> demonstrate to the politicians that you personally care

They dont care whether you care or dont care because they know that they will be elected anyway.

> bring awareness of an issue to the larger public.

Irrelevant. If they dont have a party sympathetic to the demonstrated cause to vote for at the next elections, the awareness alone will not lead to any change. You have to have a party channeling the awareness into political change.

> The first step to a public debate

If theres no "other" party to vote for, public debate withing the existing party space is just a superficial ritual. It leads to no siginificant change whatsoever.

> because you don't want it to work.

Because it doesnt work. It will not make members of existing parties sympathetic to the hacktivism cause.

> media whoring is astoundingly effective.

Only if you already have political power. Neither the hacktivists nor their political representatives (if they existed, but they dont even exist) will get political power because of hacktivism. It serves no measurable purpose.

Hactivism (or any other sort of activism for that matter) is a rather desperate and pointless endevour because it will not lead to any change whatsoever in the direction the hacktivists hope for. It is just useless effort, often even damaging to their cause.

The only way to change things is to make people at large stop voting always the same parties into the parliaments. If you have effort or money to spend, support your local pirate parties. Persuade eligible voters to vote for them.

Whatever you do, have a clearly defined and well distinguished political party to be able to channel the support you gained. Votes are the only currency that counts. Hacktivism, demonstrations, OWS, etc are all just useless masturbation if they dont rally around a specific political party.

The problem is political. You wont solve a political problem by non-political means. You cant beat them at their game without playing the game. You have to get in there, however dirty and rigged it may be in ther favor, and win against all odds. Only by winning will you get to change future rules.

Hacktivism is none of that. It is a vulgar display of wretched, powerless frustration and doesnt indicate that you are or ever will be, a winner. It communicates the exact opposite, even more so.

> but not the creators?

It is OK for creators to make money off content... if they can. If people are willing to pay. If they are not willing and prefer to produce their copies themselves instead bying them from you, you're SOL and have to change jobs to something wehere people want to pay for what you do. What is NOT ok is to solve the problem simply by making technological advancements and the modern copying infrastructure illegal with the intent to simulate the 50's where nobody had a PC and nobody had his PC connected with billions of other people with a PC. "Now as all of you have those wonderful futuristic tools became real... dont use them, because people will lose jobs."

For your business model (selling copies) to work, you basically have to make people forever stay in the 50's. This is the same as if people in the 16th century made book printing illegal to protect manuscript scribes. You're basically a luddite fighting technological advancement because it obsoletes your business. Do you sincerely think you can win that fight? Before, you could run a business to distribute stuff to people, now they can do it themselves. The distribution problem has now been solved. Your business model is simply gone. Adapt or die, you won't win this.

> All of this for the sake of being more newbie-friendly and ooh-shiny.

Thats the PR make-believe.

The real reason is that many businesses refuse to upgrade their XP/2003 offices because they work too well. So you have to intentionally break them by getting all new office users used to the ribbon, so when they get into a company still using XP/2003, they feel helpless and ask for 2007 because of the ribbon.

This is something I've observed over the years, users accustomed to the ribbon complain much more about having to work with menus than menu users complain about the ribbon.

The one and only raison d'Ãtre of the Ribbon is to enforce office upgrades. Once companies stop upgrading their ribbon versions, they'll change it again.

> Good luck having another supplier, vendor, or another business view your documents

Who has to conform to whom depends on who is the dominating partner in a communication. If the dominating partner mandates that all communication with him from now has to be LO-compatible, as a supplier you have to become LO-compatible, or you wont get his business.

The key to establish LO in the office space is to make a few influential players start using it, everybody who depends on them in some way will have to follow.

> and have them all looking funny?

If they depend on getting money from you, it suddenly is their documents looking funny, not yours. It is just a matter of perspective.

> This absolutely stinks

What absolutely stinks is that the electorate is voting in the same people turn after turn after turn. Not only in Australia but in all western "democracies".

After a certain number of cycles, the policians realize that _whatever_ they do, they'll be voted in anyway, so what exactly is stopping them from making a little bit of money by catering to special interests? The electorate doesnt seem to be mentally able to defend themselves anyway, so why not fuck them a little bit?

The root of all problems is this: The majority of people are too dumb. This so called "democracy" went well only as long as nobody dared or tried to exploit their dumbness. But politicians have now tasted blood and realized there's no consequences to expect, so they wont stop. In the mid to long term, we're fucked. We're heading straight into a nightmarish hight-tech dystopia. Thank the dumb idiots to your left and to your right.

> Under direct democracy, you would have to vote

Wrong. You _could_ vote on issues you want to vote on, ald let professional politicians vote on stuff you dont care or dont know about.

> Also, do you think general population is smart? Don't forget it were them who elected those politicians that don't have a clue in the first place.

