I've put up more than one ghost bike in my time, and it is almost always a hit and run wreck.
Huh? WTF is a "ghost bike"? Is this some kind of simulation or something?
But yeah, what we really need is separate bike lanes, so cyclists don't have to worry about getting creamed by a car. Shitty cyclists suck, but they're not nearly as dangerous as shitty drivers. 200lbs of mass at 10-20mph doesn't have remotely as much kinetic energy as 3000lb at 50mph.
That's like saying that "encryption isn't the answer, eradicating computer misuse is."
Please tell us how you plan to eradicate blatant sexism in Saudi Arabia. I'm really interested in how you think the culture there can be changed, and why women should sit at home and never travel until sexism has been eradicated, rather than just using Uber.
It's not a "problem", I'm pointing out that what little money Uber may be saving by avoiding that isn't enough to cause the fares for riding an Uber to be **so** much cheaper than taking a regular cab.
What this means is that obviously, there's some other reason cabs cost a ridiculous amount of money; either from price gouging by the cab companies, or from excessive regulation costs (from the "medallion", which is nothing more than a way to limit competition unfairly).
Why would you think it costs less? That Mercedes with leather seats and that nice middle-class or above driver wasn't paid for by Uber.
Yes, actually it is. The driver has to pay for it himself, and if driving for Uber doesn't net him enough money to make it worth it to make his Mercedes payments, he's not going to bother.
Obviously, driving for Uber is generating enough cash for the Mercedes owner that he can afford such a vehicle.
Your driver most likely paid for it using a his main or previous middle-class or above job.
If he's working Uber on the side, then what's the problem? Looks like Uber found a better business model to me. Instead of riding with some guy who doesn't speak English and drives a 30-year-old jalopy, I get to ride with a guy who speaks great English, uses his smartphone to navigate instead of taking some weird back route that's twice as long (to get a higher fare), drives a really nice car, and costs me half as much. What the fuck is the problem with that? Why should people be restricted to working only one job?
And if he bought the car at his previous job, got laid off, and is now making ends meet with Uber, again, WTF is the problem with that?
It sounds like you have a problem with people working voluntarily, at hours they choose, instead of being stuck with a wage-slave job and having to work at hours their employer demands.
The problem with this is there's no way in hell that Uber is saving *that much* money with background checks, to where it costs less than 1/2 as much to get somewhere, and I can do it in a newer Mercedes with leather seats rather than some 20-year-old stinky piece of shit car, and with a driver who obviously is middle-class or above and speaks perfect English, rather than a driver who barely speaks the language at all (and thus, you would think, costs less).
This ensures that there is a supply of taxis in most cases, and not just around congested more profitable locations.
Wrong. Source: you. You just said there's a shortage of taxis, in reference to my 30-60 minute waiting time complaint. Obviously, fixing the fares **doesn't** ensure a supply of taxis in most cases. A 30-60 minute waiting time is completely usuable for a service.
If the government wants to ensure low fares for certain people, maybe they should just subsidize them directly, rather than preventing supply & demand from working for everyone else.
By using Uber aren't you restricted to just using one app for that particular company? And if you are using Lyft then, well, aren't you then using multiple apps which you seem to be against?
I see your point here, and sorry if I didn't elaborate on this before, but a couple of counterpoints:
1) There's only 3 ride-sharing apps that I know of: Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar. The first two are easily the biggest, I'm pretty sure; I don't think Sidecar even competes directly with them. And there's only those two, nationwide; if you go to different metro areas, you still only have to deal with one or two ride-sharing companies. With regular cab companies, there's a bunch of them in any given metro area, and they're all different. If you travel to a handful of different cities for work, for instance, that means you'll have to deal with dozens of cab companies' apps. Even if you stick to one area, there's still likely quite a few companies there.
2) Uber's drivers aren't employees, they're "contractors", and more importantly, they actually compete with each other. With a regular cab company, you're stuck with whoever they feel like sending. With Uber, you can reject drivers if you don't like them (rating is too low, personal experience with them before, their car is ugly, whatever). In fact, sometimes it really pays to reject a driver, because some guy who's really far away may grab your fare, so you can reject him and let a closer driver take you instead. Anyway, with Uber/Lyft, you have options, and control over who drives you. U/L are really just ways for drivers to connect with riders; though the pricing is controlled, and some other aspects, it's not like a regular taxi company (or any other business) where the company picks the employee you're going to deal with, and you can like it or lump it.
