Linguistically speaking, I think this concept is paradoxical. The government can't "rise up" as it's already "over" The People. Since the government is in power, as long as they don't violate their own rules, whatever they do is, by definition, legal...which conveniently includes changing their own rules.

Your example is one cop pepper-spraying somebody for a bad reason? You can't "punish The Government" for that...find who's responsible for telling him to do whatever and punish *that* person, or else just punish the cop if it was his own initiative. Obviously the system is stacked to prevent that from happening, unless They decide to throw somebody to the wolves, though.

Not that I'm disagreeing with your underlying emotion. Those in power abusing said power is always a problem.

In Australia, a no-confidence motion is called if the legislature can't pass the budget. I can't tell how much this action is voluntary, though...Commonwealth countries and "can they or do they have to" issues seem to go hand-in-hand, e.g. whether the king/queen can actually veto a bill in the UK.

That would've come in handy during that budget ceiling crap we were going through. They said just over 50% of those polled at one point were in favor of firing the entire government, which I can't much fault.

Sounds like that would be a good time for me to finally buy my tactical nuke. Y'know, for defence. Apparently it won't require any validation so all I'd need is a sufficiently large bucket of cash, right?

Yet.

Are you really complaining that you can't be conscripted and forced to get shot and killed for your country against your will?

Why don't we trade--you take my male right to be conscripted and I'll take your female right not to be.

1. Declare that only militias can bear arms.
2. Outlaw/strictly regulate militias. (Remember that article where Australian fliers had to declare illegal porn or something in the airport?)
3. There is no step 3.
4. Profit!!

Does TrueCrypt use SSL?

Yeah, because it's so easy for the public to audit closed-source software.

That's like saying "there's nothing wrong with this sports car besides somebody smearing shit all over it." 90% of Windows' value is the UI. (The other 10% is being trapped on the platform.)

If they had a free and clear referendum with no intimidation and *actually* 100% voter turnout, I'd abide by their decision. The anti-Russian people also boycotted the vote somewhat from what I heard...which makes all this shadow-casting rather silly, as you said, if they were doing so voluntarily.

Yeah, it was a really bad idea to begin with IMO. But now everybody's angry so it doesn't seem fixable anymore.

For maximum screwage, they should continue releasing badly-named X-Boxen until it's impossible to refer to the original one at all using English :D

X-Box
X-Box 360
X-Box One
X-Box Classic
X-Box Original
X-Box First
X-Box Old (I'd love to see that ad campaign)

If we accept that the referendum is legitimate, then your points all more or less make sense. I, however, do not. You can't have a fair vote when one of the sides has soldiers at the voting area.

And your software quite possibly won't work anymore.

...oh right, this is OS X we're talking about. They don't believe in 3rd party software, do they?

And that's what percentage of Mint upgrades? There's going to be a fuckton of duplicates in that list, too.

Look, I can pull grossly inaccurate numbers out of my ass, too! Here's a few: 47 19 297 4,359,291 -945,651