The 15 elected jurists on the English-language Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee -- among them a former staffer for presidential candidate John Kerry, an information-technology consultant in a tiny British village and a retired college librarian -- have clerks, write binding decisions and hear appeals. They even issue preliminary injunctions.
If ever we develop a Ministry of Truth (pun intended) — or, in the case of US, a Department of same — it will begin with the similar seemingly benign composition.
What is it with your kind insisting on calling strangers "bro"? Is it a subtle insult you make — defiling the target's reputation by claiming his close acquaintanceship with the likes of your own? Or just a desperate and pitiable attempt to belong?
you appear to be replying to the voices in your head
I'm addressing the cowards like this one, having heard their voices — snarky and outraged alike — numerous times before. Indeed, yours may very well have been among them, whether out of sincere agreement or just the already-mentioned desire to belong...
rather than anyone in the thread.
I started this thread. By your logic, anyone doing such a thing suffers from a mental disease... Need I say more? Perhaps, I need — but I will not, for I am not the professional which can help you.
Tell me again,please, how stupid, unfriendly, obnoxious, and otherwise unpleasant America is, and how badly degrading and oppressive and otherwise unfortunate the life here...
But neither the call center nor Abramovich were affiliated with the well-known brands presented to the customer during the prerecorded message.
If you ever come to read the actual wording of the calls, I'm sure, you'll see for yourself, that they never claimed to actually be so affiliated.
For example, consider: "Are you interested in purchasing a vacation from a reputable company like Expedia at a special low price? If yes, press #1 now!" It suggests, the asker is offering something from Expedia, but, in fact, he is talking only about a "company like Expedia"...
since they were not affiliated with the companies, they COULD NOT be selling 'discounted' packages from those companies
Neah, that's not a proof either. I can sell you a Sony TV without being affiliated with Sony.
Anyway, let's wait, how it plays out in court... Or, at least, until the actual words used by the recordings are published by someone.
That article does not cite the words in the recording either. Take a deep breath, get what wits you've got back together, and try to substantiate your accusation.
to “Press 1” to hear more about an “exclusive” vacation deal offered by a well-known travel or hospitality company, like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Marriott, or Hilton, the FCC said.
They would then be transferred to a call center, where live operators would attempt to sell them one or more “discounted” vacation packages, like timeshares.
But neither the call center nor Abramovich were affiliated with the well-known brands presented to the customer during the prerecorded message.
Not one word in that paraphrase is fraudulent... The call-centers, likely, did have some deals to sell from some of those companies. As well as many others. Were they "discounted"? Likely, they were — compared to some nebulous "list price" — as everything else is, in most stores you walk in to.
No fraud... Unless FCC bankrupts him with the legal fees — an abuse of process we all should denounce regardless of its target — he'll win in court.
It says they talked to people CLAIMING to be legitmate companies, but were in fact fake. In other words, fraud.
Your passionate hatred dims your wits. TFA makes no such allegations. Indeed, it does not cite the actual text of his messages at all — but if you have some other source, I'd be most interested in reading the actual verbiage of the recordings.
I addressed this point first, by asking, how could his calls be possibly interpreted as fraudulent. They can not be — he'll win in court.
After I addressed this point, I made a different observation:
Sadly, the First Amendment keeps spammers (of all kinds) protected from most measures that could be taken against them...
This was about spammers in general — including ones, whose claims are squeaky clean. We hate them with passion, but can not make their practices illegal...
I would strongly object to getting drowned, but that's off-topic. The coward explicitly said (emphasis mine): "stop trying to remove government's checks on pollution". Since TFA is about "greenhouse gases", rather than pollution, my retort was correct, justified, and proper.
None of which can be said about your own, customarily witless, ejaculation.
penalizing a crime, of which fraudulent speech was a central element
While I agree, that fraud is not protected by the First Amendment, our hatred with spam in general — and with this guy in particular — is not based on content. Even if we were to stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this guy's calls were fraudulent — and he is disputing it — that'd be irrelevant to my observation anyway.
Because you and I would be just as irritated, if we kept getting calls politely reminding us, that 2x2=4...
How to make such behavior illegal in a country with the First Amendment, I do not know...
This is exactly the kind of leftist thinking that makes me so furious with Republicans [...] Obesity is something you mostly do to yourself
Your ire is misplaced and the downvote you gave me — wasted. Obesity is, largely, a personal problem (ignoring for a second the idiotic "war on fat" waged by the Federal government for 30 years), but this does not contradict what I said in any way. Because I never suggested, government needs to spend on fighting it.
You're still left with approximately 100% of remaining atmospheric researchers [...]
