Obviously this isnt suffrage or civil rights, but it's an important piece of information when building a socioeconomic model of how American capitalism functions. These are the real "rational" actors in the market and we need all this information. Letting lawsuits like this settle behind closed doors for relatively small amounts of money and heavily redacted documents only serves to further obscure the truth. It doesn't take millions marching on Washington to for the truth to have value. Rather, without the truth, who will ever protest?

I understand where you are coming from but I think your line of thought here does the discussion a disservice. It's never futile to work for informing the public even just a little bit more. But it's time to stop "expecting" these lawsuits to produce crappy results -- it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

As I mentioned in my OP: one of the class advocates for the plaintiff did not accept the settlement that the lawyers on both sides had worked out. And instead of giving in to fatalism that "this is just the way these lawsuits go", he instead wrote a letter to Lucy Koh, the judge, asking her to throw out the settlement. And now she has done just that!

This quote is cheesy but good:

(Incidentally I can't imagine you actually think Snowden had no lasting effect on the world).

I don't think apathy needs an advocate. There really is no sense in loudly proclaiming defeatism. Sure, some people don't care, but the defendants would not have worked so hard to keep documents sealed if *nobody* cared. This case is being widely covered by the media:

Reuters: http://uk.reuters.com/article/...
Time: http://time.com/42322/steve-jo...
Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ee7535...

And over 186 more articles just from the past few days

So I don't know about what you said right there. I don't believe that "no one cares".

/there is always some subset of people who claim no one cares about any given news story.

You dont need to wonder, you need to read:

http://pando.com/2014/03/22/re...

http://pando.com/2014/01/23/th...

Some estimates put it as high as $9 billion.

This wasn't just about cold calling. The chilling effects were far more reaching. It's just that the documented evidence only referred specifically to cold calling, so that is what can be proved. In reality this was much more of a "gentleman's agreement" and it had the effect of driving down wages at dozens of large companies possibly affecting ~1 million workers. If you think it stopped with just poaching and had no other effect, you are being naive. Google actually had to raise some salaries due to Facebook not participating.

Here are just some of the companies involved:
  Google
  Apple, Inc
  Comcast Corporation
  DoubleClick
  Genentech
  IBM Corporation (Junior hires okay—also applies to subsidiaries)
  Illumita
  Intel Corporation
  Intuit
  Microsoft
  Oglivy
  WPP
  AOL, Inc.
  Ask.com
  Clear Channel Communications, Inc.
  Dell, Inc.
  Earthlink, Inc
  Virgin Media, Inc. (Formerly NTL, Inc.)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2136...

http://pando.com/tag/techtopus...

Yeah, Tea Party is too specific to an existing dogma. But, there are quite a few liberals who skew closer to Noam Chomsky's brand. I think a number of liberals take anti-establishment seriously and believe that libertarianism has some insightful observations on how things work ( e.g. regulatory capture). But a number of liberals have different solutions. Very different from Chomsky's "Anarchist Social Libertarianism" (or whatever he calls it). And especially different from the pro big business of "libertarian" politicians.

There is room to agree on populism.
There is room to agree on that things are broken.
There is room to agree things need to change.

But what we need is to stop fighting on abstract idealistic polarized solutions.

It's time to start thinking beyond these extreme dogmatic and impractical abstract ideas of how to run things. We dont want oppressive big brother government, and we dont want out-of-control, laissez-faire, libertarian capitalism.

The thing we really need here is public justice. If the world does not know how these ultra rich are conspiring against them, then there is no justice. They need to unseal all of the evidence, no exceptions.

Also I think it's important to note one of the plaintiffs (Michael Devine) who pushed the judge into ruling against this, the lawyers wanted to walk away with their check.

From a May 2014 CNET article

Apparently Google agrees with you as well as it seems they changed the priority to Critical in the past few hours.

Microsoft: Pawn takes Pawn
Motorola: Hey that's illegal
Apple: it's called en passant...
Oracle: You sunk my battleship!

