I've just learned that both CS:GO and DOTA 2 are free to play. Since it literally costs nothing I'm going to borrow your comment and post it as a review. Let's see what happens!
Based on what I've seen offered to me to "boost" Facebook Page posts, they use the data they've collected to let advertisers target certain demographics for advertising. This way the actual data doesn't ever leave Facebook. My guess is that Google does something similar with their ad targeting programs.
When the CIA (or the US military for that matter) kills first responders by bombing an area that was recently bombed they are acting no better than Hamas or any other terrorist organization that does this. The only difference would be if the area attacked was an active warzone already and even then it would be questionable.
On your original point, my understanding is that the ADL doesn't publicly dox people. They simply provide their identifying information along with evidence of any crimes to law enforcement agencies. Operating within the legal system makes the difference.
Unless, of course, you believe that there's effectively an asymmetric war between the ADL and their detractors where the "other side" uses public doxxing the same way that the ADL uses the justice system. While I can see the logic in such a point of view, I can't agree with it.
Finally, if I remember correctly, PaulT is from the UK so using an American agency probably isn't as effective in your argument.
Asked whether state employees are permitted to install end-to-end encryption applications on their state-issued phones, Caleb Buhs, a spokesman for DTMB, said that would be allowed only "if the application is for legitimate state business." [Emphasis Mine]
It seems like the Detroit Free Press is conflating end-to-end encrypted messaging with self-destructing messaging. End-to-end encryption is fine and, by now, should be standard. Self-destructing messages shouldn't be allowed for official business conducted by employees covered by federal or state level freedom of information acts.
Unfortunately, if the coverage on this is anything to go by, the two will be conflated and this will end up being used as further evidence for why end-to-end encryption is evil and should be forbidden or backdoored.
These municipalities are also suing Dish Network and DirecTV, I guess they must consider all of the radio waves from satellites that enter their jurisdiction as, "using public rights-of-way".
Ten years ago I didn't have health insurance because I was (and still am) self employed, insurance was quite expensive and I made too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Now, I am insured and have been able to get treatment for my issues before they reach the emergency room level.
In this case, it appears to be a spam-bot that scanned the article and is using some sort of algorithm to write a sentence or two that, at first glance, look related (followed, of course, by the spam link). This is a sign that the bots are (slowly) getting smarter.
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
<ahem>
I agree with you completely, I just couldn't pass up a chance to "say" that line in public.
Between work and leisure, I still spend the vast majority of my time in front of a computer. It's odd that parents are still wondering about screentime. Aren't most parents of primary-school-age children in their thirties (like me)? Do they remember how much time we'd spend playing video games or watching television? Do they think that they turned out badly?
You might want to check and see if your local library system integrates with Hoopla. Mine does and just about every book that they can lend digitally I can get from there. I have still bought more books in the past year than I usually would though.
The guy in the article was quoted $50,000 for the same. He said that he would have paid if it'd been $10,000. Also, unlike Comcast, the neighbors who put in a few thousand each to help fund the initial investment will each get their investment's worth of internet which comes up to multiple years of already paid service.
In this particular case, Mr. Mauch is buying bandwidth from ACDnet and 123Net. Both of which compete with the local major providers (AT&T, Comcast, Charter, etc.) for backbone and business customers.
It looks like Mr. Stone was correct in his assessment. Pro-Black doesn't have to mean anti-White. For example, a pro-black statement is, "I believe that Blacks should have the same rights as Whites, Latinx, and any other race in this country." However, that statement is categorically not anti-White since any loss of rights for Whites would mean a loss of rights for everyone. I posted more of this quote in another comment on this thread but here's a part that I think you need to see.
And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
You seem to believe that any Black person speaking out about the current injustices is looking for revenge. In my experience, those who feel that way do so because, if they'd been oppressed and were suddenly free from that oppression, they would be looking for vengeance rather than equality. That being the case, they fear ever lifting the oppression lest the oppressed get a chance for revenge.
