The way I put it is that "facts are about observation; truth is about understanding".
I originally arrived at that from the perspective of a context of a Sherlock Holmes-type detective investigating a crime, but I think it applies in pretty much every other context I've been able to think of as well.
It certainly dovetails well with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness", and his line about not caring for facts but preferring truth instead.
At one point (I think before these allegations started to come forward), in response to a question about whether he had ever done the sorts of things he was talking about in the now-famous "Access Hollywood" video, he did - after two rounds of irrelevant responses, with repeated reference to how he has "so much respect for women" - say "No, I did not". That segment has been played on TV and radio multiple times.
It could be argued that that statement, combined with the fact that he is calling the women who are making these allegations liars, constitute saying that he did not assault these women.
I'm sure quite a few people would have said the same thing about many of your posts.
What I just said is, essentially:
* If you include "Please... no emails!" in a post but don't include an E-mail address, I flag the post.
* If you do your U-N-R-E-A-D-A-B-L-E emphasis in a post, I flag the post.
* If you go on an off-topic rant in a post, I flag the post.
* The fact that you felt it appropriate to make the post to which I was replying means I no longer have any regrets, or feel any guilt, about doing this.
If I had any compunctions about having taken up flagging every post you make which contains the "no emails" request without any proximate E-mail address, does any of your bizarre formatting, or involve an off-topic rant, this has pretty much destroyed them.
I've begun habitually flagging any post of his in which he includes that tagline and omits an E-mail address (which works out to about 99% of his posts). I think I even did that with a post which I also voted insightful, once.
Why do you keep saying "Please!... no emails!" in comments in which you do not provide any E-mail address, and so no one reading the comment would be able to send you E-mail in any case?
Why? They have competition, they are not run or controlled by the government and they have a responsibility to the majority of their customers (most importantly, advertisers, not just normal users).
Because they don't have meaningful competition in their own space (or at least not enough of it), because of the network effects which kick in when a platform gets to anywhere near Facebook's current share of its market.
Part of the reason why the government may not censor speech in the public square is that saying "you can speak, but only where the public can't hear you" is not terribly meaningfully different from saying "you can't speak at all".
Saying "you can say this, but you can't say it on Facebook" is saying "you can say this, but you can't say it where (large parts of) the public can hear you". Just because it's Facebook, a private company, engaging in the censorship does not make it less censorship, nor less of a problem; it just means that it's not a type of censorship which is prohibited by the First Amendment.
When there is an established platform for speech - such that to move speech away from that platform is to remove that speech from view so that it will not be heard - which is controlled by a private company, it is just as bad for that company to be permitted to censor that speech as it is for the government to be permitted to censor speech in the public square.
The only solution I can see would be to require that such public-square speech platforms be implemented not as "platforms" in the usual sense, but as protocols, more analogous to the old news:// protocol underlying Usenet than to existing central-provider social-media platforms we see today. (See also things like RSS and BitTorrent; the concept of peering, where each peer decides which other peers' content they should redistribute, is also relevant.) That way, anyone who wants to get in on the business can provide all the same content (meaning: existing posts which people have shared publicly, et cetera), without having to struggle against network effects to gain enough users - and, thus, existing content - for it to seem like a reasonable place to speak.
The only way I can see to "get there from here", however, would be for the major established platforms - such as Facebook - to reimplement themselves on top of such a protocol, such that other entities using the same protocol could have (theoretically-)equal access to the existing content and therefore the user base would have less reason not to switch providers. Given that this would open them up to more direct and active competition, however, the established platforms have no incentive to undertake any such effort.
If the third-party boxes work out to be more expensive, the consumer would still have the option of going with the cable provider's set-top box. This plan wasn't designed to take away any options from the consumer, only to add new ones.
As to the "no one needs cable" argument - you're right, they don't. That's why so many people are cutting the cord, and why it would be in the cable industry's best interest to support things which might help keep them from doing that or draw them back - things such as the improved features and/or reduced prices which might come from the increased competition which this proposal would enable.