You are appealing to authority, which is a fallacy. But worse, all of these people are employed by the governments and have a vast conflict of interest. Should they discover, the threat is overrated, the vast majority of them would need new careers. This is enough to impeach their testimonies and expert opinions. Without those words, you'd need hard facts. And those the alarmists do not have...
Maybe you should publish some numbers on how affordable this air travel is.
I never said it is. Read carefully, try to keep up.
stop trying to remove government's checks on pollution
A complaint filed by the FCC against Abramovich in June 2017 alleged he had broken the Truth in Caller ID Act -- which prohibits callers from falsifying caller ID information to disguise their identity with intent to harm or defraud
I doubt, this will hold up in court. The victims were neither harmed (unless every robocall is harmful), nor defrauded (they got to talk to vacation salespeople selling legitimate vacation-packages)...
Sadly, the First Amendment keeps spammers (of all kinds) protected from most measures that could be taken against them...
Obesity, for example, is a much greater threat to Americans, than climate change — even if it were as real, as the shrillest alarmists contend. Affordable and ubiquitous air-transport, for another example, would bring immense improvements to the quality of lives for all — and free up most of the billions spent annually on roads.
By spending on this not merely "overhyped", but completely nonexistent "threat", we slow down on the acutely useful research.
Why would a Climate Monitoring System be under NASA and not NOAA?
Why? To increase the number of people employed by the government and to tie up as many of the America's resources seeking solutions for non-existent problems as possible, so that America's adversaries and enemies have some breathing room to catch up on the stuff that actually matters... Like space programs...
So, your counterargument is basically "no, I disagree, here are examples where countries used espionage".
Nope. My argument is, here is where the espionage was essential, where the country would not have had a piece of technology without the espionage either at all, or only decades later.
Private funding didn't come in for any of those until the government had provided so much support
Been there, argued that. Step one, where are your citations?
This is where your shrink away, or offer me to "google it". Nope, you do that. I'll wait.
What do you mean, "as it did in due time"? Did you somehow visit another reality and see if the internet would develop in the absence of government funding?
Now, that is rich. As if you have somehow visited another reality, where the Internet did not develop without it...
Can espionage speed up progress that a competing nation makes? Sure, but it's not a requirement.
It is a requirement. If the adversary is evolving faster than you, then your only hope to avoid falling further and further behind is to steal his results every once in a while.
And we are evolving faster than China. To even match our speed they need to become a free-market Capitalist country — and they are moving in the opposite direction at present.
Also, you need to know, what the adversary is developing. It takes years to design a new anti-aircraft missile, for example. If your current designs have the top speed of X km/h and the ceiling of N thousand meters, you will be unprotected against the enemy's aircraft flying faster than X or higher than N for years until you can field a modernized weapon. Knowing the X and the N of the enemy's current designs is crucially important — and only spying can get you these numbers. For example, the US does not make much of a secret of the F-35 — and sells them to many allies — but many details of the F-22 are classified.
Intelligence, science, technology, and math aren't some hoardable commodities
They are hoardable. Though the theory was already well understood, try as they might have, for example, USSR could not create atomic bombs of their own in practice — until a family of Communist scumbags handed them the blueprints. The resulting nuclear parity emboldened USSR and condemned millions of people in Eastern Europe to decades of suffering under Soviet occupation. North Koreans and Vietnamese suffer even worse to this day for the same reasons. That is, how important anti-spying is...
There are plenty of other things (including Pepsi-Cola!) USSR just could not replicate — some of these they also ended up stealing, others (like automobile factories) they bought openly, or confiscated as spoils of war. Had the knowledge really been "not hoardable", as you naively assert, they would not have needed to pay Ford and Fiat for it.
The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give correct answers to questions, only how closely answers resemble those a human would give.
Well, we have government-sponsored research to thank for your being able to share that comment with us
Your kind have been repeating this line for years. It is bullshit — because it presupposes, that, had ARPA not funded what later became known as "the Internet", no one else would've done it either.
That's nonsense. Private companies did fund and successfully built networks of railroads, telegraph, and telephone. They would've built the current Internet, when the technology developed — as it did in due time.
Your argument boils down to: "People are too dumb to be trusted with their own money, government must use its power to confiscate funds because Congressmen just know better, what to spend on." Authoritarian much?
Don't let yourself be distracted, people — neither by electronic spying in TFA, nor by the other kind. The real and most prepossessing problem facing humanity in general and the US in particular is that a promiscuous man with bad hair is the President. #Resist!!
What it does provide for is that the information never goes away, whether it is accurate or not.
Like digitized music, the information may bad to begin with. But it will not deteriorate with time and each replica will be a perfect copy of the original. That's what I meant.
