The problem then becomes this chips away at the safe harbor rules that lets sites host user-generated content.
Right now, if I were to post copyrighted material to Slashdot, Slashdot wouldn't be held liable. They would get a take-down notice, sure, but they would comply with it, I could challenge the notice, and Slashdot could put it back online while the alleged copyright owner and I hashed it out in court. With your "sue Twitter for their users' actions" stance, Slashdot would be liable every time someone said something about anyone else. Every single user comment would carry legal liability and few sites would be willing to shoulder that risk.
I'm a believer in free speech as much as the next guy, but there's a limit. If you're repeatedly harassing someone for having a different opinion/nationality/religious belief, you're not engaging in free speech. If you keep making throwaway accounts to flood a person (or persons) with abusive language, you're not engaging in free speech. If you're egging others on to keep harassing someone because they "deserve it" by virtue of not being a part of your group, you're not engaging in free speech.
If someone says "I believe in X", that's free speech. I can disagree with them vehemently, but I won't push for them to be banned. I might even think that a group is scum as far as their beliefs are concerned but so long as they are smart scum and they stay to one side of the line between free speech and harassment, I'd support their right to free speech. I might not like it, but the real test of free speech is protecting unpopular opinions. However, if the group started harassing anyone that they didn't agree with, they would lose my support and I'd be in favor of banning them. Free Speech isn't absolute. It doesn't give anyone the right to engage in any behavior and say "Free Speech" afterwards.
You could do this, but it's easier to sue People Magazine than AbusiveTroll3117. People Magazine is a rather public institution and it's easy to track down where they reside to serve them papers. Tracking down AbusiveTroll3117 would mean first filing a John Doe lawsuit, proving to a judge that you need to get the information on the person from Twitter, getting said information which might only include a throwaway e-mail address and an IP address, convincing the judge that you need to get the user's information from the ISP, getting said information from the ISP, and THEN serving him with paperwork. After all of this work, the IP address might belong to a VPN provider, someone with an open wireless network, a college computer lab, or some other area that leads to a dead-end.
You can control what appears in your feed based on who you follow, but the big problem is that if you "@" anyone, that will appear in your feed whether or not you follow that person. This can be a good thing as celebrities can see who is "talking to them" without having to follow everyone, but it can also wind up allowing Random Internet Troll the ability to repeatedly invade your stream with harassing remarks. You can block/mute people to stop this, but many times these trolls have plenty of time on their hands and form multiple throwaway accounts to keep harassing you with.
The block feature has proven to be ineffective because trolls just keep creating new accounts, or moving on to harassing followers and friends of their victims.
I can personally confirm this. I had a stalker/troll (who we'll call DG) who assumed that I was the same person and another person she had a beef with because we both liked photography. (As if we're the only ones online who like taking pictures.) Now, you couldn't argue with her, because she's a prophet of god. Yes, she honestly believes that god talks to her and is telling her these things. You don't even try arguing with someone who thinks this as no proof you can provide is good enough to counter "god himself told me." All the photos of me and my family that I posted online? Stolen from some other family's website. Online history going back years? Faked. Clear evidence that we were from totally different countries? Also faked.
In any event, she would contact me repeatedly, harassing me over the "crimes" I had committed (crimes which "god" told her the other guy had done). She left comments on my blog, harassed my wife, threatened to warn off every company I had dealt with, and said she was filing police reports against us. (Hard to do since I didn't use my real name on Twitter or my blog but I knew that it wouldn't be impossible to track me down.) She also claimed that I was hacking the Twitter accounts of anyone who didn't agree with her or of anyone who blocked her. (Ignoring her but not blocking her equaled "I totally agree with you" in her twisted mind.)
Me and some other people she harassed would report her abuse and her account would get shut down. Then she's pop up under a new account. Sometimes, we'd spot the new accounts lying in wait before she even used them. (She's register accounts with incrementing numbers - harasser1, harasser2, etc - so it wasn't hard to spot.) Twitter refused to permanently ban her no matter what proof we provided of her abusive actions. She's since backed off on harassing me (but occasionally returns to highlight my "misdeeds") but still harasses other people, including some celebrities. Every so often her account will get shut down and she'll be quiet for a month or so before popping back online.