The point of this article is that a new regulation which would> have helped people has not been enacted, due to the pressure of those special interests.
The special interests were fighting against the new regulation, because it would have damaged their monopoly control.
The quote is from Chris Fabricant, of the Innocence Project. Its thrust appears to be incredulity at the suggestion that Eric Lander would do anything like what the claims are essentially accusing him of.
I think the argument is that Google's news search results reflect the news articles which the media is producing, so the dearth of negative results in Google searches represents the lack of negative coverage by the media, which indicates bias towards the thing not being negatively covered.
This argument ignores at least one obvious explanation which does not involve bias, in addition to being offtopic to the article currently at hand, but it is at least internally consistent.
This thread is about Peter Wexler, or at least it was until you brought Hillary Clinton into things. As such, your posts here are offtopic and look very much like trying-to-provoke-a-reaction trolling, and I've flagged them (other than the one I'm now replying to) on those grounds.
As other people have said in these comments: these are the city's poles. It's the equipment that's already on the poles that belongs to the companies, and that's what the companies are saying no one should be allowed to touch (i.e., move around to make room for new stuff) without their permission.
Unfortunately, I think that does lose meaningful amounts of nuance; without the contextual indication that I'm referring specifically to causes which they have backed during the campaign to date (which carries the subtextual implication that they may have backed some of those causes insincerely, only to raise support), it leaves more room for them to deliver a nonresponsive answer which can be plausibly claimed to address the question that was actually presented.
I have compressed the question itself down to something that's nearly short enough (the limit is 80 characters), but I'm reluctant to submit it in that form. This is probably related to one of the principles which define my approach to life: "if you're not going to do something right, you shouldn't bother to do it at all". (In practice, that's a goal, which frequently has to be compromised on for the sake of actually getting things done - but it does sum up my feelings on such matters fairly well.)
I define something as DRM if it would fail two specific, somewhat detailed tests, which can be somewhat loosely summarized as "install and run normally, from a backup of the installer, on a deserted island with no network access".
By that definition, at a glance, I would have to say that indeed this does not look like DRM. Malware, definitely, yes - and if the company can push out an update such that you can't run (or newly install) the game without accepting the update which installs the malware, that's a problem of its own, which could indeed qualify as DRM. But the behavior of the code which was pushed out by this update does not sound like DRM to me.
(Examples of a mechanism which would qualify as DRM which would not fail that test would be interesting to me; if you know of any, please do share them.)
I'm told that 4chan and some of the Reddit subcommunities have campaigns going to upvote questions designed to make Hillary Clinton look bad; on the other hand, most of these questions are unlikely to get chosen to be asked, since the rule is that questions must be suitable to be asked of either candidate (so questions about "your private E-mail server" don't qualify).
I've come up with a question which several people have told me is a good one and worth asking, but unfortunately it doesn't fit in their submission form, due both to the length limits and to the requirement to choose a particular topic category for the question. I've E-mailed the contact address to ask if there's a way to submit it anyway, but I don't have great hopes of getting a response.
The question itself is, in not-actually-a-question form, something like:
You've spoken out strongly in support of many causes during your campaign, and the polls seem to show that the election is likely to be very close.
Please name at least one of these causes which you intend to continue fighting for even if you lose the election, and explain how you intend to do that.
I think the answers could help shed light on the candidates' character, temperament, motivations, and dedication, among possibly other things.
Amusingly enough, my understanding is that the NSA was similarly created to be a central coordination and analysis entity for the existing intelligence agencies - to take in, analyze, and (if and/or as suitable) disseminate the intelligence which the other agencies gather, and specifically not to do any intelligence-gathering of its own.
If that's accurate, it seems fairly clear that they've diverged pretty far from that ideal... and it would seem unsurprising for the DHS to do the same.
Unfortunately, no. I've seen it discussed in the past, and I believe there were links involved, but I didn't keep any of them.
I can't speak for other people, of course, but the reason I'm not entirely comfortable with the practice is that - so far as I understand matters - there's currently no way for the provider to determine which packets to handle in which way except by inspecting the contents of the packets, so this can't currently be done without violating the neutrality principles at least in concept.
