I certainly believe both are the same case. The key distinction is how common the refusal is. If 1% of stores refuse to serve you, then get over it, go next door. If 99% of stores refuse to serve you, then it's a societal problem, not a personal problem, and government arm-twisting becomes justified.
Free speech is a fundamental right and I am all about any person saying what ever they want. However, it is up to you to send your message, and no one else has to provide you with a platform.
Sure, right up until that private service effectively becomes the common forum.
Print all the anonymous pamphlets you want, on your press, I do not have to provide it for you.
Sure - unless you're the primary public forum. There's a reason the broadcast networks used to be bound by "equal time" laws, when other media never were.
Perhaps you also want to argue that we need to favor the speech of the historically oppressed? That free speech is violence? That free speech threatens a stable society (totalitarian regimes love that one)? We can walk through all the stale arguments used through the centuries to remove a fundamental right, if you'd like.
Free speech protects you from the GOVERNMENT, genius.
Free speech is a fundamental human right. The First Amendment specifically protects you against government taking away that right, sure, because that's the scope of the Amendments: protecting you from the government. But free speech remains a fundamental human right in any context.
There is no right not to be offended though. The only free speech that matters is speech that offends you.
Free speech was enshrined because we considered it useful, because the concept came from a time when you had to stand up for what you say, you couldn't just spew hate speech anonymously without consequence.
This is what kids learn instead of history? I blame the schools. FYI, anonymous pamphleteering filled with every kind of slur and insult was common then, and some of the Founding Fathers were busy printing some pretty vile shit to smear Royalists with.
So what if we reexamine the concept of free speech and whether or not it's serving a good cause?
Sure, it's always good to re-examine core beliefs. But I come to the same conclusion: free speech is a fundamental human right, while taking offense at speech is your problem.
Without the app store, you'll be as successful as the Fire phone or Windows phone. But you can't just take the app store, you have to take the whole bundle. Bundling a web browser with the dominant OS - where have we seen that sort of thing before?
Amazon is definitely big enough to do things as Standard Oil did. Google is big enough to do such things and HAS with the help of government institutions.
And yet, most stuff sold on amazon.com is not sold by Amazon. Personally, I hate that, since I hate the flea market feel and risk of fraud from random sellers, but they certainly aren't acting like a monopoly.
Google OTOH would hassle me to switch to Chrome every time I checked gmail, has started Chrome firmly down the path to being the next IE6, and is abusing the Android platform with their all-or-nothing demands for Google apps / app store.
Hardly seems fair to group them together. And Facebook, much as I hate them, is just a popular platform. Regulating them as a public forum might make sense, under the theory that since enough public discourse passes through them they're not allowed to be discriminatory, but regulating them as a monopoly makes little sense.
If you're marching along with the soldiers, fighting alongside them, claiming to be a civilian shouldn't mean much. Journalists do however have special provision in many treaties that they will not be considered unlawful combatants or spies, even though they aren't in uniform, which seems right to me.
There's always been a difference fighting military vs civilians.
You'd be surprised how rare it is in practice that armies care, laudable as it might be as an ideal.
The display of poor language skills is horrifying. Could Slashdot please find editors with the ability to briefly appear to be people of normal intellect and capability?
The coverup is shooting someone who is clearly identified as a journalist.
People get all upset when journalists get shot, and I don't understand why - they're fighting the same war the infantry is, just with different weapons. Perfectly valid targets if you ask me.
I'll back up a bit. Popular music is written specifically to appeal to the lowest common denominator, a simple rhythm that resonates with most people in a given region or culture, on a basic level. There are a lot of well-known tricks you can use, including a "heartbeat" rhythm, a straight-forward happy-sounding refrain that is easy to sing along to, a repeated refrain at end of the song with the final repetition a half tone up, there's a whole recipe for making pop music with a reasonable chance at success.
Obviously, taste is fickle and ever-changing, so you also need a hell of a lot of luck to make a popular hit.
Taste may change, but I suspect this recipe is very old - certainly older than radio, probably as old as music that's recognizably western (e.g., medieval folk music). Check this out: https://youtu.be/x9g7azfKckc
It's a modern arrangement, so it's not clear evidence, but certainly the pattern of happy-sounding sing-along chorus and an appropriate beat is centuries old.
