If you're passionate enough about it, you'll *make* it happen.
Of course. That's almost a tautology.
The question is, how much passion does it take? I submit that an inner-city black kid would have required even more passion than you had to do the things that you did. He'd not only have had to overcome the "geek" label, but the "white" label as well. I've been studying a lot of black American history lately and I can't blame blacks at all for wanting to hold proudly to their racial identity, not after what they've been through (and don't fool yourself that just because few living black Americans lived directly under slavery or its even more pernicious and brutal reincarnation during Jim Crow that blacks today aren't really affected), but it's an unfortunate truth that black racial pride often views education-based economic success, or anything that might lead that way, as "whiteness".
In addition, it doesn't end even after people make it out, get through school and land a job. Consider this story, of a black woman who succeeded in IT but then found that the unremitting small stresses of being "different" took a major toll on her happiness, and even her health. Like many chronic stressors, she didn't even fully realize what merely feeling like an outsider all the time was doing to her, until she happened to spend a little time in a place where she didn't stand out.
There are other minorities in IT who don't suffer the same pain of differentness, who are less sensitive to it. And there are others who are much more sensitive; most of them just wouldn't make it where Erica did. I happen to know that I'm mildly sensitive to "differentness" myself, though it takes months of being immersed in an environment where I'm the only tall white guy before I start to feel it.
So, you can't just sweep it under the rug with "if they care enough, they'll do it", because while that's true, it may be that enough is way too much. And it's a multi-faceted problem. Cultural obstacles, stereotypes in school and workplace, not fitting in, and there'e probably more.
All of these layers of obstacles can be overcome by passion, sure. But, jeez, at some point the hurdles are so high that hardly anyone is passionate enough.
We can't remove all of the obstacles, or even just all of the obstacles except the ones that you and I had to face, but we should do what we can and it starts by not sweeping the issue under the rug with "If you're passionate enough about it, you'll make it happen."
Teach who? Unless your referring to teaching the people who stereotype then its usless.
Not at all. Not to put words in the GPs mouth, I believe he was referring to teaching and mentoring more young black people, to give them something akin to the opportunity he got from his dad. And that is not useless. No, it doesn't change the stereotypes held by others, but do you know what will demolish those stereotypes? Significant numbers of people who defy and invalidate their stereotypes.
In fact, that is the only thing that ever does eliminate stereotypes.
Most of Java is free software, under the terms of the GNU GPL, and Android Java is also open-source, so how can Google infringe any copyright?
This question shows a lot of understandable confusion, because Java is multiple things, some of which cannot be copyrighted and some of which can, and in the latter case multiple implementations exist with different owners and different copyright licensing situations.
Java is programming language. The Java programming language is a pure idea, which can't be copyrighted. The programming language includes the syntax and semantics of the language. Documentation describing the language can be and is copyrighted, but the language described cannot be.
Java is also a bytecode "language", which again is a pure idea which can't be copyrighted. This includes the syntax and semantics of the bytecode, which necessarily also requires defining the characteristics of the virtual machine which executes the bytecode.
Java is also a set of library APIs, with specific package, class and method names, with specific lists of arguments and defined semantics. Note that I am not talking about code implementing the APIs, or even documentation describing the APIs, but about the conceptual lists of names and arguments and associated semantics. This is what is at issue.
Java is also a specific software platform, currently owned by Oracle. This platform consists of a compiler that parsed Java code and emits Java bytecode, a JVM that interprets Java bytecode, and a set of libraries that implement the Java APIs. This platform was not originally under the GPL, though it is now.
There are other implementations of the Java software platform, in part or in whole, owned by other parties. IBM has reimplemented much of Java (and licensed the rest from Sun/Oracle). Since Sun's version wasn't originally GPLd, the GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony projects reimplemented big pieces of it. And, of course, there's Android's implementation of parts of it, which uses Java bytecode as an intermediate language and provides tools to translate it to Dalvik bytecode, plus a VM to execute that.