(I can't swear there isn't a way to do it without that, even currently much less in "someone could design one" nebulous form, but I don't know of any.)
That said, some providers actually do do this, right now - or at least they claimed to, when I last saw the matter being discussed. I don't have any references for that either just offhand, however.
On the post: Donald Trump's Son & Campaign Manager Both Tweet Obviously Fake Story
Re:
I originally arrived at that from the perspective of a context of a Sherlock Holmes-type detective investigating a crime, but I think it applies in pretty much every other context I've been able to think of as well.
It certainly dovetails well with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness", and his line about not caring for facts but preferring truth instead.
On the post: As Donald Trump Ramps Up Threats To Sue Newspapers, A Reminder Of Why We Need Free Speech Protections
Re: Just change the subject: Bill did it also
It could be argued that that statement, combined with the fact that he is calling the women who are making these allegations liars, constitute saying that he did not assault these women.
On the post: Media Bias And The Death Of Intellectual Honesty, Doubling Down
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: TRUMP IS A JOKE
What I just said is, essentially:
* If you include "Please... no emails!" in a post but don't include an E-mail address, I flag the post.
* If you do your U-N-R-E-A-D-A-B-L-E emphasis in a post, I flag the post.
* If you go on an off-topic rant in a post, I flag the post.
* The fact that you felt it appropriate to make the post to which I was replying means I no longer have any regrets, or feel any guilt, about doing this.
On the post: Media Bias And The Death Of Intellectual Honesty, Doubling Down
Re: Re: Re: Re: TRUMP IS A JOKE
If I had any compunctions about having taken up flagging every post you make which contains the "no emails" request without any proximate E-mail address, does any of your bizarre formatting, or involve an off-topic rant, this has pretty much destroyed them.
On the post: Media Bias And The Death Of Intellectual Honesty, Doubling Down
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: TRUMP IS A JOKE
On the post: Yahoo Email Scanning May Sink EU Privacy Shield Agreement
Re: Re: Re: BEAUTIES AND THE BEAST
On the post: Yahoo Email Scanning May Sink EU Privacy Shield Agreement
Re: BEAUTIES AND THE BEAST
On the post: DOJ To Anti-Muslim Troll Pam Geller: You're Suing The Wrong Entity, Genius
Part of the reason why the government may not censor speech in the public square is that saying "you can speak, but only where the public can't hear you" is not terribly meaningfully different from saying "you can't speak at all".
Saying "you can say this, but you can't say it on Facebook" is saying "you can say this, but you can't say it where (large parts of) the public can hear you". Just because it's Facebook, a private company, engaging in the censorship does not make it less censorship, nor less of a problem; it just means that it's not a type of censorship which is prohibited by the First Amendment.
When there is an established platform for speech - such that to move speech away from that platform is to remove that speech from view so that it will not be heard - which is controlled by a private company, it is just as bad for that company to be permitted to censor that speech as it is for the government to be permitted to censor speech in the public square.
The only solution I can see would be to require that such public-square speech platforms be implemented not as "platforms" in the usual sense, but as protocols, more analogous to the old news:// protocol underlying Usenet than to existing central-provider social-media platforms we see today. (See also things like RSS and BitTorrent; the concept of peering, where each peer decides which other peers' content they should redistribute, is also relevant.) That way, anyone who wants to get in on the business can provide all the same content (meaning: existing posts which people have shared publicly, et cetera), without having to struggle against network effects to gain enough users - and, thus, existing content - for it to seem like a reasonable place to speak.
The only way I can see to "get there from here", however, would be for the major established platforms - such as Facebook - to reimplement themselves on top of such a protocol, such that other entities using the same protocol could have (theoretically-)equal access to the existing content and therefore the user base would have less reason not to switch providers. Given that this would open them up to more direct and active competition, however, the established platforms have no incentive to undertake any such effort.
