Saying that "Net Neutrality is about protection from abusive companies" is an oversimplification. It's not about protection from all abuses by all companies; it's about protection from abuse of gatekeeper position by the entities which provide the low-level networks which let computers talk to one another.
The principle that the network should be neutral refers - at least in its most basic and fundamental form - only to the network over which the data travels, not to the services on that network. It applies only to entities which provide those network connections - i.e., to ISPs.
Those social networks are services on the Internet, not providers of connections to the Internet.
Those social networks, therefore, are entirely out of scope for network neutrality. If the companies behind them set themselves up as ISPs (as Google-the-company has done, and as Facebook-the-company may have done or be doing), that ISP service should be within the scope of network neutrality - but any other services provided by those companies are still out of scope.
That's not to say that the things you point out as problematic aren't bad; it's just that they don't have anything to do with the provision of network connections, and therefore have nothing to do with the principle that the network should be neutral. They have to be addressed in other ways and on the basis of other principles.
Actually, regulating ISPs under Title II is a fairly old thing in the history of the Internet; it was only in the late '90s, IIRC, that the provision of the service of connection to the Internet was reclassified as non-Title-II.
As I recall it, the argument was that the companies which provide that service also provide services over the Internet, that those latter services do not qualify to be covered by Title II, and therefore the entire companies in question should not be covered by Title II.
The possibility of classifying just the connection service under Title II, and leaving the rest of the company's Internet-related activities out from under that umbrella, does not seem to have been considered at the time.
IMO that late-'90s move was a mistake, and while reversing that mistake might result in disruption of the systems that have grown up in the less-regulated interim and there might be unfortunate consequences as a result of that disruption, the net benefit once all the consequences of that reversal have shaken themselves out will be worth it.
So basically, 2nd Amendment means fully automatic weapons, mortars, bazookas, guided missiles, tanks...
...or maybe, just maybe, there are limits for people not in the Armed Forces or National Guard.
I presume that the "Armed Forces or National Guard" reference is to the "well-regulated Militia" portion of the 2nd Amendment, and to the fact that the courts have held that the National Guard is the militia in question?
I have a somewhat different reading of that aspect of the 2nd Amendment, and one which as far as I know has been adopted by no court, probably in part because if followed to its logical extreme it would require disbanding the standing Armed Forces entirely. And yet, I think there's an argument to be made that that is the intent underlying the 2nd Amendment, and that if we want to diverge from that intent we should adopt another amendment.
My logic is roughly:
To say "X being necessary for Y, Z" is to say "Because X is necessary for Y, Z".
In order for the foregoing to be true, adhering to Z must be an essential prerequisite for X.
Therefore, inserting the wording of the 2nd Amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" must be an essential prerequisite for "a well-regulated militia". In other words, if the people do not have that right, no such militia will be able to exist.
It seems plain that the National Guard - and beyond them, the standing Armed Forces - could exist, and be effective, even if private ownership of firearms were totally illegal; they would simply need to stockpile and store their own supply of firearms, provide them to their members as needed both for training and for actual real-world use (and require them to be turned back in afterwards), and train their members in using them. In fact, as I understand matters, this is largely what actually happens.
Thus, if the National Guard or even the Armed Forces is the "well regulated Militia" referred to by the 2nd Amendment, the statement that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is a necessary prerequisite for that militia being possible does not seem correct.
Thus, one of the underlying assumptions of the 2nd Amendment seems to be that rather than members of the "well regulated Militia" being supplied with firearms by that militia and provided training in how to use them by the same militia, they would necessarily have to supply their own, and train with them on their own in their private life.
This assumption clearly does not hold true if a standing military force exists.
Thus, the 2nd Amendment appears to be based on the assumption that no standing (or possibly merely standing peacetime) military force exists.
Thus, when the country established a standing military, it violated one of the underlying assumptions of the 2nd Amendment.
Therefore, the 2nd Amendment is a poor match for the reality of the modern situation, and has been for as long as a standing military has been in existence in this country.
Therefore, either the 2nd Amendment needs to be amended to correct for this mismatch, or the standing military needs to be abolished as being unconstitutional.
The screams from the right wing at any proposal to do either of those things would be of legendary proportions, and yet I don't see any way to reconcile a standing military with the assumption that having a well-regulated militia requires that the people be permitted to keep and bear arms.
The problem isn't inability to receive what is sent via this channel; the problem is the inability to send via this same channel, or more particularly, the selective denial of that ability to specific people.
