Gabriel’s Techdirt Profile

sagacitas

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  • Sep 20th, 2018 @ 12:18pm

    Re: Re: Re: 'post fact era'

    >let's say 1% of the US population is a fanatic, that 50% are men, 60% are white and we exclude anyone younger than 16 and older than 70. Let's say that 80% own a computer with access to the internet. That's about 700k nut jobs spewing hatred...

    So fanatics with internet access sure hated if and only if they are white males? That seems unnecessarily bigoted.
  • Aug 10th, 2018 @ 11:52am

    Re: Re: Not too hard to see

    Unfortunately, a hypothetical EUCANN would quickly lead to a system of dual, incompatible internets; we'd end up in a scenario like in the early 1900s where people had to have two telephones, one from Bell and one from the local carrier, in order to be confident of being able to reach everyone.

    Convincing people to use a new root server would be tough but not impossible, so DNS is not necessarily a blocker. But IP addresses and autonomous system numbers have to reliably be globally unique or things dramatically don't work.
  • Aug 9th, 2018 @ 4:53am

    Re: Re: Loss of accreditation

    If ICANN simply stops doing business in the EU, how do German courts have any jurisdiction?
  • Aug 9th, 2018 @ 4:50am

    Not too hard to see

    "ICANN says that it is "considering its next steps", but it's hard to see what those might be"

    Really? It's hard to figure out what options the global internet registration authority might have in this scenario?

    Do you know what ICANN does?

    Do you know what happens if they stop doing it?

    I suspect if EU forces the issue they won't be pleased with the results. Having to go to American registrars for domain names and ASNs won't sit well with European organizations.

    And what is the author's beef with accurate whois, and why is a Luddite writing for techdirt?
  • Jul 3rd, 2018 @ 10:11am

    (untitled comment)

    Why is the headline "Strip Search A Classful Of Female Students" instead of "Strip Search A Classful Of Students"? Is it legally significant that the students were female? Does anything in the ruling suggest that the violated rights were gender-specific? Would this case have been less bad or less notable if the students were mixed or all male?
  • Nov 3rd, 2016 @ 6:23am

    (untitled comment)

    On the other hand, maybe if people didn't get themselves into stupid financial crises, and then sign up for loans with horrible terms, and then fail to pay those loans back as agreed, this would be less of a problem.

    Yes, sometimes genuine misfortune leads people into lesser of two evils situations, but I suspect the vast majority of these cases are simply irresponsible spending, bad decision making, and the cascading consequences thereof.

    That doesn't mean that the lenders aren't horrible human beings, but unless someone was holding a gun to a head while brandishing a loan contract, the borrowers made the choice to do business with those horrible human beings.
  • Jun 15th, 2016 @ 12:42pm

    Definitely check reviews first

    Oneplay has a lot of very bad customer service feedback on an initial Google search. Caveat emptor.
  • Oct 2nd, 2015 @ 9:54am

    (untitled comment)

    If we admit the idea of intellectual property at all, the idea of property ownership includes multiple rights including the right to use, the right to exclude, and (importantly) the right to dispose. If I as a content creator sell the rights in my work to someone else then I no longer own those rights, and if this "feels wrong" to you then you fundamentally disagree with the idea of intellectual property as property.

    Which is a perfectly reasonable position to take, but if that's your stance then you should be saying that the idea of copyright is fundamentally nonsensical, not that content creators should still have some rights to IP they created even after they sell those rights.
  • Oct 2nd, 2015 @ 7:06am

    (untitled comment)

    If there were a free market in last mile access, I'd have no problem with this at all. An ISP should be free to play silly buggers with my data stream, and I should be free to dump them and switch to a company that commits to being a hands-off dumb pipe.

    Since most ISP markets are nothing resembling free, I think the next best solution is to require providers to pay for their exclusivity with a commitment to do their job of delivering the content I request honestly and responsibly.
  • Oct 1st, 2015 @ 7:29am

    (untitled comment)

    If you're referring to the current practical state of supreme court jurisprudence, you're probably correct. But if you're attempting to describe the intended reading, or any honest reading, of the plain language of the constitution, the idea that driving down the block is an act of interstate commerce which Congress has delegated authority to regulate is nonsensical; likewise purchasing network connectivity to a CO a quarter-mile from my house.

    Your definition of "interstate commerce" is indistinguishable from the definition of "commerce", begging that we ask why the founders saw fit to specify "interstate".
  • Oct 1st, 2015 @ 5:36am

    (untitled comment)

    Regulating interstate commerce does not give Congress authority to pass laws about my driveway, nor to override my state's laws about my driveway. Local broadband access is not interstate commerce any more than pulling my car out of my driveway is.

    This is a horrible law, and Tennessee ought to be ashamed of itself and Tennessee voters should be up in arms about it. But states have the Constitutional right to pass horrible laws and the federal government has no right to interfere except in the case of specific, delegated powers. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.[

    If the constitutional limits on the federal government's exercise of power can validly be ignored whenever we agree with the motivation behind the abuse, then the constitution is meaningless.

    If Tennesee makes a bad call then that only affects Tennessee and Tennesseans. If all legitimate legal authority lives in Washington then when Washington makes a bad decision it affects all Americans. Avoiding the latter scenario was exactly the reason for our federal model. c.f. "laboratories of democracy".
  • Sep 29th, 2015 @ 9:09am

    Re: federal money

    New Hampshire already has a strong tradition of rejecting federal money with too many strings on it; witness their lack of an adult seat-belt requirement despite the cost to their roads budget.

    If they were several hundred miles farther south I'd definitely live there. I just can't deal with that much winter.
  • May 29th, 2014 @ 5:47am

    (untitled comment)

    Trying to look at this from the standpoint of a hypothetical sincere plaintiff, though, if we're going to support any sort of copyright at all it doesn't seem fair that my rights to my own privately-produced work can be terminated without my consent due to unilateral action by the government. If incorporation by reference does indeed place my document into the public domain, then I would argue that any such reference is a "taking" and that I have a claim against the government for compensation.

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