Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Bode -- "Gary" fell for fanboy trolling as "Richard Bennet".
Oh, the FCC may very well have claimed that, and if they did they're wrong.
But as far as I remember noticing, Richard Bennett did not claim that.
I was attempting to address only the specific claim that he had stated something (a broad generalization) which I do not remember him stating (in that broad form).
I have no problem with people arguing against him, or even achieving epic smackdown; based on what I've seen of his behavior here, I think he's a toxic and moderately horrible person. I just prefer it to happen on the basis of what his actual positions and arguments appear to be (particularly when those positions and arguments are assertions of things which do appear to be actual facts), rather than on what seem to me to be distortions of those things.
Is there any reason why you keep capitalizing "bail" in your comments? AFAIK there's no convention to refer to it with that form, but you seem to be fairly consistent about it.
"I made a mistake once. I thought I was wrong, but I wasn't."
I heard that version from my father (repeatedly, over the course of my life), but ISTR also having heard the sentiment applied to Einstein's concession WRT the cosmological constant.
Although 2+2 does usually make 4, there are two exceptions:
In base 3 (the lowest in which '2' is even a thing), 2+2 makes 11.
And in base 4, 2+2 makes 10.
(...no, I have no idea what this would mean by analogy in the things your comment actually talks about; why would you think that? I'm just being pedantic, because absolute statements tend to bother me.)
To play devil's advocate a bit: how would that work with things like online ordering (where they at least shouldn't know your location, and thus have any ability to calculate your local sales tax, before checkout time), or for that matter mail-order catalogs?
The only sane outcome of that which I can see would be for such tax-rate-unknown sales channels to be permitted to advertise the pre-tax price - and that would put the brick-and-mortar stores which do know the sales-tax rate at an even bigger competitive disadvantage (because their sticker price would then have to be higher by comparison, even though it's no longer comparing apples to apples).
Since this is (as you say) used so universally in other jurisdictions, I imagine there must be some solution in use, but I can't think of one that doesn't have at least that downside.
Re: Don't tell me the rate is $100 if 'must haves' make it $150.
On the other hand (to all of the above, including your own "other hand"), a requirement that advertised prices for products which are subject to a tax rate which the advertiser can reasonably be expected to know at the time of the ad include the amount of the tax in the advertised price would not be unreasonable and might even be a good idea.
It's irrelevant to the hidden-fees conversation, of course, with only the tangential connection that both of them relate to whether or not the price you pay in the end is the same as the price that was advertised.
Re: Re: Re: Bode -- "Gary" fell for fanboy trolling as "Richard Bennet".
Now, be fair.
The comment you're paraphrasing was referring to the fact that the FCC's comment period is intended to enable members of the public to provide the FCC with information it may not have had or analysis it may not have carried out, and therefore not only is the identity of the commenter irrelevant to the content (except insofar as it may make the content more or less credible), multiple comments providing the same information or analysis are redundant.
It was not claiming to be a general principle that applies to all comments submitted anywhere.
Where the "border exception" is read into the Fourth Amendment is in the word "reasonable", and in precedent on determining what searches are and are not reasonable (and therefore do not or do require a warrant).
My understanding is that long-established precedent has determined that searching luggage at border crossings is reasonable, and so is searching vehicles (for stowaways and/or people being smuggled, et cetera) at those same border crossings;
and then that so is searching those same things *near* a border, but not actually at a crossing, because someone could have crossed without passing through a checkpoint;
and then that so is searching houses, et cetera, near a border, because someone who crossed withough passing through a checkpoint could have hidden there;
and then that anywhere someone could have travelled to from the border in a short amount of time (a few hours) is near enough to the border for all those previous things to still be reasonable.
And of course in the modern day, you can travel a hundred miles in less than two hours by car, so of course anything within a hundred miles is close enough to the border to fall within that last determination.
To be fair, that could just mean that if they'd realized the license meant that, they wouldn't have chosen to offer the content under that license - and they could then argue that they shouldn't required to adhere to license terms they didn't intend to offer.
Their only recourse in that case, however, should be to relicense the content (and license any future content) under a different license, which does have the terms and meaning they want - even if that means defining their own license, rather than using an existing defined-for-general-usage license such as the ones Creative Commons provides.
Because it's offtopic, troll-baiting, and gets posted into lots and lots of different articles without apparent provocation to do so (and thus could arguably qualify as spam).
I think that was the point: because so many lawsuits don't make sense (and yet some of them succeed anyway), the fact that this one wouldn't make sense wouldn't preclude it from going forward (and potentially succeeding anyway).