I guess I'll do one of those "defeat your points in turn" things today.
Sweeden has been an unmitigated disaster and even they had a partial lockdown. Sweeden has had many more deaths per capita than their neighbor nations who did go into full lockdowns.
Concerning banning flights from China, that didn't help, primarily because it appears that the main Chinese vectors entered the country before that happened. Also, the strain that infected the east coast came from Europe.
The reason that it was recommended that most people not wear masks was that there was a shortage of both surgical and N95 masks and what supply existed needed to be held for medical professionals. Also, it wasn't yet known whether or not simple cloth coverings would provide a useful amount of protection from transmission of the virus. Once sufficient data was collected on the usefulness of cloth masks, and once the supply of medical quality masks improved, the recommendation changed. As a song I enjoy says, "It's a process, not an ideology." We don't believe scientists because they're gods among men, we believe them because there's a process that has been used for centuries to test hypotheses and provide repeatable conclusions.
Next, I assume that you're speaking about the various protests over the unjustified killings of black people in various states of disarmament this year. It turns out that Rutgers, Harvard, Northeastern, and Northwestern universities have performed a study on whether outdoor protests caused increased COVID-19 cases. The answer was no. Since many protesters wear some type of mask as a teargas protection measure and they're all outdoors, transmission rates were quite low.
To answer your final question, what do we do. We pay people to stay home from work. That's what other wealthy, monetarily sovereign, nations are doing. If you pay people enough to stay home, then the only people working are those who absolutely must work for the rest of us to stay home because, in order to get those people to be willing to work in a pandemic, they have to be paid more than the amount that the government is paying people not to go out during a pandemic.
I'll even answer the common, "What about inflation?" and, "What about the national debt?" questions now. Concerning inflation, given the smack the economy has been given by COVID, (back in April the Treasury Department was planning on over 2% inflation, it's about half that now) the American government could afford to print a couple trillion dollars and that would just place the inflation rate back in the annual range that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank aim for. We would still have headroom above that long before touching dangerous levels of inflation.
Secondly, the national debt is spoken about as though the federal government was a household or a business. It is neither. There are no US Dollars without the US Government. The US Dollar is backed solely by "the Full Faith and Credit" of the US Government. As such, the journey of a Dollar both begins and ends with the US Government.
Here's an example, someone receives a $600 stimulus check next week direct deposited to their bank account. What happens behind the scenes is the Treasury Department (electronically) tells the bank to add $600 to the account belonging to that person. At that point, $600 appears out of thin air. Let's say that the person in question is a 1099 worker (maybe he's a DoorDasher) and therefore hasn't had any taxes automatically withheld. So, he decides not to touch this money and March rolls around. Now, this person is doing his taxes, and let's assume that he owes $600 in federal tax. Once he files and allows the IRS to take a direct withdrawal from his account, the Treasury Department contacts the bank and has them remove $600 from that account. This causes that same $600 to disappear back into the aether from whence it came. This is the same thing that happens when the Treasury Department pays anyone. Money appears when the government pays people and businesses and it disappears when people pay the government. If those numbers were perfectly balanced every year (a balanced budget) then the amount of money in circulation from year to year wouldn't change but, our GDP is constantly growing so the same amount of money would be chasing more stuff leading to deflation and even worse trade deficits because the US Dollar would get too strong compared to other currencies. Even worse, if the government were to start taxing more than it spends (a budget surplus) then the total number of dollars in circulation would decrease which can't happen for very long before you simply run out of dollars.
This section is simply to say, for nations that print their own currency and only issue sovereign debt in their own currency, the only worry is inflation and even that can be managed. Treasury debt instruments are simply safe savings elements for people either too wealthy to use just banks (FDIC insurance only goes so far) or for people who actually want to see some growth of their savings (interest rates are quite low right now for savings accounts).
