Re: Re: Anyone new: Misnack's shtick is disaster of Biblical proportions
IIRC, he misspells "Masnick" on purpose, apparently out of an impression that including that string makes it more likely that a comment will be held for moderation.
No, I don't know where he gets that idea from, either.
The capitalization of "Biblical" is perfectly fine, however, and I don't see what you're finding odd or objectionable about that usage of "swagger"...
The term "refugee" may have a specific legal definition, by which it refers only to people who have been granted a specific legal status - but that definition is neither the only nor (AFAIK) the original one, and it is still legitimate to use the word in the broader colloquial sense.
The expression "an illegal" is problematic. It should not be, and I think is not, possible for a person to be illegal; the closest example I can think of is China's one-child policy (is that even still in effect?), under which having second or third child would be against the law, and so the child's existence would be illegal, and so the child would be an illegal person. (I'm also put in mind of the speculative-fiction short story - I think by either Isaac Asimov or Spider Robinson - about the man on his ~60th birthday who remembers, belatedly when a knock comes at the door in the last paragraph, that birth certificates now have expiration dates to avoid overpopulation.)
To permit the government to engage in vindictive action is bad for both the principles on which our society is founded, and for all of us.
The purpose of immigration law as I understand it is to ensure that those who immigrate to this country are not the sort of person we wouldn't want to have be here. The usual prime examples of that sort of person are things like people who are likely to in some way be a danger to society. The fact that he's lived here ten years without (apparently?) doing anything which would endanger society, and indeed is engaging in activities which we want to encourage in our citizens (public journalism on subjects of interest to a significant community), would seem to be a pretty strong indication that he is not the sort of person whom immigration law is meant to exclude, and that it is therefore not actually desirable to exclude him from the country. I think there's room to argue that a record like that should be able to stand in for the usual at-the-border immigration-check process, and that the fact that it is not is a flaw in our immigration laws.
Re: Once again, an "AC" somehow gets puts up as "Last Word".
The way that works is that someone who does have Last Word credits sees the AC's comment, thinks it's deserving of being singled out for special notice, and decides to make it Last Word.
People don't only use those credits for their own posts, you know.
Of course. If you look at the text of the First Amendment, you will not see anything in there about citizenship.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The only mention of even "the people" in there is about peaceful assembly and asking the government to make things right.
Oh, hey, here's an actual specific regulatory proposal!
Followed by a vague generality about antitrust and anti-monopoly regulation (that's a fairly broad field, but it's still not clear which regulations you do and don't consider to qualify), and a proposal for "fire them all, then give their replacements a strong incentive to over-regulate", which seems so self-evidently stupid I don't even know where to start talking about it.
But hey, one specific regulatory proposal is at least a starting point for a discussion!
The phrase "regulate X as a natural monopoly" does not mean "grant a monopoly on X", but rather "recognize that X is naturally a monopoly, and therefore needs to be regulated so that the monopoly is not abused".
So, again... which regulations, specifically, are supporting the Comcast monopoly and can be removed in order to open up the market?
Please cite specific regulations from the relevant publications, including links if possible.
IMO the relevant factor is the fact that they are expecting to get the people whose information is being publicized to pay them in order to cease publication.
Disseminating publicly-available information more broadly than it would otherwise reach is not, and should not be, illegal.
Doing it when the people the information is about do not want it disseminated is not, and should not be, illegal. (Consider reporters covering a scandal about some public figure.)
Doing that for a profit motive is not, and should not be, illegal. (Even assuming that the reporters from the previous example did not have a profit motive, consider someone writing an unauthorized biography.)
But in that last case, the profit is meant to come from third parties who are interested in the information, and by way of the dissemination itself - not by way of ceasing dissemination.
When the intent is for the profit to come from the parties who do not want the information to be disseminated - when you're saying "if you don't want this information widely publicized, pay me" - that IMO crosses the line into (attempted) extortion.
(Although it occurs to me that that description could apply to things like the hush-money cases which have been much in the political news lately...)
Eh? I was given to understand that part of the point of The Political Compass is specifically to define the "center" in left vs. right based on the historical definitions of those terms, not the trends of current politics.
And the up/down axis specifically is supposed to be libertarian vs. authoritarian; the left/right axis is supposed to be liberal vs. conservative, which IIRC they define purely in economic-policy terms.
(Part of the point of that is, I believe, supposed to be that people's actual positions on the left/right axis - as distinct from what is called "left" and "right" in modern politics - may surprise them.)
