The US won't reach full blown civil war in our lifetimes, I think this is clear. That does not mean the US government won't become an oppressive, authoritarian regime that crushes dissent and fucks over the people.

When it does come, oppression will be strongly targeted against the few people who are trying to organize resistance. That "resistance" will not be based on guns because a small group of politically motivated people trying to use guns to make their point are simply labelled terrorists and killed as soon as possible, via the overwhelming technological might of the state. Owning an assault rifle is pointless if your opponents have drones. So you'd have to start by trying to undermine the government in some other way.

At that point you're going to run straight into the other tools of oppression governments have. For instance, perhaps you will be labelled as a terrorist and excluded from the economy. Think it's not possible, that your friends and family wouldn't go along with it? Think again! The US Treasury thought that guy, a US citizen resident in the USA, was a terrorist (working with Hamas) - but couldn't actually prove it. And when he finally got a chance to defend himself in court, he was acquitted. It made no difference. The Treasury added him to the list of "specially designated nationals" and that made anyone who traded with him a sanctions violator, punishable with prison. Did his countrymen refuse to turn on their fellow citizen at the behest of an out of control government, as you suggest they would? Fuck no. Far from it.

If mass oppression of dissent against the US government ever happens inside the USA (as opposed to outside where it is oppressed all the time), it won't look like the National Guard taking on an army clean shaven all American heroes. That's a fantasy. It will look like it did in the DDR - a massive secret police, a surveillance state, people who try to organize resistance to the state finding themselves blacklisted, reported on, spied on and undermined via whatever means possible. And it will be their neighbours doing it.

The US is in trouble because of mindsets like yours - the belief, brainwashed into children from birth, that America is somehow a shining beacon of freedom, unique amongst the world. And in particular the belief that the Constitution is somehow better or more powerful than other countries equivalents. Reality check: many countries have constitutions. And most of the ideas that form of the basis of US government were formed by, gosh, foreigners!

It is especially a problem for you because as far as I know, there is no punishment in the United States Code for passing laws or regulations that are unconstitutional. Or if there are, they're apparently ineffective. The result is that the US Government, quite independent of any other nations, routinely wipes its ass with the entire document and passes laws that they know full well flatly contradict the constitution (in spirit, wording or both). Here are a couple of blatant examples from recent history.

(1) The Magnitsky bill. This is a bill of attainder - it enumerates the people it intends to punish. Bills of attainder are explicitly forbidden by the constitution because they were abused throughout history. The constitution says "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed". Doesn't get any clearer than that.

(2) ITAR. This was a law that censored free speech by cryptographers, in a ham-fisted attempt to stop knowledge of cryptography from spreading (apparently the USG believed non-Americans were too stupid to develop the maths themselves). It was struck down by the courts and then re-passed as EAR, which was struck down again. The constitution says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". Doesn't get any clearer than that. Yet what was the punishment for the Congressmen and bureaucrats who, on learning that their law was unconstitutional, immediately re-passed it? Nothing!

And that's ignoring all the other obvious problems like the abandonment of the warrant system (4th amendment).

You blow all this off as if it can be blamed entirely on "them". Get over it. The "us" versus "them" mentality that typifies US thinking will eventually cause your country to slide ever further into authoritarianism.

Wait, so you admit you don't understand what happened in Greece (which was quite simple), but you're sure it's not the same thing as in the USA? How does that work?

What happened in Greece was that investors stopped believing that the Greek government could pay back its debt. Yields climbed to levels so high that it was practically impossible for them to borrow any more and because they had a massive structural deficit the economy was plunged into deep recession.

If you want a slightly bigger picture, when Greece entered the Eurozone they produced deeply fraudulent statistics about the state of their economy that made it look like a real, honest to goodness first world country. As a result they could borrow very cheaply. Later on it was discovered that the economy was in much worse shape than they had admitted to and that Greece was, to a large extent, actually a third world country posing as something more. As one memorable quote put it, they imported flat screen TVs and exported tomatoes.

I've seen some people posting that if only Greece had its own currency and was not in the Eurozone, the crisis could have been avoided and everything would have been peachy. This is a fundamental error. There is no way to avoid recession in Greece because it is simply the name we give to "the economy fixing itself". The Greek economy was massively distorted by unsustainable government spending, of which examples are legion. Entire government departments that were discovered to exist only on paper. Railway workers that earn more than skilled engineers in other countries do. Etc. The Greek standard of living was artificially pumped on cheap debt for a long time and is now returning to its normal state. A very painful process, of course. If Greece had its own currency the same thing would be happening via a different mechanism - they would print the money needed to pay back their debts, inflation would soar and Greece would have been ejected from the markets for a while, causing (if anything) even faster and deeper depression than what they already have. The Greek people know this which is why they vote to stay in the Eurozone.

The USA is in a somewhat different position because it's much larger than Greece, and the dollar is the currency you need in order to buy oil, which provides an artificial lift. Countries that try to switch to a different currency tend to get invaded. A bunch of other issues too keep the dollar artificially valuable. I seriously doubt there's going to be a Greek-style correction in the USA, but who knows. Maybe we should ask Peter Schiff :)

I think there are several things in the article that are pretty much impossible to defend. Maybe you did not read it, or you have a very different worldview to me.