The commentariat is reasonably unbiased. As you can tell by the fact that you, someone who I'll hazard a guess to say voted for President Trump, are able to comment just as well as me, someone who voted for President-Elect Biden. We may disagree with each other but we are both able to post here. Also, yes there are people who have called for the deaths of various Republicans but, none of that has been in articles or by staff writers. TechDirt doesn't even mention the parties of politicians it mentions unless the party is relevant to the story unlike the vast majority of news agencies. The lengths they go to remain unbiased are incredible.
Are you claiming that we don't currently know anything about Trump's record of destroying the country? Since I don't feel like looking up any of the more esoteric examples, I'll just point you to the fact that Trump has presided over the largest number of excess American deaths in modern history and that's just in his last year in office. COVID-19 was always going to kill a large number of people but, there's absolutely no reason that it had to kill over 330 thousand Americans in nine months. That's literally 0.1% of the entire population of the country. I can't speak for you but, I consider that quite destructive.
Biden, on the other hand, has been both a Senator and Vice President in his time in the federal government. Neither of those positions allowed him to exercise the kind of individual power that the office of President allows. Were some of his views on crime in the past bad? Yes, and he has admitted as much. Did he work with segregationists to pass legislation? Yes, and that too was a known quantity. The point isn't that he's done problematic things decades ago, the question is whether he learned from people who were affected by those things and if he's changed since then. I, and a majority of other Americans, believe that he has changed for the better.
Concerning your other contention about "voting blindly". With very few exceptions, Republican politicians at the federal level have moved in lockstep with President Trump. In the last couple of years of Trump's Presidency, that march has had us walking right up to the edge of a cliff. Generally, that kind of action causes a pushback against the party currently in charge. In this case, that means that Republicans down-ballot, even if they aren't Trumpian, lose. If what you mean is that people should vote third-party, I agree. However, until we fix our first past the post voting system, voting third-party is broken for major races. I would have preferred a Democratic candidate who wasn't Biden but, a majority of Democrat primary voters decided on him.
On your last point, President Obama being racist is unlikely, to say the least. Firstly, is there any evidence that he ever used racial slurs towards anyone? I can't imagine something like that not coming out when he was running either time. Secondly, while not impossible, the evidentiary bar for calling a mixed-race person racist is pretty high. He didn't have a very long history in federal governance before being elected President (only two years in the Senate) so was it something in his voting record that you are alluding to?
Concerning the Black Lives Matter movement starting while he was President, that much is true by itself. The movement started in July 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin...by a state court. There were a number of reasons that the movement took off when it did but from my personal point of view, it was because many of us African-Americans (especially those of us in our twenties at the time) believed that finally having a black President meant that there would be justice in cases like these. However, it turns out that this kind of change has to come from the bottom up rather than the top down (which is quite apparent to mid-thirties me). So, you end up with people protesting every time something like this happens, and similarly to the civil rights protests, eventually you see change. If you see people protesting against their family members and neighbors being killed without cause as a "racewar" then you might be part of the problem.
So, when they say “Why do you burn down the community? Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?” It’s not ours. We don’t own anything. We don’t own anything. There is -Trevor Noah said it so beautifully last night “There’s a social contract that we all have. That if you steal or if I steal then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us. So, the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken why the fuck do I give a shit about burning them fucking Football Hall of Fame, about burning a fucking Target.
You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck! You broke the contract where for 400 years we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract when we built our wealth again on our own by our bootstraps in Tulsa and you dropped bombs on us. When we built it in Rosewood and you came in and you slaughtered us. You broke the contract.
So, fuck your Target. Fuck your Hall of Fame. Far as I’m concerned I could burn this bitch to the ground and it still wouldn’t be enough. And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.
"copyright is not an inevitable, divine, or natural right"
This is completely true. Copyright exists because governments decided to grant a temporary right to the creators of works (or their assignees) to exclusively create copies of those works. This was ostensibly for the purpose of incentivizing those creators to publish more works. Unfortunately, this has been twisted in the intervening centuries and now we have copyright terms that literally outlive the creators. The fact that copyright currently lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years, 95 years after publishing, or 120 years after creation is simply insane to me. How can a person be incentivized to create something when they've been dead for decades?