Well, Android Java is not released under the GPL, but rather the incompatible Apache 2.0 license.
It could also be completely closed source and proprietary. Because it's all Google's own code they can license it however they like (actually, I don't know if Google owns all the copyrights; I'm not sure how they handle contributions), but that has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether Oracle owns the Java API copyrights or, more importantly, whether the notion of an API copyright even makes any sense.
Indeed, soon they will be petrified. Perhaps even naked.
Other way around, I think. If you got a bowl of steaming hot grits dumped down your pants, wouldn't your next action be to remove them? Petrification would come later.
That is actually pretty hilarious, about video phones. It was supposedly, for decades, one of the greatest new features that couldn't be done well for bandwidth and equipment cost reasons, and when finally everyone had a 4G phone with a front-facing camera, we found that nope, nobody cares about video phones.
I think it's not so much that no one cares as that decent video calls require more infrastructure than a phone. The camera needs to be steady, lighting needs to be good, sound isolation needs to be good... all in all, video calls work much better from a laptop sitting on a desk in an office, or better yet in a conference room with dedicated video-conferencing equipment.
For an interactive, focused conversation, phone calls are better than e-mail or chat, and video-conferencing is better than phone calls. VC still isn't as good as physical presence, but it's a lot better than voice only for effective communication. After a few years of using primarily VC, I really hate trying to conduct business meetings via phone, and use it only as a fallback when the environment doesn't work for VC. For more transactional communication and asynchronous communication text is better.
It may work out mathematically the same way. But, if the universe was rotating around the earth, then there are a whole lot of stars and galaxies out there that are travelling much faster than the speed of light. Since nothing can travel faster than that speed, doesn't that mean the two are not equivalent?
I was wrong, they're not equivalent and there's an even easier demonstration of why: The existence of Coriolis forces on the Earth's surface and centrifugal force flattening the planet. So it doesn't work out mathematically the same way, because a stationary planet in the middle of a rotating universe wouldn't experience those phenomena.
Rotational frames of reference are not inertial frames of reference in relativistic spacetime, and only the latter have the fundamental consistency I mentioned. The rest of my comment applies, just not to the specific example from the GP.
What Amazon is doing here is eating their cake and keeping it too. They get the advantage of using the infrastructure and then skip out on paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure. If they don't want to pay for it, don't use it.
You want to make sure that corporations pay for all of the infrastructure they use? It's very simple: eliminate corporate income tax, and focus instead on taxing the investors, the employees, the property, the fuel, etc... all of the people that make up the corporations and all of the infrastructure they use, because while it's easy to move profits around, costs are tightly bound to where the money is spent. For that matter, you can tax the customers, too (sales tax), because they're fairly fixed geographically as well. Oh, and you can tax the investors when the profits finally make their way to them, because they have a real location as well.
Attempting to tax corporate income is always going to be a hit and miss affair, and the biggest corporations, who can hire the best tax lawyers, are the ones who will always come out the best.
In addition, even if you manage to collect the money in a reliable and somewhat fair fashion, corporate taxes are still evil, because they ultimately do get paid by all of the people involved, but in hidden and indirect ways. The customers don't know that if the company didn't have to pay taxes their goods would be little bit cheaper, but they would be, and the difference in price is a tax on the customer not the corporation, because corporations are fictions. The employees don't know that if the company didn't have to pay taxes their paychecks would be a little bit larger, but they would be, and the difference in price is a tax on the employee not the corporation. The investors probably do know that if the company didn't have to pay taxes their dividends would be a little bit larger, though they don't know how much because they can't really know how much of the difference would have gone to the customers or the employees. But in any case, they get taxed, too.
So, all of those people end up covering whatever corporate tax was paid, but they don't know how much it was, which distorts their view of the cost of government and limits their ability to make good judgments about whether government services are good value for the money. That's evil.
That's a nice rant on income taxation but the article here is discussing corporate taxation (and evasion).
