The argument would be that if specific group X is prohibited from requiring people to do Y, then any agreement entered into by X to require people to do Y is void, because X does not have the power to do that.
Thus, it wouldn't matter how the consent decree was written, because the entity which is agreeing to it (the city) is Constitutionally prohibited - by the same First Amendment which the decree is aimed at enforcing - from doing what the decree would require it to do.
The only loophole I see in that is the idea of the decree requiring the city to embed the decree's more-individual requirements in the terms of the officers' employment contracts - including altering the terms of the contracts of anyone who's already employed, firing anyone who won't accept the alteration, and eating any costs which such firing might trigger.
(I think what I'm doing is basically arguing the libertarian - or perhaps the Libertarian - perspective on this. Which feels weird, since I don't really agree with the parts of that worldview which (would?) give rise to this argument (the fetishization of the right of private contract, among other things), but since I can see the argument it seems like intellectual dishonesty not to try to make sure that counterarguments don't overlook it.)
For all we know, he might have had a job which boiled down to "wait for someone to need service, then provide it". That covers everything from "customer-service-desk representative" through "helpdesk phone technician" and "tollbooth attendant" to "back-office camera-watching security guard" (at least for cases where there's rarely any traffic past the cameras), and probably quite a few other things along the way.
For someone in that position, browsing the Internet during the "wait" periods of your duty shift isn't unreasonable, as long as you drop it and respond appropriately whenever something that matches your job responsibilities does come along. In the vast majority of such cases, however, that "not unreasonable" does not extend to browsing porn.
"Any search engine, news aggregator, or other entity which wishes to link to this site is hereby granted permission to do so, conditional on the payment of one euro per ten thousand years, due at any time prior to the expiration of that time period."
The argument is that the police officers in question are themselves people, and as such are protected by the Bill of Rights from government prohibitions on doing things like this, just as much as any non-police people would be. There are holes in that argument, but the point you attacked isn't one of them.
Also, tossing around words like "dipshit" doesn't exactly help, in almost any argument.
While I concur with the Insightful votes, I think there's a nuance you didn't address.
I think the argument being made is that while the city agreed not to do it, the individual police officers who are actually doing it and came on board after the agreement was made did not agree to any such thing, and - since doing it is First Amendment-protected activity, and those individual officers have First Amendment rights - the city cannot compel them to do so; any attempt by the city to do that would itself be unconstitutional.
In theory, if the employment agreement for those officers contains terms requiring them to agree to follow the consent decree (or not get/keep the job), that would obviate that objection. However, given the apparent limited effort put into complying with the consent decree in other regards, I would be surprised if there were any such terms in place.
Well, to be fair, the phrasing leaves it open to be (and I would suspect the more likely interpretation of what he's saying is) that he tried to comment there once, it got filtered/blocked, he tried another 11 times with and/or without variations, every single one of them got blocked, then he tried here and it went through on the first try.
There might still be legitimate reasons for the comment in the other place being blocked, without invoking the "manual realtime moderation" model he seems to be assuming, but that's at least not the same thing as "obviously, posting too many comments too quickly is going to result in them being blocked as probable spam".
Re: Re: Re: 'Also if you could somehow shoot our competition again...'
His position appears to be that the primary barriers to entry into the ISP market are regulatory, and that the FCC is falsely labeling the result as being a natural monopoly, and that anyway the only purpose of such a label is to serve as justification for not properly regulating (i.e, breaking up) whatever monopoly is being labeled as "natural".
This ignores both the other barriers to entry into that market and the fact that getting labelled as a "natural monopoly" actually opens a company up to *more* anti-monopoly regulation than not being so labelled; it just doesn't open it up to being broken up, because by the definition of "natural monopoly" the consequences of such a break-up would be worse than inaction.
And if criminals who've already paid their debt to society can be locked up for nebulous reasons, why isn't Jones tossing everyone ever picked up on vandalism charges into the ad hoc lockup for the night?
This actually hits on the exact, core problem: the very concept of "paying one's debt to society", with its associated implication that once the debt is paid normal life can resume, is fading into unpopularity nowadays.
