You both asked:

and answered your own question:

The Occupy movement in the US is essentially the political equivalent of bitcoint: It takes large amounts of valuable time and energy and produces seeming random outputs that are claimed to be valuable but which in fact are largely useless despite the claims of their respective supporters.

Excellent: “Daily Show” on class divisions at Occupy Wall Street

Occupy’s Misogyny

When are the feminists going to speak out on the abuse of women that’s happening at the hands of the Occupy crowd? Rapes and sexual assaults are rampant among the Occupy movement in cities across the nation. According to ABC News, this past Saturday night a 23-year-old reported being raped by a 50-year-old inside a tent at Occupy Philadelphia. Similarly, a 14-year-old child was allegedly raped at Occupy Dallas. And at Occupy Cleveland, a 19-year-old told police she was raped after sharing a tent with an unknown man. After reporting her rape at Occupy Baltimore, a young woman claimed occupiers refused to help find her attacker. Now reports of rape and attempted rape in Zuccotti Park are surfacing. These are just the ones that were reported.

In addition to rapists, suicidal folks are causing emotional distress within the movement. After a 32-year-old man shot himself inside his tent at Occupy Burlington, Vermont protesters were so traumatized that they readily agreed to pack up and end their demonstration.

Besides rapes and suicides, occupiers have injured women in the midst of their shameless attempts to grab attention. A couple weeks ago, I attended Americans for Prosperity’s “Defending the American Dream” Summit, which was crashed by Occupy D.C. I was able to depart safely, with my frightened guests in tow, as protesters hissed vile remarks in our direction. Others weren’t that lucky. The Daily Caller reports that an elderly woman was pushed down the stairs during the occupiers’ stampede into the convention center. Not one protester stopped to help her, even as she lay in pain from severe injuries to her wrists, ankles, and legs.

Despite claiming to represent the 99%, Occupy Wall Street managed to cost at least 91 people their jobs: Milk Street Cafe, FiDi eatery that lost business due to Occupy Wall Street barricades, to close for good

During a time when most city governments have having a very difficult time financially, the Occupy movment jacked up the costs. It cost Oakland CA about $2.4 million, LA is looking at $2.3 million, with some more big bills coming in shortly. Many other cities are in a similar position.

A number of "Occupy" site around the world was hit by revelations that most of the tents are empty at night. (Which of course generated attempts from fellow travelers in the media (AKA the Guardian) to try to mislead and obfuscate the issue.)

There is little new going on with the Occupy movement - care to guess why?

Ex-ACORN operatives playing role in 'Occupy Wall Street' movement

The former New York office for ACORN, the disbanded community activist group, is playing a key role in the self-proclaimed "leaderless" "Occupy Wall Street" movement, organizing "guerrilla" protest events and hiring door-to-door canvassers to collect money under the banner of various causes while spending it on protest-related activities.

Sources told FOXNews.com that the former director of New York ACORN, Jon Kest, and his top aides are now busy working at protest events for New York Communities for Change (NYCC). That organization was created in late 2009 when some ACORN offices disbanded and reorganized under new names after undercover video exposes prompted Congress to cut off federal funds.

NYCC's connection to ACORN is not a tenuous one. It works from the former ACORN offices in Brooklyn, uses old ACORN office stationery, employs much of the old ACORN staff and, according to several sources, engages in some of the old organization's controversial techniques to raise money, interest and awareness for the protests.

Sources said NYCC has hired about 100 former ACORN-affiliated staff members from other cities -- paying some of them $100 a day -- to attend and support "Occupy Wall Street." Dozens of New York homeless people recruited from shelters are also being paid to support the protests, at the rate of $10 an hour, the sources said.

Sources said cash donations collected by NYCC on behalf of some unions and various causes are being pooled and spent on "Occupy Wall Street." The money is used to buy supplies, pay staff and cover travel expenses for the ex-ACORN members brought to New York for the protests.

Killing the mayor and city council isn't necessarily terrorism. It could be outright rebellion. Not all violent action is terrorism.

You apparently missed the point of the discussion, and in essence I think you'll agree with me. The GP post was trying to blur the distinction between civil disobedience and terrorism, which is a common bit of rhetorical foolishness and fuzzy thinking on Slashdot. I think you'll agree that outright rebellion isn't civil disobedience either. Murdering a mayor and city council might be a horrific crime, an act of terrorism, an act of rebellion, it might even be an accident of war, but it certainly isn't civil disobedience as understood in the United States.

The militant atheist Communists of Russia and China actively suppressed religion through arrest, imprisonment, seizure of church property, and other measures*, and along the way managed kill around 100,000,000 people (far more than actual terrorists), set off arms races and wars around the world, and threaten to return again in many parts of the world. Maybe we can start off by banning them.

