I didn't say that I won't try it, for future instances; I may do so, now that it's been brought to my attention.
The reason I didn't try it originally is that it didn't occur to me that it might be appropriate, and the reason I haven't tried it now that you've pointed it out is that I've already reported the problem (publicly, with all the downsides involved in that) so there's no real point in reporting it again (privately).
As to "not worth the effort of typing as much as (I) have", most of the typing thus far has been about explaining myself; when someone asks me about something that's not obvious, and seems reasonable about doing so, I usually prefer to answer - if only as a matter of courtesy.
Why is the first obviously a typo but missing a space is obviously not a typo?
The missing space is not "obviously not a typo"; it is merely "not obviously (nothing more than) a typo". (By contrast to the other, which is obviously nothing more than a typo.)
It could be one, but other explanations exist, and past experience (in many contexts) leads me to suspect that one of those other explanations is the more likely (and thus treat it as the default).
Did you try the "Help & Feedback" link at the bottom of the page?
No; it hadn't occurred to me that that might be appropriate. I would expect (and/or would have expected) that such a site-navigation-footer "feedback" link would be for reporting problems with the site in general or as a whole, not details about individual articles. Glancing at it, it doesn't really seem particularly well suited for the purpose - though arguably not much less so than the comment form is, and the fact that it's nonpublic where the comment form is not might be enough to outweigh that "not much".
If that contact/feedback form really is intended and suitable for pointing out typos (et cetera) on individual articles, that's fine, and I can go that route in future (assuming I remember) - but I don't think there's anything to lead the observer to expect that to be the case.
(I seem to be in a moderately pedantic, lots-of-parentheses mode at the moment. Sorry if that gets in the way here...)
footage submitted everyday -> footage submitted every day
The former is clearly a simple typo, but the latter is one of my minor peeves. The word "everyday" is an adjective, meaning something like "routine" or "ordinary"; the phrase "every day" is a noun, meaning "each day without exception". This context clearly requires a noun.
(I'd prefer to report this sort of thing directly, rather than via public comment that's likely to remain up forever even if the mistakes get corrected, but if there's a meaningful way of doing so I'm not aware of what it is.)
I think there's a fair argument to be made that guns really are different for that case, specifically because of the imbalance of dangerousness created.
Most, if not all, of the things restricted by those other laws don't make their owner/user more dangerous - but guns do.
Therefore, criminals having those things when non-criminals do not does not make the criminals proportionally more dangerous - but criminals having guns when non-criminals do not does do that.
That difference in the nature of the product, so to speak, seems substantial enough to justify different treatment in this regard. At the very least, arguments which treat the two types of laws as equivalent but do not take that difference into account are unlikely to be persuasive.
More seriously, the part of me which goes out of its way to look for reasonable interpretations of statements I disagree with wants to argue that it's possible Trump was trying to suggest that we need separate ratings for "sexy stuff" vs. "violent stuff", rather than the simple uninformative categories things generally get rated into.
I think I've heard rumblings in the direction of such a thing at least once in the past, but if it's already been done, it's at least not widespread enough for me to be aware of it as a standard practice.
I'm not sure such a thing would make much difference in practice vs. what we already have; what's more, if it's not trivial to implement, I wouldn't be surprised if implementing it were impractically difficult. But it's at least not an obviously stupid or ignorant idea.
Maybe it's based on the idea that (even) people who didn't really need antidepressants in the first place might have a disproportionate reaction to the changes in internal chemical balance from going off of them?
I'm not sure the conclusions are sound even based on that, but it's the best logic I can think of for connecting the two statements from the first and last sentences of that comment.
You said "it's more newsworthy when it happens in America" (by implication, vs. when it happens somewhere else).
This is equivalent to saying "it's less newsworthy when it happens in places other than America" (by implication, vs. when it happens in America).
PaulT did not say that you said such things are "less newsworthy in the US"; he said that you said they are "less newsworthy than in the US". (Emphasis mine.)
To my eye, this seems like a perfectly consistent representation of the position you expressed.