Corporate income taxation, so the rant is directly on topic, whether or not you agree with it.
Personally, income taxes don't give me heartburn, but I think corporate taxes are a bad idea. They're just a way to hide taxes from the real taxpayers. Hidden taxes are truly evil. Government provides value for money, and the customers/owners of government (the taxpayers) need to see both the costs and the value clearly so they know if they're getting a good deal. Hiding costs subverts critical transparency.
In other words, if you assume that the Earth is the stationary center of the universe, with the rest of observed reality rotating around it, the numbers still work just fine....
I think the real point of relativity is that not only do the numbers work, but that there's absolutely nothing more or less true about that assumption than there is about assuming any other frame of reference. They're all perfectly valid, not just numerically, but because the laws of the universe are fundamentally consistent and favor no frame of reference over any other. Indeed, the way relativity came about was because Einstein felt like such fundamental consistency was how things had to be, and then proceeded to work out the math needed to describe a universe that behaved that way.
And then experimentalists verified that his mathematical model indeed works in every case that we have been able to measure. Which is a deeply extraordinary fact.
Sure, we devised mathematics to model bits of the universe, but the fact that the models work perfectly so far beyond what was being modeled is really mind-blowing -- and to me, at least, strongly implies that we shouldn't simply ignore singularities and other corner cases in the models.
I could easily do this, and I used to, but I decided I just don't care. I don't even worry about posting my e-mail address all over the Intenet. What does it cost me? More stuff for my spam folder, but GMail catches all of it, or so close to all of it as makes no difference. I have a message or two per week which slips past the filter, so I just click the "spam" icon and go on with life.
As for Home Depot, I really like the e-mailed receipts. I wish all stores offered that option; I'd give all of them my e-mail address.
Sure, but on the other hand nobody but a novelist or a lonely weather station operator would bother uttering the phrase "fine, dry snow blowing in the wind". They'd just say "it's snowing."
Spoken like a man who doesn't live in an area where snow is a frequent and persistent phenomenon. I guarantee you that anyone who does finds occasion to distinguish between fine snow, large flake snow, dry snow, wet snow, crusty snow, icy snow, blowing snow and many combinations of those.
But the claim is that it would be threatened. So... why doesn't hemp use threaten paper use where it's legal?
Nobody claimed that Hearst and the rest actually knew what they were talking about, merely that they feared something and sought to criminalize it via dubious methods by lying to the public and invoking 'the children'.
Any amount of lost market share is lost profits. It wasn't that hemp was threatening tree paper, it was that it was competition and getting rid of competition is always profitable.
You keep downgrading the hemp risk to tree paper. Replacement to threatening to competition... but okay, I'll run with it: can you show me any place that hemp is actually competing with tree paper?
Note that I don't really have a dog in this fight. I lived in Colorado in 2012 and voted in favor of marijuana legalization, but I have never used the stuff and will never use it.
Indeed, there doesn't seem to be support for any of Nintendo's network-enabled products, nor do I see Dreamcast or for that matter any cellphones (still being manufactured and sold, net enabled and with data plans, believe it or not) that don't run Android *or* iOS. Where is the security auditing tool for my Pantech Link II god damnit?
If you can get your network-enabled device to talk through a router, nogotofail can test it. Which means your dumbphone is probably out, since it doesn't support Wifi and you probably don't have access to the routers in the cell towers, but the Nintendo and Dreamcast devices can be tested.
From the summary: "Please hold off on any Google haters, that's a different discussion for a different forum."
From msobkow: "People will post what they post, regardless of your control-freak fantasies of filtering out the chaf."
From the mods (to msobkow): "-1 Offtopic".
Nicely done, mods. That's what moderation is for: not to suppress ideas you disagree with, or silence people you dislike, but to keep conversations on topic and useful.
(And, yes, this post is off topic, but I had to say this and my karma won't notice the hit.)
I assure you, the argument "But I'm not selling an X, I'm selling a magic box that spits out X when you press a button" will not go over well with a judge.