I'm not a fan of censorship, but there has to be a balance between free speech and preventing people from engaging in repeated, targeted harassment.
Speaking off the cuff and not being scripted isn't the problem. The problem is when a politician (and, yes, Trump is included here) speaks off the cuff and says things like "Obama is literally the founder of ISIS", promises to pay legal fees if his supporters beat up protesters, claims that he'll change libel laws so he can sue any media company that says things about him that he doesn't like, etc.
I'm not saying we shouldn't accept better behavior from our politicians who seem to think it's ok to say "I'll do X" but really mean "I'll do Y because the companies that support Y paid for my campaign." We should totally want them to act differently, but "different" doesn't mean "better."
Don't take all this to mean that I like Hillary. I really don't like her. I think that she'll take this country in the wrong direction. Still, "wrong direction" is better than "drive this country off the cliff." The former can be corrected the latter can't be.
Back in college, Gopher was my first introduction to the Internet. I remember excitedly clicking from link to link, amazed at the information at my fingertips. Then, I got to a link titled "Middle East" and suddenly got worried that I would get in trouble for incurring long distance charges for my college. I closed it down and left.
The next time I went to the computer lab, I had a better understanding how networking worked (and why there wouldn't be long distance charges no matter what link I clicked on) and explored Gopher further.
My boys recently got into Pokemon (the TV series for my oldest, the TV show and cards for my youngest). I brought up that Pokemon is basically capturing wild animals and training them to fight each other. Looked at this way, what Ash and his friends do is terrible, not fantastic. Especially when it seems that these wild animals have some kind of sentience. (I've experienced some of the TV shows by virtue of being in the next room while my boys watch it.)
I look forward to the episode where Ash is arrested for cruelty to animals and the Pokemon battling areas are raided by the police. Or, at the very least, when Ash needs to push through Pokemon Rights Activists who are protesting the battles Ash is trying to engage in.
I'm not totally a believer in the "Trump is a Clinton plant" theory, but I might get on board with "The Clintons baited him into running and then his ego took him from there."
The scary part, though, are the number of people who cheer when he says extremely outrageous things that would tank any normal politician's candidacy.
RIAA. While we might hate our ISPs, at least there's something useful about them - the Internet Service they provide. It might be subpar quality (speed, customer service, etc) and they might overcharge for it, but there's a bit of value there. With the RIAA - or more specifically in this instance, RightsCorp - there's nothing of value there for us. They exist solely to serve themselves and at no point does their existence give us anything of value.
One of the problems is that Hillary tends to have normal or slightly above normal levels of problems for a politician. If the media would focus on her problems, her polling would suffer. However, any time they begin to focus on her, Trump loudly spouts something so outrageous that they can't help but focus on him. If he'd keep his mouth shut for a bit, Hillary's own scandals would get front page treatment. It's like the two are swimming in shark infested waters, Trump keeps tossing chum in the water by him and then wondering why the sharks don't bother Hillary.
(For the record, I don't like either candidate but don't think Trump would make an acceptable president at all.)
"No, I didn't. I read the sign posted on your door that said 'The spare key is under the third rock on the left along the path leading up to the door.' I lifted that rock, found the key, and opened your door."
First off, volcanos are dwarfed by the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that people pump into the atmosphere annually. Secondly, what we pump into the atmosphere came from an area deep underground where it had been sequestered for millions of years. So for millions of years, the trees/plants didn't need to take care of this carbon dioxide and it wasn't part of the natural carbon cycle. Now, though, it's suddenly being tossed into the atmosphere and some people act surprised that the existing plant life can't just magically handle all of the new stuff too.
Will climate change end life on Earth? No, it won't. Might it make life on Earth really horrible for humans? Yes. Our cities on the coastlines (where we've historically loved building cities) will get flooded. Traditional crops won't grow in their usual farm areas and the new areas that have the right temperature might not have suitable farmland/soil conditions. (If you want to grow corn in the new "corn belt" area, it won't be good if that happens to lie on a mountainous terrain.) In short, humans can pay to fix climate change now or we really pay for it later.
