And if Matthew Shepard didn't want to get savagely beaten to death by a group of bigots, he should have kept his sexual orientation a secret as well.

Consider what you're saying. It's like condoning someone who breaks and enters into peoples' houses and goes reading through their papers and personal effects, and saying the problem is that they didn't have a secure enough vault in their home.

Perhaps we should encrypt everything, all the time, petrified that someone unintended will snoop on us and find out about it. Perhaps the problem is that we've been too transparent and open about how we live our lives, not that someone else shouldn't be prying into them. However, before adopting Pig Latin as the national language, let's gloss over the Fourth Amendment for a moment.

Hmm. Seems like our right to privacy was pretty important when we founded the U.S.. We didn't want our government invading it, so I doubt we would've wanted anyone else to either. Debate resolved; there's already been a determination on the matter over two hundred years ago, so the matter seems rather dated and redundant now.

Touché, sir. You cut me to the quick.

Certainly. Which word gave you difficulty?

We appear to be using two different definitions of "accountability".

People used to be accountable to themselves and each other - and through them, the law. If you violated rights, you had to make amends or become an outlaw. Laws were made to uphold standards of rights and values that people had in common - they were a formalized system of basic human decency.

In time, the representatives we delegated to maintain that system turned the concept of "accountability" on its ear, pretending that they, as public officials, were entities in and of themselves - with an agenda all their own. So today, people often think of "accountability" only in their redefined, bastardized usage: accountability to the whimsical edicts of legislators. But this is the idea of accountability being made to stand on its' head. There is no accountability without self-accountability, just as there is no control without self-control. The idea of being held accountable to an arbitrary, whimsical system is the idea of being accountable to a non-system - in other words, arbitrary edicts and mandates from authority figures. Slavery. In this modern usage, "accountability" doesn't mean anything valid. It becomes a socially acceptable substitute for "slavery", and I'm not using it that way because it would be rather bizarre and unconscionable. I mean real, legitimate, true accountability.

Chaos is just as much a threat to rights as tyranny. Is that not self-evident to you?

It's like they're people who are tired of freezing, and so they set themselves on fire. Spectacular, but utterly useless.

Groups like Anonymous seem to get quite a kick out of thumbing their noses at the authority figures in the room. If only they'd realize that as members of We, the People, we are the authority figures, and the politicians are required to be our representatives, they could start reasserting a legitimate, functional society. And they'd realize that doesn't happen by adopting the position of the incorrigible adolescent truant; it takes people actively being functional human beings. That's the only way you get a functional society.

Can someone please tell me what's supposed to be so politically edgy about creating yet another disordered, unregulated system?

That kind of jumbling and lack of accountability is pretty much the problem with our political system, and yet Anonymous sells it as subversive and avant-garde. It's not.

Then when you ask Anonymous what it thinks it's trying to accomplish, rather than sending you a sheaf of redacted government memos they just tell you, "There is no such thing as Anonymous." If life were a party, Anonymous would be the geeky attention-seeking teen off in the corner snorting handfuls of GHB.

It'd be nice if groups "there's no such thing as" didn't make headlines so often. I can't take them seriously.

Politicians are a lot less quick to use that, "Only criminals demand their right to privacy" routine after a few demands for public strip-searches.

Interestingly, the political corruption in the U.S. is getting resolved by, of all people, the military.

Slashdot, your innuendos are getting worse.

That makes sense. A good workaround might be a Javascript CAPTCHA-like element; I'm not sure how advanced the anti-CAPTCHA technology has gotten yet.

If the male representative you're telegramming is an older "fundamentalist" conservative, you might get better results with a Chippendale.

It sounds like what these guys need is a simple website capability, easily feasible in something like Drupal, that would enable users to click for or against an issue. In addition to cutting down on spam, it would enable constituents to immediately see how much activity there has been on an issue. You could even do a Facebook-style "Like", or enable constituents to Tweet their feedback. And if there's no API, it makes it more difficult to mass-spam the feature.

Seems to me they get a lot of spam because e-mail is about the only internet-based feedback system they have in place.

Note that this will not address the issue of money-guzzling politicians who are too corrupt to be motivated by feedback.

Then by that reasoning, chiseled stone tablets ought to carry a lot more weight!

Right. On. Thank you for the info!

Here's to the day when instead of mandatory school hours, we stay at home and play things like Gene Splicer Hero.

I love this trend. Free online courses make perfect sense with the internet's information distribution model, and if the coursework can be properly accredited there's no reason to have to pay absurd sums to proprietary universities. Plenty of people have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an education that was supposed to ensure they'd have a well-paying job, never mind that they'd had to mortgage the rest of their working lives to pay off the student loans. Now, they find they can't get work anyway.

In addition to online courses, I think gameification would be such a great match with online learning. There are plenty of unemployed game designers and teachers; there's no reason they shouldn't pair up. Learning shouldn't be a chore; if we stop accepting the low standard that it's acceptable for it to be, we'll have a society where learning happens painlessly.

There's also no reason online learning games couldn't lead directly to great jobs or cash incentives. Remember Rock Band and Guitar Hero? I kept waiting for a version that would gradually teach you to play an actual guitar. Pitch sensors would pick up the notes, and as your skill increased your online ranking would as well. The highest-ranking players could get a recording contract.

It's not like the world is suffering a shortage of guitar players, but it's good proof-of-concept. There has to be a way to implement the various sciences and technologies into games; I spent hours playing CellCraft without realizing I was picking up basic cellular biology.

Basically, I think the writeups are faulty and I'm calling attention to that.

I should have clarified that I was referring to gurps_npc's writeup of the piece, and particularly the conclusion.

I agree with you.

I'd been referring to gurps_npc's writeup of the piece, and particularly his or her conclusion.

This works.

If we can agree that the mainstream news media are no longer opting to practice legitimate journalism, and that many new online reporters do not know how, it doesn't follow that journalistic standards do not exist, or that they're impossible to implement or insist upon. I think it may argue the case in favor of them more strongly.