Why the fuck should I be constrained to using one company's cabs with their app? Why the fuck would I start up 5 different apps to see which company has a cab closest to me?
You're a fucking moron. Go fuck a donkey, you anonymous piece of shit.
The 30-60 minute wait is mainly because the taxi is busy or will take that long to arrive so that part of your argument is pretty poor.
100% wrong. If that's the case, why is it that I can get an Uber, in the same place and same time, in less than 5 minutes? Obviously, there's a problem with the cab company, not with too few drivers. Or maybe the regulation has intentionally constrained the supply of drivers and cabs, because the goal of the regulation is to greatly reduce competition and keep prices high.
And if things are working "well" in other countries, then why is there so much demand for Uber? If things were that great, they wouldn't have any customers there, because the riders would stick with the traditional cab companies.
Citation needed. From what I remember on Uber's own website, they claim to do background checks of drivers. That doesn't sound like opposition to me.
Plus, regular cab companies don't do background checks. There's no guarantee, or even any way to check, that the driver that picks you up in a yellow cab has been checked.
No-one is arguing that it's wrong for Uber to enhance the UI of getting a taxi ride with a smartphone application.
Yes, they are. The traditional cab companies don't want anything to do with this, and want people to stick to calling them on the phone, or with some of them, using their own cab-calling app (which of course only works for their company, and sure as hell doesn't let you rate drivers).
The problem is that Uber operates a taxi service with unlicensed drivers in unlicensed cars.
Then that's something the governments need to work with Uber on fixing, instead of trying to shut them down. So far, Uber is providing a service that's far better, with better driver and better cars and better service along with the better UI, all at a much cheaper price.
You have a very strange idea about how taxis work.
because their usage is sporadic — you need it, you raise a hand to hail one and take the first available without any way of figuring out the driver's and his company's reputation.
Absolutely, 100% wrong unless you live in Manhattan, NYC. Have you ever been outside Manhattan? I used to live in northern NJ, and I noticed that a lot of Manhattanites had an extremely myopic view of the world, and it seemed like many of them had never left the island at all and couldn't conceive of how life is very different outside their little bubble.
Let me clue you in. Outside of Manhattan (but inside the US), at almost any place except for a busy airport's taxi stand, or a few select high-density downtown areas (perhaps SF or Chicago), you don't get a cab by raising your hand. Instead, you (before Uber came along) had to find a phone, then find a phone book (remember those?), then look up cab companies, call one of them, hope they're open, and have them "radio dispatch" a driver to pick you up. You could be waiting 30-60 minutes to get a ride. After smartphones became common, it got a little easier because now you have a phone in your pocket and can look up cab companies on Google Maps, but the 30-60 minute wait was still there.
Uber/Lyft changed all that, because now you could just start up the U/L app, hit a button, and a driver would pick up the hail and start driving to you immediately, without having to talk to some moron at a dispatch office and try to tell them where you're located; the app knows exactly where you are from your GPS location, and sends that to the driver. Then, you can see just how far away the driver is, so if he's too far away you can cancel that hail and start a new one and let another closer driver pick it up. U/L put power back into the hands of the consumer, rather than the service provider.
The stuff about reputation is good too, but the biggest difference I saw in using the services a handful of times when my car was unavailable was convenience.
U/L really are revolutionary in multiple ways: convenience, reputation, etc.; I do believe they still need regulation, but this seems like an unfortunately case where many different governments in different places are showing themselves to be either incompetent or outright corrupt by attempting to kill U/L instead of working with them to establish good regulations, mainly because the established taxi companies don't like it and want to keep things in the 20th century, where consumers have no way of sharing information about cab companies and drivers and have no way of easily making use of them.
And since everyplace online or offline is owned by someone, this ends up being a rather clever way to render that First Amendment null and void in practice while still paying it lip service in speeches.
Somehow, StormFront doesn't seem to have any problems keeping their site running.
You can always set up your own server too; you just have to sign up for the appropriate service level from an ISP.
Actually, there's a much, much bigger problem for YOU: you can't read!