I am incapable of comprehending this number. I really can't comprehend how they could spend that. Imagine, for a minute, $23 Billion would employ 115,000 people at an average salary and overhead of $200,000. Where the heck are these people? Seattle, I guess. What are they all doing? How many projects are there?
Last I checked, Amazon had ~500k full-time employees. I imagine a lot of those are "R&D": could easily be 115k. For sure they can't hire fast enough in Seattle, which is why they're doing to whole "HQ2" thing.
There will always be new jobs. But Amazons workforce (both professional and blue collar) still grows every year, despite whatever automation they have. Interesting times.
he Supreme Court ruled corporations are people. See the Citizens United case.
Oft-repeated, but simply false. Corporation are only people in the sense that laws that restrict people also restrict corporations by default. Nothing to do with Citizens United.
The Citizens United case established just one thing: the owners of a closely-held corporation (all the owners know each other, nothing like Facebook) have the same rights as the owners of a partnership. You know the Citizens United corporation existed only to fund a film critical of Hillary, right? It wasn't in some public business, it existed only to criticize the government.
The more interesting general point is that the government should never be in the business of determining whether a company is or is not "the press", because as technology evolves any simple definition would become obsolete, and in general it's a power ripe for abuse. If the Washing Post corporation, owned by Americas richest man, can publish political advocacy pieces, as is clearly protected by the First Amendment, how should the government decide which other corproations have that right? The party in power would find ways to exclude the types of corporations that mostly donate to the other party from having that right.
The fact that the number 10**241 itself is unfathomable, is in itself unfathomable. Here's why. It is perfectly possible to generate a non-repeating series of random numbers many orders of magnitude larger than 10**241. In fact, if you generate 10**241 random numbers per second, your random number series need not repeat in 10**241 years, that is to say during the life of the Universe, as we know posit it.
You cannot generate 10^241 random numbers per second. You cannot generate that ever, in this universe, no matter how long the universe lasts. That's because the maximum possible entropy of the universe is roughly 2.3*10^123 (that's the limit if the universe were a black hole - the actual entropy is quite a bit less). That's therefore also the limit on the largest number you could represent in any physical way.
I think it's fair to say that 10^241 is unfathomable. By the way, trying to store a number with an entropy of about 10^68 in the volume of the human skull will create a black hole.
Fortunately most that part of the Christian right is busy dying off from old age now. You'll find most modern Christians are plenty happy to enjoy sex, they just get married first. Unfortunately, the sex-negative half of feminism seems determined to take up the slack with their own pinched-faced moral scolding. I guess there's just a percentage of people who will adopt whatever ideology is convenient in order to be unhappy and try to force it on others.
My point was that certified mail requires a signature and so should solve a mailbox theft problem.
Mailbox theft seems unlikely here.
As far as "requires a signature", I once received a check for about $30k mis-delivered to me by certified mail. Postal carrier took my signature and went on about his day. Fortunately for the intended recipient, they were close by and I didn't mind walking it over.
Aren't these being sent to corporate mailboxes? As soon as the mail is handed off from a USPS employee to a private mail contractor, the severe laws all vanish.
why would even dispute this in the first place? If you don't find the amusement value in radioactive bananas, it might be time to change the battery in your sense of humor.
'Gaming" does not mean only "first person shooters". Most MMOPRGs play fine with a ping up near 100ms. MOBAs are little bit more sensitive, but not much. And the really popular games - free mobile games - don't care about latency at all, just the bandwidth for the ad traffic or altcoin mining.
We just don't when they're Muslim. The reason for that should be obvious: people have the misconception that Muslims are more likely to kill than other people, which is statistically untrue, and it's dishonest to implicitly support that by pointing it out every time.
Bayesian reasoning fail (if the reverse of the usual sort). Muslims are statistically much more likely to kill multiple strangers (outside of a formal war). Even so, it's still a very low risk here, because the base rate of terrorism in the US is very low. Still, hiding facts is bad practice.
This week's shooter was also Muslim, or at least raised that way, though I'd bet she was very secular. That's not the funny part of the story though, so I didn't mention it above.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly believe both are the same case. The key distinction is how common the refusal is. If 1% of stores refuse to serve you, then get over it, go next door. If 99% of stores refuse to serve you, then it's a societal problem, not a personal problem, and government arm-twisting becomes justified.
Free speech is a fundamental right and I am all about any person saying what ever they want. However, it is up to you to send your message, and no one else has to provide you with a platform.
