Anyone hear of something called 'Fingerprint Technology'?

[indolikaa]

that is why we are losing our freedoms. Everyday stupid laws are being passed that make your average law-abiding citizen a criminal.

Not so much that. It's the fact that 'we the people' are allowing those we elect to pass the laws, and not holding them accountable. We put the ******** in office, we have the power to vote them out.

Same thing with judges. If we don't send a mandate to our elected officials that this (perceived) judicial activism is intolerable, what will their incentive be to remove the judges from the bench?

It all starts with the voter. And given the recent turnout of voters, they just don't care anymore.

[Nilfennasion]

Unfortunately, having a 100% voter turnout doesn't necessarily fix the problem. In Australia, it is compulsory to vote (so long as you bother to enrol), and the people still aren't represented by the elected officials. It is, in fact, possible for a Prime Minister to be elected with less than 49% of the vote, which is astounding in a two-party system.

The big problem is that the more you force people to do something, the less they care about it.

[proxyx99]

Big business in never late at the election time. They are not forced to excercise their influence. But they always do that (unlike most of us) in our name You hear milions of reasons why it will be beneficial to you to divert your money to taxes for services that you never see. Your buck ends up as a multimillion dollar bonus to polititians, their families engaged in countless non-profit organization for causes like reaserch on dolphin population in Arctic waters, and Big Business CEO's.

[Nilfennasion]

Which is why 100% voter turnout does not solve the problem.

Most changes are brought about by civil disobedience, not by checking a box on a bit of paper. A good way to make the MPAA rethink some of their decisions, for example, would be to send the studios a DVD-R of their films with all the copyright messages ripped out, along with a little note asking them to take note of how much more fun it is to watch the film in question without being reminded of the penalties for illegal copies in a dozen languages, most of which they probably cannot read to begin with.

I can just picture the kind of message it would send if every person who owned a DVD-R drive did that with one out of every 25-disc spindles they bought.