[OT2] pieces and tides

> is missing a critical piece
Seems you might have missed a truckload of those...

> I think that Mr. Stallman is raging against the tide.
There's nothing wrong in that per se, the tide /can/ be all wrong. E.g. see the story of multiple French revolutions ca. 1792 and later on, the "tide" was artifical, ill-minded and, well, all wrong.

See e.g. Cochen et Charpentier "Le campagne electorale de 1789 en Bourgogne", p. 15, to better understand the role of "common people" for some particular tides.

> improved economics
"The tide" these days seems to be rather "a crisis" than "improved economics".

> it is illegal to monitor cellphone conversations
Stretching the periods of gov-required telco logs is legal indeed :] As well as building more classified hi-perf clusters just in case govs might need to monitor possibly illegal conversations. Possibly yours and mine as well.

> the price for living in a democracy
I'd like to know what country are you from -- or whether they managed to make you believe it's called "living in a democracy". In the US, for example, there seems to be none; folks I knew who migrated from ex-SU admit that current US is very much like SU they knew all too well.