Do you have the impression that "trolling" is something that has meaning only in the context of filing lawsuits? Because that's certainly not correct.
The term "troll" has different meanings in different contexts. The shared, underlying concept is hard to winkle out, but seems to be something like "person wanting/trying to cause trouble".
One of the contexts in which the term is used is that of In the context of Internet discourse, the simplest and best definition of "trolling" that I've found yet is "posting with the intention of causing a furor". I.e., posting in order to try to stir up trouble, rather than to further discussion or for other legitimate purpose.
What the intent of a post (or posting pattern) may be is of course a subjective matter, but it's something that people can try to discern by observation and analysis. Posting characteristics which are typical of trolling include ad hominem attacks, the dragging in of offtopic arguments, and gratuitous foul language; none of these definitely indicates trolling, and none of them is essential for it, but when seen as part of an overall pattern they can be indicative of that conclusion.
Have you considered the possibility that, if "non-partisan third-party fact checkers" wind up appearing left-wing, maybe that's not a sign of conspiracy or bias but rather a sign that - to borrow a quote - "reality has a well-known liberal bias"?
Not DVD/Blu-ray release, necessarily - but yes, what they're saying is that streaming and subscription-video releases may not be made until three years after the theatrical run.
This is probably specifically to protect the physical-media markets for these movies, as well as the theaters. (If it were just to protect the theaters, there would be no need for the three-year delay, unless the delay is from the start of the theatrical run; a three-days-after-end-of-theatrical-run delay would work just as well.)
Re: Re: Re: It's Time For The FCC To Actually Listen:
Removing regulation won't help.
With regulation or without it, power will always seek to consolidate and enhance itself, at the expense of whoever it must.
The only solution is to constantly fight back.
Without regulation, that fight takes place on a wide assortment of battlefields, and is directly against the now-unregulated companies, who are not even technically required to listen to you, and who have little or no reason to do so.
With regulation, much more of the fight takes place on the single battlefield of the regulator, who is technically required to listen to what the public wants.
That single, central authority - your "consolidat[ion of] power into a smaller surface area' - is much easier to steer than the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of possible catch-points for unchecked power that there would be without regulation. Yes, it's easier to steer for the companies as well, and regulatory capture is a thing - but fighting against regulatory capture is still easier, and more effective, than fighting against unregulated companies out in the general market.
No, regulation isn't a perfect solution - but it is far better, and easier to work with, than a total lack of regulation.
(Also, your line about "this is 100% good people and that is 100% evil people" is a plain and pure straw-man argument; virtually nothing in the real world is that binary, and virtually no one sane even pretends to believe that it's that simple.)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: NSA: The Best Defense is a Good Offense
That's the Microsoft article I read, but I didn't spot an explicit statement that only v1 was affected; I saw it as being implied by parts of the phrasing I don't remember (I'm currently on a computer which is configured in a way that doesn't load most Microsoft pages correctly, and I don't feel like undoing and redoing that configuration just at the moment, so I can't double-check right now), but not stated explicitly. That's why I didn't bother pushing to only disable SMBv1 in my organization, rather than an emergency deployment of the patch. (I'm working on getting regular, timely patch deployments going, but that implementation has been stalled by factors out of my control, including bureacratic obstacles. We may hope that they clear out of the way somewhat after this incident.)
I agree that we got lucky this time, for all the reasons you cite.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: NSA: The Best Defense is a Good Offense
Hmm. Thanks for the note; I'd heard suggestions of the problem being specific to SMBv1, but even Microsoft's own article on the subject didn't seem to be explicit that this was SMBv1 only and that other versions of SMB are not vulnerable, so I didn't trust that as being a fix. (If you have a source for an explicit statement that this is only a hole in SMBv1, I'd appreciate a link.)
If it's confirmed that only SMBv1 has the problem, then that does simplify things considerably, and would have let the NSA secure their own systems without needing to touch the question of hacking together a third-party patch (and dodging code signing enforcement, in whatever form it may be in place).
The established narrative is that the NSA found the vulnerability, it got leaked via the Shadow Brokers, and some unknown people used it to build this ransomware.