Go back and read my whole post. I said basically the same thing as your rant. You just read the first few lines of my post, got mad for some dumb reason, and ran off at the mouth without even bothering to read the rest of my post, which explicitly made clear the difference between public and private ownership of a "podium" from which to speak.
No wonder everything is going downhill in this society. People see one little soundbite and start screaming, instead of reading the whole thing for context. It's also no wonder religious fundamentalism is so strong in America, with attitudes like this: just read one little phrase out of the Bible, ignoring all the context around it, and make up a whole belief system based on it.
There's nothing stopping you from paying $5/month somewhere and setting up a crappy Wordpress site where you and your racist buddies can chat all you want. The Google bit is apples-and-oranges. Google is not a forum (not the search engine part anyway), it's a way to find stuff. A forum is a forum, a destination, a "community". And finally, "caving to government pressure" implies a form of censorship. Reddit isn't "caving to government pressure", they're removing some assholes from their site voluntarily, because those assholes make them look bad and cost them a lot in administration time. Private companies have every right to select who their users/customers are, as long as they don't discriminate along federally-protected classes. If you're making a scene in a brick-and-mortar store, the manager has every right to force you to leave, and if you refuse, the police will take you to jail for trespassing.
They're destroying a community full of racists. You're the one complaining about "destroying" that "community". It sounds like you're a racist, and thus an asshole.
If you like racist speech so much, why don't you set up your own forum for it?
Oh please. It's not like the racists are going to take over/r/movies or whatever. What are they going to do, start having conversations in some other forum? You don't think the mods there will swiftly ban them?
And who cares if they're "hard to find"? They're simply going to leave Reddit and find some other forum, perhaps Stormfront (which happily allows that kind of talk). It's not Reddit's job to be the moral police, they just don't want to deal with racist scumbags, or have them tarnishing the site's image.
ISPs are a special case, because they're a telecommunications provider. Way back, before the internet, the phone companies ran into this issue, and they were legally deemed "common carriers". The deal was, they could not censor or hinder customers' communications in any way, and in exchange, they were immune from any legal liability for those communications. So if some terrorists used the phone network to plot an attack, the phone company was not liable for that, because it wasn't their job to listen in on everyone's communications (and instead, because of privacy, they're explicitly not allowed to; only police with a warrant were allowed to "wipe-tap").
For some strange reason, this principle has been completely forgotten about in the Internet Age, and we're reinvented it with the name "Network Neutrality". But it's basically the same idea, and it's galling that this wasn't firmly established 20 years ago (with some possible exceptions for QoS: Skype packets should be prioritized over email and bittorrent packets, for instance).
For ballpoint pens, that one is a bit ridiculous, because it's plainly impossible to enforce. It's also plainly illegal according to the First Sale doctrine. Companies can't sell you physical items and then tell you what you can and can't do with them, including reselling them to others (though they don't have to honor warrantees if they're "used" or not sold by authorized dealers). They can try to put up technical hurdles (like chipped printer cartridges), but there's no legal weight behind them, and depending on how reasonable those hurdles are, they can get sued for them if they weren't disclosed before (unfortunately, the claim that 3rd-party or remanufactured consumables are inferior is sufficient, since the printer and coffee maker companies both use this excuse).
Ceasing to use one isn't that hard, but it does mean giving up your account and the reputation it's built up, the community including what may be a number of personal friends, etc.
Yes, but this account is 1) free of charge and 2) on someone else's servers, which is costing them money in bandwidth, electricity, hardware, and administration. You are not entitled to getting a service for free; this is the fundamental issue here. If you don't like their service, you can demand a refund (of $0.00), and use a different service, or start your own. I guess you could try to get the law changed so that Reddit isn't allowed to ban anyone or censor in any way, and must give white supremacists their own forums, but 1) if that ends up costing Reddit too much, they'll just shut their doors, and you won't have a service at all, and 2) good luck getting politicians to push a law to help out blatant racists. Even the Republican politicians aren't dumb enough to get behind that; many of them support certain forms and amounts of racism, but they certainly aren't completely blatant about it.
Do they actually advertise that they have "free speech" forums with no restrictions whatsoever, and that anything goes? I doubt that.
Besides, if you're unhappy with their service, you can always request a full refund of the money you paid to have an account there. I'm sure they'd be happy to do better, and refund you 1 million times your membership fee.
