On sites without ads, there is often reasonable use of whitespace, leaving space empty for both visual and "click in the window without triggering anything" reasons.
On sites with ads, the entire page tends to be cluttered with objects, to the point that frequently even clicking in what looks like empty space will actually trigger a hyperlink to whatever page the ad is pointing to.
I've started to use "clutter" as a curse word in the past year or two, for unrelated reasons, and the idea holds up just as well on the WWW as it does elsewhere.
No - that line is based on a persuasive analysis I ran across last year which explained/argued the ways in which the structural incentives of single-choice first-past-the-post drive inevitably towards a two-party system, purely out of people attempting to vote in their own best interests.
Unfortunately I don't remember where that analysis was or who presented it, so I can't cite it effectively, and I don't remember its arguments well enough to persuasively present them myself.
That just means that Canada hasn't devolved to the natural end-point of a single-choice, first-past-the-post voting system yet. There was a time when America hadn't either, and yet here we are.
The real problem isn't first-past-the-post itself; it's the spoiler effect, and the perverse voting patterns which it incentivizes. That effect exists under first-past-the-post, and there's no way to eliminate or minimize that fact; the only solution is to switch to a voting system which does not produce that effect.
(The best-known ranked-choice voting system, known as IRV - the one in which the candidate with the most last-place or fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and then the results are recalculated on the basis of the remaining candidates - doesn't have the same spoiler effect as does FPTP, but does still leave situations in which ranking your preferred candidate a certain way can actually decrease the chance of that candidate winning. A Condorcet system, although much harder to understand, is the most ideal option known as far as perverse incentives goes.)
I was going to post something similar, but I ran up against the fact that if you ignore the legal context and look only at the colloquial sense of the term, the events you describe do constitute him winning - or, in other words, "prevailing in" - his fight against Gawker.
Nothing about that win says that the court will be more likely to rule in his favor in this instance - but nothing about this instance says that the force-the-target-into-bankruptcy tactic won't be just as effective in this case as it was in the previous one, assuming that he has sufficient funds available on his end.
So that argument turns into arguing over the meaning of the word "prevail", and that type of semantic hairsplitting is not going to convince anybody who doesn't already agree with you.
His position seems to be that it's all of the other rules still in place which are giving the monopolies government blessing, and preventing other people from coming in to compete.
If I undestand matters correctly, he's said that he's in favor of anti-monopoly regulation, but against all other forms of regulation, on (I think) the grounds that all - or at least the overwhelming majority of - other forms of regulation serve to make it harder for people to come into the market and thus give those already in the market a competitive advantage.
I think that's going too far, personally, but a lot of the specific forms of regulation I think I've seen him mention in the specific market in question (spectrum licenses, pole-access rules, et cetera) do seem to have that effect. It's just that they may also have other, positive effects, which he seems to either ignore or reject out of hand as being obviously outweighed by the fact that they also represent government blessing of the market incumbent.
I can't entirely refute that claim, but all I can say is that the only examples of the Crusades being brought up in re modern Christianity that I can think of have all been in terms of pointing out "Christianity isn't pure and innocent either" when people point out atrocities (both current and historical) of Islam. That doesn't read like "blame" to me, although the people on the opposing side in the arguments where I've seen it often seem to have read it that way.
Maybe it's true that Christianity in its entirety has developed past the point of doing things like that, and maybe it's also true that Islam (in whole or in part) has not - but there was a time when Christianity hadn't either, and it would be no more appropriate for us to declare Islam as a whole hateful and irredeemable for today's actions than it would have been for people to similarly condemn Christianity as a whole for the atrocities of those earlier times.
Sorry, that's not how the language works. A republic is a form of government, or a nation (ostensibly) under that form of government; the equivalent noun would be "democracy", not "Democrat".
The adjective for "republic" is "republican", and the noun for "member of the Republican Party" is "Republican".
The adjective for "democracy" is "democratic", and the noun for "member of the Democratic Party" is "Democrat".
The names of the parties are derived from descriptive adjectives which evolved differently over the course of linguistic history, and they take different forms when conjugated. Trying to force otherwise for parallelism is pointless.
There's no such thing as the "Democrat Party", or "Democrat rhetoric", et cetera; the word is "Democratic", or sometimes "democratic".