The inability to address the President via what is apparently one of his primary acting-as-President official channels, when other people are able to do so, is itself the problem at hand.
If he didn't make himself accessible via Twitter at all, that would be one thing; there's no right to a direct channel to the President from members of the public. (Maybe there should be, but that would probably be impractical, and in any case would be a separate argument.)
Similarly, if he made himself accessible via Twitter only on a "whitelist" basis - e.g. setting it up so that the only @realDonaldTrump tweets he sees are those from his actual friends, et cetera - that would not be a public forum in any meaningful sense, and the large majority of people who do not have access to contact him that way would have no standing to complain over lack of that access.
But if he's making himself accessible via Twitter to most of the public, while denying the rest of the public that access on a "blacklist" basis, the people to whom he is denying that access have a legitimate complaint.
It would be plausible to argue that he meant "a model for other states to adopt", not "a model for the federal government to force on all states". So it could still be that this is internally consistent.
A bit more of a stretch with that additional background detail, though.
That's where the "without any prior cases on point" part comes in.
This particular deputy is walking away, because no previous case had said that this is enough to cross the line into illegality, and so (in the logic of the courts) he could not have been expected to know that it was beyond his authority - in other words, he was operating in good faith that this was permitted.
This case has now said that this is enough to cross that line. Therefore, any cops who do this in the future (at least in the jurisdiction of that court) will not be able to rely on the "good faith" argument, because this case clearly establishes otherwise.
Well, to be fair, I'm told that Romney explicitly said that he thought his approach was a good idea at the state level - not above it.
Exactly why this distinction would exist, aside perhaps from limited-federal-government-powers arguments which have basically been rejected under longstanding Commerce Clause jurisprudence (however wrongheaded that may be), is less clear - but at least on the surface, saying "it's good for the states to do this, but bad for the federal government to do it, so I oppose the federal government doing what I supported a state doing" is not internally inconsistent.
Not to mention George F. Will, who has been so consistently conservative in his published views for as long as I've known who he is that I've virtually never agreed with him - to the extent that I've gotten in the habit of referring to him semi-derisively as "Fwill" - but whose every column that I've seen post-Trump-election has been eloquently but vitriolically anti-Trump.
He appears to be a genuine, consistent, philosophical/ideological conservative, rather than a Republican partisan - and there are too few such people left, for any political faction or facet, in the modern world.
A mixed economy with a strong social safety net will always be the best option for a healthy society.
While this may be true... that idea itself would be an -ism, although I don't know whether it has a name yet, and so to state it as you have done would seem to contradict the principle from your preceding question.
There's no such thing as the/a "Democrat Party", at least not in the United States of America.
It's called the "Democratic Party".
This can be a legitimate confusion, arising from the fact that the adjective and noun for one major party are the same (both "Republican") but the adjective and noun for the other major party are different.
In my experience, however, the usage of "Democrat" as an adjective has historically been a red-flag indicator that the speaker has a distinct right-wing bias. This seems to be becoming a less reliable sign in more recent times, but the past precedent is still there.
> fail to give the necessary infomation for a software developer to solve the problem
If they bought the patent from someone else, the trolls don't have the necessary information anyway.
If the patent itself (as filed by and granted to the original inventor) includes the necessary information, then yes, they do.
If the patent does not include that information, then (by the "should" standard given in the post you quoted) it should not be considered valid, and should not have been granted.
As I've said here before at greater length: if a person skilled in the art can look at just the summary/outline of a patent application (with none of the implementation details) and produce something which would violate the patent, then the proposed patent fails the "obviousness" test and should be rejected.
Similarly, if a person skilled in the art working from the full details of a patent application is unable to reproduce the claimed invention (assuming sufficient resources to actually build it), then the proposed patent does not sufficiently describe the claimed invention and must be rejected.
Unfortunately, from what I read about these things, the patent office does not generally seem to apply either of these standards.
(my local copy of gcide)/Construe - To put a construction upon; to explain the sense or intention of; to interpret; to understand.
That is, by explaining what (they alleged that) Winner's statements meant, the FBI was construing those statements.
And since it was doing so inaccurately, it was misconstruing them.
IOW: the given definition for "misconstrue" appears to be overly narrow, or at least a little misleading, even by Wiktionary's own definition of "construe". (It can be correct if you parse "interpret" broadly enough, but I suspect that most people will parse that word more narrowly.)
It is my understanding that the term was first used of the movement by its members, and that the pejorative use of it arose only when the media began pointing out (or people began pointing out to the media) that that word had an existing meaning.
