Because apparently by your logic, and theirs, "what they asked for" amounts to "things that agree with us."
That's an assumption that may very well be true, but there's no reason to assume that when an entirely plausible reason exists for ignoring what essentially amounts to spam unless you make the presumption that was their agenda the whole time, which, if anybody had actually believed, would have meant that nobody would have written letters at all.
Clearly there is a demographic that was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
That said, it's also fairly obvious that is still the direction they were leaning toward, and it would have fallen to the respondents to convince them otherwise. But discounting the ignored letters, there simply wasn't a sufficient response to merit such reconsideration. If nobody had made up a form letter for people to send, and if even just a tenth of those people who may have otherwise submitted the form letter would have instead written their own, we may very well have seen a very different outcome by now.
We'll never know for sure... but it's not rational to conclude that they were never really interested in people's views simply because of how things turned out because a very reasonable explanation exists for why it has happened, and this is quite far from the first time this sort of thing has happened, where mass mailings of a form letter completely backfired on the people who bothered to send one.
You mistake my question.... I'm asking how would they even be aware, for example, in what was apparently a plain voice conversation, that a supposedly unbreakable encryption was being used and it was not just two people communicating in a language that is not known to eavesdroppers?
The thing about unbreakable encryption is that it can always be masqueraded as something entirely innocuous that you just don't happen understand, or sometimes even something that you believe that you *DO* understand, while not actually having any real clue about what was actually being communicated.
No more 'unbreakable' encryption allowed on the intertubes...
I wonder how they would enforce that, exactly. How can they even generally tell the difference between something that is not encrypted, and something that is encrypted but disguised as something that is not?
Actually, I've always thought that a fairly good argument can be made that it is stealing... unless you are going to assert one of the following:
1. when the person who is supposedly "stealing" does not get the same worth out of what they stole as the person that they stole it from means that it is not stealing;
2 that the thing that is being "stolen" was, in the opinion of the "thief", never rightfully possessed by the person who originally had or controlled it in the first place, and thus not really stealing;
3. something which is intangible is unceremoniously exempt from any attempt to classify unauthorized acquisition as stealing, or;
4. things which other people may not deem to have any value cannot be stolen.
Barring the above rationalizations, copyright infringement can be thought of as theft on the grounds that copyright entails an exclusive right to dictate who may copy a work. Exclusive, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, and so when a person commits copyright infringement, they are literally depriving the copyright holder of some measure of the exclusive control that the rights holder was supposed to have over that work. Obviously for any single unauthorised copy, the amount of exclusivity lost is very minor, but the cumulative effect of multiple unauthorised copies can still be substantial.
You know, not all content shared by bittorrent is illegal.
Every quarter, I get an update email on a software package that I use which is actually distributed via bittorrent, because it lightens the load on the main server when everybody is trying to get the file at about the same time.
it shows them by count alone that many people are concerned about the issue
True, but without a really *LARGE* number of signatures on that petition, it's still not likely to be taken very seriously. For a nation the size of the USA, You'd need hundreds of thousands of signatures, at least, and quite possibly even millions of signatures on a petition before you could have any measure of confidence that it is an accurate cross sampling of what the entire nation actually felt on a matter, and not simply a niche group of like-minded people. But to that end, it probably would still been more effective to have sent just a single letter, and attached people's names and addresses to it as signatories for those that wished their name to be sent than to have effectively spammed the organization with emails that are basically all just carbon copies of eachother.
Because, quite simply, there weren't enough signatures on just that one letter to warrant giving it the same level of merit that even a fraction of that number of individual letters would have had.
Every individual letter received on a subject is generally going to be worth no less than *HUNDREDS* of such signatures. They asked for opinions, and most of what they got was essentially just a petition. I don't side with the FCC's final decision here for a second, but why is it in any way surprising that they ignored the people who essentially just signed such a petition when that's not what they asked for?
Well, the Brits that won that war "for Canada" were actually *FROM* Canada. Canada didn't become sovereign until 1864, and was still part of the UK at the time, so saying that the "Brits won that war for Canada" is kind of like saying that non-Americans actually won the war for America in 1776.
It's my understanding that many people believe that the USA won that war (or more generously, was a "tie"), simply because Canadian forces voluntarily withdrew upon that war's conclusion. The fact that the US's forces were completely repelled from Canada and that the whitehouse got burned to the ground is seen as irrelevant... Canada did nothing to try and occupy the US after the war, so many people believe that the USA didn't lose that one.