The use of "Democrat" as an adjective (outside of certain limited contexts where nouns work as adjectives, such as "Democrat Elizabeth Warren", where it's a shorthand for "member of the Democratic Party") is a red-flag indicator that either the speaker is not familiar with the usage of English grammar, or the speaker is accustomed to contexts which have a distinct right-wing bias.
As I've just been arguing over in a thread on the latest article about Kim Dotcom, the Fourth Amendment does not actually define "reasonable" explicitly; instead, it includes a clause about warrants, without saying anything about what warrants have to do with searches or reasonability.
It is up to the reader to infer any connection between those two, and although it's well-established in the courts that warrants imply reasonability, many people (and courts) have concluded that reasonability can and does exist without warrants in some cases.
Neither of the above, in fact. I simply don't like to see people arguing from what appear to me to be false premises.
I would very much like to be able to read the Fourth Amendment as saying what you've claimed it says, but I have not managed to do that.
I honestly believe that the courts are reading it the same way I am, and that that is why they have held that exceptions to the warrant requirement exist.
If you want to convince the courts, you need to argue in their terms, on the same premises they hold - or else argue against those very premises. (And "Yes, it does say that" is an assertion, not an argument.)
Which words do you claim I need to be educated on? If you can point to specific words which mean things that I'm missing, or specific wording which means something I'm not catching, I'd be glad to learn.
I would love for the Fourth Amendment to explicitly say that a warrant is required, or to explicitly say that the issuance of a warrant, results in reasonability, or to explicitly define what "reasonable" means in any other way. Even if there were negative consequences from that explicit clarity (such as ruling out things which obviously should be permitted), it would make it possible to debate the matter on a much more solid footing.
But as far as I can see, the explicit wording of the Fourth Amendment does not do any of those things. It is, instead, highly reliant on the reader to implicitly extract those meanings from its explicit wording - and different people will disagree on what meanings are implied.
If you are arguing that the Fourth Amendment does do any of those things, it is incumbent upon you to either point to where it does, or explain how the understanding that it does inevitably arises from the explicit things which it does say.
If you can do either of those things, you might have a chance of convincing a court - and if you can improve the reach of the protections of the Fourth Amendment in the process, I say more power to you. (Convincing me, in the wilds of the Internet, means little or nothing.)
If not... well, to my eye it looks much more as if you are the one who is failing to understand the definitions of words and the logic of how they link together.
If the second part of the clause describing the requirements for a warrant are ignored then the right is violated.
That's an assumption, though. It's not explicitly stated in the Amendment. (The Amendment doesn't even explicitly state that the issuance of a warrant under the described conditions results in reasonability.)
That's the loophole through with the courts have established the various exceptions to the warrant requirement.
I can't even in good conscience argue that the warrant requirement should be absolute, either. If an ordinary, non-government-agent citizen would be permitted to look somewhere without permission (and to testify as to what was seen there), should a police officer or similar government agent be forbidden to look there without permission, in the absence of a warrant?
The answer "yes" would seem unreasonable, in the ordinary meaning of that term - and yet if the warrant requirement were absolute then a "yes" would be required.
Unfortunately, if you allow that one example of "reasonable" outside of a warrant context, you've opened the door to the possibility of others - and my understanding is that that's exactly what has happened, and that it's simply cascaded out until we reach the current situation.
I believe the drafters of the Amendment included the qualifier "unreasonable" specifically so that "oh, of course he's allowed to do that, anyone is allowed to do that, trying to insist otherwise would be crazy" sorts of situation would not be barred - but it's been extended and expanded, over centuries of legal dispute and discourse, to cover far more than they would probably have intended.
Where does any of that say that a search without a warrant is not reasonable?
The Fourth Amendment does say that (paraphrasing) people have a right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure, and that that right shall not be infringed upon; it also defines the conditions that must exist for a warrant to be issued.
But it does not seem to say that a warrant must be issued in order for the search to be reasonable. It probably should say that, and the drafters probably meant something close to that (with wiggle room to prevent excluding e.g. things discovered in the course of perfectly ordinary, non-investigatory activity), but it does not seem to actually explicitly say that.
If you can see how it does say that, please do share. I'd very much like to understand how it does, because I'd very much like to be wrong about the conclusion that it does not, but so far nothing has convinced me that I am.
Re: Re: So...what's the legal basis behind asset forfeiture?
