Am I the only one that is starting to think that everything wrong with society is caused by lawyers and their owners?

(Congress is 51% lawyers.)

The traitor's name is "Honorable" Robert J. Bryan.

I'll allow this.

Then why didn't they say something?

Because greedy scumbag (lawyer)s.

The longer and harder I look at (particularly American) society, the more I think that a bunch of paper tiger (lawyers) are the front line that corrupt society for their benefit, and the benefit of their plutocrat owners. Maybe this isn't new, but it needs to end. And the only thing I think has any power to end it are brilliant guys like Snowden coupled with the Internet which circumvents the plutarchy's media oligopolies.

Don't let lawyers make up new ways for their masters to assert ownership over unownable things.

Intellectual Property is a farce indistinguishable from imaginary property. We didn't let any other kids get away with that bullshit when we were kids, why would we let them now?

If a tech company starts inventing ways to "protect" the rights of rich assholes, stop buying their stuff until the company goes the fuck under and is replaced by some honest pirates.

The founding fathers intended that the freedoms assigned by the Bill of Rights not be superseded by technology, bureaucracy, plutarchy, or dictatorship.

They violated the bill of rights with their toys. They should be taken away, and the children who did it punished.

Anyone can transfer Bitcoins anywhere for free and that could put a dent in some banking transaction processing fees.

In other words, it's a lot more efficient and cuts out the now unnecessary plethora of middlemen.

Welcome to the future!

I'd would short sell stocks in banks & credit card processors if you're dumb enough to still have any. It may not be bitcoin, but it will be a digital distributed currency that kills the banks.

If it weren't for the continuous and ongoing bailouts they would have already collapsed and they are going to do so.

When I was 15 or so I didn't have a PC, so I programmed my TI-85. Then after loading some assembler games onto it that disabled its screensaver and breaking it, I got a TI-86. I wrote a two-player tic-tac-toe game (no computer player), a Chemistry program, a base-10 to binary converter that supported arbitrary length numbers (built in converter was way faster but overflowed on I think 16-bit numbers), oh and a Physics program.

I even sold a copy of the Chemistry program in High School. So technically I was a professional programmer (got paid for doing it, right?) by 17.

I'm now have a BS in Computer Science and I've been a programmer ~8 years specializing most recently in Java.

All of this could have been avoided if we changed out monetary system to one that doesn't rely on these parasitic banks not only controlling the quantity of currency available, but profiting on it through the age old practice of usury. All of our money is based on debt which directly profits the banks. Sovereign countries should control their currencies, not a private industry with a huge conflict of interest. Money should be created by spending it into existence to pay for public goods, services, and infrastructure, not created as debt owed to banks who then collect interest on it. The whole system is rigged in their favor and history has shown time and time again that they will manipulate entire countries' economies simply to increase their own personal profits. The fact that we continue to tolerate this monetary system blows my mind. Right now, banks rule countries through their economies, which is monumentally fucked up.

One man's nonsense petition is another man's heartfelt position. This is the core reason for the freedom of speech. Not silencing dissenting voices - particularly minority dissenting voices - is crucial to maintaining democratic distance from fascism.

The USA is a plutocracy disguised as a constitutional republic sold to the proletariat as a democracy.

Copyright is 90% for the benefit of lawyers. Congress is 51% lawyers by volume. This is not a coincidence.

Let's not kid ourselves. They weren't after him for downloading articles. They were after him because of his work on demandprogress.org, rootstrikers and other political activism. As with the dubious accusations (not charges) against Assange, the charges over Schwartz' alleged crimes were trumped up to stop him from doing what he obviously considered important work: political activism challenging the status quo.

Which sounds great until you realize that the cost of living in the SF Bay area is significantly higher than most parts of the US except NYC.

Comparing salaries without accounting for cost of living is extremely misleading.

We also have the most of it. Though tanks and rifles are practically irrelevant. We live on a water planet. Therefore its the Navy this is of the most concern, and we have eight Nimitz class aircraft carriers complete with, I assume, long range fighters, not to mention drones, with presumably medium to long range missiles in addition to their support fleets.

One of those floating fortresses can easily subdue most countries entire military without the use of ground forces. Though there are really only a handful of countries that could mount significant resistance.