All the stories about North Korea seem to be saying is that the "unknown people" in question are the North Korean government, not that the earlier stages of the narrative (involving the NSA) didn't happen.
According to a comment further upthread, the patch for XP (et cetera) which Microsoft released after WannaCry was in the wild is a patch which they had created back in February, but had only made available to people on specialty operating systems which are variants of XP - things like "Windows POSReady", for example. ("POS" here almost certainly stands for "Point Of Sale", meaning it's for things like cash registers, though many people have certainly made the "Piece Of Shit" joke by now.)
Even though Microsoft ended security support for XP some time ago, they've continued to make and distribute patches for XP variants which were sold under other names; people have found ways to modify the XP Registry to trick it into accepting those patches, and they install and run without apparent issues as far as I've heard.
The claim I see being made here is that Microsoft should not be restricting those security patches to only the private release channels of the companies which pay it to support those other-name XP variants; they should be releasing them publicly, just as they had done for years.
The only reason that Microsoft isn't doing that, as far as I can see, is as a way of trying to push people off of XP and onto newer Windows.
Re: Re: Wow, so according to your theory if I bought a ford in 2001 they should still be proving me with free service for the car.
Brilliant.
This should be a serious proposal: you should be required to provide security support (et cetera?) for software, for as long as you claim IP rights over it which would prevent anyone else from providing that same support.
Announcing end-of-support for a software product should be read as implicitly releasing IP rights over that product.
I don't know of anyone saying that mental health should be ignored (except, perhaps, when it's suggested that people should not own a gun if they are found to be unstable - that one really annoys people who think they shouldn't have to prove their sanity before owning another toy).
Well, to be fair, there's justifiable logic behind that one.
The problem with having to prove your sanity in order to own a gun (aside from any difficulties with "proving a negative", in the form of "not insane") is that it establishes a gatekeeper - and one based on a fuzzy, non-obvious criterion, which could and can be determined arbitrarily by whoever has been given the power to decide.
Once that's been done, eventually there will be cases where someone is declared "not sufficiently sane", specifically so as to deny that person the right to own a gun, not on any legitimate basis but simply because the people in the right positions don't like that person. And once you've been labeled as mentally unstable, it's difficult to persuasively argue against it, without the help of someone who has not been so labeled.
The sane and principled people arguing against a sanity requirement for gun ownership are, or at least IMO should be, doing so as an outgrowth of that logic - however subconsciously understood it may be. (Which is not to say that there are not people arguing against it for other reasons! There are certainly (metaphorical!) crazies in the gun-rights/gun-control debate, without question.)
Let's try something slightly different, then, to explain what's being said.
There's a famous saying, in many forms, one of which is: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose."
Or to put it another way, "My freedom does not include the freedom to punch you in the face."
In almost exactly the same way, "My freedom does not include the freedom to obtain a monopoly over something that you need."
This is not the same as "freedom is not freedom".
More generically:
If I were free to do X, you and many other people would be less free.
The loss of freedom to me from not being permitted to do X is outweighed by the loss of freedom to you (and many other people) from me being permitted to do so.
Therefore, if I were free to do X, the world would be less free than if I am not.
This reasoning holds for many values of X, including acts of violence, and also including monopolistic behavior.
Re: Re: Re: NSA: The Best Defense is a Good Offense
The NSA, knowing about these offensive exploits, can defend their computers against them.
How?
In this case, the only fix I've seen reported is to install a patch from Microsoft.
That patch only exists because Microsoft was notified about the vulnerability. No one else has the source code, so no one else can build a patch to close the vulnerability, much less actually get it installed (given code-signing practices nowadays, et cetera).
If the NSA notifies Microsoft about the vulnerability, the patch for it will be released publicly, thereby both notifying the public about the vulnerability and enabling the public to close it - meaning that the NSA won't be able to rely on using the vulnerability to get in.
If the NSA does not notify Microsoft about the vulnerability, no patch will be created (until such time as someone else finds and reports the same vulnerability), and so the NSA will not be able to secure their own Windows computers.