More realistically, I think it would involve just tracking his mobile device, which would likely achieve the same ends for most practical purposes, but I'm not sure if even *THAT* is legal without his permission, let alone implementing the effects described above.
That's just it. The FCC doesn't decide anything. Those with wealth & power tell the FCC what they will do.
Of course... it is much easier to form the conspiracy theory that they were always against you from the beginning than it is to assume that what essentially amounts to a signature on a petition, which is what sending a form letter basically is, is not going to count as high as the individual letters, and the difference in that significance can completely outweigh the volume of responses.
If more than 90% of the letters are basically just carbon copies of eachother, than they are basically just one letter with that number of signatures on it, like a petition. If the number of signatures on it is greater than the organization would have expected, they are not going to conclude that their expectations were necessarily wrong, they are going to conclude that the signatures don't really mean anything because it is too simple to sign something that the signers don't even necessarily strongly agree with, but are just not opposed to it strongly enough actually to refuse to sign. A letter, meanwhile, indicates a clear intent on the writer, and if even a very tiny percentage of those who had just sent the form letter had written their own, however lacking in the same elegance as the form letter it may have been, a greater level of consideration may have been given, particularly if the total number of real letters received actually exceeded their expectations.
When you have two things, a petition with 1000 signatures, and 100 individual letters on the topic, you wanna guess how significant that petition is going to be? Especially if the recipient was expecting letters and not a petition in the first place.
Such form letters allow the usually silent majority to speak up because they can do it quickly and without having to spend hours trying to compose a letter on a topic they might not feel fully comfortable addressing due to lack of in-depth knowledge of the topic.
In principle, yes... but if they were asking for public comment, then they were expecting public comment, not a public petition, which is actually just one person or one group's comment, with the support of some large number of people that they found who happened to be willing to sign it, because in practice, a mere signature on a petition does not in any way offer credibility that the signer genuinely wanted whatever the petition was, it only offers evidence that they didn't *not* want it badly enough to refuse to sign. The signer's actual opinion may have been far closer to indifference, while an individual letter says that the writer was deeply concerned about the topic. The number of signatures that you need on a petition vs the number of letters that you need to express the same level of concern is different by multiple orders of magnitude. Why is surprising that the FCC is essentially ignoring what they never asked for in the first place?
I don't side with the FCC's decision for a second, but I can't say I'm surprised by it. I didn't know about the form letters by EFF and OpenMedia before, but if I had, I would have stated something about it then.
Just double-checked my facts on the point.. I was misrembering, and I apologize for misstating. They did not receive millions... they received just under 9,000 submissions, a response level that astonished the organization that was soliciting the responses. Very fewof these submissions were original, however, which completely offset the significance of the response.
You are making the assumption that the organization that needs to sort through the emails is any less lazy than the people who were too lazy to formulate their own opinion.
The better thing for EFF to have done would have been to inform people, and get them to write their own letters in their own words. Providing an email address to send to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content.
As I said elsewhere.... I've seen this sort of thing happen before, where millions of responses were received on a matter, and over 90% of them were just a copy-paste of some open letter that a well-meaning person had posted publicly as an example of what sort of letter might be good. However benign that person's intentions were, they hopelessly backfired.
If the EFF had wanted people to write letters, they could have provided all the information that a person would need to know to understand what is going on, and then a mailto link that opened up as a blank slate except for the "to" field. This would force any user who was remotely serious about writing a letter to have to take the time to compose it, in their own words, and would not basically create a set up for this situation to be all but completely certain.
Form letters do dick-squat. If you want people to write letters, then you inform the people, but you do *NOT* tell them or even suggest to them exactly what they ought to write because 9 out of 10 people, however well-intentioned they might have otherwise been, will just not bother trying to put it into their own words when something else already exists. You'd get less people sending letters, but you wouldn't get a situation where 90% of the letters get ignored.
The problem is really that organizations like EFF and OpenMedia should not be providing form letters to send in the first place. They should give the person an address to send their remarks to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content of the email should be provided or else they are just setting up a situation where this kind of thing is going to happen.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where a federal organization accepts public comments on an issue, and a well-meaning person or organization that wants people to send letters about the matter decides to supply an example of what such a letter should look like. Laziness on the part of the end-user kicks in and everybody just copies and pastes the darn thing, maybe changing only about 10% of it, and causing the organization to ignore all of them.
The biggest problem with what you are describing is when you have parties with differing agendas, requiring a coalition often means that it takkes much more time (and money) to get anything done.
It's possible to get Facebook to give someone LESS ads if they can convince Facebook that they are a minority that should be excluded from certain types of ads?