In this case, the judge won't even blink. We're talking about very well-established, well-proven law here. For many years people have been selling not just machines that manufacture X, but X itself, lacking only some finishing touches, plus instructions, access to equipment, etc... You can get someone to sell you an 80% lower receiver, set it up in the drilling jig, position the drill press, turn it on, put your hand on the lever and say "pull to finish your receiver".
There is no question whatsoever about the legality of this machine. It is perfectly legal.
The potential liability and government oversight is simply not worth it.
What potential liability and government oversight? Cite me a single example of a payment service being named in a firearm-related lawsuit, or being a target of a BATFE investigation, for anything other than actual lawbreaking on the part of the service provider.
You think they lose? Let me introduce you to a little concept called contingent liability. They are making the perfectly sane decision that the potential liability and government scrutiny that could arise from facilitating these payments is not worth it. Honestly I might have made the same decision. Has nothing to do with approving or disapproving of the product being sold. It's simply an actuarial analysis that says the costs outweigh the benefits. They are in business to make money, not to facilitate business models that could cause them legal heartburn later.
That argument would be a lot stronger if there were a pattern of payment service providers being held liable for damages due to criminal acts performed with firearms purchased with payment via their services. AFAICT, not only is there no such pattern, there isn't even a single example. There are a small number of examples of gun stores being sued (with little success except where the gun store broke the law), but no case where payment providers were even named in the suits, that I can find, anyway.
Given that, this decision seems more politically than fiscally motivated.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're passionate enough about it, you'll *make* it happen.
Of course. That's almost a tautology.
The question is, how much passion does it take? I submit that an inner-city black kid would have required even more passion than you had to do the things that you did. He'd not only have had to overcome the "geek" label, but the "white" label as well. I've been studying a lot of black American history lately and I can't blame blacks at all for wanting to hold proudly to their racial identity, not after what they've been through (and don't fool yourself that just because few living black Americans lived directly under slavery or its even more pernicious and brutal reincarnation during Jim Crow that blacks today aren't really affected), but it's an unfortunate truth that black racial pride often views education-based economic success, or anything that might lead that way, as "whiteness".
In addition, it doesn't end even after people make it out, get through school and land a job. Consider this story, of a black woman who succeeded in IT but then found that the unremitting small stresses of being "different" took a major toll on her happiness, and even her health. Like many chronic stressors, she didn't even fully realize what merely feeling like an outsider all the time was doing to her, until she happened to spend a little time in a place where she didn't stand out.
There are other minorities in IT who don't suffer the same pain of differentness, who are less sensitive to it. And there are others who are much more sensitive; most of them just wouldn't make it where Erica did. I happen to know that I'm mildly sensitive to "differentness" myself, though it takes months of being immersed in an environment where I'm the only tall white guy before I start to feel it.
So, you can't just sweep it under the rug with "if they care enough, they'll do it", because while that's true, it may be that enough is way too much. And it's a multi-faceted problem. Cultural obstacles, stereotypes in school and workplace, not fitting in, and there'e probably more.
All of these layers of obstacles can be overcome by passion, sure. But, jeez, at some point the hurdles are so high that hardly anyone is passionate enough.
We can't remove all of the obstacles, or even just all of the obstacles except the ones that you and I had to face, but we should do what we can and it starts by not sweeping the issue under the rug with "If you're passionate enough about it, you'll make it happen."
Teach who? Unless your referring to teaching the people who stereotype then its usless.
Not at all. Not to put words in the GPs mouth, I believe he was referring to teaching and mentoring more young black people, to give them something akin to the opportunity he got from his dad. And that is not useless. No, it doesn't change the stereotypes held by others, but do you know what will demolish those stereotypes? Significant numbers of people who defy and invalidate their stereotypes.
In fact, that is the only thing that ever does eliminate stereotypes.
Yes, I was referring to the components that Google has implemented. Sorry, I should have been more precise.