Sure, right up until that private service effectively becomes the common forum.
Print all the anonymous pamphlets you want, on your press, I do not have to provide it for you.
Sure - unless you're the primary public forum. There's a reason the broadcast networks used to be bound by "equal time" laws, when other media never were.
Perhaps you also want to argue that we need to favor the speech of the historically oppressed? That free speech is violence? That free speech threatens a stable society (totalitarian regimes love that one)? We can walk through all the stale arguments used through the centuries to remove a fundamental right, if you'd like.
Free speech protects you from the GOVERNMENT, genius.
Free speech is a fundamental human right. The First Amendment specifically protects you against government taking away that right, sure, because that's the scope of the Amendments: protecting you from the government. But free speech remains a fundamental human right in any context.
There is no right not to be offended though. The only free speech that matters is speech that offends you.
Free speech was enshrined because we considered it useful, because the concept came from a time when you had to stand up for what you say, you couldn't just spew hate speech anonymously without consequence.
This is what kids learn instead of history? I blame the schools. FYI, anonymous pamphleteering filled with every kind of slur and insult was common then, and some of the Founding Fathers were busy printing some pretty vile shit to smear Royalists with.
So what if we reexamine the concept of free speech and whether or not it's serving a good cause?
Sure, it's always good to re-examine core beliefs. But I come to the same conclusion: free speech is a fundamental human right, while taking offense at speech is your problem.
If a baker doesn't want to bake a cake for you, for ANY reason, why on earth would you want to force them to?
Anyone who imagines this is a good idea has never worked in food service. The stuff that might be in that cake ...
Early to rise, early to bed
Makes a man poor, stupid and dead.
Without the app store, you'll be as successful as the Fire phone or Windows phone. But you can't just take the app store, you have to take the whole bundle. Bundling a web browser with the dominant OS - where have we seen that sort of thing before?
Amazon is definitely big enough to do things as Standard Oil did. Google is big enough to do such things and HAS with the help of government institutions.
And yet, most stuff sold on amazon.com is not sold by Amazon. Personally, I hate that, since I hate the flea market feel and risk of fraud from random sellers, but they certainly aren't acting like a monopoly.
Google OTOH would hassle me to switch to Chrome every time I checked gmail, has started Chrome firmly down the path to being the next IE6, and is abusing the Android platform with their all-or-nothing demands for Google apps / app store.
Hardly seems fair to group them together. And Facebook, much as I hate them, is just a popular platform. Regulating them as a public forum might make sense, under the theory that since enough public discourse passes through them they're not allowed to be discriminatory, but regulating them as a monopoly makes little sense.
If you're marching along with the soldiers, fighting alongside them, claiming to be a civilian shouldn't mean much. Journalists do however have special provision in many treaties that they will not be considered unlawful combatants or spies, even though they aren't in uniform, which seems right to me.
There's always been a difference fighting military vs civilians.
You'd be surprised how rare it is in practice that armies care, laudable as it might be as an ideal.
The display of poor language skills is horrifying. Could Slashdot please find editors with the ability to briefly appear to be people of normal intellect and capability?
You must be new here!
The coverup is shooting someone who is clearly identified as a journalist.
People get all upset when journalists get shot, and I don't understand why - they're fighting the same war the infantry is, just with different weapons. Perfectly valid targets if you ask me.
I'll back up a bit. Popular music is written specifically to appeal to the lowest common denominator, a simple rhythm that resonates with most people in a given region or culture, on a basic level. There are a lot of well-known tricks you can use, including a "heartbeat" rhythm, a straight-forward happy-sounding refrain that is easy to sing along to, a repeated refrain at end of the song with the final repetition a half tone up, there's a whole recipe for making pop music with a reasonable chance at success.
Not just pop music - check this out: https://youtu.be/B9FzVhw8_bY
Obviously, taste is fickle and ever-changing, so you also need a hell of a lot of luck to make a popular hit.
Taste may change, but I suspect this recipe is very old - certainly older than radio, probably as old as music that's recognizably western (e.g., medieval folk music). Check this out: https://youtu.be/x9g7azfKckc
It's a modern arrangement, so it's not clear evidence, but certainly the pattern of happy-sounding sing-along chorus and an appropriate beat is centuries old.
The problem with that line of reasoning is: bands like Led Zepplin and Pink Floyd and Dire Straits and Rush really were better.