Another troubling development: [The Islamist-Leftist] Allied Menace

*Such as the League of Militant Atheists

To defeat terrorism, we /must/ defeat all forms of communication at all costs.

Not at all. Twitter is a form of mass media, like radio, TV, or newspapers. Denying specific terrorist groups the continued ability to leverage mass media is a reasonable strategy, and doesn't require destroying the entire infrastructure. Twitter as 100,000,000 users. If you take away the 5 or so identified terrorist group accounts, the other 999,999,995 users will continue tweeting away quite happily.

People use infrastructure. Terrorists are people. Therefore terrorists use infrastructure. Therefore we must destroy infrastructure.
  You gotta love that kind of reasoning.

As of October, Twitter had 100,000,000 active users. Denying something like 5 accounts to continue using Twitter means that the other 999,999,995 users are still using Twitter, and none of Twitter's servers have been effected. That doesn't really constitute "destroying infrastructure". You've gone way off the tracks here with your "reasoning".

As I recall, the US didn't allow the Imperial Japanese or Nazi Germans to directly transmit from American radio stations in WW2. Did that constitute destroying the American radio infrastructure too?

Yes Twitter is and can be used for protest and civil disobedience ^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C Terrorism.

Civil disobedience is getting arrested for refusing to leave the Mayor's office.
Terrorism is killing the mayor and city council.

Civil disobedience is trespassing on corporate property.
Terrorism is blowing up the house of the CEO, killing her and her family.

Civil disobedience is guerilla theater that gets you arrested for blocking traffic.
Terrorism is flying a plane into the World Trade Center, or a truck bomb at the mall.

Anyone more gifted than the mentally impaired shouldn't be confused about the difference between civil disobedience and terrorism. If what you are doing is resulting in large numbers of other people dying, it isn't likely to be civil disobedience.

Anything that yields a crop of puns this good must surely be fabricated.

I'm not sure that I fully take your meaning. Are you suggesting that they need to spin up manufacturing? Or are you trying to gin up a controversy because you think this yarn about cotton transistors is made up out of whole cloth? If it really works, there could be enormous potential in high-speed communications and backplanes, interfacing to fibre, and switching fabrics, for example. This could be an interesting investment opportunity. If it takes off, they'll need some good marketing, and a spokesman. I think that guy from the Matrix would be perfect! What was his name..... Agent Smith.... Hugo something?

foldingclothes@home*

*With apologies

Over the years I've spoken with many electrical engineers and software engineers, and heard much technical lore, but a cotton transistor? That is a yarn worthy of a prize.

There is no such thing as 'child porn sites' that take any payment.

Really?

Feds: 100 Arrested in Child Porn Bust

One hundred people have been arrested as part of an undercover sting investigation into the largest known commercial child pornography business ever uncovered, U.S. government officials said today.

The two-year investigation began with Landslide Productions Inc., a Fort Worth, Texas, company owned by Thomas and Janice Reedy. Authorities said the company was at the center of an international child pornography business that distributed lewd pictures of children having sex to subscribers over the Internet. . . . .

Landslide grossed as much as $1.4 million in one month alone, the profits coming from monthly fees viewers paid to access child pornography Web sites, authorities said. Called Operation Avalanche, the undercover operation was based on intelligence developed from the Landslide investigation and encompassed 30 federally funded task forces formed to combat Internet crimes against children.

"During an Operation Avalanche search, we found a collection of videotapes produced by a suspect depicting the sexual abuse of several young girls. One of the girls was only 4 years old," said Chief Postal Inspector Kenneth C. Weaver.

The Reedys were convicted last year on charges that included sexual exploitation of minors and distribution of child pornography. A federal judge on Monday sentenced Thomas Reedy, 37, to life in prison and his 32-year-old wife, Janice, to 14 years in prison. . . . .

OMG! OMG! Think of the children

Maybe it's better if you, specifically, didn't. I'm not sure the outcome would be good for anybody.

Pedophiles should be seeking help instead of seeking children or pictures of children.

Communism killed around 100,000,000 people in the last century.

The Black Book of Communism

The Black Book of Communism (Translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer) (Review) / (book review)
Author: Daniel J. Mahoney

The Black Book of Communism is one of those rare books that really matters. It is the first systematic and comparative analysis of the "crimes, terror and repression" that accompanied Communism everywhere and that seemed to define its "genetic code." The book's centerpiece is a relentlessly documented narrative of political violence and repression in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, drawing on extensive archival materials made available to researchers since the collapse of Communist rule in 1991. But The Black Book also contains absorbing accounts of Communist repression in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Third World. . . . .