Do you have any references for specific Trump statements from the campaign which make it unambiguously clear that "drain the swamp" was talking about lobbying and monied interests and so forth?
I wasn't paying close enough attention to his speeches back then that I'd have a hard time believing I'd missed something, but in looking back on what I do remember, I haven't been able to dredge up any comments involving that phrase which would contradict the idea that the "deep state" is pretty-much always what was being meant. (With perhaps an attempt to mislead the uninitiated into thinking that he might mean those other things.)
If there is sufficiently-clear evidence to contradict that idea, I'd be glad to be corrected on the subject.
Nope. Like every other Cabinet department, it's part of the executive branch.
The only parts of the judicial branch that I'm aware of are the actual courts - the forums where cases (criminal and otherwise) are filed under the law, and the people who staff them, and most particularly the judges who rule on those cases. (And I think the juries which serve as finders of fact, when applicable.)
With possible limited exceptions (e.g. bailiffs), those who investigate and enforce the law are separate from the courts which judge the law.
Eh, the Constitution disagrees. There's supposed to be a separation between the judicial, the executive, and the legislative branches. That Trump is merging them is unconstitutional.
I think the argument is that the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and NSA are all parts of the executive branch, so the Constitution's separation-of-powers-between-branches division doesn't come into play.
If there are places where Trump has been trying to blur the lines between the branches of government (as opposed to the branches of the executive branch) in any meaningful way, I'm fairly sure I haven't heard about it.
What are you thinking is being referred to when "the swamp" is mentioned?
A lot of people seem to think it's talking about lobbying, monied influence, and so forth, but I don't think that's what it's meant to refer to at all.
I think it's meant to refer to what is also called the "deep state": the entrenched career government officials who persist in their positions across administrations, are not accountable to the electorate, and - by way of those positions - thwart the attempts of those who do get elected (and thus *are (presumed to be) accountable to the electorate) to do anything those entrenched officials don't want done.
A. K. A. the experienced people who actually know how government operates and have the skills and institutional knowledge to actually get things done.
Talking about draining that type of "swamp" "into the White House" wouldn't really seem to make any sense.
Trump and his appointees do seem to have been doing a fairly decent job of cleaning a lot of those people out, and I suspect that that - even more than his changes to regulations and his stacking of the federal bench and so forth - will be the part of the damage done by his administration that's going to be the hardest, and take the longest, to reverse.
By "top of the list", he appears to have meant "the list of specifically-enumerated rights, when they got around to enumerating those rights in amendments to be on the safe side, after having initially tried to not enumerate any in the original Constitution".
IIRC the original argument way back when was that enumerating any rights would lead people towards thinking that any rights not enumerated did not exist, and they wanted to go with an explicit-grant-of-powers rather than explicit-grant-of-rights model, but after the Constitution originally passed the side arguing that failing to enumerate important rights would inevitably lead those rights to be ignored later on won out.
And indeed, the two rights mentioned - free speech and (by paraphrase) bearing arms - are covered by the first two Amendments in the list of Amendments.
gun owners who keep shooting up schools and other crowds every few weeks
More frequently than that, actually, depending on your threshold for "shooting up".
When I first heard about the recent mass shooting that's in current public discussion, which occurred approximately six weeks in to 2018, it was cited as being the eighth school shooting thus far in 2018.
Now, they didn't specify their criteria for what they were counting as a school shooting; I've seen reports that some such counts include things as inapplicable as "a police officer doing a firearms-related demonstration to a high-school class flubbed the demonstration and shot himself in the foot while trying to get the gun out of the holster" through "a gun went off accidentally, hitting nobody" all the way down as far as "a student whose family keeps guns in the house forgot that he had one in the car when he was driving to school". And certainly most of the other seven will not have been on anything near the scale of Number Eight.
But even if half of those eight turn out to be invalid, that's still considerably more frequent than "every few weeks".
Just as a nit, I don't think "the store" necessarily implies a brick-and-mortar shopfront; last I checked (which admittedly may not have been recently), it was still relatively common to refer to online merchants as "stores", or at least "Web stores".