I'm guessing this is the same person who, in comments on another recent article, claimed that only a handful of people - presumably, site regulars - actually flag comments (as any of the three) and characterized the assertion/impression/appearance/etc. that it's done by the community as being a sham.
Or that's how I parsed those comments, anyway. As to whether that's the intended interpretation, your guess is as good as mine.
That doesn't explain the lack of a Linux version of GOG Galaxy, though; the same games are available for Linux both with and without the client.
Also, wouldn't they still need to support the game on Linux under Wine, whether they have a Linux-native version available or not? The support might be more limited, but it seems to me there'd still be a cost there, and quite possibly enough of one for the difference to be relatively minimal.
Why do government regulatory agencies solicit public comments ??
Because even though the regulatory body may be composed of experts, there's no possible way to be sure that the regulator won't miss noticing and/or thinking of something that's relevant enough to be taken into consideration, so it's valuable to make sure that other experts out in the general populace can contribute information the regulator may have missed.
While the regulator may not be under any obligation to take such input into account, if they don't solicit public comment, they won't be able to take the input into account (because it won't be provided).
Importantly, mere "I don't like or want this" opinions do not constitute information worth contributing; in theory, a regulator may be not merely permitted but actually required to ignore comments of that nature.
Also importantly, once a single comment has presented a given piece of information, additional comments presenting the same information (without new insights resulting from a different viewpoint) are of no further use in making sure that the regulator is fully informed.
Re: Re: Re: Re: 'If we didn't write them, they don't count.'
If he's the person who usually expresses such opinions here, his position seems to be "those bitching about this problem also supported the previous rules, and by supporting those supported the FCC having the right to decide to impose them, which means also supporting the FCC having the right to decide not to impose them, so for those people to complain about the FCC doing exactly that is hypocritical".
I think the more honest response (and also one they might actually give, in some form) would be along the lines of "Yeah, the women who are already in the profession and aren't getting out are in more danger, but all the women who never get dragged into the profession in the first place (because the law made dragging women into it more dangerous) have been saved!". With the implication that the benefit of the latter far outweighs the detriment of the former.
It's still specious, of course, especially when put up against real-world statistics about both halves of that divide - but it's at least internally consistent.
I'm not sure how that addresses the point the AC was trying to make.
The AC's point, as I read it, seemed to be that if you're going to throttle for anti-congestion purposes at all, you should do it 24/7, even when congestion is not actually occurring - because otherwise the customer's experience will be inconsistent, and the customer will find the unpredictability itself ("what video quality can I get right now? No way to tell except to try!") irritating.
Under that logic, the overall customer experience is better if the customer is always throttled down to the best quality that can be reliably provided, rather than unpredictably sometimes getting high quality and sometimes getting low quality with no way to be sure which will happen when.
There's a certain amount of logic to that argument, but I do think the question it leaves unaddressed - of whether the customer aggravation from the inconsistency would really outweigh the customer aggravation from being unable to get the higher qualities at all - is a major one, and worth addressing.
"And because I, as a tiny little cog, have no chance to influence the contract with twitter:"
You can, just as you can the terms of any major service - don't use them if you don't like the terms of their service.
This seems disingenuous.
Yes, you have the option to not use Twitter's service if you don't want to accept the terms of that service.
But what is being asserted is not that you don't have a choice in that regard, but that you don't have any meaningful chance to influence the terms of the proposed contract - to negotiate over what the agreement should be. They've already been written, and if you try to negotiate a different set of terms, Twitter will completely ignore you - you almost certainly won't even get a response, if your attempt at communicating with Twitter to propose alternate terms even gets read at all, and if you do it will be a rejection.
This objection applies equally well to any "take it or leave it" contract; it's no less valid because such contracts are in such common use as to be generally unremarkable.
(I have some sympathy for the notion that any contract which is not open to negotiation prior to acceptance should be held to be unenforceable, specifically because the power imbalance involved in such "take it or leave it" contracts seems so problematic - but I also recognize that that model would be utterly unworkable in the real world, especially at the scales at which many Internet companies now operate.)
On the post: Creative Commons Continues To Try To Help Courts Understand What Its NonCommercial License Means
Re: Re: This should be really easy?
That sounds to me like exactly what his interpretation is. I'm not sure how you see that as supporting the position you seem to have been arguing.
On the post: New Bill Tries To Ban Obnoxious Hidden Fees On Broadband, TV
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Bode -- "Gary" fell for fanboy trolling as "Richard Bennet".