We need to stop the ratchet of increasing copyright law and reset it to something saner. I'd even be fine with only setting a new copyright length for works created from now forward. (While I'd like to actually see things created in the first few decades of my life enter the public domain, those creators created their works under the assumption of these insane copyright lengths and they shouldn't have those rights simply taken away.) I'd prefer that copyright last just as long as utility patents in the US, 20 years.
If works created and/or published starting on January 1st of whichever year followed such legislation, were limited to that kind of term, maybe we'd finally see more innovation in entertainment since a company couldn't simply keep releasing new versions of their old properties for a century without competition.
Generally, in two-party states, you would post signage informing anyone on your property that security cameras are running. That handles the "consent" part. If they don't want to be recorded, they can go elsewhere.
Also, the FCC is required to have three members from the same party as the sitting President and two members from the other party. Chairman Pai was simply one of the Republicans Obama had to place. The reason that he was still around for Trump's presidency is that FCC Commissioners have terms longer than that of the President.
On the post: Steam Becomes Available In China, Offers 53 Whole Games To Customers
Re:
I've just learned that both CS:GO and DOTA 2 are free to play. Since it literally costs nothing I'm going to borrow your comment and post it as a review. Let's see what happens!
On the post: Canadian Privacy Commission Says Clearview's App Is Illegal, Tells It To Pack Its Things And Leave
Re:
Based on what I've seen offered to me to "boost" Facebook Page posts, they use the data they've collected to let advertisers target certain demographics for advertising. This way the actual data doesn't ever leave Facebook. My guess is that Google does something similar with their ad targeting programs.
On the post: Professional Assholes Equate Consequences With 'Cancel Culture' To Obscure That They're Finally Being Held Accountable
Re: Not my problem
When the CIA (or the US military for that matter) kills first responders by bombing an area that was recently bombed they are acting no better than Hamas or any other terrorist organization that does this. The only difference would be if the area attacked was an active warzone already and even then it would be questionable.
On your original point, my understanding is that the ADL doesn't publicly dox people. They simply provide their identifying information along with evidence of any crimes to law enforcement agencies. Operating within the legal system makes the difference.
Unless, of course, you believe that there's effectively an asymmetric war between the ADL and their detractors where the "other side" uses public doxxing the same way that the ADL uses the justice system. While I can see the logic in such a point of view, I can't agree with it.
Finally, if I remember correctly, PaulT is from the UK so using an American agency probably isn't as effective in your argument.
On the post: Michigan State Police Officials Are Dodging Public Records Obligations By Using Encrypted Messaging Apps
This Looks Bad
It seems like the Detroit Free Press is conflating end-to-end encrypted messaging with self-destructing messaging. End-to-end encryption is fine and, by now, should be standard. Self-destructing messages shouldn't be allowed for official business conducted by employees covered by federal or state level freedom of information acts.
Unfortunately, if the coverage on this is anything to go by, the two will be conflated and this will end up being used as further evidence for why end-to-end encryption is evil and should be forbidden or backdoored.
On the post: Georgia Towns Sue Netflix In Flimsy Bid To Nab A Slice Of The Pie
Re: Yeah, that is stupid.
These municipalities are also suing Dish Network and DirecTV, I guess they must consider all of the radio waves from satellites that enter their jurisdiction as, "using public rights-of-way".
On the post: How Can Conservatives Fight Back Against Big Tech? For A Start, Just Be Sane Again.
Re: Re: Great Old Plan
Ten years ago I didn't have health insurance because I was (and still am) self employed, insurance was quite expensive and I made too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Now, I am insured and have been able to get treatment for my issues before they reach the emergency room level.
On the post: Congressman Asks House Education Committee To Look At Pre-Crime Program Targeting Florida Schoolkids
Re: Re: Re: Educational Program
In this case, it appears to be a spam-bot that scanned the article and is using some sort of algorithm to write a sentence or two that, at first glance, look related (followed, of course, by the spam link). This is a sign that the bots are (slowly) getting smarter.