Also, the Facebook logo being present on the packaging does not necessarily imply "requires Facebook in order to use the device" (although it should certainly be enough of a red flag to get someone who's anti-Facebook to do extra research before buying); it could simply imply "supports Facebook connectivity", much as a Facebook logo on a Website or in an app often means nothing more than "we make it easy for you to share (things related to us) via Facebook!".
I agree that "not using Facebook or anything like it" isn't necessarily anything to boast about, though. Even I don't tend to bring my personal Facebook avoidance up in public discussions, even ones where Facebook is the topic, unless it's directly relevant; I might mention it if Facebook comes up in individual conversation, but that's about as far as that goes.
I think that may be a bit farther than is justified.
I, too, would return a product if I discovered after buying it that it would not work without Facebook authentication - but that does not imply that I wouldn't do the research before buying; I would, and generally do, and then don't buy such products (though I can't remember any examples of such products just off the top of my head).
All it says is that if I missed the requirement in my pre-purchase research, or if I failed to do the research in one instance and it turned out that that instance was one where it actually mattered, I would go through with the return.
That seems like a reasonable position, to me - if nothing else, then because such a requirement makes the product useless to me, because I do not have a Facebook account and (for reasons of my own) refuse to create one.
I forgot to add: clearly, the way to deal with that (even accepting his premise) is to put in regulators who do want to remove or rein in the monopolies, but he either doesn't think that that's possible or doesn't trust that those regulators won't be replaced by monopoly-supporting ones again later on.
I'm moderately certain that that poorly-constructed sentence was meant to convey "if the regulators didn't want the monopolies to exist, the monopolies would not exist", with the intended implication that "therefore the regulators do want the monopolies to exist" and subsequently "therefore any attempt to get those same regulators to save you from the monopolies is hopelessly misguided".
And if we limit the scope of discourse to the US market, and the regulators which have sway there (since AFAIK there is no single regulatory body, or set thereof, which has sway across the entirety of all Internet-service markets), I can kind of see the point. I think it's still ignoring important relevant facts, in a way somewhat analogous to how rejecting entropy because life on Earth grows more complex ignores the energy input Earth receives from the Sun (i.e., ignoring the closed-system/open-system dichotomy), but to someone who doesn't accept those facts - as the person we're presumably dealing with clearly does not - it would be a reasonable position to take.
In that view, your comment about "the regulators who successfully dismantle monopolies in countries where effective regulation is allowed" would be flying wide of the point; the very fact that regulators in non-US markets have reined in monopolies would imply that those regulators do not want the monopolies to exist, but he's complaining about the ones in US markets, which - by his logic - do want the monopolies to exist.
I believe that "claim to be against the thing you're spamming for" technique is a known method for making spam posts look plausible; it's not exactly common, but it's not at all unheard-of.
Or, to be charitable, possibly the linked-to site could maybe be (the? a?) place where he(?) got into the cryptocurrency thing, and he(?) just didn't explain it properly. Seems less likely to me, but I suppose it's not impossible.
On the post: Loss In 9th Circuit Appeals Court Isn't Slowing 1-800-LAWFIRM's Lawsuit Crusade Against Social Media Companies
Re: Re: Re:
I didn't say that I won't try it, for future instances; I may do so, now that it's been brought to my attention.
The reason I didn't try it originally is that it didn't occur to me that it might be appropriate, and the reason I haven't tried it now that you've pointed it out is that I've already reported the problem (publicly, with all the downsides involved in that) so there's no real point in reporting it again (privately).
As to "not worth the effort of typing as much as (I) have", most of the typing thus far has been about explaining myself; when someone asks me about something that's not obvious, and seems reasonable about doing so, I usually prefer to answer - if only as a matter of courtesy.
On the post: Loss In 9th Circuit Appeals Court Isn't Slowing 1-800-LAWFIRM's Lawsuit Crusade Against Social Media Companies
Re:
The missing space is not "obviously not a typo"; it is merely "not obviously (nothing more than) a typo". (By contrast to the other, which is obviously nothing more than a typo.)