To give members of the public who have technical and/or economic insights to provide the opportunity to do so, so that the decision-makers can draw on those insights in making their decision.
Under that model, once a given insight has been presented by/in one comment, a second comment presenting that same insight adds nothing.
I actually agree with Richard Bennett that for the FCC to permit the weight of numbers in the comments on either side of the issue to influence their decision would be inappropriate. Where I think the actual problem lies is in the issue of identity fraud - not in any effect on the decision by the FCC, but in the appropriation by whoever made those comments of the identities of others with which to do so. The FCC's comment system was merely a place for this fraud to occur.
I usually mentally translate it to something closer to "to promote the advancement of knowledge and of techniques for doing useful things", as being the rough equivalent in more modern terminology.
And, yes, under that definition there doesn't seem to be very much room for having copyright apply to fiction. The only angle on it I can see is the idea that fiction can help disseminate (promote) otherwise-unfamiliar ideas (knowledge) to the public; that seems to have been the way e.g. Heinlein used it, and it might qualify, if you interpret things a certain way.
Re: Re: First, the U.S. has to get to actual 4G...
Are you sure?
I'm given to understand that "LTE" stands for "Long-Term Evolution" - i.e. that "4G LTE" is something which is not 4G, but will evolve into 4G over the long term. (IIRC, they complained about not being able to implement the 4G standards as they were being defined by whatever international standards body did that, and got permission to use the "4G LTE" terminology instead - primarily for marketing purposes.)
Since they're still calling it "4G LTE", I've been presuming that this evolution has not actually taken place, and what they're calling by that name does not actually meet the 4G standard.
Re: "Well yeah, but the light's better over here."
That certainly covers a lot of it, but I'm not so sure it's the root of the reason in many cases.
I suspect that many people are working from the (probably implicit and subconscious) idea that "by agreeing to host the content - either when you know what the content is in advance, or by continuing to host it after you learn what it is - you are speaking that content yourself, and therefore you are the speaker, and can be held liable for the speech".
That is, it's not that they'd object to the original speaker being liable - they just consider anyone who chooses to cooperate / collaborate in the act of speaking, such as someone who chooses to host the speech, to be equally responsible for what is said.
That's why that whole tangle of ideas including terms like "red-flag knowledge" and "knew or should have known" develops in the first place.
The result of all of that is the setup you describe, but I think that setup is all based on this deeper root.
4) Do you find that your friends are determined by your marijuana use?
Determined to do what, exactly? Is there some other use of the word "determine" that I'm missing here, because I looked through all of these and none of them properly fit with the way this question is structured:
I think the sense of the word being used here is that in definition 3 from the first two sets at that link, and definition 4 from the third set.
Saying that "your friends are determined by your marijuana use" means something like "whether or not you count someone among your friends depends on what their opinion is, and/or would be, about (your) marijuana use". I.e., the question of your marijuana use is an overriding determining factor in whether or not any given person is your friend.
7) Does your marijuana use let you live in a privately defined world?
More questions that don't make any fucking sense. There's that "define" again. Is this a British thing?
No, this is "define", not "determine".
To define a world is to outline the limits of its scope. I think the sense is - coincidentally enough - roughly that in definition 3 from the first and second sets, and definition 4 from the third set, of the sets of definitions given at https://www.thefreedictionary.com/define.
The question is about whether you enable yourself to ignore (parts of) the world that other people live in, in favor of a world whose characteristics you choose yourself, and (if so) whether it is marijuana use that helps make it possible for you to do this.
This probably ties back to the "avoid dealing with your problems" question.
I'm sorry; I interpreted that part of your comment as meaning "there is no law requiring corporations to seek profit, just a law requiring publicly-traded ones to do so", because I understood it to be so clearly established that publicly-traded corporations have a fiduciary duty (read: obligation) to seek profit on behalf of their shareholders and can be punished in court for failing to adhere to that duty.
If publicly-traded corporations do not have such an obligation, I'm befuddled as to why I've seen it mentioned so many times in so many places that I couldn't begin to tell you where I first got the idea from.
If they do, then there is a law which underlies that obligation.
The question is why "further (the profits of) outside investors" should be an obligation which comes along with being publicly traded - or, to put it another way, why we should not impose an obligation on such corporations to do things other than merely seek profit, if only to counter a naturally-existing incentive provided by the investment market. (I believe we already do that in some sectors and some areas; banks, for example, are apparently legally required to have community investment / improvement / etc. plans.)