It's being replaced with the idea that "once you have done X, you are tarnished forever, and can never redeem yourself", where X can be any of an increasing number of things - sex offenses (an extremely broad category, and worthy of a rant all its own) being just one subset of them, albeit the one that carries perhaps the most severe tarnish.
Look at the "convicted felons lose their right to vote, and can rarely if ever regain it" angle, or at "convicted felons lose their right to bear arms" (similarly), just for two additional examples.
(I think I want to say more here, but I'm running out of time to get ready for work, so at least for the moment I'll leave it at that.)
What I mean by that is that if enough people feel for a long enough time that the legal definition is wrong, they will elect enough people who pass enough laws (and/or appoint enough judges who issue enough rulings) which reject the established legal definition that the combined result will be that the legal definition which actually gets used will have changed to more closely matched the colloquial one.
That's basically a description of how democracy is supposed to work: when the law doesn't match what the public thinks the law should be, the public is supposed to get the law changed, by that exact method. It's just that in this case, if the law were what a large part of the public appears to already think it should be, the long-term net negative consequences would be fairly severe.
WTF do you get the idea that the "please stop" comment came from blue? Given the history and context involved, it's fairly clearly a request from a third-party commenter, asking that the person who keeps trying to bait blue into polluting the comment sections with yet more frothing explosions not make the blue problem any worse than it already is.
I'm confident that there are plenty of us who are tired of the continual troll-baiting which such gratuitous invocation of out_of_the_blue represents; I for one have taken up flagging such comments as being trolling in their own right, since previous requests that they no longer be posted seem to have been ignored, and I've seen enough of them hidden that I can't be the only one doing so.
It's a spambot, which tries to shield itself from automated spam filtering by reposting (parts of) other comments, and putting its spam link in the comment's URL field.
If you see a comment whose name is a hyperlink - particularly if the hyperlink points to a URL which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the contents of the comment and/or the topic of the article - and it's not visibly from a commenter whose name you recognize, try searching the thread for a distinctive line from that comment. If you find that it appears at least twice, one of the two comments is almost certainly spam, and thus flag-worthy.
No - based on the very line you quoted, I suspect he'd say that copyright should be perpetual (because as soon as it terminates "those who make the content" no longer have "ALL the rights"), and reducing its term would constitute stealing from the creators.
Whether he'd argue that the creators should retain those rights permanently without being able to sell them, or that the rights which the creators have include the right to sell those rights, I'm not as clear about. Both approaches have their negatives, but I can't tell which set of negatives his particular pathology would take as being positives.
You offer no compelling argument as to why this will happen beyond "but piracy".
If he's making the same argument he usually does on that point, I think the chain of logic is:
Because piracy, therefore reduced sales.
Because reduced sales, therefore reduced profits.
Because reduced profits, therefore reduced budgets for new production.
Because reduced budgets for new production, therefore reduced quality of what is produced. (At least in terms of what is sometimes labeled as production values; think the spectacular special effects we've gotten used to in big-budget productions, at the very least.)
There are multiple points where that chain could break down, of course - the two most obvious being "piracy doesn't necessarily reduce sales" and "quality of production doesn't necessarily correlate with size of budget" - but the idea itself has at least a seed of reasonability to it.
According to multiple articles I've read about this subject (including this one), when you choose to vote a straight ticket and manage to trigger this problem, it somehow checks the box for the Senate candidate from the other straight-ticket option - no matter which straight-ticket option you chose.
That is, triggering the problem while voting a straight Democratic ticket votes for Cruz rather than O'Rourke, and triggering it while voting a straight Republican ticket votes for O'Rourke rather than for Cruz.
How exactly the system might be managing to produce that result, I haven't managed to develop a clue yet.
Unfortunately, "causing undeserved harm to the reputation of" pretty much is the colloquial definition of "defamatory".