If anything, I'd say that's discriminatory against people who don't fall into a minority category.
So.... how does one get Facebook to think that you are a minority?
Slashdot Mirror
That's an assumption that may very well be true, but there's no reason to assume that when an entirely plausible reason exists for ignoring what essentially amounts to spam unless you make the presumption that was their agenda the whole time, which, if anybody had actually believed, would have meant that nobody would have written letters at all.
Clearly there is a demographic that was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
That said, it's also fairly obvious that is still the direction they were leaning toward, and it would have fallen to the respondents to convince them otherwise. But discounting the ignored letters, there simply wasn't a sufficient response to merit such reconsideration. If nobody had made up a form letter for people to send, and if even just a tenth of those people who may have otherwise submitted the form letter would have instead written their own, we may very well have seen a very different outcome by now.
We'll never know for sure... but it's not rational to conclude that they were never really interested in people's views simply because of how things turned out because a very reasonable explanation exists for why it has happened, and this is quite far from the first time this sort of thing has happened, where mass mailings of a form letter completely backfired on the people who bothered to send one.
You mistake my question.... I'm asking how would they even be aware, for example, in what was apparently a plain voice conversation, that a supposedly unbreakable encryption was being used and it was not just two people communicating in a language that is not known to eavesdroppers?
The thing about unbreakable encryption is that it can always be masqueraded as something entirely innocuous that you just don't happen understand, or sometimes even something that you believe that you *DO* understand, while not actually having any real clue about what was actually being communicated.
I wonder how they would enforce that, exactly. How can they even generally tell the difference between something that is not encrypted, and something that is encrypted but disguised as something that is not?
Barring the above rationalizations, copyright infringement can be thought of as theft on the grounds that copyright entails an exclusive right to dictate who may copy a work. Exclusive, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, and so when a person commits copyright infringement, they are literally depriving the copyright holder of some measure of the exclusive control that the rights holder was supposed to have over that work. Obviously for any single unauthorised copy, the amount of exclusivity lost is very minor, but the cumulative effect of multiple unauthorised copies can still be substantial.
You know, not all content shared by bittorrent is illegal.
Every quarter, I get an update email on a software package that I use which is actually distributed via bittorrent, because it lightens the load on the main server when everybody is trying to get the file at about the same time.
True, but without a really *LARGE* number of signatures on that petition, it's still not likely to be taken very seriously. For a nation the size of the USA, You'd need hundreds of thousands of signatures, at least, and quite possibly even millions of signatures on a petition before you could have any measure of confidence that it is an accurate cross sampling of what the entire nation actually felt on a matter, and not simply a niche group of like-minded people. But to that end, it probably would still been more effective to have sent just a single letter, and attached people's names and addresses to it as signatories for those that wished their name to be sent than to have effectively spammed the organization with emails that are basically all just carbon copies of eachother.
Because, quite simply, there weren't enough signatures on just that one letter to warrant giving it the same level of merit that even a fraction of that number of individual letters would have had.
Every individual letter received on a subject is generally going to be worth no less than *HUNDREDS* of such signatures. They asked for opinions, and most of what they got was essentially just a petition. I don't side with the FCC's final decision here for a second, but why is it in any way surprising that they ignored the people who essentially just signed such a petition when that's not what they asked for?
You mean kind of like how it was non-Americans who won the US revolutionary war?
Sorry... I meant 1867. I didn't spot the typo until after I had clicked "submit".
Well, the Brits that won that war "for Canada" were actually *FROM* Canada. Canada didn't become sovereign until 1864, and was still part of the UK at the time, so saying that the "Brits won that war for Canada" is kind of like saying that non-Americans actually won the war for America in 1776.
It's my understanding that many people believe that the USA won that war (or more generously, was a "tie"), simply because Canadian forces voluntarily withdrew upon that war's conclusion. The fact that the US's forces were completely repelled from Canada and that the whitehouse got burned to the ground is seen as irrelevant... Canada did nothing to try and occupy the US after the war, so many people believe that the USA didn't lose that one.
More realistically, I think it would involve just tracking his mobile device, which would likely achieve the same ends for most practical purposes, but I'm not sure if even *THAT* is legal without his permission, let alone implementing the effects described above.
I like this... Especially your second suggestion. But is there a way to do it that's legal, but only without net neutrality?
Of course... it is much easier to form the conspiracy theory that they were always against you from the beginning than it is to assume that what essentially amounts to a signature on a petition, which is what sending a form letter basically is, is not going to count as high as the individual letters, and the difference in that significance can completely outweigh the volume of responses.
