not to mention Rock Band) games were coming out a year. With the level of marketing and production that was going on it didn't take long until everyone who wanted Guitar Hero owned it. And as it was mostly a party game you only really sell a few copies to every group of friends instead of most of the group buying it like online multiplayer games.
Most people weren't interested in the new game mechanics, they would buy new copies to get new songs. What they should have done was release a base game every 1 - 2 years and sold extra tracks (fully transferable between versions) from an online store.
That way they would have nursed the brand instead of dressing it in a short skirt and pimping it out on a shady corner. Of course Kotick doesn't know how to do anything but rape franchises.