Most of Java is free software, under the terms of the GNU GPL, and Android Java is also open-source, so how can Google infringe any copyright?
This question shows a lot of understandable confusion, because Java is multiple things, some of which cannot be copyrighted and some of which can, and in the latter case multiple implementations exist with different owners and different copyright licensing situations.
Java is programming language. The Java programming language is a pure idea, which can't be copyrighted. The programming language includes the syntax and semantics of the language. Documentation describing the language can be and is copyrighted, but the language described cannot be.
Java is also a bytecode "language", which again is a pure idea which can't be copyrighted. This includes the syntax and semantics of the bytecode, which necessarily also requires defining the characteristics of the virtual machine which executes the bytecode.
Java is also a set of library APIs, with specific package, class and method names, with specific lists of arguments and defined semantics. Note that I am not talking about code implementing the APIs, or even documentation describing the APIs, but about the conceptual lists of names and arguments and associated semantics. This is what is at issue.
Java is also a specific software platform, currently owned by Oracle. This platform consists of a compiler that parsed Java code and emits Java bytecode, a JVM that interprets Java bytecode, and a set of libraries that implement the Java APIs. This platform was not originally under the GPL, though it is now.
There are other implementations of the Java software platform, in part or in whole, owned by other parties. IBM has reimplemented much of Java (and licensed the rest from Sun/Oracle). Since Sun's version wasn't originally GPLd, the GNU Classpath and Apache Harmony projects reimplemented big pieces of it. And, of course, there's Android's implementation of parts of it, which uses Java bytecode as an intermediate language and provides tools to translate it to Dalvik bytecode, plus a VM to execute that.
Well, Android Java is not released under the GPL, but rather the incompatible Apache 2.0 license.
It could also be completely closed source and proprietary. Because it's all Google's own code they can license it however they like (actually, I don't know if Google owns all the copyrights; I'm not sure how they handle contributions), but that has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether Oracle owns the Java API copyrights or, more importantly, whether the notion of an API copyright even makes any sense.
Indeed, soon they will be petrified. Perhaps even naked.
Other way around, I think. If you got a bowl of steaming hot grits dumped down your pants, wouldn't your next action be to remove them? Petrification would come later.
That is actually pretty hilarious, about video phones. It was supposedly, for decades, one of the greatest new features that couldn't be done well for bandwidth and equipment cost reasons, and when finally everyone had a 4G phone with a front-facing camera, we found that nope, nobody cares about video phones.
I think it's not so much that no one cares as that decent video calls require more infrastructure than a phone. The camera needs to be steady, lighting needs to be good, sound isolation needs to be good... all in all, video calls work much better from a laptop sitting on a desk in an office, or better yet in a conference room with dedicated video-conferencing equipment.
For an interactive, focused conversation, phone calls are better than e-mail or chat, and video-conferencing is better than phone calls. VC still isn't as good as physical presence, but it's a lot better than voice only for effective communication. After a few years of using primarily VC, I really hate trying to conduct business meetings via phone, and use it only as a fallback when the environment doesn't work for VC. For more transactional communication and asynchronous communication text is better.
It may work out mathematically the same way. But, if the universe was rotating around the earth, then there are a whole lot of stars and galaxies out there that are travelling much faster than the speed of light. Since nothing can travel faster than that speed, doesn't that mean the two are not equivalent?
I was wrong, they're not equivalent and there's an even easier demonstration of why: The existence of Coriolis forces on the Earth's surface and centrifugal force flattening the planet. So it doesn't work out mathematically the same way, because a stationary planet in the middle of a rotating universe wouldn't experience those phenomena.
Rotational frames of reference are not inertial frames of reference in relativistic spacetime, and only the latter have the fundamental consistency I mentioned. The rest of my comment applies, just not to the specific example from the GP.
Don't like it? Move.
What Amazon is doing here is eating their cake and keeping it too. They get the advantage of using the infrastructure and then skip out on paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure. If they don't want to pay for it, don't use it.
