They are sticking for people that elected them. That's the entire point. It's just that ignorant people like you think that masses elected them.

In reality, their campaign donors elected them. Masses merely did what election campaigns paid by said donors told them to do.

No, he tells you one of the things that would indeed work.

Unfortunately, since most people instead follow the original advice, they get no results while remaining under the illusion that voting for incumbents from two main parties would bring some kind of a change.

I'll point at moderation numbers, at least five people apparently do give a fuck what I think.

Ball is in your court now. Who gives a fuck about your hyperbole?

Yes. It's easy to convince yourself that you did something, when in reality what you did was worse than doing nothing. You actually made yourself think that you tried to make a change, and as a result if nothing happens, you have a "well, at least I tried" excuse.

Which is why this is the reality:
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgil...

If you don't know what that is - that's the study of democratic impact of things like "desires of the masses" on actual legislative process. The study that concluded that US is de facto oligarchy, because when masses want something and capital wants something else, capital almost always gets what it wants.

And if you want to know why that is, all you need is to look in the mirror. "Just write your [legislative representative] (so he/she can ask for a bit more money in donations when he/she makes the opposite decision as to have a bit more to finance his/her re-election campaign)" is the solution that is worse than doing nothing.

At least doing nothing makes you feel guilty about it, and may eventually push you to act in ways that may actually bring about a change. What you are advocating is status quo. As a result, you're part of the problem.

And while "sawing people's heads off on youtube" is also a terrible solution, yours isn't that much better.

You'll have to explain in great detail why he, who made his white listing process extremely transparent and even allowed users to vote on it, he who kept his add-on fully open source and under permissive license that allows you to fork it. And he who unlike those who forked it, actually continues to work on developing the add-on, while allowing you to completely turn off all of monetization functions with a single check box on first page of options is somehow "can't be trusted now". If you are this paranoid, then how could you trust him in the past? Surely you had no way of knowing back then what his monetization scheme was, and it was far more likely to be something really insidious rather than benign "just uncheck this box once and you're good" that it is today.

So tell me. Why should I not trust him. Be specific, and try no to sink into the old "but turned the monetization options on by default when he implemented them (and I won't tell you that he actually warned you about it upon installation because that goes against the message I'm trying to deliver), that makes him completely untrustworthy" hyperbole. You'll also have to tell me who offers an alternative that is actually developing the add on. Whoever forked Adblock Edge is certainly not that person. It's still stuck in previous version of Adblock Plus apparently, because whoever forked it couldn't even be bothered to update his fork by copy pasting code from new version.

Adblock Edge is Adblock Plus without the checkbox on the first page of options menu to enable/disable acceptable ads.

It's literally the exactly same thing in all other aspects of it.

Regulate exchanges. You can do whatever you want with your cryptocurrency, but it's not worth the electricty needed to keep it alive until you can exchange it for hard currency. For example, most of the "we accept bitcoin" companies do not handle bit coin at all. Instead they simply outsource the payment to an exchange which delivers hard currency to the company at certain exchange rate when customer pays in bitcoins.

Exchanges need to interface with standard payment systems. As a result, they are vulnerable to government intervention.

You mean "your data is gone".

Might as well save the pain and just wipe the disk afterwards.

This is incorrect. Depth perception at significant ranges (i.e. driving) is based on parallax rather than stereoscopy.

Stereoscopy is for close range depth perception only.

Perhaps I was unclear on this point. I'm not naive enough to think that politicians that are visibly at the helm set the long term policies. They are a part of the "club" that does it, but far from being the only ones.

As far as "people in power" aspect goes, there is exactly one thing that people in power have feared throughout the ages. Masses. Because masses are the one thing that is capable of unseating them by throwing the entire country into chaos. That's why when French Revolution occurred, all surrounding countries sent armies to suppress it or helped armies that were sent to suppress it.

As a result, I think that leaders at the helm are certainly a part of the elite umbrella "club" that I call "leaders". They're just far from being the only ones. They are however the executors of the will of the club, and effectively its executive arm. Without their help, leading countries would become exceedingly difficult, if not an impossible task. As a result, influence over these people is by far the most important part of managing power.
And as a result, if we have to call certain people "leaders", as in people who actively lead, politicians in power are the ones that match the title. Now if you want to use the wider scope of "who sets the policy", then we certainly have to talk about a much bigger group of people.

I think this is the most missed part by the general public. There's too little focus on what is probably the biggest issue, politicians' ability to control intelligence bureaus.

Consider for a moment one of the best aspects of having functional dragnet surveillance in democratic society with need to get re-elected and at least partially functioning anti-corruption legislation. Dragnet surveillance means that you have the ability to unseat and discredit any politician at any time when you need to. You can't overuse this ability for obvious reasons, but you most certainly can influence all of them to support you to a significant extent. Even if they are actually against you.

As noted, you are indeed naive in your assumption that acceptability of ripping people off is universal in all cultures.

QED.

At this point, I think many are overlooking one important part of the whole dragnet surveillance.

They have compromising material on EVERYONE. The amount of surveillance they ensures it. That means it doesn't matter which politician gets into position of importance and power, because they have blackmail material on him/her. There's no such thing as a human being who's interested in power who doesn't have significant skeletons in his/her closet.

That's why it's pointless to point fingers at leaders at this point. They are part of the problem, but most definitely not the source of it, and haven't been for a while.

Except that at its best, Stasi had to employ massive amount of people and it still couldn't only keep an eye on about every seventh citizen and some key people abroad. That's it.

US already keeps an eye on every single one of its citizens, and most of the people around the globe, with additional more rigorous checks done against those it puts on various "watch lists".

Between the dragnet surveillance, extraordinary rendition, targeted killing campaigns, "advanced interrogation techniques" and highest incarceration rate in the world, Eastern Germans were like little inexperienced trainees in comparison to US when it comes to surveillance and control of its population.

The problem is that if you have something that government finds worth torturing over on your drive, you're boned regardless.

Very few people have the sufficient stress and pain tolerance to be able to not divulge the password to the files for extended period of torture by best professionals in the world.