The 4th clearly states that the ONLY REASONABLE way to search or seize a citizen or their property is by obtaining a warrant.
Where does it say that?
I've looked several times, and devoted considerable attention to attempting to parse it in a way which squeezes this statement out of it, and I just don't see that.
The clause about unreasonable search and seizure and the clause about warrants appear to be structurally distinct and, aside from their juxtaposition, unrelated. The authors of the amendment almost certainly meant for them to be related and interlinked, but they don't seem to have stated that intention explicitly in the text.
There is no left wing in national (or even, for the most part, state-level) office in the USA, by historical standards of what left vs. right means. It's all just different degrees of right-wing.
Bernie Sanders' campaign positions were actually mildly left-wing - but not nearly as far as the positions of many people I know, including myself. (As assessed by the standards of The Political Compass, at any rate.)
Actually, promoting public respect for police work does start with the public.
It starts with looking at the public, to understand why the public lacks that respect, and what can be done to address that reason.
To the extent that officer morale is because of public attitudes towards the police, that also starts with looking at the public, to understand why those attitudes exist.
On the post: New 'Perceptual' Ad Blocking Tech Doesn't Win The Ad Blocking War, But It May Put Advertisers On Their Heels... Permanently
Re: Re: Re: Re: Nowhere to go BUT down
On sites without ads, there is often reasonable use of whitespace, leaving space empty for both visual and "click in the window without triggering anything" reasons.
On sites with ads, the entire page tends to be cluttered with objects, to the point that frequently even clicking in what looks like empty space will actually trigger a hyperlink to whatever page the ad is pointing to.
I've started to use "clutter" as a curse word in the past year or two, for unrelated reasons, and the idea holds up just as well on the WWW as it does elsewhere.
On the post: Bad Take: Rep. Sensenbrenner's Response Over Internet Privacy Concerns: 'Nobody's Got To Use The Internet'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Unfortunately I don't remember where that analysis was or who presented it, so I can't cite it effectively, and I don't remember its arguments well enough to persuasively present them myself.
On the post: German Consumers Face $26,500 Fine If They Don't Destroy Poorly-Secured 'Smart' Doll
Re:
Therefore, securing the Internet is the responsibility of everyone who uses the Internet (and, arguably, even of those who do not).
On the post: Bad Take: Rep. Sensenbrenner's Response Over Internet Privacy Concerns: 'Nobody's Got To Use The Internet'
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The real problem isn't first-past-the-post itself; it's the spoiler effect, and the perverse voting patterns which it incentivizes. That effect exists under first-past-the-post, and there's no way to eliminate or minimize that fact; the only solution is to switch to a voting system which does not produce that effect.
(The best-known ranked-choice voting system, known as IRV - the one in which the candidate with the most last-place or fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and then the results are recalculated on the basis of the remaining candidates - doesn't have the same spoiler effect as does FPTP, but does still leave situations in which ranking your preferred candidate a certain way can actually decrease the chance of that candidate winning. A Condorcet system, although much harder to understand, is the most ideal option known as far as perverse incentives goes.)
On the post: Latest Filings In Our First Amendment Fight; Please Help Keep True Independent Journalism From Being Silenced
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I was going to post something similar, but I ran up against the fact that if you ignore the legal context and look only at the colloquial sense of the term, the events you describe do constitute him winning - or, in other words, "prevailing in" - his fight against Gawker.
Nothing about that win says that the court will be more likely to rule in his favor in this instance - but nothing about this instance says that the force-the-target-into-bankruptcy tactic won't be just as effective in this case as it was in the previous one, assuming that he has sufficient funds available on his end.
So that argument turns into arguing over the meaning of the word "prevail", and that type of semantic hairsplitting is not going to convince anybody who doesn't already agree with you.
On the post: Yes, There Are Other Laws That Protect Privacy, But FCC's Rules Were Still Helpful
Re: Re: Re:
If I undestand matters correctly, he's said that he's in favor of anti-monopoly regulation, but against all other forms of regulation, on (I think) the grounds that all - or at least the overwhelming majority of - other forms of regulation serve to make it harder for people to come into the market and thus give those already in the market a competitive advantage.