You want to make sure that corporations pay for all of the infrastructure they use? It's very simple: eliminate corporate income tax, and focus instead on taxing the investors, the employees, the property, the fuel, etc... all of the people that make up the corporations and all of the infrastructure they use, because while it's easy to move profits around, costs are tightly bound to where the money is spent. For that matter, you can tax the customers, too (sales tax), because they're fairly fixed geographically as well. Oh, and you can tax the investors when the profits finally make their way to them, because they have a real location as well.
Attempting to tax corporate income is always going to be a hit and miss affair, and the biggest corporations, who can hire the best tax lawyers, are the ones who will always come out the best.
In addition, even if you manage to collect the money in a reliable and somewhat fair fashion, corporate taxes are still evil, because they ultimately do get paid by all of the people involved, but in hidden and indirect ways. The customers don't know that if the company didn't have to pay taxes their goods would be little bit cheaper, but they would be, and the difference in price is a tax on the customer not the corporation, because corporations are fictions. The employees don't know that if the company didn't have to pay taxes their paychecks would be a little bit larger, but they would be, and the difference in price is a tax on the employee not the corporation. The investors probably do know that if the company didn't have to pay taxes their dividends would be a little bit larger, though they don't know how much because they can't really know how much of the difference would have gone to the customers or the employees. But in any case, they get taxed, too.
So, all of those people end up covering whatever corporate tax was paid, but they don't know how much it was, which distorts their view of the cost of government and limits their ability to make good judgments about whether government services are good value for the money. That's evil.
That's a nice rant on income taxation but the article here is discussing corporate taxation (and evasion).
Corporate income taxation, so the rant is directly on topic, whether or not you agree with it.
Personally, income taxes don't give me heartburn, but I think corporate taxes are a bad idea. They're just a way to hide taxes from the real taxpayers. Hidden taxes are truly evil. Government provides value for money, and the customers/owners of government (the taxpayers) need to see both the costs and the value clearly so they know if they're getting a good deal. Hiding costs subverts critical transparency.
In other words, if you assume that the Earth is the stationary center of the universe, with the rest of observed reality rotating around it, the numbers still work just fine....
I think the real point of relativity is that not only do the numbers work, but that there's absolutely nothing more or less true about that assumption than there is about assuming any other frame of reference. They're all perfectly valid, not just numerically, but because the laws of the universe are fundamentally consistent and favor no frame of reference over any other. Indeed, the way relativity came about was because Einstein felt like such fundamental consistency was how things had to be, and then proceeded to work out the math needed to describe a universe that behaved that way.
And then experimentalists verified that his mathematical model indeed works in every case that we have been able to measure. Which is a deeply extraordinary fact.
Sure, we devised mathematics to model bits of the universe, but the fact that the models work perfectly so far beyond what was being modeled is really mind-blowing -- and to me, at least, strongly implies that we shouldn't simply ignore singularities and other corner cases in the models.
Meh.
I could easily do this, and I used to, but I decided I just don't care. I don't even worry about posting my e-mail address all over the Intenet. What does it cost me? More stuff for my spam folder, but GMail catches all of it, or so close to all of it as makes no difference. I have a message or two per week which slips past the filter, so I just click the "spam" icon and go on with life.
As for Home Depot, I really like the e-mailed receipts. I wish all stores offered that option; I'd give all of them my e-mail address.
But what if there are three people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfridge%E2%80%93Conway_discrete_procedure
Sure, but on the other hand nobody but a novelist or a lonely weather station operator would bother uttering the phrase "fine, dry snow blowing in the wind". They'd just say "it's snowing."
Spoken like a man who doesn't live in an area where snow is a frequent and persistent phenomenon. I guarantee you that anyone who does finds occasion to distinguish between fine snow, large flake snow, dry snow, wet snow, crusty snow, icy snow, blowing snow and many combinations of those.
But the claim is that it (paper) would be threatened.
