Remember, this is a country where the military has had to rescue the populace from theocracy multiple times since the 20’s.

You didn’t have to go to Turkey for those very same sort of repressive measures. In New York City during the time of the 2004 Republican National Convention mid-town Manhattan was basically shut down. Broadway, Sixth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, and Eighth Avenue (and probably Ninth Avenue too – I didn’t verify that) were all closed within about a twenty block distance from Madison Square Garden, the site of the convention. Thousands of extra police were brought in to flood the midtown streets with literally dozens of police on every corner in the area. There were also military personal with automatic weapons at the ready.

One aspect which might seem trivial but which I found somewhat repulsive was a line of police that I saw with truncheons that were much more like stick ball bats than night sticks. They were smacking them against their hands in an almost gleeful anticipation of their use. Demonstrators, when they were actually allowed to form parades and demonstrate were forbidden by law to use anything but cardboard tubes as supports for banners. Cardboard tubes compared to stick ball bats held by drooling police.

Speaking of bike paths, next to the new bike path along the Hudson River a city parking garage was converted into a makeshift prison. Demonstrators, potential demonstrators (possible pre-crime perpetrators) and those bystanders unlucky enough to have been netted (again, literally, with orange construction fencing material) were held for days there without charge or appearance in any court – conveniently till the convention was over. The Hudson River was also patrolled by small Coast Guard boats with high caliber machine guns fore and aft.

It’s one thing to control public demonstrations and prevent violence but quite another to prevent and inhibit wide spread popular expressions of dissent from within the public. When did the idea of temporary prisons called “free speech zones” become acceptable in America?

Can anyone name a corporate-funded contribution to Linux that has hurt it for non-corporate users? Just to pick two examples of “desktop” tasks, low latency and support for USB devices, Ingo Molnar gets paid by RHT and Greg K-H gets paid by NOVL.