Oh, the FCC may very well have claimed that, and if they did they're wrong.
But as far as I remember noticing, Richard Bennett did not claim that.
I was attempting to address only the specific claim that he had stated something (a broad generalization) which I do not remember him stating (in that broad form).
I have no problem with people arguing against him, or even achieving epic smackdown; based on what I've seen of his behavior here, I think he's a toxic and moderately horrible person. I just prefer it to happen on the basis of what his actual positions and arguments appear to be (particularly when those positions and arguments are assertions of things which do appear to be actual facts), rather than on what seem to me to be distortions of those things.
On the post: NYC Prosecutors Accidentally Admit They Use Bail To Deprive Presumably-Innocent People Of Their Freedom
Re: Re:
On the post: Oh Look, The FCC Is Lying Again In Its Latest Court Filings On Net Neutrality
Re: Re:
I heard that version from my father (repeatedly, over the course of my life), but ISTR also having heard the sentiment applied to Einstein's concession WRT the cosmological constant.
On the post: Oh Look, The FCC Is Lying Again In Its Latest Court Filings On Net Neutrality
Re: 2+2 = ALWAYS MAKES 4
Careful with those absolute statements, now.
Although 2+2 does usually make 4, there are two exceptions:
In base 3 (the lowest in which '2' is even a thing), 2+2 makes 11.
And in base 4, 2+2 makes 10.
(...no, I have no idea what this would mean by analogy in the things your comment actually talks about; why would you think that? I'm just being pedantic, because absolute statements tend to bother me.)
On the post: Washington Post Gives 'Three Pinocchios' To Rep. Ann Wagner For Falsely Claiming FOSTA Stopped 90% Of Sex Trafficking Ads
"the full three Pinocchios" is wrong
A minor detail: the Pinocchio scale used by the Washington Post's Fact Checker doesn't top out at three Pinocchios, but rather goes up to four.
As I write this, the front page of the Fact Checker blog - listing only the most recent ten fact checks - shows no fewer than six four-Pinocchio claims.
On the post: New Bill Tries To Ban Obnoxious Hidden Fees On Broadband, TV
Re: Re: The usual anti-corporate double-standard?
To play devil's advocate a bit: how would that work with things like online ordering (where they at least shouldn't know your location, and thus have any ability to calculate your local sales tax, before checkout time), or for that matter mail-order catalogs?
The only sane outcome of that which I can see would be for such tax-rate-unknown sales channels to be permitted to advertise the pre-tax price - and that would put the brick-and-mortar stores which do know the sales-tax rate at an even bigger competitive disadvantage (because their sticker price would then have to be higher by comparison, even though it's no longer comparing apples to apples).
Since this is (as you say) used so universally in other jurisdictions, I imagine there must be some solution in use, but I can't think of one that doesn't have at least that downside.
On the post: New Bill Tries To Ban Obnoxious Hidden Fees On Broadband, TV
Re: Don't tell me the rate is $100 if 'must haves' make it $150.
It's irrelevant to the hidden-fees conversation, of course, with only the tangential connection that both of them relate to whether or not the price you pay in the end is the same as the price that was advertised.
On the post: New Bill Tries To Ban Obnoxious Hidden Fees On Broadband, TV
Re: Re: Re: Bode -- "Gary" fell for fanboy trolling as "Richard Bennet".
The comment you're paraphrasing was referring to the fact that the FCC's comment period is intended to enable members of the public to provide the FCC with information it may not have had or analysis it may not have carried out, and therefore not only is the identity of the commenter irrelevant to the content (except insofar as it may make the content more or less credible), multiple comments providing the same information or analysis are redundant.
It was not claiming to be a general principle that applies to all comments submitted anywhere.
On the post: DHS Investigators Argue The Border Warrant Exception Covers Searches Performed Miles From The Border
Re: How is it not null and void?
My understanding is that long-established precedent has determined that searching luggage at border crossings is reasonable, and so is searching vehicles (for stowaways and/or people being smuggled, et cetera) at those same border crossings;
and then that so is searching those same things *near* a border, but not actually at a crossing, because someone could have crossed without passing through a checkpoint;
and then that so is searching houses, et cetera, near a border, because someone who crossed withough passing through a checkpoint could have hidden there;
and then that anywhere someone could have travelled to from the border in a short amount of time (a few hours) is near enough to the border for all those previous things to still be reasonable.
And of course in the modern day, you can travel a hundred miles in less than two hours by car, so of course anything within a hundred miles is close enough to the border to fall within that last determination.