Actually if you own a shopping mall in the USA and a self-appointed preacher enters and starts to sermon about the end of world being nigh, you have to tolerate that. Since the mall floor is open to the general public, including those who just want to admire the shop window displays for free, you can't discriminate
That's total bullshit. If that were true, there's be tons of preachers at malls every night, bothering shoppers. No, the mall does not have to tolerate that; that's why they have private security. Anyone who causes a disturbance (and public speaking is a disturbance in a mall) is thrown out. Malls are private property, no different from a Walmart. You're not allowed to go into a Walmart and preach either. You're only allowed to stay there as long as the management decides you're not a problem. Every business open to the public in America is like this.
This is why you only see those annoying preachers on street corners in areas with lots of pedestrians. Those are actual public spaces where people are allowed to exercise their freedom of speech. Not on privately-owned property.
The "private club" thing only affects who you can allow in. If you're "open to the public", you can't discriminate. That's why some golf courses are "private clubs", so they can only have white people.
'Freedom of speech' is an awesome and wonderful thing. But where do you draw the line?
It's simple: you don't. It's right there in the First Amendment: any speech is legal, as long as it isn't something along the lines of yelling "fire" in a theater.
However, the thing everyone keeps missing is that some random internet site (in this case, Reddit) is owned by some other person or entity, and they can censor stuff on their own site as much as they want. If you don't like it, find another site, or buy your own.
So, if you're talking about legality, the line is speech which constitutes an actual threat of harm or causes people to get hurt (this is case law dating back decades or more). If you're talking about privately-owned forums, the line is wherever the owner of that forum decides it to be. If the owner of that forum wants to just ban people and posts arbitrarily, for no good reason at all, that's their right.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're entitled to use someone else's podium for your speech.
So, to address your other points: Is it as OK for someone to have a discussion forum where they talk about all the sexual fantasies they have about children Answer: yes. It doesn't put anyone in immediate harm (the fire-in-theater-test), so it's legal. You probably won't find many public forums willing to host that kind of discussion, so you'll have to set up your own forum and pay for it yourself.
Is it as OK to have a place where people are talking about how blacks and immigrants are awful and how they shouldn't be 'allowed' to live as well as white people
Answer: yes, with the same caveats as above. Stormfront did exactly that; they have their own site, so no one can censor them there. If you want to participate in racist discussions with a bunch of low-foreheads, point your browser there.
How about religious extremists promoting violence as a way of spreading their (version of their) 'faith'
Answer: yes, with the same caveats as above. There's countless churches that preach this crap every Sunday in person too.
There has to be a balance
So you're arguing for government censorship? Are you forgetting that about half the people in Congress are from a party that sides with religious people who advocate violence? This is the government you want censoring things?
Does anyone remember the time when software just WORKED?
I remember those days well. It was just like yesterday.
However, back in those days, our computers ran MS-DOS, and weren't connected to the internet. For the few people who did have internet access (mainly college students), they usually didn't have their own computer hooked up to the internet, they shared some VAX or Unix machine, and mainly used it just for email, USENET, and maybe exchanging files via FTP. Some people used Gopher, though I don't remember what for. Since so few people used networked computers, hacking wasn't much of a problem, and was mostly an activity done by bored college students to see if they could.
Also, I do remember some updates back then, mainly to DOS games. Even back then, the games were buggy, but not too much. I remember some of them using some kind of utility (was it called "Patch"?) to update their software, so the updates could be distributed on BBSs. This software actually worked quite well: it only contained the parts that had changed, and the utility would actually modify the binaries on-disk as necessary. I haven't seen anything like it since, which is a shame since we do so many updates these days. For some strange reason, all our updates now involve distributing a bundle that includes all the changed files (rather than just the changed part of a file), so the update bundle is much larger than it needs to be. If some pathetically slow circa-1992 DOS machine could handle modifying binaries on-disk, why can't modern machines? It would save a huge amoung of bandwidth.
Slashdot Mirror
I've put up more than one ghost bike in my time, and it is almost always a hit and run wreck.
Huh? WTF is a "ghost bike"? Is this some kind of simulation or something?
But yeah, what we really need is separate bike lanes, so cyclists don't have to worry about getting creamed by a car. Shitty cyclists suck, but they're not nearly as dangerous as shitty drivers. 200lbs of mass at 10-20mph doesn't have remotely as much kinetic energy as 3000lb at 50mph.