On the post: A Massive Cable Industry Disinformation Effort Just Crushed The FCC's Plan For Cable Box Competition
Re: Re: Iddiots
As to the "no one needs cable" argument - you're right, they don't. That's why so many people are cutting the cord, and why it would be in the cable industry's best interest to support things which might help keep them from doing that or draw them back - things such as the improved features and/or reduced prices which might come from the increased competition which this proposal would enable.
On the post: A Massive Cable Industry Disinformation Effort Just Crushed The FCC's Plan For Cable Box Competition
Re: Take a hard look
The point of this article is that a new regulation which would> have helped people has not been enacted, due to the pressure of those special interests.
The special interests were fighting against the new regulation, because it would have damaged their monopoly control.
On the post: FBI, DOJ And Their Forensic Scientists State They'll Continue Using Discredited Junk Science To Put People Behind Bars
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Donald Trump Happily Repeating Lie About Google Autocomplete Suppressing Negative Hillary News
Re: Re:
This argument ignores at least one obvious explanation which does not involve bias, in addition to being offtopic to the article currently at hand, but it is at least internally consistent.
On the post: How I Taught A Jury About Trolls, Memes And 4Chan -- And Helped Get A Troll Out Of Jail
Re:
On the post: How I Taught A Jury About Trolls, Memes And 4Chan -- And Helped Get A Troll Out Of Jail
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Fat Man Gadget =?
On the post: AT&T Sues Nashville To Keep Google Fiber At Bay
Re: Re: Re: Stupid question from the EU
On the post: Trump Offers More Insight On His Cybersecurity Plans: 10-Year-Old Relatives Vs. 400-lb Bedroom Dwellers
Re: Re: Re:
I have compressed the question itself down to something that's nearly short enough (the limit is 80 characters), but I'm reluctant to submit it in that form. This is probably related to one of the principles which define my approach to life: "if you're not going to do something right, you shouldn't bother to do it at all". (In practice, that's a goal, which frequently has to be compromised on for the sake of actually getting things done - but it does sum up my feelings on such matters fairly well.)
On the post: Capcom Releases DRM For Street Fighter 5, Promptly Rolls It Back When It Screws Legitimate Customers
Re: Re: Not the whole story
By that definition, at a glance, I would have to say that indeed this does not look like DRM. Malware, definitely, yes - and if the company can push out an update such that you can't run (or newly install) the game without accepting the update which installs the malware, that's a problem of its own, which could indeed qualify as DRM. But the behavior of the code which was pushed out by this update does not sound like DRM to me.
(Examples of a mechanism which would qualify as DRM which would not fail that test would be interesting to me; if you know of any, please do share them.)
On the post: Trump Offers More Insight On His Cybersecurity Plans: 10-Year-Old Relatives Vs. 400-lb Bedroom Dwellers
Re:
I've come up with a question which several people have told me is a good one and worth asking, but unfortunately it doesn't fit in their submission form, due both to the length limits and to the requirement to choose a particular topic category for the question. I've E-mailed the contact address to ask if there's a way to submit it anyway, but I don't have great hopes of getting a response.
The question itself is, in not-actually-a-question form, something like:
I think the answers could help shed light on the candidates' character, temperament, motivations, and dedication, among possibly other things.
On the post: DHS Offers Its Unsolicited 'Help' In Securing The Internet Of Things
Re: Re: Re: Can't be regulatory
If that's accurate, it seems fairly clear that they've diverged pretty far from that ideal... and it would seem unsurprising for the DHS to do the same.
On the post: AT&T Will Zero Rate its Upcoming Streaming TV Service, Doesn't Think FCC Will Act
Re: Re:
I can't speak for other people, of course, but the reason I'm not entirely comfortable with the practice is that - so far as I understand matters - there's currently no way for the provider to determine which packets to handle in which way except by inspecting the contents of the packets, so this can't currently be done without violating the neutrality principles at least in concept.
(I can't swear there isn't a way to do it without that, even currently much less in "someone could design one" nebulous form, but I don't know of any.)
That said, some providers actually do do this, right now - or at least they claimed to, when I last saw the matter being discussed. I don't have any references for that either just offhand, however.
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