• Classifying OWS as "domestic terrorists" and having agents in those parts of the FBI investigate them. This flatly contradicts common sense. People protesting against banks are not terrorists, unless you warp the meaning of "terrorist" to encompass any politically motivated crime. It's obviously very convenient if you can classify people you don't like as terrorists, but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to do it.
• The fact that the government apparently lied in response to FOIA requests by claiming no such documents existed, when those documents later turned up. Lying in response to requests for citizens from transparency is a major warning sign of bad things to come.
• The general line-blurring that apparently occurred between state and private security. Law enforcement is the domain of government for a reason!
• The general point made about financing of WikiLeaks is sound. Going via the judicial system, passing laws which are not bills of attainder, building a case, prosecuting it, allowing for a defence etc .... all very messy and inconvenient compared to simply adding the people you don't like to a banking blacklist. Exclusion from the financial system should not be allowed, period - if somebody has broken the law, then it's the judicial systems job to handle that, not the banks.

In what universe was Stuxnet a "basic attack"? Did you ever read how it worked?

I got that from this article on Ars Technica which states it's an authentication chip and claims "manufacturing sources" have found it difficult to duplicate. But it doesn't say who is trying to duplicate them, I suppose to avoid them getting sued by Apple. Wikipedia also states that it's an auth chip twice and provides two different citations. Reading the citations and clicking through links, you end up here which is an article on Apple Insider that also repeats this claim.

Now I'm looking closer at all the sources and citations that are claiming this, it's not really clear to me if the chip is indeed designed to engage in some kind of auth protocol, or if it's just that nobody actually knows what it does and so people assumed it must be for auth. It seems like it's at least responsible for pin routing, whether it does more is unclear. Given the licensing requirements and Apples love of squeezing customers for fat accessory profits, it's not an unreasonable assumption, but as far as I can tell nobody has fully reverse engineered the chip. The Chinese manufacturers aren't stupid so I'd think if the chip was doing something trivial it'd have been cloned by now, but it seems no-one knows for sure.

There's an authentication chip in the cables. The iPhone will refuse to charge if it can't handshake with the chip in the cable. To make a compatible cable you'd need to duplicate the chip, which is apparently hard.

Lightning cables, unlike any other connector I can think of outside of HDMI connectors, have custom chips inside them designed to prevent people making their own cables or accessories. So unfortunately you can't make your own.

I'm not seeing how this is Apple's fault ...... they gambled that it would be smooth sailing with the as-then-unannounced connector and pushed ahead with product development without having all of their ducks in a row.

That's the kind of statement that might make sense if Apple and its connector was some kind of inherently unpredictable thing, like a hurricane or an earthquake or the results of cutting edge research. But it's not. It's an electronics company. They deliberately chose to make Lightning proprietary even though it's nothing more than a cable, and then kill this product for, apparently, no reason at all. How is this not Apples fault? Can you come up with any scenario in which you would accept that something was Apples fault?

At the time they made the project proposal the Lightning connector did not exist. The whole concept of licensing it therefore also did not exist. So that can't have been the reason nobody was making them.

But they already are - the Lightning connector was not official when the project began, so how could they offer it?

Presumably they felt their actual offering was "whatever the contemporary connector Apple uses is", given that a device which can only be connected to obsolete devices is .... obsolete.

If they started the project based on rumours of the new connector, or with a plan to include it *without* discussing terms with Apple first, then that was just silly.

Erm, yes, how silly of them to not anticipate that Apple would require licensing for a goddamn power plug. Since when have you had to sign exclusivity agreements to connect a battery to another battery? Can you name any other manufacturer that uses custom authentication chips to prevent people making charging cables? Maybe at the time the Kickstarter project proposal was made, they figured Apple might actually pull its head out of its arse and use the same connector the rest of the world was already standardizing on. Then when the reality turned out to be far worse than they had imagined they realized they'd effectively take peoples money to build a device that wouldn't charge most of their customers iPhones. I think they did exactly the right thing in the circumstance.

RTFA.

This is not necessarily the end of the Edison Junior’s portable power project. Siminoff told me that the team will be re-focusing on a device that supports Android phones and tablets and Apple products as well, if backers wish to use a Lightning-to-USB connector, or an older 30-pin connector. They’ll only build that device, however, if the crowdfunding community wants it.

They want to do that, but they'd be building a different project than what people pledged for. So for obvious reasons they would need to start over.

Yes, in fact, this appears to be something the government is finally getting absolutely right! It kind of amazed me that such a service didn't already exist, but better late than never. Using technology to help improve employment at scale is an obvious and good idea, more of this please!

The law requires exactly what is being done, so much so that the regulators themselves do this (thus setting an example for everyone else). How exactly is this some nefarious plot by website operators, again?

You don't need to be trained. If you hear about this issue and care, you can just search on Google for "how to disable cookies" and get the main browsers help pages right at the top. This isn't exactly rocket science.