I think what he meant is something like "the Right to be Forgotten is a legal principle which only exists in Europe, so nothing that happens in the US can be an example of the Right to be Forgotten, so why is a story about something that happened entirely within the US talking about the Right to be Forgotten?".
The answer, of course, is that the article is using the term "Right to be Forgotten" to refer to the entire concept of there being such a right, and possibly even more generally to the attempt to make past reporting on a subject disappear, rather than to the legal recognition of that in European law.
He might dispute that that's an appropriate usage, and indeed his post might be a ham-handed attempt to do so, but the basic idea seems sound enough.
Not to mention: what happens if it's illegal in one country to e.g. deny the Holocaust and illegal in another to claim that it happened?
It's my understanding that the former is the case in Germany; it's also my understanding that the leaders of at least one or two of the more totalitarian states out there have denied that the Holocaust happened, and it's not a far step from there to forbidding claiming that it did happen (although I don't recall offhand any reports of such a ban in practice).
If every nation has worldwide jurisdiction, then not only does the most restrictive law apply for every circumstance, sooner or later you wind up with conflicting laws attempting to govern the same act - and then whoever is involved in that act is stuck, in trouble no matter what course is chosen.
Re: 'Companies that offer internet service' does not equal 'The internet'
Yep.
AFAIK, nobody is pushing for the FCC to be in charge of the Internet.
What some people are pushing for is for the FCC to have specific authority over the Internet-access market, which could be spun as giving them (limited) control of that market, but not of the Internet itself.
There are at least two distinct things which get conflated under the same name:
Access to the Internet, also known as "Internet service". This is what ISPs originally provided, and is what would - and should - qualify for common-carrier status: the connection and the pipe. I believe the FCC calls this "communications services", or words to that effect.
Services on and over the Internet - E-mail servers and search engines, for example. I believe the FCC calls this "information services". ISPs also often provide these, but they need to be kept separate from the previous category, and treated / regulated differently.
(Arguably "the Internet itself" or "the actual Internet" should be a third distinct thing, but I'm having a hard time defining it cleanly in a way that doesn't have too much overlap with "services on and over".)
The first, key mistake which led us to the current market situation was failing to maintain the distinction between those two things.
Back in (I think) the early noughts, or possibly the late '90s, some of the major ISPs successfully argued both A: that the second type of services are correctly classified as information services, and B: that since ISPs do usually provide services of the second type (E-mail accounts, for example) as well as of the first, they should be classified and regulated under the second category.
They somehow hoodwinked the regulators into failing to recognize that most ISPs actually provide two distinct types of services, which need to be regulated separately.
Unfortunately, my understanding is that what Maine seems to have chosen is one of the worst functional ranked-preference voting systems, in terms of eliminating the effects that lead to motivation for voting strategically rather than voting your actual preferences.
It's been more than a decade since I was familiar with the details and the examples, but although "eliminate the candidate with the most last-place votes" and "eliminate the candidate with the fewest first-place votes" and so forth are certainly better in that regard than single-choice first-past-the-post, examples of voting situations where ranking A ahead of B can increase the probability of B being elected still exist.
The only system I've encountered where no such examples have been found that I know of is the Condorcet method itself, which has the downside that it's relatively hard to understand how votes are actually counted.
I just hope that any difficulties Maine may encounter with their experiment with ranked-preference voting which may be due to the choice of a relatively poor method won't turn people off of ranked-preference voting in general.
Does the Fourth Amendment specify that only a judge can issue a warrant?
If so, I don't see it in the text you quoted.
The thrust of that aspect of the article, as I read it, was not saying that the police are engaging in searches without warrants - only that the warrants they are getting are not from judges, but from magistrates, who are less inclined (and possibly less able) to scrutinize the warrant requests for validity.
There are at least three facets to the principle of network neutrality:
The network should be content-neutral. That is, it should neither know nor care what the packets passing over it contain. (The moment you begin Deep Packet Inspection, you have violated this facet of the principle.)
