Re: Is no one else disturbed by the transport medium?
Well, I wasn't, because I was assuming that the file was the original list initially generated by denizens of 8chan, and that it was those denizens who had put it into .docx format - that the police who were passing it around had simply not bothered shifting it into another format, at least not by the point where that mail happened.
But looking at it again, if we have enough access to that original "dossier" to know that this list is in it and where the contents of the list come from (signatures on a petition), we presumably know what format the original "dossier"'s version of the list was in - and if it were a .docx, that would probably have been mentioned.
So now I'm not entirely not disturbed by that, anymore.
I'm not sure, but I think you may have missed a nuance.
I don't think this is (necessarily) the same person, repeating the same "I'm being censored!" complaint.
I think this is a second person, complaining that people flagging the first person blocks the second person from seeing the first person's comments (without having to allow scripts and click through the "flagged by the community" link).
Parts of your reply would still apply equally well to that, but other parts read to me as if you're responding to "I'm being censored!" rather than to "the content I might want to read is being censored!", so I'm not sure whether I'm parsing things correctly.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that he was expecting people to be able to "elect individual cops" from in the first place.
I suspect that his response to the objection of "and what about when the replacement candidate turns out to have lied about not hiring petty-abuse officers?" would be "then vote that person out too, and repeat as necessary, until you get someone who wasn't lying".
What he seems to be saying in this repeated admonition is basically "if this is that important to you, then make it the single issue on which you vote for the appropriate office in the next election, and the next, and the next, until whoever gets in actually does this right; if you don't do that, then clearly this isn't really as important to you as you're pretending it is".
Which is probably not a fair position either, particularly not when he takes it on so many different issues - but it's also not the position you seem to be arguing against.
(And it's entirely possible that it is what he's been doing, and that's why he feels OK about telling other people to do it in turn.)
If I understand matters correctly (which I may very well not), the differentiation is between "backbone" providers in the middle of the network and "edge" providers at the (er) edge, with other types of providers in between.
The core of the Internet is not the sites to which people connect, or the data centers from which those sites are hosted; it is the infrastructure over which those connections travel. The endpoints of those connections are considered the "edges" of the Internet.
When you connect to one of those sites (such as Google or Facebook), you are not connecting to the Internet; you are connecting over or across the Internet, from one endpoint (you) to another (the server which hosts the content you want). Both of these endpoints, by definition, sit at the Internet's edge.
Your ISP, by contrast, is part of the Internet-as-infrastructure. It is just "inside" the edge; you (as an endpoint node) are on the edge, and it is one step farther in than you are.
I think the alleged point was that you need a machine to decode the physical pattern in the storage medium into the form of the bytes, and then to display the result to you. That's still just as true whether the displayed result is in the form of binary, octal, hexadecimal, font-based glyphs, or graphics from simple 2D on up.
Re: Re: As usual Bodey McBodeface is missing the point
I'm about 99.44% certain that's a Poe-ing troll, not the actual Richard Bennett. (In addition to the over-the-top offensive rhetoric, beyond what even Richard Bennett has historically used, IIRC the actual guy usually posts logged in and with a non-snowflake avatar.)
Re: Re: What's "anti-competitively" about charging heaviest users more?
To be fair, there's a tiny connection between congestion and data caps: if you know that you can only use so much data within a month, you're more likely to spread the usage of that data out across the month rather than concentrating it in one narrow time period, so the chance of your using so much data in any one millisecond that congestion results is likely to be smaller.
It's not at all clear that this link is strong enough to justify the argument for data caps as a way to fight congestion, however.
What, pray tell, is "my model"? And where have I asked for governments to support businesses?
If I'm reading this correctly, what (he?)'s referring to as "your model" is the idea that "in some contexts, regulatory frameworks can produce more positive outcomes than negative ones".
Based on past comment history, I suspect that this commenter has a model of (his?) own which I think could be summarized briefly as follows:
Any regulatory framework will, over time, inherently and inevitably result in more negative results than positive ones, due to the influence of lobbying power by those who are to be regulated.
Because that outcome is an inevitable consequence of any regulatory framework, support for the imposition of a regulatory framework - in any context, no matter how limited - equals support for the negative results which will inevitably arise from that framework.