I'm mildly afraid that the apparently-increasing gap between that colloquial sense of the word and the legal sense of the word is going to eventually force a "correction" in which the legal definition is adjusted to be closer to the commonly understood colloquial one, with all the negative consequences that would involve.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Inquisition/crusades: Terrible with a god AND without
Well, for some atheists it apparently is more complex, detailed, and even nuanced than that single one-sentence belief statement, and some of those atheists have (I think, based on what I've seen in quotelists and the like) been among the ones who have been sufficiently activist about their atheism to be relatively prominent and visible. (Unfortunately, I haven't bothered noting down their names, and I don't have the lists themselves in readily browseable form.) So it's possible that those who describe atheism that way are extrapolating from that sample set.
Re: Re: Re: Re: The Inquisition/crusades: Terrible with a god AND without
I think (at least part of) the confusion arises from the "or" in the definition you cite: the fact that the word "atheism" is used to refer both to absence of belief in the divine ("I don't believe in God" - a superset of agnosticism), and to belief in absence of the divine ("I believe there is no God").
The latter would qualify as a belief system, such that the term "faith" could be argued to apply in at least some cases, but the former would not - and yet they're both referred to using the same word.
As to communism - while it's true that authoritarian communism as implemented did kill huge numbers of people, and (so far as I'm aware) that authoritarian communism as implemented did incorporate atheism among its tenets, I see no basis for concluding that the killing arose from the atheism - much less that there are tenets of atheism which require, call for, or even lead to.
I am reminded of Spider Robinson's "Asshole Principle", expounded by one of the primary protagonist characters in his novel "Lifehouse".
There's a good handful of examples provided (including Jesus), and a better explanation of it than I can give without digging out the book and transcribing the section verbatim, but the basic principle boils down to "Everyone is an asshole, and that includes both me and you".
It could make sense as an anti-competitive tactic, a way to push one's own services (from which one gets other benefits) over those of competitors, by leveraging the market power of the underlying platform.
IIRC, Microsoft did something vaguely like that back in the day, although the parallels I'm being able to recall aren't exact.
That's not an approach Google seems to have actually taken, however. All they've done (historically) is to make the products in question available for free (and present by default), which - while it may constitute a considerably lesser form of the same leveraging of existing market presence - is by far a less severe degree of inappropriate pressure.
On the post: Judge Says Memphis PD's Surveillance Of Protesters Violated 40-Year-Old Consent Decree
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Thus, it wouldn't matter how the consent decree was written, because the entity which is agreeing to it (the city) is Constitutionally prohibited - by the same First Amendment which the decree is aimed at enforcing - from doing what the decree would require it to do.
The only loophole I see in that is the idea of the decree requiring the city to embed the decree's more-individual requirements in the terms of the officers' employment contracts - including altering the terms of the contracts of anyone who's already employed, firing anyone who won't accept the alteration, and eating any costs which such firing might trigger.
(I think what I'm doing is basically arguing the libertarian - or perhaps the Libertarian - perspective on this. Which feels weird, since I don't really agree with the parts of that worldview which (would?) give rise to this argument (the fetishization of the right of private contract, among other things), but since I can see the argument it seems like intellectual dishonesty not to try to make sure that counterarguments don't overlook it.)
On the post: Employee Watching Porn At Work Infected US Government Agency's Network
Re: Doesn't this guy have work to do?
For someone in that position, browsing the Internet during the "wait" periods of your duty shift isn't unreasonable, as long as you drop it and respond appropriately whenever something that matches your job responsibilities does come along. In the vast majority of such cases, however, that "not unreasonable" does not extend to browsing porn.
On the post: Small And Medium Publishers Protest EU Link Tax, Which Will Harm Them, While Helping Only Large Publishers
Re: Use the law to get around the law.
"Any search engine, news aggregator, or other entity which wishes to link to this site is hereby granted permission to do so, conditional on the payment of one euro per ten thousand years, due at any time prior to the expiration of that time period."
On the post: Judge Says Memphis PD's Surveillance Of Protesters Violated 40-Year-Old Consent Decree
Re: Re:
Also, tossing around words like "dipshit" doesn't exactly help, in almost any argument.