The network should be source-neutral. That is, it should neither know nor care about what a given packet source may be; at most, it should only care about making sure that packets marked as coming from that source don't actually come from a different one (i.e., that they are not spoofed).
The network should be destination-neutral. That is, it should neither know nor care what a given destination may be; it should only care about making sure that a packet marked as being for that destination gets there.
Network neutrality is the principle that "the network should be utterly indifferent to the contents and nature of the traffic passing over it" - that it should be content-, source-, and destination-neutral. A dumb pipe, in other words.
(It would be possible to modify that somewhat, by agreeing on adjustments to the transport protocols whereby a given packet can request classification into "high throughput" or "low latency" or similar transport pools - but as far as I'm aware that hasn't been done, and even if it does happen, the maximum limit of what the network should care about is what the packet itself is requesting.)
That should still leave room for traffic shaping, to rein in usage spikes which threaten to choke the pipes enough to prevent some traffic from getting through at all - as long as that shaping is applied to all traffic passing through the relevant bottlenecks, irrespective of source, destination, or content.
That in turn should make it possible to address DDOS attacks, at least to some limited extent (and I might argue that if the cost of relaxing those limits is the loss of neutrality, the benefit of avoiding DDOS attacks at this layer is not worth it).
A fair point, and thank you for the assessment and for digging up that analysis.
Looking back in more detail, I think my relatively-positive impression of him prior to his (best-known?) Presidential run came largely from an aspect of that "maverick" reputation not directly addressed above: a sense of integrity, of being willing to stand up for his principles even if they go against what the party wants.
In that Presidential campaign, I remember him breaking with what had appeared to be his principles to endorse what the party appeared to want their candidate to do/be/say, and that did serious damage to that appearance of integrity - and, by consequence, to that "maverick" reputation.
He's still not quite as bad as many of his colleagues, but he's never really recovered from that shift, IMO.
Another point in favor of creating an account in the face of impersonation like that: if you don't, the impersonator can, and may beat you to it - leaving you without the option of posting under your own chosen name.
On the post: US Court Upholds Enforceability Of GNU GPL As Both A License And A Contract
Re: Re: Re:
The term "troll" has different meanings in different contexts. The shared, underlying concept is hard to winkle out, but seems to be something like "person wanting/trying to cause trouble".
One of the contexts in which the term is used is that of In the context of Internet discourse, the simplest and best definition of "trolling" that I've found yet is "posting with the intention of causing a furor". I.e., posting in order to try to stir up trouble, rather than to further discussion or for other legitimate purpose.
What the intent of a post (or posting pattern) may be is of course a subjective matter, but it's something that people can try to discern by observation and analysis. Posting characteristics which are typical of trolling include ad hominem attacks, the dragging in of offtopic arguments, and gratuitous foul language; none of these definitely indicates trolling, and none of them is essential for it, but when seen as part of an overall pattern they can be indicative of that conclusion.
On the post: Well, Duh: Facebook's System To Stop 'Fake News' Isn't Working -- Because Facebook Isn't The Problem
Re:
On the post: French Theater Owners Freak Out; Get Netflix Booted From Cannes Film Festival
Re: Re:
Not DVD/Blu-ray release, necessarily - but yes, what they're saying is that streaming and subscription-video releases may not be made until three years after the theatrical run.
This is probably specifically to protect the physical-media markets for these movies, as well as the theaters. (If it were just to protect the theaters, there would be no need for the three-year delay, unless the delay is from the start of the theatrical run; a three-days-after-end-of-theatrical-run delay would work just as well.)
On the post: It's Time For The FCC To Actually Listen: The Vast Majority Of FCC Commenters Support Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: It's Time For The FCC To Actually Listen:
Removing regulation won't help.
With regulation or without it, power will always seek to consolidate and enhance itself, at the expense of whoever it must.
The only solution is to constantly fight back.
Without regulation, that fight takes place on a wide assortment of battlefields, and is directly against the now-unregulated companies, who are not even technically required to listen to you, and who have little or no reason to do so.