It could be one, but other explanations exist, and past experience (in many contexts) leads me to suspect that one of those other explanations is the more likely (and thus treat it as the default).
No; it hadn't occurred to me that that might be appropriate. I would expect (and/or would have expected) that such a site-navigation-footer "feedback" link would be for reporting problems with the site in general or as a whole, not details about individual articles. Glancing at it, it doesn't really seem particularly well suited for the purpose - though arguably not much less so than the comment form is, and the fact that it's nonpublic where the comment form is not might be enough to outweigh that "not much".
If that contact/feedback form really is intended and suitable for pointing out typos (et cetera) on individual articles, that's fine, and I can go that route in future (assuming I remember) - but I don't think there's anything to lead the observer to expect that to be the case.
(I seem to be in a moderately pedantic, lots-of-parentheses mode at the moment. Sorry if that gets in the way here...)
On the post: Loss In 9th Circuit Appeals Court Isn't Slowing 1-800-LAWFIRM's Lawsuit Crusade Against Social Media Companies
Proofreading
Two nits that jump out at me:
Plantiff -> Plaintiff
The former is clearly a simple typo, but the latter is one of my minor peeves. The word "everyday" is an adjective, meaning something like "routine" or "ordinary"; the phrase "every day" is a noun, meaning "each day without exception". This context clearly requires a noun.
(I'd prefer to report this sort of thing directly, rather than via public comment that's likely to remain up forever even if the mistakes get corrected, but if there's a meaningful way of doing so I'm not aware of what it is.)
On the post: Right On Time: Kentucky Governor Lays The Blame For Florida School Shooting At The Feet Of Video Games
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I think there's a fair argument to be made that guns really are different for that case, specifically because of the imbalance of dangerousness created.
Most, if not all, of the things restricted by those other laws don't make their owner/user more dangerous - but guns do.
Therefore, criminals having those things when non-criminals do not does not make the criminals proportionally more dangerous - but criminals having guns when non-criminals do not does do that.
That difference in the nature of the product, so to speak, seems substantial enough to justify different treatment in this regard. At the very least, arguments which treat the two types of laws as equivalent but do not take that difference into account are unlikely to be persuasive.
On the post: Trump Blames School Shootings On Violent Video Games, Movies; Suggests We Need Some Sort Of Rating System For Them
Re: Ratings system?
More seriously, the part of me which goes out of its way to look for reasonable interpretations of statements I disagree with wants to argue that it's possible Trump was trying to suggest that we need separate ratings for "sexy stuff" vs. "violent stuff", rather than the simple uninformative categories things generally get rated into.
I think I've heard rumblings in the direction of such a thing at least once in the past, but if it's already been done, it's at least not widespread enough for me to be aware of it as a standard practice.
I'm not sure such a thing would make much difference in practice vs. what we already have; what's more, if it's not trivial to implement, I wouldn't be surprised if implementing it were impractically difficult. But it's at least not an obviously stupid or ignorant idea.
On the post: Trump Blames School Shootings On Violent Video Games, Movies; Suggests We Need Some Sort Of Rating System For Them
Ratings system?
On the post: Right On Time: Kentucky Governor Lays The Blame For Florida School Shooting At The Feet Of Video Games
Re: Re:
I'm not sure the conclusions are sound even based on that, but it's the best logic I can think of for connecting the two statements from the first and last sentences of that comment.
On the post: Right On Time: Kentucky Governor Lays The Blame For Florida School Shooting At The Feet Of Video Games
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You said "it's more newsworthy when it happens in America" (by implication, vs. when it happens somewhere else).
This is equivalent to saying "it's less newsworthy when it happens in places other than America" (by implication, vs. when it happens in America).
PaulT did not say that you said such things are "less newsworthy in the US"; he said that you said they are "less newsworthy than in the US". (Emphasis mine.)
To my eye, this seems like a perfectly consistent representation of the position you expressed.