The fact that you apparently support the institution of network-neutrality regulations in that one limited context means that you support the imposition of some regulatory framework in some context.
When you put that fact together with the (strikingly absolutist) ideas given in those bullet points, the conclusion seems to follow naturally.
Refuting the conclusion would require refuting one or more of the given ideas. Unfortunately, this particular commenter seems to take those ideas as articles of the faith, and to be unwilling to waver on them no matter what evidence or logic is provided to the contrary.
The thing is, in that broadest sense of the word, "bias" does not imply any of prejudice, preference, or error; it just means a greater tendency in one direction than in others.
(I will grant that "political bias" does tend to imply those sorts of thing, but IIRC in this subthread we're already discussing the senses and contexts in which the word can apply to nature et cetera, so we're already out of the more limited scope of that more specific term.)
Consider flipping a coin. Almost by definition, a fair, unbiased coin has 50/50 odds of coming up either heads or tails.
If you flip a coin a thousand times, and it comes up heads 650 times, that coin is clearly biased towards heads (in a sense related to that from definition d(1) given in a quote above) - or, to put it another way, the "tails" side of the coin is heavier. There's no prejudice, et cetera, involved in that; it's all physics. But it still falls within that broadest sense of the word "bias".
Now consider that in the context of evolution. We don't have a handy predefined baseline like that 50/50 probability, so we need to come up with one. (By necessity, not having done the research on the subject, this is going to involve me making up numbers for the sake of the argument; because of that, I'm going to choose numbers suitable to let us ignore any statistical-error objections.)
Say you take a million genetic strains completely at random, and implement them (however that would be done) in the real world, and only 10% survive; you can treat that as a baseline probability that a given genetic strain is viable for survival in the world. (In practice, given the complexity of genetic code and the likelihood of producing a viable sequence by purely random selection of genetic bases, 10% is probably way too high.)
Then take a million genetic strains which have been produced by the evolutionary process, and implement them in the real world, and observe that (say) 60% of them survive. This demonstrates that the output of the evolutionary process is significantly more likely to survive than is the case with the baseline - or, to put it in other words, that the evolutionary process contains a bias (in that probably-broadest sense) towards things which survive.
That sense of the word is so broad that it is probably not terribly useful in a lot of contexts, but it is still valid.
2) Indulging you for a moment: Where the actual fuck do you get the idea that nature is "biased"? Evolution is almost literally the opposite of biased; evolution is all about throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.
I think the idea here is that a bias towards "what sticks" is still a bias, in that (probaby broadest) sense of the word.
I'll agree that that broadest sense is not usually terribly useful in meaningful conversation, however. (There are occasions where it can be, so people trying to use it in that sense shouldn't be automatically shut down, but most of the ones I can think of border on abstract philosophy.)
You would run afoul of the Scunthorpe Problem in a hurry. Just ask anyone who has ever tried to talk about socialism on a forum with a wordfilter for “cialis”.
Or, for those who think "socialism" is such a bad thing that preventing people from even talking about it is OK, the problem manifests just as badly with "specialist" - which can crop up in conversations about many different subjects.
While I don't think he's using it that broadly, that does raise a possibly valid alternate meaning: he might also, in some cases (though probably not this one), be using it to refer to the Techdirt readers and commenters who (seem to) universally/blindly support Mike's arguments on every subject.
Exactly how large a group that may be is unclear, given the number of (non-trolling) people who seem to disagree with the argument presented in one Techdirt article or another, but I imagine he thinks it's the bulk of the regular readership (or at least commentariat).
This particular troll (or I suppose it could be a small collection of related trolls) uses the term "minion" to mean the Techdirt staff/writers/etc. who are not Mike Masnick. The idea is that those people - by virtue of writing things for the site under his direction - are Mike's minions, writing what he tells them to write and regurgitating exclusively opinions he approves of.
Evidence for this proposition (rather than other, more innocuous, explanations for the observable facts) seems to be completely lacking, but this particular troll does not seem to be in any way hindered by an inconvenient need for facts, evidence, or logic.