So except that with direct democracy would enable the people to prevent unwanted laws, nothing substantial would change.

> but direct democracy is only going to result in widespread populism.

How is it different than representative democracy? It isnt. In a direct democracy the people would have a way to override purchased policitians, in a representative democracy they dont.

> We need to invent better mechanisms

I agree. But while we're waiting for them to be invented, I suggest we rely on direct democracy instead of representative democracy, I'm tired of special interests purchasing politicians and purchasing laws.

> Still can't work out how to solve the tyranny of the majority.

How does representative democracy solve the tyranny of the majority? It doesnt. Did representative democracy prevent Hitler? It didnt. Do we have any historic example of a direct democracy turning out fundamentally bad? We havent. Do we have historic examples of representative democracies turning out bad? We have.

I know I'm preaching to the choir again, but still. Your sentence sounded like a typical argument that direct democracy would somehow lead to problems we _dont_ already have.

> And politicians are qualified to vote on all issues how exactly?

Even if they're qualified on paper, theres no way to make sure they cant be bought by special interests. Just look at the copyright policy. You make just a few people able to vote on it, and peng, you have laws prosecuting millions of people for "thought theft". The same with the war on drugs, the "noble experiment" of prohibition, etc.

There are countless laws, almost always enacsted by special interests and then enforced against the broad majority, which very likely would not exist if anybody ever would let the people directly vote on them.

The point of direct democracy is not to have the average guy vote on any random technical stuff decision, it is to have knowledgeable, interested people be able to _prevent_ bad, unwanted laws. Checks and balances. Professional politicians are not impartial enough to have the last word on everything, there should be a way for the population to correct bad decisions, like preventing a war by referendum.

> It's the big flaw of the democratic system.

And what would be better? Having the self-procaimed "brilliant people's" votes weight more? Who would prevent then that those smart people tune the system in their favor and discriminate against the blind idiots?

> don't vote, simply because their vote does not matter.

Their vote absolutely matters, but they seem to be pissed that their vote doesnt matter _more_ than a blind idiot's vote. They seem to have a sense of entitlement that their one vote should weight as 100 blind idiot votes, so that the blind idiots cant outnumber them.

Because referendum opponents usually cite the high costs attached to paper based voting as the main reason against direct democracy.

Online voting would enable many, many more elections per year, and let people vote on more fine grained issues than just "a party to represent me for the next 4 years". Many representative positions could be abolished completely when people could directly vote on everything.

Paper based voting and represetative democracy are solutions from hundred of years ago. The fact that they were the best solutions back then does not imply that they still are the best solutions today or in future.

> there is a direct link between free users of file-hosting services and copyright infringement.

There is also a direct link between internet users and copyright infringement. There is also a direct link between prople exchanging information and copyright infringement. And so on.

Copyright is for-profit censorship. As soon as you have two people exchanging information, be it on the net, by pendrives, even exchanging books, as soon as you cut out the middlemen, it will probably be some kind of infringement.

The problem with this, what they call infringement is _normal human behavior_ that shouldnt be infringement in the first place. As soon as people get together, they exchange information. Declaring parts of this information exchange somebody elses "property" and trying to censor it by basically spying on every information exchange between two people, is censorship straight from the darkest surveillance state nightmares. The worst case scanario. It is basically north korea, but not with respect to "political information" but with respect to "proprietary information". Censorship is censorship, whatever paltry excuse you can come up with for it.

> Power is something government should have very little of.

Power is something both goverment _and_ private conglomerates should have very little off. If you have a too weak goverment, private special interests can grab too much power and become de facto goverments piggybacking on weak official goverments, so you get the same negative results for the population. The key is to cut power everywhere before it starts reaching critical, self-sustaining thresholds. And this only works if the people are powerful enough to cut both the goverment and special interests. It works only with a more direct democracy.

> When what you're doing is illegal people are often

Stuff is not simply "illegal" by itself. In a so called democracy, people allegedly far and wide agree that something should be illegal, because they think that it is wrong, and then it becomes illegal by law.

But freely sharing copyrighted stuff is today illegal although a majority of people doesnt really object to it and doesnt think that it _should_ be illegal. The really only reason why filesharing is illegal is not because of a societal consensus that it should be illegal, but because politicians make the policy together with a few stake holders behind closed doors under the exclusion of the public, because the policy will be enforced _against_ the public.

An influential few make the laws, the public is expected to simply STFU and obey. With respect to copyright policy and enforcement, the so called "democracy" here absolutely isn't working.

> So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good?

No, that artificial restrictions are good only when there is a overwhelming agreement that they are beneficial for everyone, especially for those subjecting themselves freely to those artificial restrictions. I dont think that such an agreement, that strict enforcement of for-profit censorship (copyright) on the internet is beneficial for all of us, exists today.