I do remember TV coverage of someone wearing a wide-brimmed hat with tea bags hanging from the rim, espousing something like the positions of what would later come to be called the Tea Party; it is my understanding that this was done on purpose by the people involved in the original gatherings, to invoke the historical memory of the Boston Tea Party, and that it is this practice that gave is the movement its name.
Just to devil's-advocate a bit: what aspect of a system of religion (which is, generally speaking, a matter of choice) raises it to the same level as the ethnicity of a person (which, at least in all examples I can think of, cannot be changed)?
And what is it about a system of religion (again, a matter of choice and belief) that distinguishes it from any other belief system in this regard? In philosophical and principle terms, I mean, not anything based in "because the people who wrote the rules said it should be that way".
Nit/peeve (applicable both to the above comment, and more importantly, to the main article): the word is "genericide", not "generecide". It's spelled correctly in the quotes from the court rulings, but all but one other usage in the article gets it wrong.
Re your "one", there are at least two ways to be in the country illegally without having committed a crime: to come in legally and then overstay the visa, and to be brought in illegally against your will.
Re your "three", would you rather the economies of the various relevant areas collapse, and the prices for the essential staples produced there go through the roof elsewhere? It may not be ideal, but it certainly seems like by *far* the least of the available evils.
Also re your "three", what distinguishes this from slavery (let alone "racial slavery") is that no one is forcing these people to come here and work these jobs for this pay; in fact, these people are choosing to come here in the face of systems set up to make it hard for them to do that, specifically because they think this is *better* than the alternatives.
On the post: A Public Focused Approach To Net Neutrality
Re: Protection from abusive companies?
Saying that "Net Neutrality is about protection from abusive companies" is an oversimplification. It's not about protection from all abuses by all companies; it's about protection from abuse of gatekeeper position by the entities which provide the low-level networks which let computers talk to one another.
The principle that the network should be neutral refers - at least in its most basic and fundamental form - only to the network over which the data travels, not to the services on that network. It applies only to entities which provide those network connections - i.e., to ISPs.
Those social networks are services on the Internet, not providers of connections to the Internet.
Those social networks, therefore, are entirely out of scope for network neutrality. If the companies behind them set themselves up as ISPs (as Google-the-company has done, and as Facebook-the-company may have done or be doing), that ISP service should be within the scope of network neutrality - but any other services provided by those companies are still out of scope.
That's not to say that the things you point out as problematic aren't bad; it's just that they don't have anything to do with the provision of network connections, and therefore have nothing to do with the principle that the network should be neutral. They have to be addressed in other ways and on the basis of other principles.
On the post: A Public Focused Approach To Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: "Free and open access to the Internet
Actually, regulating ISPs under Title II is a fairly old thing in the history of the Internet; it was only in the late '90s, IIRC, that the provision of the service of connection to the Internet was reclassified as non-Title-II.
As I recall it, the argument was that the companies which provide that service also provide services over the Internet, that those latter services do not qualify to be covered by Title II, and therefore the entire companies in question should not be covered by Title II.
The possibility of classifying just the connection service under Title II, and leaving the rest of the company's Internet-related activities out from under that umbrella, does not seem to have been considered at the time.
IMO that late-'90s move was a mistake, and while reversing that mistake might result in disruption of the systems that have grown up in the less-regulated interim and there might be unfortunate consequences as a result of that disruption, the net benefit once all the consequences of that reversal have shaken themselves out will be worth it.
On the post: Judge Bars News Station From Showing Pictures In News Story, Admits It's Prior Restraint, Shrugs
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Constitution, Constismooshion... Who cares...
I presume that the "Armed Forces or National Guard" reference is to the "well-regulated Militia" portion of the 2nd Amendment, and to the fact that the courts have held that the National Guard is the militia in question?
I have a somewhat different reading of that aspect of the 2nd Amendment, and one which as far as I know has been adopted by no court, probably in part because if followed to its logical extreme it would require disbanding the standing Armed Forces entirely. And yet, I think there's an argument to be made that that is the intent underlying the 2nd Amendment, and that if we want to diverge from that intent we should adopt another amendment.
My logic is roughly:
To say "X being necessary for Y, Z" is to say "Because X is necessary for Y, Z".
In order for the foregoing to be true, adhering to Z must be an essential prerequisite for X.
Therefore, inserting the wording of the 2nd Amendment, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" must be an essential prerequisite for "a well-regulated militia". In other words, if the people do not have that right, no such militia will be able to exist.