The thing is, that $150,000 maximum is reasonable - for cases of counterfeit products, i.e., where people are creating physical copies of the copyrighted work and selling them commercially in the same way/market/etc. as the original.
It's always been my understanding that the law establishing those damages figures was written on the assumption that the only form of infringement which might be sufficiently profitable for the infringer to be worth trying to deter would be in the form of "reproduction of physical copies at scale for commercial sale", and the damages were set based on the expected profitability of that form of endeavour.
Unfortunately, after the world developed such that assumption no longer held true, the law was never updated to better match the new reality - in large part because there were by that point influential forces in place which found those damages to be a useful cudgel to wield against infringement on a much smaller scale, which the original laws never contemplated, and to which those damages are grossly disproportionate.
Given the extent to which Microsoft has historically also mashed together the OS and the (graphical) shell, one might consider this a pattern, and even suspect it of being an intentional strategy...
Re: 'No amount of evidence will change a mind already made up'
Actually, I expect they'll dismiss this one as softballing the offense, being insufficiently negative about it and giving Google too much of the benefit of the doubt.
(And, yes, as being written with the purpose of providing something to point to as being negative about Google. But that's not nearly as effective a point - even in a world where it's effective at all - if the article is actually clearly negative, so the dismissal as not-negative-enough comes first in the resolution order.)
In my experience, it's actually more common to call them "telephone poles", and that name's implication that they're owned by the telephone company (which nowadays tends to be, or be owned by, a major ISP) is usually correct.
The logic behind "collect it all" is something like: we can only search hay when it's in a haystack, and if we leave too much hay out of the haystack we risk also leaving the needle out of the haystack, so that no matter how much searching of the haystack we do we'll never find the needle.
Therefore, in order to guarantee that any needles which exist are in the haystack to be found, we need the haystack to include as much of the hay as possible.
The logic is even sound, really. It just ignores A: the decrease in searching effectiveness when using the same techniques to search a much larger haystack, and B: the trade-offs in other areas that result from making the haystack bigger.
On the post: Louisiana Police Appear To Be Using A Hoax Antifa List Created By 8Chan To Open Criminal Investigations
Re: Is no one else disturbed by the transport medium?
Well, I wasn't, because I was assuming that the file was the original list initially generated by denizens of 8chan, and that it was those denizens who had put it into .docx format - that the police who were passing it around had simply not bothered shifting it into another format, at least not by the point where that mail happened.
But looking at it again, if we have enough access to that original "dossier" to know that this list is in it and where the contents of the list come from (signatures on a petition), we presumably know what format the original "dossier"'s version of the list was in - and if it were a .docx, that would probably have been mentioned.
So now I'm not entirely not disturbed by that, anymore.
On the post: We Shouldn't Want Internet Giants Deciding Who To Silence; But They Should Let Users Decide Who To Hear
Re: Re: Re:
I don't think this is (necessarily) the same person, repeating the same "I'm being censored!" complaint.
I think this is a second person, complaining that people flagging the first person blocks the second person from seeing the first person's comments (without having to allow scripts and click through the "flagged by the community" link).
Parts of your reply would still apply equally well to that, but other parts read to me as if you're responding to "I'm being censored!" rather than to "the content I might want to read is being censored!", so I'm not sure whether I'm parsing things correctly.
On the post: Court Says Cop Gets No Immunity For Pulling A Man Over For Flipping Him Off
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: This is ridiculous.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that he was expecting people to be able to "elect individual cops" from in the first place.
I suspect that his response to the objection of "and what about when the replacement candidate turns out to have lied about not hiring petty-abuse officers?" would be "then vote that person out too, and repeat as necessary, until you get someone who wasn't lying".
What he seems to be saying in this repeated admonition is basically "if this is that important to you, then make it the single issue on which you vote for the appropriate office in the next election, and the next, and the next, until whoever gets in actually does this right; if you don't do that, then clearly this isn't really as important to you as you're pretending it is".
Which is probably not a fair position either, particularly not when he takes it on so many different issues - but it's also not the position you seem to be arguing against.
(And it's entirely possible that it is what he's been doing, and that's why he feels OK about telling other people to do it in turn.)