On the post: Creative Commons Continues To Try To Help Courts Understand What Its NonCommercial License Means
Re: This should be really easy
Their only recourse in that case, however, should be to relicense the content (and license any future content) under a different license, which does have the terms and meaning they want - even if that means defining their own license, rather than using an existing defined-for-general-usage license such as the ones Creative Commons provides.
On the post: New Verizon Ad Hopes To Make You Forget It Throttled Firefighters For No Reason
Re: Re:
On the post: New Verizon Ad Hopes To Make You Forget It Throttled Firefighters For No Reason
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: stockholders
On the post: Tim Berners-Lee Moves Forward With His Big Plan To Fix The Web By Bringing Back Its Original Decentralized Promise
Re: Re: Re:
Or that's how I parsed those comments, anyway. As to whether that's the intended interpretation, your guess is as good as mine.
On the post: GOG Celebrates 10 Years Of Competing With Piracy And Being DRM Free By Saying So
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Linux Support
Also, wouldn't they still need to support the game on Linux under Wine, whether they have a Linux-native version available or not? The support might be more limited, but it seems to me there'd still be a cost there, and quite possibly enough of one for the difference to be relatively minimal.
On the post: Fake Comments Are Plaguing Government Agencies And Nobody Much Seems To Care
Re: Why Comments ?
Because even though the regulatory body may be composed of experts, there's no possible way to be sure that the regulator won't miss noticing and/or thinking of something that's relevant enough to be taken into consideration, so it's valuable to make sure that other experts out in the general populace can contribute information the regulator may have missed.
While the regulator may not be under any obligation to take such input into account, if they don't solicit public comment, they won't be able to take the input into account (because it won't be provided).
Importantly, mere "I don't like or want this" opinions do not constitute information worth contributing; in theory, a regulator may be not merely permitted but actually required to ignore comments of that nature.
Also importantly, once a single comment has presented a given piece of information, additional comments presenting the same information (without new insights resulting from a different viewpoint) are of no further use in making sure that the regulator is fully informed.
On the post: AT&T Claims It Wants Meaningful Privacy Rules...After Just Lobbying To Kill Meaningful Privacy Rules
Re: Re: Re: Re: 'If we didn't write them, they don't count.'
The hole in that logic should be obvious.
On the post: Six Months Later, People Are Finally Realizing That FOSTA Actually Is Putting Lives At Risk
Re: 'I'm a politician, we're NEVER wrong.'
It's still specious, of course, especially when put up against real-world statistics about both halves of that divide - but it's at least internally consistent.
On the post: Report Finds U.S. Wireless Video Streaming Utterly Mediocre Thanks To Arbitrary Carrier Throttling
Re: Re: False Premise
I'm not sure how that addresses the point the AC was trying to make.
The AC's point, as I read it, seemed to be that if you're going to throttle for anti-congestion purposes at all, you should do it 24/7, even when congestion is not actually occurring - because otherwise the customer's experience will be inconsistent, and the customer will find the unpredictability itself ("what video quality can I get right now? No way to tell except to try!") irritating.
Under that logic, the overall customer experience is better if the customer is always throttled down to the best quality that can be reliably provided, rather than unpredictably sometimes getting high quality and sometimes getting low quality with no way to be sure which will happen when.
There's a certain amount of logic to that argument, but I do think the question it leaves unaddressed - of whether the customer aggravation from the inconsistency would really outweigh the customer aggravation from being unable to get the higher qualities at all - is a major one, and worth addressing.
On the post: Did France Just Make It Effectively Impossible To Use Twitter?
Re: Re: License terms.
This seems disingenuous.
Yes, you have the option to not use Twitter's service if you don't want to accept the terms of that service.
But what is being asserted is not that you don't have a choice in that regard, but that you don't have any meaningful chance to influence the terms of the proposed contract - to negotiate over what the agreement should be. They've already been written, and if you try to negotiate a different set of terms, Twitter will completely ignore you - you almost certainly won't even get a response, if your attempt at communicating with Twitter to propose alternate terms even gets read at all, and if you do it will be a rejection.
This objection applies equally well to any "take it or leave it" contract; it's no less valid because such contracts are in such common use as to be generally unremarkable.
(I have some sympathy for the notion that any contract which is not open to negotiation prior to acceptance should be held to be unenforceable, specifically because the power imbalance involved in such "take it or leave it" contracts seems so problematic - but I also recognize that that model would be utterly unworkable in the real world, especially at the scales at which many Internet companies now operate.)
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