On the post: Trump, Nunes Accidentally Undo DOJ's Efforts To Keep Surveillance Docs Under Wraps
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: partisanship
Do you have any references for specific Trump statements from the campaign which make it unambiguously clear that "drain the swamp" was talking about lobbying and monied interests and so forth?
I wasn't paying close enough attention to his speeches back then that I'd have a hard time believing I'd missed something, but in looking back on what I do remember, I haven't been able to dredge up any comments involving that phrase which would contradict the idea that the "deep state" is pretty-much always what was being meant. (With perhaps an attempt to mislead the uninitiated into thinking that he might mean those other things.)
If there is sufficiently-clear evidence to contradict that idea, I'd be glad to be corrected on the subject.
On the post: Trump, Nunes Accidentally Undo DOJ's Efforts To Keep Surveillance Docs Under Wraps
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: partisanship
The only parts of the judicial branch that I'm aware of are the actual courts - the forums where cases (criminal and otherwise) are filed under the law, and the people who staff them, and most particularly the judges who rule on those cases. (And I think the juries which serve as finders of fact, when applicable.)
With possible limited exceptions (e.g. bailiffs), those who investigate and enforce the law are separate from the courts which judge the law.
On the post: Trump, Nunes Accidentally Undo DOJ's Efforts To Keep Surveillance Docs Under Wraps
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: partisanship
I think the argument is that the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and NSA are all parts of the executive branch, so the Constitution's separation-of-powers-between-branches division doesn't come into play.
If there are places where Trump has been trying to blur the lines between the branches of government (as opposed to the branches of the executive branch) in any meaningful way, I'm fairly sure I haven't heard about it.
On the post: Trump, Nunes Accidentally Undo DOJ's Efforts To Keep Surveillance Docs Under Wraps
Re:
Isn't "King me" more a thing in checkers than in chess?
On the post: Trump, Nunes Accidentally Undo DOJ's Efforts To Keep Surveillance Docs Under Wraps
Re: Re: Re: partisanship
What are you thinking is being referred to when "the swamp" is mentioned?
A lot of people seem to think it's talking about lobbying, monied influence, and so forth, but I don't think that's what it's meant to refer to at all.
I think it's meant to refer to what is also called the "deep state": the entrenched career government officials who persist in their positions across administrations, are not accountable to the electorate, and - by way of those positions - thwart the attempts of those who do get elected (and thus *are (presumed to be) accountable to the electorate) to do anything those entrenched officials don't want done.
A. K. A. the experienced people who actually know how government operates and have the skills and institutional knowledge to actually get things done.
Talking about draining that type of "swamp" "into the White House" wouldn't really seem to make any sense.
Trump and his appointees do seem to have been doing a fairly decent job of cleaning a lot of those people out, and I suspect that that - even more than his changes to regulations and his stacking of the federal bench and so forth - will be the part of the damage done by his administration that's going to be the hardest, and take the longest, to reverse.
On the post: Even If The Russian Troll Factory Abused Our Openness Against Us, That Doesn't Mean We Should Close Up
Re: Re: Lies, damned lies, and journalism.
By "top of the list", he appears to have meant "the list of specifically-enumerated rights, when they got around to enumerating those rights in amendments to be on the safe side, after having initially tried to not enumerate any in the original Constitution".
IIRC the original argument way back when was that enumerating any rights would lead people towards thinking that any rights not enumerated did not exist, and they wanted to go with an explicit-grant-of-powers rather than explicit-grant-of-rights model, but after the Constitution originally passed the side arguing that failing to enumerate important rights would inevitably lead those rights to be ignored later on won out.
And indeed, the two rights mentioned - free speech and (by paraphrase) bearing arms - are covered by the first two Amendments in the list of Amendments.
More frequently than that, actually, depending on your threshold for "shooting up".
When I first heard about the recent mass shooting that's in current public discussion, which occurred approximately six weeks in to 2018, it was cited as being the eighth school shooting thus far in 2018.