No, that was not the claim.
It was Maxo-Texas' claim. (S)he wrote:
This is true. Hearst demonized marijuana because hemp fiber threatened his tree based paper products.
But the claim is that it would be threatened. So... why doesn't hemp use threaten paper use where it's legal?
Nobody claimed that Hearst and the rest actually knew what they were talking about, merely that they feared something and sought to criminalize it via dubious methods by lying to the public and invoking 'the children'.
Hanlon's Razor. That I can buy.
That still doesn't explain why it isn't used elsewhere. Not everything is sold to the US.
Any amount of lost market share is lost profits. It wasn't that hemp was threatening tree paper, it was that it was competition and getting rid of competition is always profitable.
You keep downgrading the hemp risk to tree paper. Replacement to threatening to competition... but okay, I'll run with it: can you show me any place that hemp is actually competing with tree paper?
Note that I don't really have a dog in this fight. I lived in Colorado in 2012 and voted in favor of marijuana legalization, but I have never used the stuff and will never use it.
Read parent again. Nobody said paper would be discontinued.
But the claim is that it would be threatened. So... why doesn't hemp use threaten paper use where it's legal?
Indeed, there doesn't seem to be support for any of Nintendo's network-enabled products, nor do I see Dreamcast or for that matter any cellphones (still being manufactured and sold, net enabled and with data plans, believe it or not) that don't run Android *or* iOS. Where is the security auditing tool for my Pantech Link II god damnit?
If you can get your network-enabled device to talk through a router, nogotofail can test it. Which means your dumbphone is probably out, since it doesn't support Wifi and you probably don't have access to the routers in the cell towers, but the Nintendo and Dreamcast devices can be tested.
CVV1 is in the magstripe.
There is a difference between fiscal and political motivation? In which country? Or planet?
To businesses they're completely different. To politicians, perhaps not so much.
From the summary: "Please hold off on any Google haters, that's a different discussion for a different forum."
From msobkow: "People will post what they post, regardless of your control-freak fantasies of filtering out the chaf."
From the mods (to msobkow): "-1 Offtopic".
Nicely done, mods. That's what moderation is for: not to suppress ideas you disagree with, or silence people you dislike, but to keep conversations on topic and useful.
(And, yes, this post is off topic, but I had to say this and my karma won't notice the hit.)
I assure you, the argument "But I'm not selling an X, I'm selling a magic box that spits out X when you press a button" will not go over well with a judge.
In this case, the judge won't even blink. We're talking about very well-established, well-proven law here. For many years people have been selling not just machines that manufacture X, but X itself, lacking only some finishing touches, plus instructions, access to equipment, etc... You can get someone to sell you an 80% lower receiver, set it up in the drilling jig, position the drill press, turn it on, put your hand on the lever and say "pull to finish your receiver".
There is no question whatsoever about the legality of this machine. It is perfectly legal.
The potential liability and government oversight is simply not worth it.
What potential liability and government oversight? Cite me a single example of a payment service being named in a firearm-related lawsuit, or being a target of a BATFE investigation, for anything other than actual lawbreaking on the part of the service provider.
The only people who lose here are stripe
You think they lose? Let me introduce you to a little concept called contingent liability. They are making the perfectly sane decision that the potential liability and government scrutiny that could arise from facilitating these payments is not worth it. Honestly I might have made the same decision. Has nothing to do with approving or disapproving of the product being sold. It's simply an actuarial analysis that says the costs outweigh the benefits. They are in business to make money, not to facilitate business models that could cause them legal heartburn later.
That argument would be a lot stronger if there were a pattern of payment service providers being held liable for damages due to criminal acts performed with firearms purchased with payment via their services. AFAICT, not only is there no such pattern, there isn't even a single example. There are a small number of examples of gun stores being sued (with little success except where the gun store broke the law), but no case where payment providers were even named in the suits, that I can find, anyway.
Given that, this decision seems more politically than fiscally motivated.