The chapters on the Soviet Union and China are as powerful as they are in large part because their authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, avoid excessive polemics and allow the evidence to simply speak for itself. If anything, Werth is excessively conservative in his estimates, drawing almost exclusively from not always reliable "official" party and state archival materials to verify politically--inspired deaths and incarcerations in the Soviet Union. Despite the limits of this method, Werth concludes that the Bolshevik regime was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of 20 million people between 1918 and 1956, and for the imprisonment in camps of millions more. He demolishes the notion of a good Lenin and a bad Stalin by showing that terror defined the Soviet regime from its inception. And he concludes that there is no basis for the claim that the terror of the 1930s was driven by overzealous Party and police officials acting independently of orders.

Likewise, Margolin's chapter on China shows that the crimes of Maoism are rooted in ideological hubris and a denial of the humanity of political or class "enemies." Margolin demonstrates that Mao committed crimes unprecedented in Chinese history, and damaged the nation in everything from economics to ethics. The devastating consequences of Mao's rule: 65 million lost lives. Perhaps the deepest reason The Black Book has sparked controversy is that it argues Communism is as intrinsically perverse as Nazism. Editor Stephane Courtois argues that Communist crimes, like Nazi ones, partake of the desire to eliminate groups of people on the basis of their origins, not because of any individual culpability or responsibility. He denies that Communism's crimes have any right to be excused or qualified because they were committed in the name of egalitarian principles. Courtois shows that Communism is an exterminationist ideology which selects its enemies on the basis of class...

The biggest right-wing propaganda coup of the last twenty years has been convincing people like you that anyone to the left of the Republican Party wants a communist overthrow of the United States. It's just... not true. At all. In any way.

"Occupy Chicago" Protesters CHEER the Communists (Video)

Nazis and Communists Throw Their Support Behind Occupy Wall Street Movements (Updated)

Occupy L.A. Speaker: Violence will be Necessary to Achieve Our Goals

Just because the truth stinks doesn't mean it's bullshit.

"Occupy Chicago" Protesters CHEER the Communists (Video)

Nazis and Communists Throw Their Support Behind Occupy Wall Street Movements (Updated)

Occupy L.A. Speaker: Violence will be Necessary to Achieve Our Goals

"Occupy Wall Street" is a fringe movement spouting tired, old, leftist dogma and hate. The only thing it has in common with the "Arab Spring" is that there are threads of anti-Semitism running through both.

Occupy Wall Street Goes Global

Sunday Reflection: Protestors should try occupying reality for real change

Right now, idealistic young Americans are gathered together to fight injustice and build a better world.
  Sure, they're a little dirty, and maybe some of their language is a bit rough, but they've left behind family and friends, as well as the creature comforts the rest of us take for granted, to make a stand for what they believe in.

It's just too bad that today the mainstream media is focusing on the spoiled, incoherent clowns of Occupy Wall Street and ignoring our young fighting men and women.

The mainstream media's cameras can't get enough of these pierced protesters, with their crudely written signs proclaiming their unfocused discontent and general anger at society's selfishness in failing to satisfy their every want and desire.

Of course, those cameras discreetly turn away when the placards demanding socialist revolution and blaming the Jews come out. The protesters' function is to demonstrate inchoate outrage simply by being there. When they start talking, they start alienating the normals.

These are Potemkin protesters, community organized by government worker unions to allow liberal Democrats a way to triangulate to the center next year. Only the rebel media outfits will actually stick a mic in the protesters' dirty faces and let them talk.

What comes out is a confused hash of gripes about their banks, complaints about their student loans, and whining about the quality of their jobs.

Tragically, graduates of Ivy League universities brandishing master's degrees in minority women's studies are not getting jobs that pay enough to service their $150,000 student loans. Who could have seen that coming?

PICKET: Occupy Wall Street protesters post manifesto of 'demands'

Nazis and Communists Throw Their Support Behind Occupy Wall Street Movements (Updated)

Occupy L.A. Speaker: Violence will be Necessary to Achieve Our Goals

Video: Occupy Portland Protesters Sing “F*ck the USA”

THOUSANDS Of Obama-Endorsed “Occupy Chicago” Protesters CHEER the Communists (Video)

Wall Street: Occupied by Anti-Semites?

Political party paying Occupy Wall Street protesters?

More Anti-Semitism at Occupy Los Angeles

Coast Guard member spit on near Occupy Boston tents

‘Occupy’ protesters branch out

if Occupy Wall Street was a genuine grassroots movement genuinely outraged by the idea that banksters own the government, then they would be marching on the Obama White House.

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Government is the biggest job killer