On the post: That Time Telco Lobbyists Sent Me All Their Talking Points About Trying To Shift The Blame To Internet Companies
Re: Question
If I understand matters correctly (which I may very well not), the differentiation is between "backbone" providers in the middle of the network and "edge" providers at the (er) edge, with other types of providers in between.
The core of the Internet is not the sites to which people connect, or the data centers from which those sites are hosted; it is the infrastructure over which those connections travel. The endpoints of those connections are considered the "edges" of the Internet.
When you connect to one of those sites (such as Google or Facebook), you are not connecting to the Internet; you are connecting over or across the Internet, from one endpoint (you) to another (the server which hosts the content you want). Both of these endpoints, by definition, sit at the Internet's edge.
Your ISP, by contrast, is part of the Internet-as-infrastructure. It is just "inside" the edge; you (as an endpoint node) are on the edge, and it is one step farther in than you are.
On the post: Important Appeals Court Ruling States Clearly That Merely Having An IP Address Is Insufficient For Infringement Claims
Re:
Marten Reed's mother would seem to disagree about that latter point.
On the post: Indiana Appeals Court Says Forcing Someone To Unlock Their Phone Violates The 5th Amendment
Re:
On the post: Big Telecom Resorts To Lying To Senior Citizens To Scuttle Net Neutrality In California
Re: Re: As usual Bodey McBodeface is missing the point
On the post: Big Telecom Resorts To Lying To Senior Citizens To Scuttle Net Neutrality In California
Re: Re: What's "anti-competitively" about charging heaviest users more?
It's not at all clear that this link is strong enough to justify the argument for data caps as a way to fight congestion, however.
On the post: Honest Government Ads Takes On EU Parliament's Plan To Censor The Internet With Article 13
Re: Re: Re: Re: look on the bright side...
If I'm reading this correctly, what (he?)'s referring to as "your model" is the idea that "in some contexts, regulatory frameworks can produce more positive outcomes than negative ones".
Based on past comment history, I suspect that this commenter has a model of (his?) own which I think could be summarized briefly as follows:
Any regulatory framework will, over time, inherently and inevitably result in more negative results than positive ones, due to the influence of lobbying power by those who are to be regulated.
The fact that you apparently support the institution of network-neutrality regulations in that one limited context means that you support the imposition of some regulatory framework in some context.
When you put that fact together with the (strikingly absolutist) ideas given in those bullet points, the conclusion seems to follow naturally.
Refuting the conclusion would require refuting one or more of the given ideas. Unfortunately, this particular commenter seems to take those ideas as articles of the faith, and to be unwilling to waver on them no matter what evidence or logic is provided to the contrary.
On the post: Internet Content Moderation Isn't Politically Biased, It's Just Impossible To Do Well At Scale
Re: Re: Re: Oh, come on.
(I will grant that "political bias" does tend to imply those sorts of thing, but IIRC in this subthread we're already discussing the senses and contexts in which the word can apply to nature et cetera, so we're already out of the more limited scope of that more specific term.)
Consider flipping a coin. Almost by definition, a fair, unbiased coin has 50/50 odds of coming up either heads or tails.
If you flip a coin a thousand times, and it comes up heads 650 times, that coin is clearly biased towards heads (in a sense related to that from definition d(1) given in a quote above) - or, to put it another way, the "tails" side of the coin is heavier. There's no prejudice, et cetera, involved in that; it's all physics. But it still falls within that broadest sense of the word "bias".
Now consider that in the context of evolution. We don't have a handy predefined baseline like that 50/50 probability, so we need to come up with one. (By necessity, not having done the research on the subject, this is going to involve me making up numbers for the sake of the argument; because of that, I'm going to choose numbers suitable to let us ignore any statistical-error objections.)
Say you take a million genetic strains completely at random, and implement them (however that would be done) in the real world, and only 10% survive; you can treat that as a baseline probability that a given genetic strain is viable for survival in the world. (In practice, given the complexity of genetic code and the likelihood of producing a viable sequence by purely random selection of genetic bases, 10% is probably way too high.)