Now, they didn't specify their criteria for what they were counting as a school shooting; I've seen reports that some such counts include things as inapplicable as "a police officer doing a firearms-related demonstration to a high-school class flubbed the demonstration and shot himself in the foot while trying to get the gun out of the holster" through "a gun went off accidentally, hitting nobody" all the way down as far as "a student whose family keeps guns in the house forgot that he had one in the car when he was driving to school". And certainly most of the other seven will not have been on anything near the scale of Number Eight.
But even if half of those eight turn out to be invalid, that's still considerably more frequent than "every few weeks".
On the post: Terrible Copyright Ruling Over An Embedded Tweet Undermines Key Concept Of How The Internet Works
Re: Re: Re:
Your beard is just ridiculous.
On the post: Facebook 'Security': A New VPN That's Spyware And Two-Factor Authentication That Spams You
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Also, the Facebook logo being present on the packaging does not necessarily imply "requires Facebook in order to use the device" (although it should certainly be enough of a red flag to get someone who's anti-Facebook to do extra research before buying); it could simply imply "supports Facebook connectivity", much as a Facebook logo on a Website or in an app often means nothing more than "we make it easy for you to share (things related to us) via Facebook!".
I agree that "not using Facebook or anything like it" isn't necessarily anything to boast about, though. Even I don't tend to bring my personal Facebook avoidance up in public discussions, even ones where Facebook is the topic, unless it's directly relevant; I might mention it if Facebook comes up in individual conversation, but that's about as far as that goes.
On the post: Facebook 'Security': A New VPN That's Spyware And Two-Factor Authentication That Spams You
Re: Re:
I, too, would return a product if I discovered after buying it that it would not work without Facebook authentication - but that does not imply that I wouldn't do the research before buying; I would, and generally do, and then don't buy such products (though I can't remember any examples of such products just off the top of my head).
All it says is that if I missed the requirement in my pre-purchase research, or if I failed to do the research in one instance and it turned out that that instance was one where it actually mattered, I would go through with the return.
That seems like a reasonable position, to me - if nothing else, then because such a requirement makes the product useless to me, because I do not have a Facebook account and (for reasons of my own) refuse to create one.
On the post: FCC Broadband Availability Data Derided As Inaccurate, 'Shameful'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I have to admit...
I forgot to add: clearly, the way to deal with that (even accepting his premise) is to put in regulators who do want to remove or rein in the monopolies, but he either doesn't think that that's possible or doesn't trust that those regulators won't be replaced by monopoly-supporting ones again later on.
On the post: FCC Broadband Availability Data Derided As Inaccurate, 'Shameful'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I have to admit...
I'm moderately certain that that poorly-constructed sentence was meant to convey "if the regulators didn't want the monopolies to exist, the monopolies would not exist", with the intended implication that "therefore the regulators do want the monopolies to exist" and subsequently "therefore any attempt to get those same regulators to save you from the monopolies is hopelessly misguided".
And if we limit the scope of discourse to the US market, and the regulators which have sway there (since AFAIK there is no single regulatory body, or set thereof, which has sway across the entirety of all Internet-service markets), I can kind of see the point. I think it's still ignoring important relevant facts, in a way somewhat analogous to how rejecting entropy because life on Earth grows more complex ignores the energy input Earth receives from the Sun (i.e., ignoring the closed-system/open-system dichotomy), but to someone who doesn't accept those facts - as the person we're presumably dealing with clearly does not - it would be a reasonable position to take.
In that view, your comment about "the regulators who successfully dismantle monopolies in countries where effective regulation is allowed" would be flying wide of the point; the very fact that regulators in non-US markets have reined in monopolies would imply that those regulators do not want the monopolies to exist, but he's complaining about the ones in US markets, which - by his logic - do want the monopolies to exist.
On the post: Cryptocurrency Mining Company Coinhive Shocked To Learn Its Product Is Being Abused
Re: Re: I started hating cryptocurrencies
Or, to be charitable, possibly the linked-to site could maybe be (the? a?) place where he(?) got into the cryptocurrency thing, and he(?) just didn't explain it properly. Seems less likely to me, but I suppose it's not impossible.
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