Hopefully when Blackberry goes out of business, they'll open-source QNX.
Eradicating blatant sexism is.
That's like saying that "encryption isn't the answer, eradicating computer misuse is."
Please tell us how you plan to eradicate blatant sexism in Saudi Arabia. I'm really interested in how you think the culture there can be changed, and why women should sit at home and never travel until sexism has been eradicated, rather than just using Uber.
I know, I know. Sorry. It's too bad this place is so chock-full of them these days though.
How is that a problem?
It's not a "problem", I'm pointing out that what little money Uber may be saving by avoiding that isn't enough to cause the fares for riding an Uber to be **so** much cheaper than taking a regular cab.
What this means is that obviously, there's some other reason cabs cost a ridiculous amount of money; either from price gouging by the cab companies, or from excessive regulation costs (from the "medallion", which is nothing more than a way to limit competition unfairly).
Why would you think it costs less? That Mercedes with leather seats and that nice middle-class or above driver wasn't paid for by Uber.
Yes, actually it is. The driver has to pay for it himself, and if driving for Uber doesn't net him enough money to make it worth it to make his Mercedes payments, he's not going to bother.
Obviously, driving for Uber is generating enough cash for the Mercedes owner that he can afford such a vehicle.
Your driver most likely paid for it using a his main or previous middle-class or above job.
If he's working Uber on the side, then what's the problem? Looks like Uber found a better business model to me. Instead of riding with some guy who doesn't speak English and drives a 30-year-old jalopy, I get to ride with a guy who speaks great English, uses his smartphone to navigate instead of taking some weird back route that's twice as long (to get a higher fare), drives a really nice car, and costs me half as much. What the fuck is the problem with that? Why should people be restricted to working only one job?
And if he bought the car at his previous job, got laid off, and is now making ends meet with Uber, again, WTF is the problem with that?
It sounds like you have a problem with people working voluntarily, at hours they choose, instead of being stuck with a wage-slave job and having to work at hours their employer demands.
Uber doesn't seem to be offering something to people who need a guaranteed pick-up at 5am to get to the airport/railway station.
You want a guaranteed pick-up? Make an appointment with a limo service, or take the bus.
You can't have something for nothing.
The problem with this is there's no way in hell that Uber is saving *that much* money with background checks, to where it costs less than 1/2 as much to get somewhere, and I can do it in a newer Mercedes with leather seats rather than some 20-year-old stinky piece of shit car, and with a driver who obviously is middle-class or above and speaks perfect English, rather than a driver who barely speaks the language at all (and thus, you would think, costs less).
This ensures that there is a supply of taxis in most cases, and not just around congested more profitable locations.
Wrong. Source: you. You just said there's a shortage of taxis, in reference to my 30-60 minute waiting time complaint. Obviously, fixing the fares **doesn't** ensure a supply of taxis in most cases. A 30-60 minute waiting time is completely usuable for a service.
If the government wants to ensure low fares for certain people, maybe they should just subsidize them directly, rather than preventing supply & demand from working for everyone else.
By using Uber aren't you restricted to just using one app for that particular company? And if you are using Lyft then, well, aren't you then using multiple apps which you seem to be against?
I see your point here, and sorry if I didn't elaborate on this before, but a couple of counterpoints:
1) There's only 3 ride-sharing apps that I know of: Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar. The first two are easily the biggest, I'm pretty sure; I don't think Sidecar even competes directly with them. And there's only those two, nationwide; if you go to different metro areas, you still only have to deal with one or two ride-sharing companies. With regular cab companies, there's a bunch of them in any given metro area, and they're all different. If you travel to a handful of different cities for work, for instance, that means you'll have to deal with dozens of cab companies' apps. Even if you stick to one area, there's still likely quite a few companies there.
2) Uber's drivers aren't employees, they're "contractors", and more importantly, they actually compete with each other. With a regular cab company, you're stuck with whoever they feel like sending. With Uber, you can reject drivers if you don't like them (rating is too low, personal experience with them before, their car is ugly, whatever). In fact, sometimes it really pays to reject a driver, because some guy who's really far away may grab your fare, so you can reject him and let a closer driver take you instead. Anyway, with Uber/Lyft, you have options, and control over who drives you. U/L are really just ways for drivers to connect with riders; though the pricing is controlled, and some other aspects, it's not like a regular taxi company (or any other business) where the company picks the employee you're going to deal with, and you can like it or lump it.