In my initial comment, I qualified my comments as being specifically about publicly-traded corporations; my reference to understanding the law as requiring profit-seeking, in my second comment, was in that context and should be read as implicitly containing that same qualifier.
Bringing in corporations which do not choose to become publicly-traded is expanding the universe of discourse. The question is precisely why - indeed, whether - it's appropriate to require publicly-traded corporations to adopt a posture which would be labeled "greedy" if held by an individual.
A nice try, but the phrasing and formatting (capitalization, punctuation, etc.) are a bit off. This looks to me like someone attempting to impersonate blue (or whoever it usually is), for reasons even less explicable than the ones why blue does his thing in the first place.
Re: Re: Re: Re: is enforcing "history libel" only a bad thing when *THEY* do it?
One nit: I think the "aggressors" label may have been intended to refer, not to the victims of the Holocaust, but to the invaders and occupiers of the West Bank.
That doesn't invalidate any of your points about how important it is to remember the Holocaust (and I thank you for pointing out the thing about the internment camps, as I don't think I'd realized it), but it's still important to avoid mischaracterizing the arguments of one's opponents.
Well, why is the company obligated to seek profit for its shareholders (as its overriding priority) in the first place?
As I understand matters, it is because A: American law requires it to, and B: the company is incorporated in America.
If US law gets changed to require something else instead of (or in addition to) profit as the overriding priority, and the company doesn't want to have to adhere to that even in other countries, it would seem reasonable to say "then don't incorporate in the US".
IOW, the thing which would place US law ahead of other countries' laws in the hierarchy of overrides would be the fact that the (primary / governing / parent) corporation is incorporated under US law.
As far as I know it's not possible for a single company to be incorporated in two different places at the same time, so that would seem to provide a reasonable tiebreaker.
(In theory, a genuinely communist / socialist government - as distinct from the generally totalitarian / authoritarian ones which have adopted the names of "Communism" and "Socialism" in actual historical practice - would probably object to giving "profit" such primacy, more than a capitalist government would. At which point we might see the same problem arise from the opposite direction.)
On the post: Forget The GDPR, The EU's New Copyright Proposal Will Be A Complete And Utter Disaster For The Internet
Re: Re: Anyone new: Misnack's shtick is disaster of Biblical proportions
No, I don't know where he gets that idea from, either.
The capitalization of "Biblical" is perfectly fine, however, and I don't see what you're finding odd or objectionable about that usage of "swagger"...
On the post: ICE Trying To Deport Journalist For Reporting On Abusive ICE Behavior
Re:
The expression "an illegal" is problematic. It should not be, and I think is not, possible for a person to be illegal; the closest example I can think of is China's one-child policy (is that even still in effect?), under which having second or third child would be against the law, and so the child's existence would be illegal, and so the child would be an illegal person. (I'm also put in mind of the speculative-fiction short story - I think by either Isaac Asimov or Spider Robinson - about the man on his ~60th birthday who remembers, belatedly when a knock comes at the door in the last paragraph, that birth certificates now have expiration dates to avoid overpopulation.)
To permit the government to engage in vindictive action is bad for both the principles on which our society is founded, and for all of us.
The purpose of immigration law as I understand it is to ensure that those who immigrate to this country are not the sort of person we wouldn't want to have be here. The usual prime examples of that sort of person are things like people who are likely to in some way be a danger to society. The fact that he's lived here ten years without (apparently?) doing anything which would endanger society, and indeed is engaging in activities which we want to encourage in our citizens (public journalism on subjects of interest to a significant community), would seem to be a pretty strong indication that he is not the sort of person whom immigration law is meant to exclude, and that it is therefore not actually desirable to exclude him from the country. I think there's room to argue that a record like that should be able to stand in for the usual at-the-border immigration-check process, and that the fact that it is not is a flaw in our immigration laws.
On the post: ICE Trying To Deport Journalist For Reporting On Abusive ICE Behavior
Re: Once again, an "AC" somehow gets puts up as "Last Word".
The way that works is that someone who does have Last Word credits sees the AC's comment, thinks it's deserving of being singled out for special notice, and decides to make it Last Word.
People don't only use those credits for their own posts, you know.
On the post: ICE Trying To Deport Journalist For Reporting On Abusive ICE Behavior
Re: Re: Re:
Of course. If you look at the text of the First Amendment, you will not see anything in there about citizenship.
The only mention of even "the people" in there is about peaceful assembly and asking the government to make things right.
