A moderate opinion on slashdot? How dare you!

You are correct on all points about the Tea Party being co-opted by politicians and the OWS movement also summarily moving in the same direction except it is being subverted by the socialist agenda. I personally believe that this is in no small part due to the 24 hour news cycle pulling some half literate socialist off the street and giving them a bit of barely comprehensible air time. The same thing could be found when the Tea Party movement started, the media grabbed one of the tricorne wearing, misspelled sign waving, isolationists stuck them up in front of the camera and said "Well here's what the Tea Party is." Obviously there are problems on all sides, however the majority of Americans straddle the fence on many many issues despite what the media and the politicians would like you to believe.

There really is no fix all to the situation, however I feel that term limits to prevent professional politicians, and hard caps on campaign spending would be a step in the right direction. It was probably a Slashdot commentator who said it best (so I'm going to rip them off) "Did you ever stop to wonder why someone would spend 80 million dollars to be elected to a 180 thousand dollar a year job? Obviously there is something else going on behind the scenes."

Granted everyone makes those types of comments however the problem with this situation is that you have an official from an agency established to serve the tax payers deriding one of their constituents to a journalist on record.

There is such a thing as discretion and this DA just stick his foot in his mouth because this is going to be thrown back at him. Hopefully there will be consequences when the next elections come around and constituents finally decide that they cannot have their rights further eroded.

I travel a lot and I read a lot so I've also been eyeing an ereader for quite some time. Until recently I've pretty much refused to buy one because I send paperbacks back and forth with my father after one of us gets done with the book and the idea of DRM offends me on pretty much every level. I also read quite a bit of sci-fi, specifically from the publisher Baen, and was unable to find any of that specific publishers books on Amazon or BN. After some searching I found that Baen does offer Ebooks for a couple of dollars less on older releases than a paperback and about half the price on new releases (hardcover only at the moment) through their own webstore without any DRM restrictions. As a result I am buying an ereader when I get home and will be directly supporting a publisher who sees that DRM is an awful idea, and has the advantage of not supporting a middleman like Amazon or BN.

I hope more Slashdotters will support publishers like Baen on their endeavor if only to show that DRM is not needed.

Steve Jobs was stopped with those items because he was passing through a public terminal to get to his aircraft. If he had boarded through a private gate onto the flight line, which many airports have, he would not have been subject to that scrutiny. It would be similar to boarding a small two seat aircraft at any grass strip or private FBO which are not subject to any security oversight.