Yes, that's exactly what I said, asswipe.
Why the fuck should I be constrained to using one company's cabs with their app? Why the fuck would I start up 5 different apps to see which company has a cab closest to me?
You're a fucking moron. Go fuck a donkey, you anonymous piece of shit.
Bullshit.
The 30-60 minute wait is mainly because the taxi is busy or will take that long to arrive so that part of your argument is pretty poor.
100% wrong. If that's the case, why is it that I can get an Uber, in the same place and same time, in less than 5 minutes? Obviously, there's a problem with the cab company, not with too few drivers. Or maybe the regulation has intentionally constrained the supply of drivers and cabs, because the goal of the regulation is to greatly reduce competition and keep prices high.
And if things are working "well" in other countries, then why is there so much demand for Uber? If things were that great, they wouldn't have any customers there, because the riders would stick with the traditional cab companies.
Citation needed. From what I remember on Uber's own website, they claim to do background checks of drivers. That doesn't sound like opposition to me.
Plus, regular cab companies don't do background checks. There's no guarantee, or even any way to check, that the driver that picks you up in a yellow cab has been checked.
No-one is arguing that it's wrong for Uber to enhance the UI of getting a taxi ride with a smartphone application.
Yes, they are. The traditional cab companies don't want anything to do with this, and want people to stick to calling them on the phone, or with some of them, using their own cab-calling app (which of course only works for their company, and sure as hell doesn't let you rate drivers).
The problem is that Uber operates a taxi service with unlicensed drivers in unlicensed cars.
Then that's something the governments need to work with Uber on fixing, instead of trying to shut them down. So far, Uber is providing a service that's far better, with better driver and better cars and better service along with the better UI, all at a much cheaper price.
You have a very strange idea about how taxis work.
because their usage is sporadic — you need it, you raise a hand to hail one and take the first available without any way of figuring out the driver's and his company's reputation.
Absolutely, 100% wrong unless you live in Manhattan, NYC. Have you ever been outside Manhattan? I used to live in northern NJ, and I noticed that a lot of Manhattanites had an extremely myopic view of the world, and it seemed like many of them had never left the island at all and couldn't conceive of how life is very different outside their little bubble.
Let me clue you in. Outside of Manhattan (but inside the US), at almost any place except for a busy airport's taxi stand, or a few select high-density downtown areas (perhaps SF or Chicago), you don't get a cab by raising your hand. Instead, you (before Uber came along) had to find a phone, then find a phone book (remember those?), then look up cab companies, call one of them, hope they're open, and have them "radio dispatch" a driver to pick you up. You could be waiting 30-60 minutes to get a ride. After smartphones became common, it got a little easier because now you have a phone in your pocket and can look up cab companies on Google Maps, but the 30-60 minute wait was still there.
Uber/Lyft changed all that, because now you could just start up the U/L app, hit a button, and a driver would pick up the hail and start driving to you immediately, without having to talk to some moron at a dispatch office and try to tell them where you're located; the app knows exactly where you are from your GPS location, and sends that to the driver. Then, you can see just how far away the driver is, so if he's too far away you can cancel that hail and start a new one and let another closer driver pick it up. U/L put power back into the hands of the consumer, rather than the service provider.
The stuff about reputation is good too, but the biggest difference I saw in using the services a handful of times when my car was unavailable was convenience.
U/L really are revolutionary in multiple ways: convenience, reputation, etc.; I do believe they still need regulation, but this seems like an unfortunately case where many different governments in different places are showing themselves to be either incompetent or outright corrupt by attempting to kill U/L instead of working with them to establish good regulations, mainly because the established taxi companies don't like it and want to keep things in the 20th century, where consumers have no way of sharing information about cab companies and drivers and have no way of easily making use of them.
And since everyplace online or offline is owned by someone, this ends up being a rather clever way to render that First Amendment null and void in practice while still paying it lip service in speeches.
Somehow, StormFront doesn't seem to have any problems keeping their site running.
You can always set up your own server too; you just have to sign up for the appropriate service level from an ISP.