We've been refusing the tests for our kids for years. It doesn't eliminate "teach to the test" but if enough parents do it, the test results will be useless* and over-testing might be backed away from.
* Arguably, the tests are already useless but the proponents of the tests insist they need this data and insist that testing kids more and more is the only way to collect this data. John Oliver covered it better than I ever could in a single comment.
That might work, but I was talking more about elementary through high school. In the US, we all but assume that everyone will be educated through high school level. In other countries, depending on where you live or what your "station" in life is, you might not even get elementary school education. You might go right into a vocational training school or might not get schooling at all. Likewise if you have some kind of disability that impairs your learning. So other countries can make sure that the tests scores are high by excluding all those folks while our scores are "dragged down" by them. Then again, our overall test scores might go but our populace as a whole has a better chance to get some rudimentary education than if we just wrote off whole groups of people and didn't even school them up to high school.
Poor students tend to do worse in school due to other reasons than "not playing video games." If you're not sure where your next meal will come from, if your parents will have a job when you get home, or even if you'll have a home to go home to, you will be worrying a lot more about things other than an upcoming test or completing a homework assignment. Much of the "our country is doing poorly on tests" could be fixed by addressing poverty. (Another part could be "fixed" by realizing that many other countries get their high scores by only selectively educating/testing kids whereas we try to educate everyone - in theory, at least. Therefore, those results will always be skewed upwards for the selective education countries.)
Just what I was going to say. I take my boys to a local children's museum (Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady NY) and they love working with all of the exhibits. Half the time, they don't even realize they are learning. They are just having fun and are picking up scientific concepts as a side effect. It works really well. If you just have a bunch of exhibits that kids need to look at but not touch, they'll learn something, but not as much as if they can interact with the exhibits.
Not only do I remember when IMDb was a Usenet created list, but I printed it out on my university's printers (the really old kind that had those perforated holes on the side of the printout) to show to people offline.
Our main "Home Phone Number" is a Google Voice line. One of the nice features they have is "spam filtering" for phone calls. If a person calls us and it's a robocall/scammer, we can block the number. Then, when they call again, they get a "this number has been disconnected" message. If enough people do this, calls from that number automatically are blocked. Often, Google Voice will alert us that we missed a call when our phones didn't ring. When we look into the number, it's invariably a scammer trying to get through.
Partly because people don't think about roaming charges anymore. Pretty much wherever you go in the US, you can use your phone without worrying about being charged extra. (The most you might worry about is not getting a signal.) Some people just don't think about phone data plans when they go overseas and wind up coming home to a huge bill.
Another issue is that some countries are more expensive than others. The Bahamas was $2 per MB but if you went to Mexico, you could pay $2 a day to bring your usual caps with you without any extra roaming charges. Spend a day in the Bahamas and use 10MB of data? Get charged $20. Spend a day in Mexico and use 10MB of data and get charged $2 (assuming you paid in advance).
Finally, some people don't realize how much traffic their phones can generate when they aren't actively using data (no launching web browsers, e-mail apps, etc). You could keep your phone on and not in airplane mode, but end up with a big fee when you get home because your e-mail app checked for new messages in the background and the Facebook app was checking for status updates and ten other apps were doing their own checks. All while you were being charged $2 for every MB used.
What if the GIFs are produced automatically? My photo automatically uploads all photos to Google Photos. If Google notices that a group of photos comprise a sequence of events, it will helpfully produce an animated version of all of those images together. Is Google violating the IOC's rules if I were to photograph an event and happened to capture enough for Google to put together an animated GIF?
A lot of people might travel internationally and just assume that their phone will serve them data at the same cost as in their home country. When we were going to go on a cruise to the Bahamas, we inquired about how much data would cost. Once we knew how much ($2 per MB), we made sure to put our phones in airplane mode for the duration of the trip, using them only to take photos that could be shared later via the ship's WiFi (which we had a set number of minutes access to) or when we returned to the US.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem then becomes this chips away at the safe harbor rules that lets sites host user-generated content.