If more than 90% of the letters are basically just carbon copies of eachother, than they are basically just one letter with that number of signatures on it, like a petition. If the number of signatures on it is greater than the organization would have expected, they are not going to conclude that their expectations were necessarily wrong, they are going to conclude that the signatures don't really mean anything because it is too simple to sign something that the signers don't even necessarily strongly agree with, but are just not opposed to it strongly enough actually to refuse to sign. A letter, meanwhile, indicates a clear intent on the writer, and if even a very tiny percentage of those who had just sent the form letter had written their own, however lacking in the same elegance as the form letter it may have been, a greater level of consideration may have been given, particularly if the total number of real letters received actually exceeded their expectations.
When you have two things, a petition with 1000 signatures, and 100 individual letters on the topic, you wanna guess how significant that petition is going to be? Especially if the recipient was expecting letters and not a petition in the first place.
In principle, yes... but if they were asking for public comment, then they were expecting public comment, not a public petition, which is actually just one person or one group's comment, with the support of some large number of people that they found who happened to be willing to sign it, because in practice, a mere signature on a petition does not in any way offer credibility that the signer genuinely wanted whatever the petition was, it only offers evidence that they didn't *not* want it badly enough to refuse to sign. The signer's actual opinion may have been far closer to indifference, while an individual letter says that the writer was deeply concerned about the topic. The number of signatures that you need on a petition vs the number of letters that you need to express the same level of concern is different by multiple orders of magnitude. Why is surprising that the FCC is essentially ignoring what they never asked for in the first place?
I don't side with the FCC's decision for a second, but I can't say I'm surprised by it. I didn't know about the form letters by EFF and OpenMedia before, but if I had, I would have stated something about it then.
Just double-checked my facts on the point.. I was misrembering, and I apologize for misstating. They did not receive millions... they received just under 9,000 submissions, a response level that astonished the organization that was soliciting the responses. Very fewof these submissions were original, however, which completely offset the significance of the response.
You are making the assumption that the organization that needs to sort through the emails is any less lazy than the people who were too lazy to formulate their own opinion.
The better thing for EFF to have done would have been to inform people, and get them to write their own letters in their own words. Providing an email address to send to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content.
As I said elsewhere.... I've seen this sort of thing happen before, where millions of responses were received on a matter, and over 90% of them were just a copy-paste of some open letter that a well-meaning person had posted publicly as an example of what sort of letter might be good. However benign that person's intentions were, they hopelessly backfired.
I'm not sure what "existing standard" you are talking about. It's common practice for comments that are obviously form letters to be ignored.
This.
So much this.
If the EFF had wanted people to write letters, they could have provided all the information that a person would need to know to understand what is going on, and then a mailto link that opened up as a blank slate except for the "to" field. This would force any user who was remotely serious about writing a letter to have to take the time to compose it, in their own words, and would not basically create a set up for this situation to be all but completely certain.
Form letters do dick-squat. If you want people to write letters, then you inform the people, but you do *NOT* tell them or even suggest to them exactly what they ought to write because 9 out of 10 people, however well-intentioned they might have otherwise been, will just not bother trying to put it into their own words when something else already exists. You'd get less people sending letters, but you wouldn't get a situation where 90% of the letters get ignored.
The problem is really that organizations like EFF and OpenMedia should not be providing form letters to send in the first place. They should give the person an address to send their remarks to, but absolutely *NONE* of the content of the email should be provided or else they are just setting up a situation where this kind of thing is going to happen.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where a federal organization accepts public comments on an issue, and a well-meaning person or organization that wants people to send letters about the matter decides to supply an example of what such a letter should look like. Laziness on the part of the end-user kicks in and everybody just copies and pastes the darn thing, maybe changing only about 10% of it, and causing the organization to ignore all of them.
The biggest problem with what you are describing is when you have parties with differing agendas, requiring a coalition often means that it takkes much more time (and money) to get anything done.
That's because nobody you've had it with evidently prepares it right.
So it's not as "cool" as Jurassic Park, but hey... baby steps.
It's just a hunch, but I have a feeling that this study is discarding much of the evidence that could suggest it was wrong as outlier data.
But then again, many examples of so called blatant discrimination are often explained by confirmation bias as well, so it's hardly anything new.
It's possible to get Facebook to give someone LESS ads if they can convince Facebook that they are a minority that should be excluded from certain types of ads?
If anything, I'd say that's discriminatory against people who don't fall into a minority category.
So.... how does one get Facebook to think that you are a minority?