Not surprised, but did they aid in obtaining them? I got the impression they aided in publishing, but that Manning obtained them all on his own.

When all the major networks ban a TV product I would think an anti-competitive FTC investigation should be something worth looking into. Basically they banned a browser with a specific user agent string based on the company that provides the device. Can you imagine if all the networks decided to ban Dell computers but not HP?

Your hubris is epic. They haven't decided anything yet. You're basically saying that FCC setting out regulations (which are toothless) may possibly be bad in the future. So tell us, oh great predictor of future bad regulations, what's going to happen? I don't suppose you actually have the ability to lay out specifics of what you're even talking about, do you?

I wish I could tell you what I think you've actually earned the right to but I'm going to leave that part out for civility's sake.

What the current congress feels about the matter is a bit irrelevant since the powers the FCC have are derived from the Telecommunications act of 1996. The Federal Court said they didn't have the legal framework to regulate under Title I. However, seeing as they do have the legal framework to regulate telecommunications under title II, and other titles, it's still possible they do from a legal sense if they were to reclassify.

Basically the court didn't simply say "u dunt haz authority on internets." Rather, it was a legal technicality that was the inevitable result of reclassifying telcos and cable internet under title I as information services so as to "deregulate" them. This actually helped strengthen the monopolies of the telcos to be on par with cable monopolies.

And the court was wrong to decide the way it did. Did you know that Comcast had previously gotten it's way out of a class action lawsuit from its users by saying the FCC did have the authority? Then only to turn around and argue in that case the FCC didn't have the authority?

Regardless, if you honestly think it's unreasonable for the regulatory body for telcos and cable companies should not regulate internet services (which they bundle with video and phone) from those same companies, then I don't know what to tell you.

Of course it matters what representatives and courts say and do, but I feel the majority of them as so far in the wrong as to be mind boggling. This is clearly what the FCC was created for. You can argue that regulation isn't needed, and that's a valid opinion, but to say that the FCC has no business regulating communications services because of imprecise legal language is just sad diversionary bs.

I'm also an Android developer and I don't share those concerns. There have been some frustrations, yes, but there are usually decent workarounds for a lot of things. As an example: Bluetooth support wasn't really solid until 2.0, yet there are excellent backport open-source libraries that make it easy to provide that support to 1.5 and 1.6 devices.

I completely disagree about reflection as well. Using reflection you can degrade gracefully for platforms that dont support what you're doing. Reflection is not ugly at all, it actually quite an elegant deign pattern imho.

If you're ending up with 6 layouts for each screen you're doing something wrong and perhaps overreaching in your support for older devices or your layout is overly complicated. It's unreasonable to think the latest Mass Effect game would run on a tiny 320x240 screen. And while that's hyperbole, yes, the point is made.

Just to be clear though, I don't find you concerns invalid, However I don't think this is unique to Android.

Granted there is still much work Google and the manufacturers could do to streamline all of this. But any software development platform, any OS, has some level of variation for what is supported. OSX, Linux, iOS, WebOS, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Symbian, HTML5/JS/CSS, Blackberry OS. Really the only platforms that don't, are the video game consoles. But now even that's starting to happen there too with external storage and peripherals.

Yes why in the world would the Federal Communications Commission, that normally regulates Telcos and Cable companies, think it has authority to regulate a new communication and information service they provide over the same wires and spectrum with some of the same types of content as cable and telephones.

Golly gee, that's just crazy talk!

/s

Your sir are rude, and your circular logic is flawed. You don't want regulation and the FCC decided to let the market decide -- and you call that a failure, blaming people who are pro regulation? Seriously, what's wrong with you?

How is toothless regulation a problem for the anti-regulation crowd? Or were you just pining for a chance to call someone a statist?

Most of those who are pro Net Neutrality wanted real regulation, not toothless fluff to cater to the anti-regulation, pro-business crowd. If anything it's your pocliy positions that got us this. Toothless regulation is pretty much the same as no regulation in my mind.