Right now, if I were to post copyrighted material to Slashdot, Slashdot wouldn't be held liable. They would get a take-down notice, sure, but they would comply with it, I could challenge the notice, and Slashdot could put it back online while the alleged copyright owner and I hashed it out in court. With your "sue Twitter for their users' actions" stance, Slashdot would be liable every time someone said something about anyone else. Every single user comment would carry legal liability and few sites would be willing to shoulder that risk.
I'm a believer in free speech as much as the next guy, but there's a limit. If you're repeatedly harassing someone for having a different opinion/nationality/religious belief, you're not engaging in free speech. If you keep making throwaway accounts to flood a person (or persons) with abusive language, you're not engaging in free speech. If you're egging others on to keep harassing someone because they "deserve it" by virtue of not being a part of your group, you're not engaging in free speech.
If someone says "I believe in X", that's free speech. I can disagree with them vehemently, but I won't push for them to be banned. I might even think that a group is scum as far as their beliefs are concerned but so long as they are smart scum and they stay to one side of the line between free speech and harassment, I'd support their right to free speech. I might not like it, but the real test of free speech is protecting unpopular opinions. However, if the group started harassing anyone that they didn't agree with, they would lose my support and I'd be in favor of banning them. Free Speech isn't absolute. It doesn't give anyone the right to engage in any behavior and say "Free Speech" afterwards.
You could do this, but it's easier to sue People Magazine than AbusiveTroll3117. People Magazine is a rather public institution and it's easy to track down where they reside to serve them papers. Tracking down AbusiveTroll3117 would mean first filing a John Doe lawsuit, proving to a judge that you need to get the information on the person from Twitter, getting said information which might only include a throwaway e-mail address and an IP address, convincing the judge that you need to get the user's information from the ISP, getting said information from the ISP, and THEN serving him with paperwork. After all of this work, the IP address might belong to a VPN provider, someone with an open wireless network, a college computer lab, or some other area that leads to a dead-end.
You can control what appears in your feed based on who you follow, but the big problem is that if you "@" anyone, that will appear in your feed whether or not you follow that person. This can be a good thing as celebrities can see who is "talking to them" without having to follow everyone, but it can also wind up allowing Random Internet Troll the ability to repeatedly invade your stream with harassing remarks. You can block/mute people to stop this, but many times these trolls have plenty of time on their hands and form multiple throwaway accounts to keep harassing you with.
I can personally confirm this. I had a stalker/troll (who we'll call DG) who assumed that I was the same person and another person she had a beef with because we both liked photography. (As if we're the only ones online who like taking pictures.) Now, you couldn't argue with her, because she's a prophet of god. Yes, she honestly believes that god talks to her and is telling her these things. You don't even try arguing with someone who thinks this as no proof you can provide is good enough to counter "god himself told me." All the photos of me and my family that I posted online? Stolen from some other family's website. Online history going back years? Faked. Clear evidence that we were from totally different countries? Also faked.
In any event, she would contact me repeatedly, harassing me over the "crimes" I had committed (crimes which "god" told her the other guy had done). She left comments on my blog, harassed my wife, threatened to warn off every company I had dealt with, and said she was filing police reports against us. (Hard to do since I didn't use my real name on Twitter or my blog but I knew that it wouldn't be impossible to track me down.) She also claimed that I was hacking the Twitter accounts of anyone who didn't agree with her or of anyone who blocked her. (Ignoring her but not blocking her equaled "I totally agree with you" in her twisted mind.)
Me and some other people she harassed would report her abuse and her account would get shut down. Then she's pop up under a new account. Sometimes, we'd spot the new accounts lying in wait before she even used them. (She's register accounts with incrementing numbers - harasser1, harasser2, etc - so it wasn't hard to spot.) Twitter refused to permanently ban her no matter what proof we provided of her abusive actions. She's since backed off on harassing me (but occasionally returns to highlight my "misdeeds") but still harasses other people, including some celebrities. Every so often her account will get shut down and she'll be quiet for a month or so before popping back online.
I'm not a fan of censorship, but there has to be a balance between free speech and preventing people from engaging in repeated, targeted harassment.