I think that's going too far, personally, but a lot of the specific forms of regulation I think I've seen him mention in the specific market in question (spectrum licenses, pole-access rules, et cetera) do seem to have that effect. It's just that they may also have other, positive effects, which he seems to either ignore or reject out of hand as being obviously outweighed by the fact that they also represent government blessing of the market incumbent.
On the post: Moderate French Presidential Candidate Suggests He May Pressure US Tech Companies Into Creating Encryption Backdoors
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I can't entirely refute that claim, but all I can say is that the only examples of the Crusades being brought up in re modern Christianity that I can think of have all been in terms of pointing out "Christianity isn't pure and innocent either" when people point out atrocities (both current and historical) of Islam. That doesn't read like "blame" to me, although the people on the opposing side in the arguments where I've seen it often seem to have read it that way.
Maybe it's true that Christianity in its entirety has developed past the point of doing things like that, and maybe it's also true that Islam (in whole or in part) has not - but there was a time when Christianity hadn't either, and it would be no more appropriate for us to declare Islam as a whole hateful and irredeemable for today's actions than it would have been for people to similarly condemn Christianity as a whole for the atrocities of those earlier times.
On the post: Attorney General Kills Off Study Of DOJ's Highly-Flawed Forensic Practices And Evidence
Re: Re: Re:
They are also certainly not exactly the same, and the differences which do exist are certainly still meaningful.
On the post: Attorney General Kills Off Study Of DOJ's Highly-Flawed Forensic Practices And Evidence
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The adjective for "republic" is "republican", and the noun for "member of the Republican Party" is "Republican".
The adjective for "democracy" is "democratic", and the noun for "member of the Democratic Party" is "Democrat".
The names of the parties are derived from descriptive adjectives which evolved differently over the course of linguistic history, and they take different forms when conjugated. Trying to force otherwise for parallelism is pointless.
On the post: Moderate French Presidential Candidate Suggests He May Pressure US Tech Companies Into Creating Encryption Backdoors
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm so far to the left that Bernie Sanders is to the right of me.
My father is a pastor, and the most thoroughly Christian person I know of.
He's even further left than I am.
(Also... didn't the Christians, you know, engage in the Crusades? Who else would you blame for the Crusades?)
On the post: Attorney General Kills Off Study Of DOJ's Highly-Flawed Forensic Practices And Evidence
Re: Re:
The use of "Democrat" as an adjective (outside of certain limited contexts where nouns work as adjectives, such as "Democrat Elizabeth Warren", where it's a shorthand for "member of the Democratic Party") is a red-flag indicator that either the speaker is not familiar with the usage of English grammar, or the speaker is accustomed to contexts which have a distinct right-wing bias.
On the post: Dear CD Projekt Red: Please Stop Trying To Get Trademarks On The Common Name Of A Genre
Re: Why?
On the post: Canada's National Police Force Officially Confirms Ownership, Use Of Stingray Devices
Re: Canada Rights
It is up to the reader to infer any connection between those two, and although it's well-established in the courts that warrants imply reasonability, many people (and courts) have concluded that reasonability can and does exist without warrants in some cases.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Asks US Supreme Court Not To Allow US Government To Steal All His Stuff Without Due Process
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: So...what's the legal basis behind asset forfeiture?
Neither of the above, in fact. I simply don't like to see people arguing from what appear to me to be false premises.
I would very much like to be able to read the Fourth Amendment as saying what you've claimed it says, but I have not managed to do that.
I honestly believe that the courts are reading it the same way I am, and that that is why they have held that exceptions to the warrant requirement exist.
If you want to convince the courts, you need to argue in their terms, on the same premises they hold - or else argue against those very premises. (And "Yes, it does say that" is an assertion, not an argument.)
Which words do you claim I need to be educated on? If you can point to specific words which mean things that I'm missing, or specific wording which means something I'm not catching, I'd be glad to learn.
I would love for the Fourth Amendment to explicitly say that a warrant is required, or to explicitly say that the issuance of a warrant, results in reasonability, or to explicitly define what "reasonable" means in any other way. Even if there were negative consequences from that explicit clarity (such as ruling out things which obviously should be permitted), it would make it possible to debate the matter on a much more solid footing.
But as far as I can see, the explicit wording of the Fourth Amendment does not do any of those things. It is, instead, highly reliant on the reader to implicitly extract those meanings from its explicit wording - and different people will disagree on what meanings are implied.