On the post: New York Times Decides Kids Are Playing Too Many Video Games During The Pandemic
Re: Moral panics about our children
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
<ahem>
I agree with you completely, I just couldn't pass up a chance to "say" that line in public.
On the post: New York Times Decides Kids Are Playing Too Many Video Games During The Pandemic
Re:
Between work and leisure, I still spend the vast majority of my time in front of a computer. It's odd that parents are still wondering about screentime. Aren't most parents of primary-school-age children in their thirties (like me)? Do they remember how much time we'd spend playing video games or watching television? Do they think that they turned out badly?
On the post: New York Times Decides Kids Are Playing Too Many Video Games During The Pandemic
Re: Re: A missed opportunity
You might want to check and see if your local library system integrates with Hoopla. Mine does and just about every book that they can lend digitally I can get from there. I have still bought more books in the past year than I usually would though.
On the post: Broadband Market Failure Keeps Forcing Americans To Build Their Own ISPs
Re:
The guy in the article was quoted $50,000 for the same. He said that he would have paid if it'd been $10,000. Also, unlike Comcast, the neighbors who put in a few thousand each to help fund the initial investment will each get their investment's worth of internet which comes up to multiple years of already paid service.
On the post: Broadband Market Failure Keeps Forcing Americans To Build Their Own ISPs
Re: Re: Re:
In this particular case, Mr. Mauch is buying bandwidth from ACDnet and 123Net. Both of which compete with the local major providers (AT&T, Comcast, Charter, etc.) for backbone and business customers.
On the post: Mitch McConnell Using Section 230 Repeal As A Poison Pill To Avoid $2k Stimulus Checks
Re: Re:
It looks like Mr. Stone was correct in his assessment. Pro-Black doesn't have to mean anti-White. For example, a pro-black statement is, "I believe that Blacks should have the same rights as Whites, Latinx, and any other race in this country." However, that statement is categorically not anti-White since any loss of rights for Whites would mean a loss of rights for everyone. I posted more of this quote in another comment on this thread but here's a part that I think you need to see.
You seem to believe that any Black person speaking out about the current injustices is looking for revenge. In my experience, those who feel that way do so because, if they'd been oppressed and were suddenly free from that oppression, they would be looking for vengeance rather than equality. That being the case, they fear ever lifting the oppression lest the oppressed get a chance for revenge.
On the post: Mitch McConnell Using Section 230 Repeal As A Poison Pill To Avoid $2k Stimulus Checks
Re: Re:
I guess I'll do one of those "defeat your points in turn" things today.
Sweeden has been an unmitigated disaster and even they had a partial lockdown. Sweeden has had many more deaths per capita than their neighbor nations who did go into full lockdowns.
Concerning banning flights from China, that didn't help, primarily because it appears that the main Chinese vectors entered the country before that happened. Also, the strain that infected the east coast came from Europe.
The reason that it was recommended that most people not wear masks was that there was a shortage of both surgical and N95 masks and what supply existed needed to be held for medical professionals. Also, it wasn't yet known whether or not simple cloth coverings would provide a useful amount of protection from transmission of the virus. Once sufficient data was collected on the usefulness of cloth masks, and once the supply of medical quality masks improved, the recommendation changed. As a song I enjoy says, "It's a process, not an ideology." We don't believe scientists because they're gods among men, we believe them because there's a process that has been used for centuries to test hypotheses and provide repeatable conclusions.
Next, I assume that you're speaking about the various protests over the unjustified killings of black people in various states of disarmament this year. It turns out that Rutgers, Harvard, Northeastern, and Northwestern universities have performed a study on whether outdoor protests caused increased COVID-19 cases. The answer was no. Since many protesters wear some type of mask as a teargas protection measure and they're all outdoors, transmission rates were quite low.