Speaking off the cuff and not being scripted isn't the problem. The problem is when a politician (and, yes, Trump is included here) speaks off the cuff and says things like "Obama is literally the founder of ISIS", promises to pay legal fees if his supporters beat up protesters, claims that he'll change libel laws so he can sue any media company that says things about him that he doesn't like, etc.
I'm not saying we shouldn't accept better behavior from our politicians who seem to think it's ok to say "I'll do X" but really mean "I'll do Y because the companies that support Y paid for my campaign." We should totally want them to act differently, but "different" doesn't mean "better."
Don't take all this to mean that I like Hillary. I really don't like her. I think that she'll take this country in the wrong direction. Still, "wrong direction" is better than "drive this country off the cliff." The former can be corrected the latter can't be.
Back in college, Gopher was my first introduction to the Internet. I remember excitedly clicking from link to link, amazed at the information at my fingertips. Then, I got to a link titled "Middle East" and suddenly got worried that I would get in trouble for incurring long distance charges for my college. I closed it down and left.
The next time I went to the computer lab, I had a better understanding how networking worked (and why there wouldn't be long distance charges no matter what link I clicked on) and explored Gopher further.
My boys recently got into Pokemon (the TV series for my oldest, the TV show and cards for my youngest). I brought up that Pokemon is basically capturing wild animals and training them to fight each other. Looked at this way, what Ash and his friends do is terrible, not fantastic. Especially when it seems that these wild animals have some kind of sentience. (I've experienced some of the TV shows by virtue of being in the next room while my boys watch it.)
I look forward to the episode where Ash is arrested for cruelty to animals and the Pokemon battling areas are raided by the police. Or, at the very least, when Ash needs to push through Pokemon Rights Activists who are protesting the battles Ash is trying to engage in.
Age can be a problem in IT if your system was designed for 1960's travel habits/workload and now has to cope with 2016 travel habits/workload.
I'm not totally a believer in the "Trump is a Clinton plant" theory, but I might get on board with "The Clintons baited him into running and then his ego took him from there."
The scary part, though, are the number of people who cheer when he says extremely outrageous things that would tank any normal politician's candidacy.
RIAA. While we might hate our ISPs, at least there's something useful about them - the Internet Service they provide. It might be subpar quality (speed, customer service, etc) and they might overcharge for it, but there's a bit of value there. With the RIAA - or more specifically in this instance, RightsCorp - there's nothing of value there for us. They exist solely to serve themselves and at no point does their existence give us anything of value.
One of the problems is that Hillary tends to have normal or slightly above normal levels of problems for a politician. If the media would focus on her problems, her polling would suffer. However, any time they begin to focus on her, Trump loudly spouts something so outrageous that they can't help but focus on him. If he'd keep his mouth shut for a bit, Hillary's own scandals would get front page treatment. It's like the two are swimming in shark infested waters, Trump keeps tossing chum in the water by him and then wondering why the sharks don't bother Hillary.
(For the record, I don't like either candidate but don't think Trump would make an acceptable president at all.)
"You hacked into my house!"
"No, I didn't. I read the sign posted on your door that said 'The spare key is under the third rock on the left along the path leading up to the door.' I lifted that rock, found the key, and opened your door."
"HACKER!!!!"
First off, volcanos are dwarfed by the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that people pump into the atmosphere annually. Secondly, what we pump into the atmosphere came from an area deep underground where it had been sequestered for millions of years. So for millions of years, the trees/plants didn't need to take care of this carbon dioxide and it wasn't part of the natural carbon cycle. Now, though, it's suddenly being tossed into the atmosphere and some people act surprised that the existing plant life can't just magically handle all of the new stuff too.
Will climate change end life on Earth? No, it won't. Might it make life on Earth really horrible for humans? Yes. Our cities on the coastlines (where we've historically loved building cities) will get flooded. Traditional crops won't grow in their usual farm areas and the new areas that have the right temperature might not have suitable farmland/soil conditions. (If you want to grow corn in the new "corn belt" area, it won't be good if that happens to lie on a mountainous terrain.) In short, humans can pay to fix climate change now or we really pay for it later.