On the post: Judge Says Memphis PD's Surveillance Of Protesters Violated 40-Year-Old Consent Decree
Re: Re:
I think the argument being made is that while the city agreed not to do it, the individual police officers who are actually doing it and came on board after the agreement was made did not agree to any such thing, and - since doing it is First Amendment-protected activity, and those individual officers have First Amendment rights - the city cannot compel them to do so; any attempt by the city to do that would itself be unconstitutional.
In theory, if the employment agreement for those officers contains terms requiring them to agree to follow the consent decree (or not get/keep the job), that would obviate that objection. However, given the apparent limited effort put into complying with the consent decree in other regards, I would be surprised if there were any such terms in place.
On the post: Employee Watching Porn At Work Infected US Government Agency's Network
Re: Truly, the best humor is the inadvertent kind
There might still be legitimate reasons for the comment in the other place being blocked, without invoking the "manual realtime moderation" model he seems to be assuming, but that's at least not the same thing as "obviously, posting too many comments too quickly is going to result in them being blocked as probable spam".
On the post: Verizon Just Obliterated Ajit Pai's Justification For Killing Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: 'Also if you could somehow shoot our competition again...'
This ignores both the other barriers to entry into that market and the fact that getting labelled as a "natural monopoly" actually opens a company up to *more* anti-monopoly regulation than not being so labelled; it just doesn't open it up to being broken up, because by the definition of "natural monopoly" the consequences of such a break-up would be worse than inaction.
On the post: Georgia Government Officials Celebrate Halloween By Engaging In Pointless Hassling Of Sex Offenders
Debt to society
This actually hits on the exact, core problem: the very concept of "paying one's debt to society", with its associated implication that once the debt is paid normal life can resume, is fading into unpopularity nowadays.
It's being replaced with the idea that "once you have done X, you are tarnished forever, and can never redeem yourself", where X can be any of an increasing number of things - sex offenses (an extremely broad category, and worthy of a rant all its own) being just one subset of them, albeit the one that carries perhaps the most severe tarnish.
Look at the "convicted felons lose their right to vote, and can rarely if ever regain it" angle, or at "convicted felons lose their right to bear arms" (similarly), just for two additional examples.
(I think I want to say more here, but I'm running out of time to get ready for work, so at least for the moment I'll leave it at that.)
On the post: Steam, Proud Adopters Of Hands Off Games Policy, Very Hands On When Banning All Of TorrentFreak
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Detailed And Thorough Debunking Of Bloomberg's Sketchy Story About Supply Chain Hack
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
What I mean by that is that if enough people feel for a long enough time that the legal definition is wrong, they will elect enough people who pass enough laws (and/or appoint enough judges who issue enough rulings) which reject the established legal definition that the combined result will be that the legal definition which actually gets used will have changed to more closely matched the colloquial one.
That's basically a description of how democracy is supposed to work: when the law doesn't match what the public thinks the law should be, the public is supposed to get the law changed, by that exact method. It's just that in this case, if the law were what a large part of the public appears to already think it should be, the long-term net negative consequences would be fairly severe.
On the post: Apple Finally Shuts Down Security Flaw Used By Phone-Cracking Vendor
Re: Re: Re:
I'm confident that there are plenty of us who are tired of the continual troll-baiting which such gratuitous invocation of out_of_the_blue represents; I for one have taken up flagging such comments as being trolling in their own right, since previous requests that they no longer be posted seem to have been ignored, and I've seen enough of them hidden that I can't be the only one doing so.
On the post: Texas E-Voting Machines Switching Votes For Non-Nefarious But Still Stupid Reasons
Re: Re: This most important
It's a spambot, which tries to shield itself from automated spam filtering by reposting (parts of) other comments, and putting its spam link in the comment's URL field.
If you see a comment whose name is a hyperlink - particularly if the hyperlink points to a URL which doesn't seem to have anything to do with the contents of the comment and/or the topic of the article - and it's not visibly from a commenter whose name you recognize, try searching the thread for a distinctive line from that comment. If you find that it appears at least twice, one of the two comments is almost certainly spam, and thus flag-worthy.