It works both ways, though. Once, after a job-interview, I looked up the prospective boss — and found, he was once arrested during a meeting in defence of Free Speech. Made me want to work for him — and for the company, that employed people like him in positions of authority...
Welcome to a world where you can't opt out of sharing, even if you didn't opt in...
We've lived in this world since we learned to speak. People could always tell other about you, spreading gossip and rumours — some accurate, some libellous. Government agencies, private detectives, and organizations like the Inquisition have also kept files on people.
The "new" thing here is that computers are used, which provides for actual accuracy of the information and vastly expands the scale...
Production of cement is disastrous for our biosphere,
Is it? Do they have a hockestick chart proving that beyond all doubt?
while the degradation of many concrete buildings has some construction experts predicting a colossal headache in the future.
Well, this settles it then. Let's ban — or, at least, "cap-and-trade" — all concrete-production effective immediately. New taxes would have to be collected (and spent) to implement it, house-building will triple in price, but think of all the jobs this will create — especially, among these same "construction experts"!
Slashdot Mirror
If ever we develop a Ministry of Truth (pun intended) — or, in the case of US, a Department of same — it will begin with the similar seemingly benign composition.
What is it with your kind insisting on calling strangers "bro"? Is it a subtle insult you make — defiling the target's reputation by claiming his close acquaintanceship with the likes of your own? Or just a desperate and pitiable attempt to belong?
I'm addressing the cowards like this one, having heard their voices — snarky and outraged alike — numerous times before. Indeed, yours may very well have been among them, whether out of sincere agreement or just the already-mentioned desire to belong...
I started this thread. By your logic, anyone doing such a thing suffers from a mental disease... Need I say more? Perhaps, I need — but I will not, for I am not the professional which can help you.
Tell me again,please, how stupid, unfriendly, obnoxious, and otherwise unpleasant America is, and how badly degrading and oppressive and otherwise unfortunate the life here...
If you ever come to read the actual wording of the calls, I'm sure, you'll see for yourself, that they never claimed to actually be so affiliated.
For example, consider: "Are you interested in purchasing a vacation from a reputable company like Expedia at a special low price? If yes, press #1 now!" It suggests, the asker is offering something from Expedia, but, in fact, he is talking only about a "company like Expedia"...
Neah, that's not a proof either. I can sell you a Sony TV without being affiliated with Sony.
Anyway, let's wait, how it plays out in court... Or, at least, until the actual words used by the recordings are published by someone.
That article does not cite the words in the recording either. Take a deep breath, get what wits you've got back together, and try to substantiate your accusation.
Not one word in that paraphrase is fraudulent... The call-centers, likely, did have some deals to sell from some of those companies. As well as many others. Were they "discounted"? Likely, they were — compared to some nebulous "list price" — as everything else is, in most stores you walk in to.
No fraud... Unless FCC bankrupts him with the legal fees — an abuse of process we all should denounce regardless of its target — he'll win in court.
Your passionate hatred dims your wits. TFA makes no such allegations. Indeed, it does not cite the actual text of his messages at all — but if you have some other source, I'd be most interested in reading the actual verbiage of the recordings.
I addressed this point first, by asking, how could his calls be possibly interpreted as fraudulent. They can not be — he'll win in court.
After I addressed this point, I made a different observation:
This was about spammers in general — including ones, whose claims are squeaky clean. We hate them with passion, but can not make their practices illegal...
I would strongly object to getting drowned, but that's off-topic. The coward explicitly said (emphasis mine): "stop trying to remove government's checks on pollution". Since TFA is about "greenhouse gases", rather than pollution, my retort was correct, justified, and proper.
None of which can be said about your own, customarily witless, ejaculation.
I hate him too. But I do not see, what law he broke. And we are a country ruled by laws, not men. We can't lock him up just because we hate him...
While I agree, that fraud is not protected by the First Amendment, our hatred with spam in general — and with this guy in particular — is not based on content. Even if we were to stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this guy's calls were fraudulent — and he is disputing it — that'd be irrelevant to my observation anyway.
Because you and I would be just as irritated, if we kept getting calls politely reminding us, that 2x2=4...
How to make such behavior illegal in a country with the First Amendment, I do not know...
Your ire is misplaced and the downvote you gave me — wasted. Obesity is, largely, a personal problem (ignoring for a second the idiotic "war on fat" waged by the Federal government for 30 years), but this does not contradict what I said in any way. Because I never suggested, government needs to spend on fighting it.