We've been refusing the tests for our kids for years. It doesn't eliminate "teach to the test" but if enough parents do it, the test results will be useless* and over-testing might be backed away from.
* Arguably, the tests are already useless but the proponents of the tests insist they need this data and insist that testing kids more and more is the only way to collect this data. John Oliver covered it better than I ever could in a single comment.
That might work, but I was talking more about elementary through high school. In the US, we all but assume that everyone will be educated through high school level. In other countries, depending on where you live or what your "station" in life is, you might not even get elementary school education. You might go right into a vocational training school or might not get schooling at all. Likewise if you have some kind of disability that impairs your learning. So other countries can make sure that the tests scores are high by excluding all those folks while our scores are "dragged down" by them. Then again, our overall test scores might go but our populace as a whole has a better chance to get some rudimentary education than if we just wrote off whole groups of people and didn't even school them up to high school.
Poor students tend to do worse in school due to other reasons than "not playing video games." If you're not sure where your next meal will come from, if your parents will have a job when you get home, or even if you'll have a home to go home to, you will be worrying a lot more about things other than an upcoming test or completing a homework assignment. Much of the "our country is doing poorly on tests" could be fixed by addressing poverty. (Another part could be "fixed" by realizing that many other countries get their high scores by only selectively educating/testing kids whereas we try to educate everyone - in theory, at least. Therefore, those results will always be skewed upwards for the selective education countries.)
Just what I was going to say. I take my boys to a local children's museum (Museum of Innovation and Science in Schenectady NY) and they love working with all of the exhibits. Half the time, they don't even realize they are learning. They are just having fun and are picking up scientific concepts as a side effect. It works really well. If you just have a bunch of exhibits that kids need to look at but not touch, they'll learn something, but not as much as if they can interact with the exhibits.
Not only do I remember when IMDb was a Usenet created list, but I printed it out on my university's printers (the really old kind that had those perforated holes on the side of the printout) to show to people offline.
Our main "Home Phone Number" is a Google Voice line. One of the nice features they have is "spam filtering" for phone calls. If a person calls us and it's a robocall/scammer, we can block the number. Then, when they call again, they get a "this number has been disconnected" message. If enough people do this, calls from that number automatically are blocked. Often, Google Voice will alert us that we missed a call when our phones didn't ring. When we look into the number, it's invariably a scammer trying to get through.
Partly because people don't think about roaming charges anymore. Pretty much wherever you go in the US, you can use your phone without worrying about being charged extra. (The most you might worry about is not getting a signal.) Some people just don't think about phone data plans when they go overseas and wind up coming home to a huge bill.
Another issue is that some countries are more expensive than others. The Bahamas was $2 per MB but if you went to Mexico, you could pay $2 a day to bring your usual caps with you without any extra roaming charges. Spend a day in the Bahamas and use 10MB of data? Get charged $20. Spend a day in Mexico and use 10MB of data and get charged $2 (assuming you paid in advance).
Finally, some people don't realize how much traffic their phones can generate when they aren't actively using data (no launching web browsers, e-mail apps, etc). You could keep your phone on and not in airplane mode, but end up with a big fee when you get home because your e-mail app checked for new messages in the background and the Facebook app was checking for status updates and ten other apps were doing their own checks. All while you were being charged $2 for every MB used.
What if the GIFs are produced automatically? My photo automatically uploads all photos to Google Photos. If Google notices that a group of photos comprise a sequence of events, it will helpfully produce an animated version of all of those images together. Is Google violating the IOC's rules if I were to photograph an event and happened to capture enough for Google to put together an animated GIF?
Luckily, you're still fine if you ask someone: "Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
A lot of people might travel internationally and just assume that their phone will serve them data at the same cost as in their home country. When we were going to go on a cruise to the Bahamas, we inquired about how much data would cost. Once we knew how much ($2 per MB), we made sure to put our phones in airplane mode for the duration of the trip, using them only to take photos that could be shared later via the ship's WiFi (which we had a set number of minutes access to) or when we returned to the US.
Lebro's Restaurant. They do it on Sunday and call it "Disconnect To Reconnect."