On the post: Australian MP Pushes Back Against Expanded Site And Search Blocking Laws
Re:
Whether he'd argue that the creators should retain those rights permanently without being able to sell them, or that the rights which the creators have include the right to sell those rights, I'm not as clear about. Both approaches have their negatives, but I can't tell which set of negatives his particular pathology would take as being positives.
On the post: Australian MP Pushes Back Against Expanded Site And Search Blocking Laws
Re:
If he's making the same argument he usually does on that point, I think the chain of logic is:
There are multiple points where that chain could break down, of course - the two most obvious being "piracy doesn't necessarily reduce sales" and "quality of production doesn't necessarily correlate with size of budget" - but the idea itself has at least a seed of reasonability to it.
On the post: Texas E-Voting Machines Switching Votes For Non-Nefarious But Still Stupid Reasons
Re: Defaults to (R)?
It doesn't.
According to multiple articles I've read about this subject (including this one), when you choose to vote a straight ticket and manage to trigger this problem, it somehow checks the box for the Senate candidate from the other straight-ticket option - no matter which straight-ticket option you chose.
That is, triggering the problem while voting a straight Democratic ticket votes for Cruz rather than O'Rourke, and triggering it while voting a straight Republican ticket votes for O'Rourke rather than for Cruz.
How exactly the system might be managing to produce that result, I haven't managed to develop a clue yet.
On the post: Detailed And Thorough Debunking Of Bloomberg's Sketchy Story About Supply Chain Hack
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Unfortunately, "causing undeserved harm to the reputation of" pretty much is the colloquial definition of "defamatory".
I'm mildly afraid that the apparently-increasing gap between that colloquial sense of the word and the legal sense of the word is going to eventually force a "correction" in which the legal definition is adjusted to be closer to the commonly understood colloquial one, with all the negative consequences that would involve.
On the post: Another Terrible Court Decision In Europe: Insulting A Religion Is Not Free Speech
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Inquisition/crusades: Terrible with a god AND without
Well, for some atheists it apparently is more complex, detailed, and even nuanced than that single one-sentence belief statement, and some of those atheists have (I think, based on what I've seen in quotelists and the like) been among the ones who have been sufficiently activist about their atheism to be relatively prominent and visible. (Unfortunately, I haven't bothered noting down their names, and I don't have the lists themselves in readily browseable form.) So it's possible that those who describe atheism that way are extrapolating from that sample set.
On the post: Another Terrible Court Decision In Europe: Insulting A Religion Is Not Free Speech
Re: Re: Re: Re: The Inquisition/crusades: Terrible with a god AND without
I think (at least part of) the confusion arises from the "or" in the definition you cite: the fact that the word "atheism" is used to refer both to absence of belief in the divine ("I don't believe in God" - a superset of agnosticism), and to belief in absence of the divine ("I believe there is no God").
The latter would qualify as a belief system, such that the term "faith" could be argued to apply in at least some cases, but the former would not - and yet they're both referred to using the same word.
As to communism - while it's true that authoritarian communism as implemented did kill huge numbers of people, and (so far as I'm aware) that authoritarian communism as implemented did incorporate atheism among its tenets, I see no basis for concluding that the killing arose from the atheism - much less that there are tenets of atheism which require, call for, or even lead to.
On the post: Another Terrible Court Decision In Europe: Insulting A Religion Is Not Free Speech
Re: Quite simple
There's a good handful of examples provided (including Jesus), and a better explanation of it than I can give without digging out the book and transcribing the section verbatim, but the basic principle boils down to "Everyone is an asshole, and that includes both me and you".
On the post: EU 'Protecting Consumers' By Forcing Them To Pay More For Android?
Re: Re: Misleading article
IIRC, Microsoft did something vaguely like that back in the day, although the parallels I'm being able to recall aren't exact.
That's not an approach Google seems to have actually taken, however. All they've done (historically) is to make the products in question available for free (and present by default), which - while it may constitute a considerably lesser form of the same leveraging of existing market presence - is by far a less severe degree of inappropriate pressure.
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