To answer your final question, what do we do. We pay people to stay home from work. That's what other wealthy, monetarily sovereign, nations are doing. If you pay people enough to stay home, then the only people working are those who absolutely must work for the rest of us to stay home because, in order to get those people to be willing to work in a pandemic, they have to be paid more than the amount that the government is paying people not to go out during a pandemic.
I'll even answer the common, "What about inflation?" and, "What about the national debt?" questions now. Concerning inflation, given the smack the economy has been given by COVID, (back in April the Treasury Department was planning on over 2% inflation, it's about half that now) the American government could afford to print a couple trillion dollars and that would just place the inflation rate back in the annual range that the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank aim for. We would still have headroom above that long before touching dangerous levels of inflation.
Secondly, the national debt is spoken about as though the federal government was a household or a business. It is neither. There are no US Dollars without the US Government. The US Dollar is backed solely by "the Full Faith and Credit" of the US Government. As such, the journey of a Dollar both begins and ends with the US Government.
Here's an example, someone receives a $600 stimulus check next week direct deposited to their bank account. What happens behind the scenes is the Treasury Department (electronically) tells the bank to add $600 to the account belonging to that person. At that point, $600 appears out of thin air. Let's say that the person in question is a 1099 worker (maybe he's a DoorDasher) and therefore hasn't had any taxes automatically withheld. So, he decides not to touch this money and March rolls around. Now, this person is doing his taxes, and let's assume that he owes $600 in federal tax. Once he files and allows the IRS to take a direct withdrawal from his account, the Treasury Department contacts the bank and has them remove $600 from that account. This causes that same $600 to disappear back into the aether from whence it came. This is the same thing that happens when the Treasury Department pays anyone. Money appears when the government pays people and businesses and it disappears when people pay the government. If those numbers were perfectly balanced every year (a balanced budget) then the amount of money in circulation from year to year wouldn't change but, our GDP is constantly growing so the same amount of money would be chasing more stuff leading to deflation and even worse trade deficits because the US Dollar would get too strong compared to other currencies. Even worse, if the government were to start taxing more than it spends (a budget surplus) then the total number of dollars in circulation would decrease which can't happen for very long before you simply run out of dollars.
This section is simply to say, for nations that print their own currency and only issue sovereign debt in their own currency, the only worry is inflation and even that can be managed. Treasury debt instruments are simply safe savings elements for people either too wealthy to use just banks (FDIC insurance only goes so far) or for people who actually want to see some growth of their savings (interest rates are quite low right now for savings accounts).
On the post: Mitch McConnell Using Section 230 Repeal As A Poison Pill To Avoid $2k Stimulus Checks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The commentariat is reasonably unbiased. As you can tell by the fact that you, someone who I'll hazard a guess to say voted for President Trump, are able to comment just as well as me, someone who voted for President-Elect Biden. We may disagree with each other but we are both able to post here. Also, yes there are people who have called for the deaths of various Republicans but, none of that has been in articles or by staff writers. TechDirt doesn't even mention the parties of politicians it mentions unless the party is relevant to the story unlike the vast majority of news agencies. The lengths they go to remain unbiased are incredible.
On the post: Mitch McConnell Using Section 230 Repeal As A Poison Pill To Avoid $2k Stimulus Checks
Re: Re:
Are you claiming that we don't currently know anything about Trump's record of destroying the country? Since I don't feel like looking up any of the more esoteric examples, I'll just point you to the fact that Trump has presided over the largest number of excess American deaths in modern history and that's just in his last year in office. COVID-19 was always going to kill a large number of people but, there's absolutely no reason that it had to kill over 330 thousand Americans in nine months. That's literally 0.1% of the entire population of the country. I can't speak for you but, I consider that quite destructive.
Biden, on the other hand, has been both a Senator and Vice President in his time in the federal government. Neither of those positions allowed him to exercise the kind of individual power that the office of President allows. Were some of his views on crime in the past bad? Yes, and he has admitted as much. Did he work with segregationists to pass legislation? Yes, and that too was a known quantity. The point isn't that he's done problematic things decades ago, the question is whether he learned from people who were affected by those things and if he's changed since then. I, and a majority of other Americans, believe that he has changed for the better.