It seems plain that the National Guard - and beyond them, the standing Armed Forces - could exist, and be effective, even if private ownership of firearms were totally illegal; they would simply need to stockpile and store their own supply of firearms, provide them to their members as needed both for training and for actual real-world use (and require them to be turned back in afterwards), and train their members in using them. In fact, as I understand matters, this is largely what actually happens.
Thus, if the National Guard or even the Armed Forces is the "well regulated Militia" referred to by the 2nd Amendment, the statement that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is a necessary prerequisite for that militia being possible does not seem correct.
Thus, one of the underlying assumptions of the 2nd Amendment seems to be that rather than members of the "well regulated Militia" being supplied with firearms by that militia and provided training in how to use them by the same militia, they would necessarily have to supply their own, and train with them on their own in their private life.
This assumption clearly does not hold true if a standing military force exists.
Thus, the 2nd Amendment appears to be based on the assumption that no standing (or possibly merely standing peacetime) military force exists.
Thus, when the country established a standing military, it violated one of the underlying assumptions of the 2nd Amendment.
Therefore, the 2nd Amendment is a poor match for the reality of the modern situation, and has been for as long as a standing military has been in existence in this country.
The screams from the right wing at any proposal to do either of those things would be of legendary proportions, and yet I don't see any way to reconcile a standing military with the assumption that having a well-regulated militia requires that the people be permitted to keep and bear arms.
On the post: Lawyers: Trump's Twitter Account Not Presidential; Also: Trump Is President, Can't Be Sued
Re: Way around the block
The problem isn't inability to receive what is sent via this channel; the problem is the inability to send via this same channel, or more particularly, the selective denial of that ability to specific people.
The inability to address the President via what is apparently one of his primary acting-as-President official channels, when other people are able to do so, is itself the problem at hand.
If he didn't make himself accessible via Twitter at all, that would be one thing; there's no right to a direct channel to the President from members of the public. (Maybe there should be, but that would probably be impractical, and in any case would be a separate argument.)
Similarly, if he made himself accessible via Twitter only on a "whitelist" basis - e.g. setting it up so that the only @realDonaldTrump tweets he sees are those from his actual friends, et cetera - that would not be a public forum in any meaningful sense, and the large majority of people who do not have access to contact him that way would have no standing to complain over lack of that access.
But if he's making himself accessible via Twitter to most of the public, while denying the rest of the public that access on a "blacklist" basis, the people to whom he is denying that access have a legitimate complaint.
On the post: New Whistleblowers Highlight How Russia's Information War On U.S. Was Larger Than Initially Reported
Re: Re: Re:
"Everyone deserves courtesy by default, until such time as they show by their actions that they do not deserve it.
"No one deserves respect by default, until such time as they show by their actions that they do deserve it."
Neither respect nor courtesy is a right.
On the post: Trump May Not Be Serious About His NBC Threats... But He May Have Violated The First Amendment
Re: Re: Re: Re: Could you even imagine
It would be plausible to argue that he meant "a model for other states to adopt", not "a model for the federal government to force on all states". So it could still be that this is internally consistent.
A bit more of a stretch with that additional background detail, though.
On the post: Court Tells Sheriff's Dept. Shackling Kids Above The Elbows Is Excessive Force
Re: Walkaway
This particular deputy is walking away, because no previous case had said that this is enough to cross the line into illegality, and so (in the logic of the courts) he could not have been expected to know that it was beyond his authority - in other words, he was operating in good faith that this was permitted.
This case has now said that this is enough to cross that line. Therefore, any cops who do this in the future (at least in the jurisdiction of that court) will not be able to rely on the "good faith" argument, because this case clearly establishes otherwise.
That is, at least, the theory.
On the post: Australia's National Rape Hotline Run By Insurance Company, Who Demands All Sorts Of Private Info
Re: 1800RESPECT
"Nothing which has any significant purpose beyond making money should ever be controlled by people whose only interest is the bottom line."
On the post: Trump May Not Be Serious About His NBC Threats... But He May Have Violated The First Amendment
Re: Re: Could you even imagine
Well, to be fair, I'm told that Romney explicitly said that he thought his approach was a good idea at the state level - not above it.
Exactly why this distinction would exist, aside perhaps from limited-federal-government-powers arguments which have basically been rejected under longstanding Commerce Clause jurisprudence (however wrongheaded that may be), is less clear - but at least on the surface, saying "it's good for the states to do this, but bad for the federal government to do it, so I oppose the federal government doing what I supported a state doing" is not internally inconsistent.