Then take a million genetic strains which have been produced by the evolutionary process, and implement them in the real world, and observe that (say) 60% of them survive. This demonstrates that the output of the evolutionary process is significantly more likely to survive than is the case with the baseline - or, to put it in other words, that the evolutionary process contains a bias (in that probably-broadest sense) towards things which survive.
That sense of the word is so broad that it is probably not terribly useful in a lot of contexts, but it is still valid.
On the post: Internet Content Moderation Isn't Politically Biased, It's Just Impossible To Do Well At Scale
Re: Oh, come on.
I think the idea here is that a bias towards "what sticks" is still a bias, in that (probaby broadest) sense of the word.
I'll agree that that broadest sense is not usually terribly useful in meaningful conversation, however. (There are occasions where it can be, so people trying to use it in that sense shouldn't be automatically shut down, but most of the ones I can think of border on abstract philosophy.)
On the post: Internet Content Moderation Isn't Politically Biased, It's Just Impossible To Do Well At Scale
Re:
Or, for those who think "socialism" is such a bad thing that preventing people from even talking about it is OK, the problem manifests just as badly with "specialist" - which can crop up in conversations about many different subjects.
On the post: Just Because The Internet Didn't Implode The Day After Repeal Doesn't Mean Killing Net Neutrality Was A Good Idea
Re: Re: Re:
While I don't think he's using it that broadly, that does raise a possibly valid alternate meaning: he might also, in some cases (though probably not this one), be using it to refer to the Techdirt readers and commenters who (seem to) universally/blindly support Mike's arguments on every subject.
Exactly how large a group that may be is unclear, given the number of (non-trolling) people who seem to disagree with the argument presented in one Techdirt article or another, but I imagine he thinks it's the bulk of the regular readership (or at least commentariat).
On the post: Just Because The Internet Didn't Implode The Day After Repeal Doesn't Mean Killing Net Neutrality Was A Good Idea
Re:
Evidence for this proposition (rather than other, more innocuous, explanations for the observable facts) seems to be completely lacking, but this particular troll does not seem to be in any way hindered by an inconvenient need for facts, evidence, or logic.
On the post: Movie Company Sues Post-Production Studio For $5 Million For Leaking 'Kickboxer' Film That Grossed $5k Domestically
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The thing is, that $150,000 maximum is reasonable - for cases of counterfeit products, i.e., where people are creating physical copies of the copyrighted work and selling them commercially in the same way/market/etc. as the original.
It's always been my understanding that the law establishing those damages figures was written on the assumption that the only form of infringement which might be sufficiently profitable for the infringer to be worth trying to deter would be in the form of "reproduction of physical copies at scale for commercial sale", and the damages were set based on the expected profitability of that form of endeavour.
Unfortunately, after the world developed such that assumption no longer held true, the law was never updated to better match the new reality - in large part because there were by that point influential forces in place which found those damages to be a useful cudgel to wield against infringement on a much smaller scale, which the original laws never contemplated, and to which those damages are grossly disproportionate.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: a shell with proper scripting abilities
On the post: Google's Location Info Failure Might Interest The FTC
Re: 'No amount of evidence will change a mind already made up'
Actually, I expect they'll dismiss this one as softballing the offense, being insufficiently negative about it and giving Google too much of the benefit of the doubt.
(And, yes, as being written with the purpose of providing something to point to as being negative about Google. But that's not nearly as effective a point - even in a world where it's effective at all - if the article is actually clearly negative, so the dismissal as not-negative-enough comes first in the resolution order.)
On the post: Nintendo Using Copyright To Erase Video Game History
Re: Re:
It is not at all true in the case of copyright.
There are multiple types of things which fall under the umbrella of "intellectual property", and they are not all subject to the same rules.
On the post: Ajit Pai Does Something Right, Will Reform Stupid Utility Pole Rules To Speed Up Fiber Deployment
Re:
On the post: Exposure Of Secret TSA Surveillance Program Nets The Government More Terrorist Watchlist Litigation
Re: Re:
Therefore, in order to guarantee that any needles which exist are in the haystack to be found, we need the haystack to include as much of the hay as possible.
The logic is even sound, really. It just ignores A: the decrease in searching effectiveness when using the same techniques to search a much larger haystack, and B: the trade-offs in other areas that result from making the haystack bigger.
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