With regulation, much more of the fight takes place on the single battlefield of the regulator, who is technically required to listen to what the public wants.
That single, central authority - your "consolidat[ion of] power into a smaller surface area' - is much easier to steer than the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of possible catch-points for unchecked power that there would be without regulation. Yes, it's easier to steer for the companies as well, and regulatory capture is a thing - but fighting against regulatory capture is still easier, and more effective, than fighting against unregulated companies out in the general market.
No, regulation isn't a perfect solution - but it is far better, and easier to work with, than a total lack of regulation.
(Also, your line about "this is 100% good people and that is 100% evil people" is a plain and pure straw-man argument; virtually nothing in the real world is that binary, and virtually no one sane even pretends to believe that it's that simple.)
On the post: Leaked NSA Hacking Tool On Global Ransomware Rampage
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: NSA: The Best Defense is a Good Offense
That's the Microsoft article I read, but I didn't spot an explicit statement that only v1 was affected; I saw it as being implied by parts of the phrasing I don't remember (I'm currently on a computer which is configured in a way that doesn't load most Microsoft pages correctly, and I don't feel like undoing and redoing that configuration just at the moment, so I can't double-check right now), but not stated explicitly. That's why I didn't bother pushing to only disable SMBv1 in my organization, rather than an emergency deployment of the patch. (I'm working on getting regular, timely patch deployments going, but that implementation has been stalled by factors out of my control, including bureacratic obstacles. We may hope that they clear out of the way somewhat after this incident.)
I agree that we got lucky this time, for all the reasons you cite.
On the post: Leaked NSA Hacking Tool On Global Ransomware Rampage
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: NSA: The Best Defense is a Good Offense
Hmm. Thanks for the note; I'd heard suggestions of the problem being specific to SMBv1, but even Microsoft's own article on the subject didn't seem to be explicit that this was SMBv1 only and that other versions of SMB are not vulnerable, so I didn't trust that as being a fix. (If you have a source for an explicit statement that this is only a hole in SMBv1, I'd appreciate a link.)
If it's confirmed that only SMBv1 has the problem, then that does simplify things considerably, and would have let the NSA secure their own systems without needing to touch the question of hacking together a third-party patch (and dodging code signing enforcement, in whatever form it may be in place).
On the post: Microsoft Is PISSED OFF At The NSA Over WannaCry Attack
Re: North Korea
The established narrative is that the NSA found the vulnerability, it got leaked via the Shadow Brokers, and some unknown people used it to build this ransomware.
All the stories about North Korea seem to be saying is that the "unknown people" in question are the North Korean government, not that the earlier stages of the narrative (involving the NSA) didn't happen.
On the post: Microsoft Is PISSED OFF At The NSA Over WannaCry Attack
Re: Why yes, I will blame them
Even though Microsoft ended security support for XP some time ago, they've continued to make and distribute patches for XP variants which were sold under other names; people have found ways to modify the XP Registry to trick it into accepting those patches, and they install and run without apparent issues as far as I've heard.
The claim I see being made here is that Microsoft should not be restricting those security patches to only the private release channels of the companies which pay it to support those other-name XP variants; they should be releasing them publicly, just as they had done for years.
The only reason that Microsoft isn't doing that, as far as I can see, is as a way of trying to push people off of XP and onto newer Windows.
On the post: Microsoft Is PISSED OFF At The NSA Over WannaCry Attack
Re: Re: Wow, so according to your theory if I bought a ford in 2001 they should still be proving me with free service for the car.
This should be a serious proposal: you should be required to provide security support (et cetera?) for software, for as long as you claim IP rights over it which would prevent anyone else from providing that same support.
Announcing end-of-support for a software product should be read as implicitly releasing IP rights over that product.
On the post: The FCC Spent Last Week Trying To Make Net Neutrality Supporters Seem Unreasonable, Racist & Unhinged
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Facts of Life
Well, to be fair, there's justifiable logic behind that one.
The problem with having to prove your sanity in order to own a gun (aside from any difficulties with "proving a negative", in the form of "not insane") is that it establishes a gatekeeper - and one based on a fuzzy, non-obvious criterion, which could and can be determined arbitrarily by whoever has been given the power to decide.