On the post: Comcast Exposes Customer WiFi SSIDs and Passwords For Customers Paying To Rent A Comcast Router
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Regs
Followed by a vague generality about antitrust and anti-monopoly regulation (that's a fairly broad field, but it's still not clear which regulations you do and don't consider to qualify), and a proposal for "fire them all, then give their replacements a strong incentive to over-regulate", which seems so self-evidently stupid I don't even know where to start talking about it.
But hey, one specific regulatory proposal is at least a starting point for a discussion!
On the post: Comcast Exposes Customer WiFi SSIDs and Passwords For Customers Paying To Rent A Comcast Router
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Regs
So, again... which regulations, specifically, are supporting the Comcast monopoly and can be removed in order to open up the market?
Please cite specific regulations from the relevant publications, including links if possible.
On the post: Mugshots.com Operators Arrested For Letting Money Influence Editorial Decisions
Re: Re: Re: Re: Them today, you tomorrow
Agreed.
IMO the relevant factor is the fact that they are expecting to get the people whose information is being publicized to pay them in order to cease publication.
Disseminating publicly-available information more broadly than it would otherwise reach is not, and should not be, illegal.
Doing it when the people the information is about do not want it disseminated is not, and should not be, illegal. (Consider reporters covering a scandal about some public figure.)
Doing that for a profit motive is not, and should not be, illegal. (Even assuming that the reporters from the previous example did not have a profit motive, consider someone writing an unauthorized biography.)
But in that last case, the profit is meant to come from third parties who are interested in the information, and by way of the dissemination itself - not by way of ceasing dissemination.
When the intent is for the profit to come from the parties who do not want the information to be disseminated - when you're saying "if you don't want this information widely publicized, pay me" - that IMO crosses the line into (attempted) extortion.
(Although it occurs to me that that description could apply to things like the hush-money cases which have been much in the political news lately...)
On the post: Facebook Moderation Ramps Up In Germany And Everything Keeps Getting Worse For Its Users
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Use it against them
Eh? I was given to understand that part of the point of The Political Compass is specifically to define the "center" in left vs. right based on the historical definitions of those terms, not the trends of current politics.
And the up/down axis specifically is supposed to be libertarian vs. authoritarian; the left/right axis is supposed to be liberal vs. conservative, which IIRC they define purely in economic-policy terms.
(Part of the point of that is, I believe, supposed to be that people's actual positions on the left/right axis - as distinct from what is called "left" and "right" in modern politics - may surprise them.)
On the post: Senators Ask FCC Why It Did Nothing To Stop Their Names From Being Fraudulently Used During Net Neutrality Repeal
Re: Re: Re: Re: Liberal hysteria
I think I may actually have seen more "Richard Bennett" posts which appear to be from that troll than from the logged-in Richard himself, lately.
On the post: Senators Ask FCC Why It Did Nothing To Stop Their Names From Being Fraudulently Used During Net Neutrality Repeal
Re: Re: Liberal hysteria
Under that model, once a given insight has been presented by/in one comment, a second comment presenting that same insight adds nothing.
I actually agree with Richard Bennett that for the FCC to permit the weight of numbers in the comments on either side of the issue to influence their decision would be inappropriate. Where I think the actual problem lies is in the issue of identity fraud - not in any effect on the decision by the FCC, but in the appropriation by whoever made those comments of the identities of others with which to do so. The FCC's comment system was merely a place for this fraud to occur.
On the post: Copyright Being Used To Prevent Actress From Showing Her Own Demo Reel
Re: Re: Re:
And, yes, under that definition there doesn't seem to be very much room for having copyright apply to fiction. The only angle on it I can see is the idea that fiction can help disseminate (promote) otherwise-unfamiliar ideas (knowledge) to the public; that seems to have been the way e.g. Heinlein used it, and it might qualify, if you interpret things a certain way.
On the post: The 'Race To 5G' Is Largely Just Marketing Nonsense
Re: Re: First, the U.S. has to get to actual 4G...
I'm given to understand that "LTE" stands for "Long-Term Evolution" - i.e. that "4G LTE" is something which is not 4G, but will evolve into 4G over the long term. (IIRC, they complained about not being able to implement the 4G standards as they were being defined by whatever international standards body did that, and got permission to use the "4G LTE" terminology instead - primarily for marketing purposes.)
Since they're still calling it "4G LTE", I've been presuming that this evolution has not actually taken place, and what they're calling by that name does not actually meet the 4G standard.
On the post: As Intermediary Liability Is Under Attack, Stanford Releases Updated Tool To Document The State Of Play Globally
Re: "Well yeah, but the light's better over here."
