This is why democracy without incredibly limited government is always a bad thing because the majority can fuck with the minority in any way they wish without the minority being able to do anything about it, despite there being no harm for the majority if the minority is allowed to do what they wish.

So what if a minority (or even a majority) wishes to dictate how everyone (including themselves) should live, in certain areas? Then surely this incredibly limited government is simply a mechanism for ensuring your wishes trump their wishes, partially depriving them of their ability to affect the politics that are supposed to represent them, even if your wishes happened to be in minority?

I don't know; it seems vaguely hypocritical to demand that an incredibly small government be permanently and inflexibly instated in a democracy, when incredibly small governments could well not be wanted. It just sounds, ironically enough, like yet another mechanism for majority consensus to oppress minority politics.

I, personally, would never hold up traffic (unless unavoidable) unless I'm doing the speed limit, or thereabouts. If they want to go faster than the speed limit, at the expense of the safety of myself and everyone else around them, they can wait until a lane opens up, at which point I will not hold them up any further. If they choose to tailgate in order to express this wish, I have been known to slowly lose speed, until they get the message and back off.

I'm entitled to at least two seconds behind me. If I don't get it, I may just slow down until the gap becomes two seconds.

Naturally. All you need to eliminate accidents is to turn off the handbrake, and put a brick on the accelerator.

and the govt...anyone that would like to see/monitor your driving habits.

When I read the title for this story, I hadn't even parsed it completely when I noticed that the words "Cameras" and "Mandatory" appeared in the sentence. I knew, from that moment, that somebody would somehow twist this into a privacy issue, possibly with a nice government conspiracy thrown in, even if it made absolutely no sense.

My false equivalences? My whining? What whining? What false equivalences? I was only working within the analogy constructed by you yourself, eventually coming to the conclusion that the analogy was flawed (that is, any equivalences that were formed were erroneous).

Your inability to process the factual information available around you has me laughing at your attempts to preach to me. I have similarly found that Slashdotters often have too much factual information available to them. They should start with an amount they can handle first. Perhaps you should start by reading the comments you reply to? If you're smart, it should save you some teeth marks in your foot. If you're not (and I have seen from this, and previous evidence, that you are not), it should save some bullet holes in your foot.

Have a nice life, idiot. Remember, you can't learn anything in life by assuming implicitly that you're right all the time.

As long as we're doing analogies with physical objects, it seems to me more like placing your wedding ring on a park bench when nobody is looking, leaving it there for a few weeks, and complaining when it's stolen.

Unlike with the pawnbroker, it's still illegal the activity, but it's hardly surprising that it occurred in the first place.

Which nation is performing a massive denial of service attack to censor the net from information it finds undesirable?

I assume you mean the US, right? I must have missed the news which proves the Jester was just covering for the US government.

Remember: the first sign of a conspiracy nutjob is the rejection of all evidence to the contrary.

The only way you can defend this is if you are a short sighted fool who thinks unlimited surveillance by the Government is the only way to stop the terrorists taking your freedoms

The only way you could jump to this conclusion is if you were some inbred hillbilly hick. What? Why should my statements have to make sense if yours don't?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

We do. How do you think we managed to come across this information in the first place?

Actually that quote is misplaced here. Just because they're watching us, doesn't mean we're not watching them. In fact, the very reason we have this information is because they handed it over in compliance with the FOI act.

Welcome to /. groupthink. Please restrict your scepticism to certain approved topics. Questioning the groupthink position on other topics will be treated swiftly and harshly.

My first reaction was that anyone who downloaded from the files that they provided would not be guilty of copyright infringement, but now that I think about it, I'm not so sure. I mean, they placed the files there in secret, and on all their products have forbidden this type of behaviour. I don't see that this would automatically be construed as permission to download their works. Even if you knew for a fact that the source you were downloading from was EMI, they never actually told you that you were allowed to download from them.

Ahh, bringing politics into this discussion, and implying governments and corporations should have the same right to privacy as real people (not that legal definition BS with corporate personhood).

Using the same system of logic by which you derived this "fact", I can similarly derive the "fact" that you want to destroy all government and authority, and live in complete anarchy, where you can live greedily and without responsibility.

Ahh, partisan politics; there's no substitute for intelligent and rational thought that's more socially accepted.

I'm seriously curious...

So you claim, but the rest of your post seems to suggest otherwise. When you say, "How do you function in life spending your time reading every last bit of every last detail of every last "contract" you enter into?", you seem to stress it as though it's an absurd activity, and you infer from his reading of a single contract that either he engages in this behaviour to extreme extents, or that he "has a bone to pick with AT&T" (which is a false dichotomy, by the way). Since the former is stressed to be absurd, we are led to believe that he has a bone to pick with AT&T.

Now, if you have "a bone to pick" with someone, there's a mild implication there that it's as much your problem as the other person's fault; that it's your own peculiar and personal bugbears that are influencing your decision, not that there was any serious wrongdoing by the other party. On top of this, you also appear to reject the any negative effects of the contract clause that's causing the OP trouble, which further cements this impression.

Either way, the possible conclusion that the OP has a bone to pick with AT&T is painted both as inevitable and as bad. Perhaps this was not your intention, but you will excuse me if I hesitate to believe that your post is a search for answers, rather than merely a rant.

Yes, but since this particular cop only fights crime by making available files about the perpetrators on his desk, then not having old files presently on his desk is the same as not presently fighting those particular criminals.

Come to think of it, I think this analogy doesn't really capture all the nuances of this issue.

I can only imagine China's delight with each new release from WikiLeaks.

Ha! They may be delighting now, but wait until tomorrow! I hear that wikileaks is publishing a classified document by an american diplomat, in which he calls all of china's leadership "poopy-pants". That'll show 'em!