If you are arguing that the Fourth Amendment does do any of those things, it is incumbent upon you to either point to where it does, or explain how the understanding that it does inevitably arises from the explicit things which it does say.
If you can do either of those things, you might have a chance of convincing a court - and if you can improve the reach of the protections of the Fourth Amendment in the process, I say more power to you. (Convincing me, in the wilds of the Internet, means little or nothing.)
If not... well, to my eye it looks much more as if you are the one who is failing to understand the definitions of words and the logic of how they link together.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Asks US Supreme Court Not To Allow US Government To Steal All His Stuff Without Due Process
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: So...what's the legal basis behind asset forfeiture?
That's an assumption, though. It's not explicitly stated in the Amendment. (The Amendment doesn't even explicitly state that the issuance of a warrant under the described conditions results in reasonability.)
That's the loophole through with the courts have established the various exceptions to the warrant requirement.
I can't even in good conscience argue that the warrant requirement should be absolute, either. If an ordinary, non-government-agent citizen would be permitted to look somewhere without permission (and to testify as to what was seen there), should a police officer or similar government agent be forbidden to look there without permission, in the absence of a warrant?
The answer "yes" would seem unreasonable, in the ordinary meaning of that term - and yet if the warrant requirement were absolute then a "yes" would be required.
Unfortunately, if you allow that one example of "reasonable" outside of a warrant context, you've opened the door to the possibility of others - and my understanding is that that's exactly what has happened, and that it's simply cascaded out until we reach the current situation.
I believe the drafters of the Amendment included the qualifier "unreasonable" specifically so that "oh, of course he's allowed to do that, anyone is allowed to do that, trying to insist otherwise would be crazy" sorts of situation would not be barred - but it's been extended and expanded, over centuries of legal dispute and discourse, to cover far more than they would probably have intended.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Asks US Supreme Court Not To Allow US Government To Steal All His Stuff Without Due Process
Re: Re: Re: Re: So...what's the legal basis behind asset forfeiture?
Where does any of that say that a search without a warrant is not reasonable?
The Fourth Amendment does say that (paraphrasing) people have a right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure, and that that right shall not be infringed upon; it also defines the conditions that must exist for a warrant to be issued.
But it does not seem to say that a warrant must be issued in order for the search to be reasonable. It probably should say that, and the drafters probably meant something close to that (with wiggle room to prevent excluding e.g. things discovered in the course of perfectly ordinary, non-investigatory activity), but it does not seem to actually explicitly say that.
If you can see how it does say that, please do share. I'd very much like to understand how it does, because I'd very much like to be wrong about the conclusion that it does not, but so far nothing has convinced me that I am.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Asks US Supreme Court Not To Allow US Government To Steal All His Stuff Without Due Process
Re: Re: So...what's the legal basis behind asset forfeiture?
Where does it say that?
I've looked several times, and devoted considerable attention to attempting to parse it in a way which squeezes this statement out of it, and I just don't see that.
The clause about unreasonable search and seizure and the clause about warrants appear to be structurally distinct and, aside from their juxtaposition, unrelated. The authors of the amendment almost certainly meant for them to be related and interlinked, but they don't seem to have stated that intention explicitly in the text.
On the post: Attorney General's Memo Indicates Trump's DOJ Is Only Interested In The Blue Side Of The Justice Equation
Re: Re: Re: Laura Norder & Jobsen Growthe
He kind of was, actually - just not far-right.
There is no left wing in national (or even, for the most part, state-level) office in the USA, by historical standards of what left vs. right means. It's all just different degrees of right-wing.
Bernie Sanders' campaign positions were actually mildly left-wing - but not nearly as far as the positions of many people I know, including myself. (As assessed by the standards of The Political Compass, at any rate.)
On the post: Attorney General's Memo Indicates Trump's DOJ Is Only Interested In The Blue Side Of The Justice Equation
Re: Beatings will continue until morale improves
Actually, promoting public respect for police work does start with the public.
It starts with looking at the public, to understand why the public lacks that respect, and what can be done to address that reason.
To the extent that officer morale is because of public attitudes towards the police, that also starts with looking at the public, to understand why those attitudes exist.
Et cetera.
On the post: American Division Of Persona 5 Developer Warns That Their 'Masters' Don't Want People Streaming Spoilers
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
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