I suspect that many people are working from the (probably implicit and subconscious) idea that "by agreeing to host the content - either when you know what the content is in advance, or by continuing to host it after you learn what it is - you are speaking that content yourself, and therefore you are the speaker, and can be held liable for the speech".
That is, it's not that they'd object to the original speaker being liable - they just consider anyone who chooses to cooperate / collaborate in the act of speaking, such as someone who chooses to host the speech, to be equally responsible for what is said.
That's why that whole tangle of ideas including terms like "red-flag knowledge" and "knew or should have known" develops in the first place.
The result of all of that is the setup you describe, but I think that setup is all based on this deeper root.
On the post: Drug Dog Trainer: Marijuana Legalization Will Literally Kill Police Drug Dogs
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I think the sense of the word being used here is that in definition 3 from the first two sets at that link, and definition 4 from the third set.
Saying that "your friends are determined by your marijuana use" means something like "whether or not you count someone among your friends depends on what their opinion is, and/or would be, about (your) marijuana use". I.e., the question of your marijuana use is an overriding determining factor in whether or not any given person is your friend.
No, this is "define", not "determine".
To define a world is to outline the limits of its scope. I think the sense is - coincidentally enough - roughly that in definition 3 from the first and second sets, and definition 4 from the third set, of the sets of definitions given at https://www.thefreedictionary.com/define.
The question is about whether you enable yourself to ignore (parts of) the world that other people live in, in favor of a world whose characteristics you choose yourself, and (if so) whether it is marijuana use that helps make it possible for you to do this.
This probably ties back to the "avoid dealing with your problems" question.
On the post: Amazon Joins Google In Making Censorship Easy, Threatens Signal For Circumventing Censorship Regimes
Re: Re: Re: US Corporations and their objectives
If publicly-traded corporations do not have such an obligation, I'm befuddled as to why I've seen it mentioned so many times in so many places that I couldn't begin to tell you where I first got the idea from.
If they do, then there is a law which underlies that obligation.
The question is why "further (the profits of) outside investors" should be an obligation which comes along with being publicly traded - or, to put it another way, why we should not impose an obligation on such corporations to do things other than merely seek profit, if only to counter a naturally-existing incentive provided by the investment market. (I believe we already do that in some sectors and some areas; banks, for example, are apparently legally required to have community investment / improvement / etc. plans.)
On the post: Amazon Joins Google In Making Censorship Easy, Threatens Signal For Circumventing Censorship Regimes
Re: US Corporations and their objectives
In my initial comment, I qualified my comments as being specifically about publicly-traded corporations; my reference to understanding the law as requiring profit-seeking, in my second comment, was in that context and should be read as implicitly containing that same qualifier.
Bringing in corporations which do not choose to become publicly-traded is expanding the universe of discourse. The question is precisely why - indeed, whether - it's appropriate to require publicly-traded corporations to adopt a posture which would be labeled "greedy" if held by an individual.
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Re: Re:
On the post: China Outlaws Telling The Truth About Communist Party 'Heroes And Martyrs'
Re: Re: Re: Re: is enforcing "history libel" only a bad thing when *THEY* do it?
That doesn't invalidate any of your points about how important it is to remember the Holocaust (and I thank you for pointing out the thing about the internment camps, as I don't think I'd realized it), but it's still important to avoid mischaracterizing the arguments of one's opponents.
On the post: Amazon Joins Google In Making Censorship Easy, Threatens Signal For Circumventing Censorship Regimes
Re: Re: Re: Re:
As I understand matters, it is because A: American law requires it to, and B: the company is incorporated in America.
If US law gets changed to require something else instead of (or in addition to) profit as the overriding priority, and the company doesn't want to have to adhere to that even in other countries, it would seem reasonable to say "then don't incorporate in the US".
IOW, the thing which would place US law ahead of other countries' laws in the hierarchy of overrides would be the fact that the (primary / governing / parent) corporation is incorporated under US law.
As far as I know it's not possible for a single company to be incorporated in two different places at the same time, so that would seem to provide a reasonable tiebreaker.
(In theory, a genuinely communist / socialist government - as distinct from the generally totalitarian / authoritarian ones which have adopted the names of "Communism" and "Socialism" in actual historical practice - would probably object to giving "profit" such primacy, more than a capitalist government would. At which point we might see the same problem arise from the opposite direction.)
On the post: War Of Words Between Anti-Vaxxers Results In An Unconstitutional Gag Order
Re:
That rule may not mean what you think it means.
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