You are appealing to authority, which is a fallacy. But worse, all of these people are employed by the governments and have a vast conflict of interest. Should they discover, the threat is overrated, the vast majority of them would need new careers. This is enough to impeach their testimonies and expert opinions. Without those words, you'd need hard facts. And those the alarmists do not have...
I never said it is. Read carefully, try to keep up.
CO2 is not a pollutant.
TL;DR
I doubt, this will hold up in court. The victims were neither harmed (unless every robocall is harmful), nor defrauded (they got to talk to vacation salespeople selling legitimate vacation-packages)...
Sadly, the First Amendment keeps spammers (of all kinds) protected from most measures that could be taken against them...
Obesity, for example, is a much greater threat to Americans, than climate change — even if it were as real, as the shrillest alarmists contend. Affordable and ubiquitous air-transport, for another example, would bring immense improvements to the quality of lives for all — and free up most of the billions spent annually on roads.
By spending on this not merely "overhyped", but completely nonexistent "threat", we slow down on the acutely useful research.
Why? To increase the number of people employed by the government and to tie up as many of the America's resources seeking solutions for non-existent problems as possible, so that America's adversaries and enemies have some breathing room to catch up on the stuff that actually matters... Like space programs...
Nope. My argument is, here is where the espionage was essential, where the country would not have had a piece of technology without the espionage either at all, or only decades later.
TL;DR
Been there, argued that. Step one, where are your citations?
This is where your shrink away, or offer me to "google it". Nope, you do that. I'll wait.
Now, that is rich. As if you have somehow visited another reality, where the Internet did not develop without it...
It is a requirement. If the adversary is evolving faster than you, then your only hope to avoid falling further and further behind is to steal his results every once in a while.
And we are evolving faster than China. To even match our speed they need to become a free-market Capitalist country — and they are moving in the opposite direction at present.
Also, you need to know, what the adversary is developing. It takes years to design a new anti-aircraft missile, for example. If your current designs have the top speed of X km/h and the ceiling of N thousand meters, you will be unprotected against the enemy's aircraft flying faster than X or higher than N for years until you can field a modernized weapon. Knowing the X and the N of the enemy's current designs is crucially important — and only spying can get you these numbers. For example, the US does not make much of a secret of the F-35 — and sells them to many allies — but many details of the F-22 are classified.
They are hoardable. Though the theory was already well understood, try as they might have, for example, USSR could not create atomic bombs of their own in practice — until a family of Communist scumbags handed them the blueprints. The resulting nuclear parity emboldened USSR and condemned millions of people in Eastern Europe to decades of suffering under Soviet occupation. North Koreans and Vietnamese suffer even worse to this day for the same reasons. That is, how important anti-spying is...
There are plenty of other things (including Pepsi-Cola!) USSR just could not replicate — some of these they also ended up stealing, others (like automobile factories) they bought openly, or confiscated as spoils of war. Had the knowledge really been "not hoardable", as you naively assert, they would not have needed to pay Ford and Fiat for it.
From Wikipedia:
It seems, we are about to arrive...
Your kind have been repeating this line for years. It is bullshit — because it presupposes, that, had ARPA not funded what later became known as "the Internet", no one else would've done it either.
That's nonsense. Private companies did fund and successfully built networks of railroads, telegraph, and telephone. They would've built the current Internet, when the technology developed — as it did in due time.
Your argument boils down to: "People are too dumb to be trusted with their own money, government must use its power to confiscate funds because Congressmen just know better, what to spend on." Authoritarian much?
With the possible exception for militarily-applicable research, no science should be government-sponsored. At all.
Don't let yourself be distracted, people — neither by electronic spying in TFA, nor by the other kind. The real and most prepossessing problem facing humanity in general and the US in particular is that a promiscuous man with bad hair is the President. #Resist!!
Like digitized music, the information may bad to begin with. But it will not deteriorate with time and each replica will be a perfect copy of the original. That's what I meant.
It works both ways, though. Once, after a job-interview, I looked up the prospective boss — and found, he was once arrested during a meeting in defence of Free Speech. Made me want to work for him — and for the company, that employed people like him in positions of authority...
We've lived in this world since we learned to speak. People could always tell other about you, spreading gossip and rumours — some accurate, some libellous. Government agencies, private detectives, and organizations like the Inquisition have also kept files on people.
The "new" thing here is that computers are used, which provides for actual accuracy of the information and vastly expands the scale...
Is it? Do they have a hockestick chart proving that beyond all doubt?
Well, this settles it then. Let's ban — or, at least, "cap-and-trade" — all concrete-production effective immediately. New taxes would have to be collected (and spent) to implement it, house-building will triple in price, but think of all the jobs this will create — especially, among these same "construction experts"!