SF's BART braces for another protest

This is why a good leader lets the mob have it's day.<p>Stop a protest because it turns violent...well everyone kind of expects that. Even the protesters.<p>Try to stop a protest before it happens, or throw up logistical roadblocks...and you end up with the Civil Rights Era redux.<p>Always let people have their say...and get it over with. You can more easily stand a gut punch than death by a thousand cuts.

So the service outage only affected people underground? I'm not sure how the stations are laid out - what happens if the protest is held right outside the station? If they cut service, would people not on BART property be affected?

And this time, people are bringing their own femtocells!<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell</a><p>(I don't in fact know if anyone is. But they should! Most US carriers offer femtocells for home broadband users that could presumably, with some work, run off batteries and relay traffic up the escalators to a sympathetic ground-level uplink.)

I can't help feeling that BART can't really get anything right. Surly employees, unusually bad BART cops, smelly trains that run extremely slowly at random intervals, and now interfering with a protest.<p>What I don't understand is why they have any interest in hampering the protest in the first place. Until the protest has been shown to be violent, how is it even conceivably within their legitimate sphere of influence to interfere with it? Particularly when it interferes with the service that regular riders have come to expect.

For this protest, I say we create a "Congress emergency off switch", only to be used in exceptional circumstances, so we can stop any single-color copyright infringements, child pornography breakouts or other crises as determined by fox news. The button would be hosted by a website, and if enough people press it at one time, then congress gets shut off and all proceedings are suspended until further notice.