"Most popular" is measurable. It has 5 billion views. Gangnam Style "only" has 3.1 billion.
I am incapable of comprehending this number. I really can't comprehend how they could spend that. Imagine, for a minute, $23 Billion would employ 115,000 people at an average salary and overhead of $200,000. Where the heck are these people? Seattle, I guess. What are they all doing? How many projects are there?
Last I checked, Amazon had ~500k full-time employees. I imagine a lot of those are "R&D": could easily be 115k. For sure they can't hire fast enough in Seattle, which is why they're doing to whole "HQ2" thing.
There will always be new jobs. But Amazons workforce (both professional and blue collar) still grows every year, despite whatever automation they have. Interesting times.
he Supreme Court ruled corporations are people. See the Citizens United case.
Oft-repeated, but simply false. Corporation are only people in the sense that laws that restrict people also restrict corporations by default. Nothing to do with Citizens United.
The Citizens United case established just one thing: the owners of a closely-held corporation (all the owners know each other, nothing like Facebook) have the same rights as the owners of a partnership. You know the Citizens United corporation existed only to fund a film critical of Hillary, right? It wasn't in some public business, it existed only to criticize the government.
The more interesting general point is that the government should never be in the business of determining whether a company is or is not "the press", because as technology evolves any simple definition would become obsolete, and in general it's a power ripe for abuse. If the Washing Post corporation, owned by Americas richest man, can publish political advocacy pieces, as is clearly protected by the First Amendment, how should the government decide which other corproations have that right? The party in power would find ways to exclude the types of corporations that mostly donate to the other party from having that right.
The fact that the number 10**241 itself is unfathomable, is in itself unfathomable. Here's why. It is perfectly possible to generate a non-repeating series of random numbers many orders of magnitude larger than 10**241. In fact, if you generate 10**241 random numbers per second, your random number series need not repeat in 10**241 years, that is to say during the life of the Universe, as we know posit it.
You cannot generate 10^241 random numbers per second. You cannot generate that ever, in this universe, no matter how long the universe lasts. That's because the maximum possible entropy of the universe is roughly 2.3*10^123 (that's the limit if the universe were a black hole - the actual entropy is quite a bit less). That's therefore also the limit on the largest number you could represent in any physical way.
I think it's fair to say that 10^241 is unfathomable. By the way, trying to store a number with an entropy of about 10^68 in the volume of the human skull will create a black hole.
"That's why you got Trump." pretty much sums up your comment and my agreement with the last line.
Fortunately most that part of the Christian right is busy dying off from old age now. You'll find most modern Christians are plenty happy to enjoy sex, they just get married first. Unfortunately, the sex-negative half of feminism seems determined to take up the slack with their own pinched-faced moral scolding. I guess there's just a percentage of people who will adopt whatever ideology is convenient in order to be unhappy and try to force it on others.
My point was that certified mail requires a signature and so should solve a mailbox theft problem.
Mailbox theft seems unlikely here.
As far as "requires a signature", I once received a check for about $30k mis-delivered to me by certified mail. Postal carrier took my signature and went on about his day. Fortunately for the intended recipient, they were close by and I didn't mind walking it over.
Aren't these being sent to corporate mailboxes? As soon as the mail is handed off from a USPS employee to a private mail contractor, the severe laws all vanish.
why would even dispute this in the first place? If you don't find the amusement value in radioactive bananas, it might be time to change the battery in your sense of humor.
'Gaming" does not mean only "first person shooters". Most MMOPRGs play fine with a ping up near 100ms. MOBAs are little bit more sensitive, but not much. And the really popular games - free mobile games - don't care about latency at all, just the bandwidth for the ad traffic or altcoin mining.
Something is wrong with you if you are drenched in sweat in a 1.5 mile trip.
Or you live in Houston.
We just don't when they're Muslim. The reason for that should be obvious: people have the misconception that Muslims are more likely to kill than other people, which is statistically untrue, and it's dishonest to implicitly support that by pointing it out every time.
Bayesian reasoning fail (if the reverse of the usual sort). Muslims are statistically much more likely to kill multiple strangers (outside of a formal war). Even so, it's still a very low risk here, because the base rate of terrorism in the US is very low. Still, hiding facts is bad practice.
This week's shooter was also Muslim, or at least raised that way, though I'd bet she was very secular. That's not the funny part of the story though, so I didn't mention it above.