On the post: Twitter Temporarily Blocks Campaign Ad... Getting It Much More Attention
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: You know
He appears to be a genuine, consistent, philosophical/ideological conservative, rather than a Republican partisan - and there are too few such people left, for any political faction or facet, in the modern world.
On the post: Analysts Predict Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Will Be A Massive Job Killer
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Thumbs Up!
While this may be true... that idea itself would be an -ism, although I don't know whether it has a name yet, and so to state it as you have done would seem to contradict the principle from your preceding question.
On the post: The Latest On Shiva Ayyadurai's Failed Libel Suit Against Techdirt
Re:
On the post: Broadband Lobbyists Gush Over Re-Appointment Of Trump's FCC Boss
Re: Re: Partisan Politics
There's no such thing as the/a "Democrat Party", at least not in the United States of America.
It's called the "Democratic Party".
This can be a legitimate confusion, arising from the fact that the adjective and noun for one major party are the same (both "Republican") but the adjective and noun for the other major party are different.
In my experience, however, the usage of "Democrat" as an adjective has historically been a red-flag indicator that the speaker has a distinct right-wing bias. This seems to be becoming a less reliable sign in more recent times, but the past precedent is still there.
On the post: Stupid Patent Of The Month: Will Patents Slow Artificial Intelligence?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Patents on AI
If the patent itself (as filed by and granted to the original inventor) includes the necessary information, then yes, they do.
If the patent does not include that information, then (by the "should" standard given in the post you quoted) it should not be considered valid, and should not have been granted.
As I've said here before at greater length: if a person skilled in the art can look at just the summary/outline of a patent application (with none of the implementation details) and produce something which would violate the patent, then the proposed patent fails the "obviousness" test and should be rejected.
Similarly, if a person skilled in the art working from the full details of a patent application is unable to reproduce the claimed invention (assuming sufficient resources to actually build it), then the proposed patent does not sufficiently describe the claimed invention and must be rejected.
Unfortunately, from what I read about these things, the patent office does not generally seem to apply either of these standards.
On the post: FBI Misconstrued Content Of Doc Leaker Reality Winner's Jailhouse Calls
Re: "FBI Misconstrued" is much too mild
(my local copy of gcide)/Construe - To put a construction upon; to explain the sense or intention of; to interpret; to understand.
That is, by explaining what (they alleged that) Winner's statements meant, the FBI was construing those statements.
And since it was doing so inaccurately, it was misconstruing them.
IOW: the given definition for "misconstrue" appears to be overly narrow, or at least a little misleading, even by Wiktionary's own definition of "construe". (It can be correct if you parse "interpret" broadly enough, but I suspect that most people will parse that word more narrowly.)
On the post: More Thoughts On The Senate's SESTA Hearing
Re: Re: Oh, there's LOTS on phrases to put a hook on. Let's look at "good faith":
On the post: Alt-Right Twitter App Developers Sue Google After Gab.Ai App Is Kicked Out Of The Play Store
Re: Re: Re: Cheezus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#.22Teabagger.22 has a brief commentary on the subject, but not much detail. I haven't found a better source in shallow searching thus far.
I do remember TV coverage of someone wearing a wide-brimmed hat with tea bags hanging from the rim, espousing something like the positions of what would later come to be called the Tea Party; it is my understanding that this was done on purpose by the people involved in the original gatherings, to invoke the historical memory of the Boston Tea Party, and that it is this practice that gave is the movement its name.
On the post: Alt-Right Twitter App Developers Sue Google After Gab.Ai App Is Kicked Out Of The Play Store
Re: Re: Re: open and shut case
And what is it about a system of religion (again, a matter of choice and belief) that distinguishes it from any other belief system in this regard? In philosophical and principle terms, I mean, not anything based in "because the people who wrote the rules said it should be that way".
On the post: Court Allows San Diego Comic-Con's Suit Against The Salt Lake City Comic Con To Move Forward
Re:
On the post: Arizona Motel 6 Branches Start Handing Out ICE To Unsuspecting Customers
Re: Re: Re:
Re your "three", would you rather the economies of the various relevant areas collapse, and the prices for the essential staples produced there go through the roof elsewhere? It may not be ideal, but it certainly seems like by *far* the least of the available evils.
Also re your "three", what distinguishes this from slavery (let alone "racial slavery") is that no one is forcing these people to come here and work these jobs for this pay; in fact, these people are choosing to come here in the face of systems set up to make it hard for them to do that, specifically because they think this is *better* than the alternatives.
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