Once that's been done, eventually there will be cases where someone is declared "not sufficiently sane", specifically so as to deny that person the right to own a gun, not on any legitimate basis but simply because the people in the right positions don't like that person. And once you've been labeled as mentally unstable, it's difficult to persuasively argue against it, without the help of someone who has not been so labeled.
The sane and principled people arguing against a sanity requirement for gun ownership are, or at least IMO should be, doing so as an outgrowth of that logic - however subconsciously understood it may be. (Which is not to say that there are not people arguing against it for other reasons! There are certainly (metaphorical!) crazies in the gun-rights/gun-control debate, without question.)
On the post: The FCC Spent Last Week Trying To Make Net Neutrality Supporters Seem Unreasonable, Racist & Unhinged
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Let's try something slightly different, then, to explain what's being said.
There's a famous saying, in many forms, one of which is: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose."
Or to put it another way, "My freedom does not include the freedom to punch you in the face."
In almost exactly the same way, "My freedom does not include the freedom to obtain a monopoly over something that you need."
This is not the same as "freedom is not freedom".
More generically:
This reasoning holds for many values of X, including acts of violence, and also including monopolistic behavior.
On the post: Leaked NSA Hacking Tool On Global Ransomware Rampage
Re: Re: Re: NSA: The Best Defense is a Good Offense
How?
In this case, the only fix I've seen reported is to install a patch from Microsoft.
That patch only exists because Microsoft was notified about the vulnerability. No one else has the source code, so no one else can build a patch to close the vulnerability, much less actually get it installed (given code-signing practices nowadays, et cetera).
If the NSA notifies Microsoft about the vulnerability, the patch for it will be released publicly, thereby both notifying the public about the vulnerability and enabling the public to close it - meaning that the NSA won't be able to rely on using the vulnerability to get in.
If the NSA does not notify Microsoft about the vulnerability, no patch will be created (until such time as someone else finds and reports the same vulnerability), and so the NSA will not be able to secure their own Windows computers.
Is there a hole in that logic somewhere?
On the post: Story About Ex-Sony Pictures Boss Magically Disappears From Gawker; His Lawyer Tells Reporters Not To Talk About It
Re: Re:
The answer, of course, is that the article is using the term "Right to be Forgotten" to refer to the entire concept of there being such a right, and possibly even more generally to the attempt to make past reporting on a subject disappear, rather than to the legal recognition of that in European law.
He might dispute that that's an appropriate usage, and indeed his post might be a ham-handed attempt to do so, but the basic idea seems sound enough.
On the post: Austrian Court's 'Hate Speech' Ruling Says Facebook Must Remove Perfectly Legal Posts All Over The World
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Not to mention: what happens if it's illegal in one country to e.g. deny the Holocaust and illegal in another to claim that it happened?
It's my understanding that the former is the case in Germany; it's also my understanding that the leaders of at least one or two of the more totalitarian states out there have denied that the Holocaust happened, and it's not a far step from there to forbidding claiming that it did happen (although I don't recall offhand any reports of such a ban in practice).
If every nation has worldwide jurisdiction, then not only does the most restrictive law apply for every circumstance, sooner or later you wind up with conflicting laws attempting to govern the same act - and then whoever is involved in that act is stuck, in trouble no matter what course is chosen.
On the post: The FCC Claims A DDoS Attack -- Not John Oliver -- Crashed Its Website. But Nobody Seems To Believe Them
Re: 'Companies that offer internet service' does not equal 'The internet'
Yep.
AFAIK, nobody is pushing for the FCC to be in charge of the Internet.
What some people are pushing for is for the FCC to have specific authority over the Internet-access market, which could be spun as giving them (limited) control of that market, but not of the Internet itself.
There are at least two distinct things which get conflated under the same name:
Access to the Internet, also known as "Internet service". This is what ISPs originally provided, and is what would - and should - qualify for common-carrier status: the connection and the pipe. I believe the FCC calls this "communications services", or words to that effect.