Concerning your other contention about "voting blindly". With very few exceptions, Republican politicians at the federal level have moved in lockstep with President Trump. In the last couple of years of Trump's Presidency, that march has had us walking right up to the edge of a cliff. Generally, that kind of action causes a pushback against the party currently in charge. In this case, that means that Republicans down-ballot, even if they aren't Trumpian, lose. If what you mean is that people should vote third-party, I agree. However, until we fix our first past the post voting system, voting third-party is broken for major races. I would have preferred a Democratic candidate who wasn't Biden but, a majority of Democrat primary voters decided on him.
On your last point, President Obama being racist is unlikely, to say the least. Firstly, is there any evidence that he ever used racial slurs towards anyone? I can't imagine something like that not coming out when he was running either time. Secondly, while not impossible, the evidentiary bar for calling a mixed-race person racist is pretty high. He didn't have a very long history in federal governance before being elected President (only two years in the Senate) so was it something in his voting record that you are alluding to?
Concerning the Black Lives Matter movement starting while he was President, that much is true by itself. The movement started in July 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin...by a state court. There were a number of reasons that the movement took off when it did but from my personal point of view, it was because many of us African-Americans (especially those of us in our twenties at the time) believed that finally having a black President meant that there would be justice in cases like these. However, it turns out that this kind of change has to come from the bottom up rather than the top down (which is quite apparent to mid-thirties me). So, you end up with people protesting every time something like this happens, and similarly to the civil rights protests, eventually you see change. If you see people protesting against their family members and neighbors being killed without cause as a "racewar" then you might be part of the problem.
I'll close with a quote from Kimberly Jones that sizes up what you've called a racewar:
On the post: Pasco County Sheriff's School 'Pre-Crime' Program Is Violating Federal Privacy Laws
Re: Protecting and Serving who?
Florida county sheriffs are elected. How is this guy keeping his job when he's pissing off a large chunk of the people?
On the post: Elsevier Wants To Stop Indian Medics, Students And Academics Accessing Knowledge The Only Way Most Of Them Can Afford: Via Sci-Hub And Libgen
What People Seem to Forget About Copyright
This is completely true. Copyright exists because governments decided to grant a temporary right to the creators of works (or their assignees) to exclusively create copies of those works. This was ostensibly for the purpose of incentivizing those creators to publish more works. Unfortunately, this has been twisted in the intervening centuries and now we have copyright terms that literally outlive the creators. The fact that copyright currently lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years, 95 years after publishing, or 120 years after creation is simply insane to me. How can a person be incentivized to create something when they've been dead for decades?
We need to stop the ratchet of increasing copyright law and reset it to something saner. I'd even be fine with only setting a new copyright length for works created from now forward. (While I'd like to actually see things created in the first few decades of my life enter the public domain, those creators created their works under the assumption of these insane copyright lengths and they shouldn't have those rights simply taken away.) I'd prefer that copyright last just as long as utility patents in the US, 20 years.
If works created and/or published starting on January 1st of whichever year followed such legislation, were limited to that kind of term, maybe we'd finally see more innovation in entertainment since a company couldn't simply keep releasing new versions of their old properties for a century without competition.
On the post: First Circuit Appeals Court Reaffirms Its 2011 Decision: The First Amendment Protects The Recording Of Cops
Re: CCTV
Generally, in two-party states, you would post signage informing anyone on your property that security cameras are running. That handles the "consent" part. If they don't want to be recorded, they can go elsewhere.
On the post: We Had To Pass A Law To Stop Telecom Monopolies From Charging You 'Rental Fees' For Things You Already Own
Re: Who appointed Ajit Pai?
Also, the FCC is required to have three members from the same party as the sitting President and two members from the other party. Chairman Pai was simply one of the Republicans Obama had to place. The reason that he was still around for Trump's presidency is that FCC Commissioners have terms longer than that of the President.
Next >>