Second, plan on having something you can offer to employers besides the threat of a revolution or strike; good workers can find good jobs.

Anything you can do can be taught to someone else willing to work for less.

Have you so soon forgotten Disney's attempt to replace their techs?
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-disney-technology-h1b-20150617-story.html

Seems that the only thing that stopped that was the publicity it got once the techs started complaining.

You are preaching to a crowd that think "loose" and "lose" are the same word. Just be happy it has two "f"s in it and ends in "t".

Lat every felawe telle his tale aboute. - G. Chaucer

It was the same guy that put an open drink can down on a large live UPS after someone let him into the server room so it's possible that stupidity has killed him by now.
Turns out the "new" phone system is a ten year old model - so telnet in with no password to change the settings and he wanted us to unblock and port forward telnet to the thing. I wonder if he convinced someone else in another place and who is getting free calls out of diverting through hacked phone systems?

So yes, these sort of people are around trying to convince anyone who will listen to punch huge holes through security to make it easier for them to support their crap devices. See the Target hack via an alarm system as an example.

All of the above was a reason to us a *nix workstation instead of a toy like Win98. Massive amounts of PR spending changed that.

People also forget that such things happen with more than just Bitcoins. I wonder how much was lost when "The Donald" had his crash, and then somehow lept back up as rich as before as if he had just moved other people's money into a secret account.
There are a lot of such crooks about.

In bitcoin it is deliberately built into the system (so that the early adopters at the top of the pyramid can clean up if enough suckers sign up).
If you have another example *in practice* please supply it.

Given the mass incompetence of how Gox was run

If people didn't mangle the name there should be no surprise - it's "MT GOX" as in "Magic The Gathering Online eXchange" - a card trading site for fucks sake people.
Typos like the one in the summary ("mount" Gox) and people referring to it as Gox without knowing why are part of the confusion that led to a reputation the site did not deserve. Hobby level bitcoin stuff behaved as expected. "Mass incompetence" in only perceived by people that thought it was a bank or some other thing it is not. It's like accusing a terrier for being incompetent because it can't do a drum solo.

Spot on. I'll bet in both cases there are plenty of stupid shortcuts that would induce facepalms or "I told you so" on a lot of the readers here.
Last year I had one idiot ask to put the phone system he was sometimes called out to work on onto the internet with telnet access - with no password! Another wanted direct RDP access to a machine over the internet. Neither of course seemed to have heard of a VPN or gave a shit about security - people who actually do what these idiots say are probably going to get burnt within days with the number of bots out there scanning for stuff.

Even if that wasn't the case, they're arguing AGAINST being a "common carrier".

Won't this make them responsible for any of the crap (death threats, libel, etc) that they distribute as part of them being an "information service"?

Since there was nothing along those lines in the credits, and given the lack of respect for the law of the "creator", that is very unlikely. The funny thing (finally) is when it ended it was replaced with the real thing.

I've had similar arguments with telco people. If the DIGITAL part of the system is not dropping (or delaying) packets then there is no problem with the DIGITAL part of the system.

Swapping cables that are not causing dropped/delayed packets for other cables that won't drop/delay packets is useless.

And testing the digital portion is very easy.

If you think you hear a difference, it is probably your imagination or the analog portion on either end.

Letterman is essentially the same as any other talk show. The distinctive feature was Letterman himself.

The Vizard show slavishly copied his mannerisms (eg. walking around with a cup at that start of the show) and the timing of the segments. It was all very strange until I saw an episode of Letterman. Of course someone who ended up being forbidden for running a company for ten years after being caught at insider trading is exactly to sort of person that doesn't care about copying someone else's show that has worked elsewhere. Few people in Australia had seen Letterman back then.
Top Gear however has a wider international reach than most things, it's broadcast just about everywhere on the planet.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone who lives outside the UK actually understand British politics?

Yes. His name is Rupert Murdoch :(

Where I am we had "pornographic rock music". One of the records taken by the police had a track called "doing the shag", which was an instrumental. Meanwhile some corrupt police were deep into a prostitution racket and the state police commissioner was playing out the "street value" drug joke in reality - selling the evidence! He went to jail as did several members of the government at the time.
Be careful when someone plays the morality card and see if you can look behind the curtain to see what they are trying to distract you from.

Do you really think giving your credit card information to a pornography website operator

Whether you like the situation or not you've somehow managed to deny what happened about twenty years ago and led to the widespread use of credit cards on the net that we have today. Ironically the problem to be solved back then was for the pornographers to trust their customers and not the other way around.
Do you really think giving your credit card information to kids on minimum wage is a good idea? Somehow retail operates that way without a lot of fraud despite plenty of people that could do with the money, yet they don't steal it from you.