(Arguably "the Internet itself" or "the actual Internet" should be a third distinct thing, but I'm having a hard time defining it cleanly in a way that doesn't have too much overlap with "services on and over".)
The first, key mistake which led us to the current market situation was failing to maintain the distinction between those two things.
Back in (I think) the early noughts, or possibly the late '90s, some of the major ISPs successfully argued both A: that the second type of services are correctly classified as information services, and B: that since ISPs do usually provide services of the second type (E-mail accounts, for example) as well as of the first, they should be classified and regulated under the second category.
They somehow hoodwinked the regulators into failing to recognize that most ISPs actually provide two distinct types of services, which need to be regulated separately.
On the post: Trump Fires FBI Director Comey
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Please Leave
Unfortunately, my understanding is that what Maine seems to have chosen is one of the worst functional ranked-preference voting systems, in terms of eliminating the effects that lead to motivation for voting strategically rather than voting your actual preferences.
It's been more than a decade since I was familiar with the details and the examples, but although "eliminate the candidate with the most last-place votes" and "eliminate the candidate with the fewest first-place votes" and so forth are certainly better in that regard than single-choice first-past-the-post, examples of voting situations where ranking A ahead of B can increase the probability of B being elected still exist.
The only system I've encountered where no such examples have been found that I know of is the Condorcet method itself, which has the downside that it's relatively hard to understand how votes are actually counted.
I just hope that any difficulties Maine may encounter with their experiment with ranked-preference voting which may be due to the choice of a relatively poor method won't turn people off of ranked-preference voting in general.
On the post: Massachusetts State Police Promise Higher Standard For No-Knock Warrants; Immediately Break It
Re: 4th amendment
If so, I don't see it in the text you quoted.
The thrust of that aspect of the article, as I read it, was not saying that the police are engaging in searches without warrants - only that the warrants they are getting are not from judges, but from magistrates, who are less inclined (and possibly less able) to scrutinize the warrant requests for validity.
On the post: A Bot Is Flooding The FCC Website With Fake Anti-Net Neutrality Comments... In Alphabetical Order
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I don't think that's quite correct.
There are at least three facets to the principle of network neutrality:
Network neutrality is the principle that "the network should be utterly indifferent to the contents and nature of the traffic passing over it" - that it should be content-, source-, and destination-neutral. A dumb pipe, in other words.
(It would be possible to modify that somewhat, by agreeing on adjustments to the transport protocols whereby a given packet can request classification into "high throughput" or "low latency" or similar transport pools - but as far as I'm aware that hasn't been done, and even if it does happen, the maximum limit of what the network should care about is what the packet itself is requesting.)
That should still leave room for traffic shaping, to rein in usage spikes which threaten to choke the pipes enough to prevent some traffic from getting through at all - as long as that shaping is applied to all traffic passing through the relevant bottlenecks, irrespective of source, destination, or content.
That in turn should make it possible to address DDOS attacks, at least to some limited extent (and I might argue that if the cost of relaxing those limits is the loss of neutrality, the benefit of avoiding DDOS attacks at this layer is not worth it).
On the post: Trump Fires FBI Director Comey
Re: Re: Re: Re: not conservative
Looking back in more detail, I think my relatively-positive impression of him prior to his (best-known?) Presidential run came largely from an aspect of that "maverick" reputation not directly addressed above: a sense of integrity, of being willing to stand up for his principles even if they go against what the party wants.
In that Presidential campaign, I remember him breaking with what had appeared to be his principles to endorse what the party appeared to want their candidate to do/be/say, and that did serious damage to that appearance of integrity - and, by consequence, to that "maverick" reputation.
He's still not quite as bad as many of his colleagues, but he's never really recovered from that shift, IMO.
On the post: House Subcommittee Passes Police-Protecting 'Thin Blue Line' Bill
Re: Re: Re: Trying to ignore realtiy?
Another point in favor of creating an account in the face of impersonation like that: if you don't, the impersonator can, and may beat you to it - leaving you without the option of posting under your own chosen name.
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