The lack of reading comprehension and the jumping to conclusions. I guess we Americans don't have a monopoly on those things after all...
How quaint. But there is one problem for you:
Actually, there's a much, much bigger problem for YOU: you can't read!
Go back and read my whole post. I said basically the same thing as your rant. You just read the first few lines of my post, got mad for some dumb reason, and ran off at the mouth without even bothering to read the rest of my post, which explicitly made clear the difference between public and private ownership of a "podium" from which to speak.
No wonder everything is going downhill in this society. People see one little soundbite and start screaming, instead of reading the whole thing for context. It's also no wonder religious fundamentalism is so strong in America, with attitudes like this: just read one little phrase out of the Bible, ignoring all the context around it, and make up a whole belief system based on it.
There's nothing stopping you from paying $5/month somewhere and setting up a crappy Wordpress site where you and your racist buddies can chat all you want. The Google bit is apples-and-oranges. Google is not a forum (not the search engine part anyway), it's a way to find stuff. A forum is a forum, a destination, a "community". And finally, "caving to government pressure" implies a form of censorship. Reddit isn't "caving to government pressure", they're removing some assholes from their site voluntarily, because those assholes make them look bad and cost them a lot in administration time. Private companies have every right to select who their users/customers are, as long as they don't discriminate along federally-protected classes. If you're making a scene in a brick-and-mortar store, the manager has every right to force you to leave, and if you refuse, the police will take you to jail for trespassing.
They're destroying a community full of racists. You're the one complaining about "destroying" that "community". It sounds like you're a racist, and thus an asshole.
If you like racist speech so much, why don't you set up your own forum for it?
Oh please. It's not like the racists are going to take over /r/movies or whatever. What are they going to do, start having conversations in some other forum? You don't think the mods there will swiftly ban them?
And who cares if they're "hard to find"? They're simply going to leave Reddit and find some other forum, perhaps Stormfront (which happily allows that kind of talk). It's not Reddit's job to be the moral police, they just don't want to deal with racist scumbags, or have them tarnishing the site's image.
ISPs are a special case, because they're a telecommunications provider. Way back, before the internet, the phone companies ran into this issue, and they were legally deemed "common carriers". The deal was, they could not censor or hinder customers' communications in any way, and in exchange, they were immune from any legal liability for those communications. So if some terrorists used the phone network to plot an attack, the phone company was not liable for that, because it wasn't their job to listen in on everyone's communications (and instead, because of privacy, they're explicitly not allowed to; only police with a warrant were allowed to "wipe-tap").
For some strange reason, this principle has been completely forgotten about in the Internet Age, and we're reinvented it with the name "Network Neutrality". But it's basically the same idea, and it's galling that this wasn't firmly established 20 years ago (with some possible exceptions for QoS: Skype packets should be prioritized over email and bittorrent packets, for instance).
For ballpoint pens, that one is a bit ridiculous, because it's plainly impossible to enforce. It's also plainly illegal according to the First Sale doctrine. Companies can't sell you physical items and then tell you what you can and can't do with them, including reselling them to others (though they don't have to honor warrantees if they're "used" or not sold by authorized dealers). They can try to put up technical hurdles (like chipped printer cartridges), but there's no legal weight behind them, and depending on how reasonable those hurdles are, they can get sued for them if they weren't disclosed before (unfortunately, the claim that 3rd-party or remanufactured consumables are inferior is sufficient, since the printer and coffee maker companies both use this excuse).
Ceasing to use one isn't that hard, but it does mean giving up your account and the reputation it's built up, the community including what may be a number of personal friends, etc.
Yes, but this account is 1) free of charge and 2) on someone else's servers, which is costing them money in bandwidth, electricity, hardware, and administration. You are not entitled to getting a service for free; this is the fundamental issue here. If you don't like their service, you can demand a refund (of $0.00), and use a different service, or start your own. I guess you could try to get the law changed so that Reddit isn't allowed to ban anyone or censor in any way, and must give white supremacists their own forums, but 1) if that ends up costing Reddit too much, they'll just shut their doors, and you won't have a service at all, and 2) good luck getting politicians to push a law to help out blatant racists. Even the Republican politicians aren't dumb enough to get behind that; many of them support certain forms and amounts of racism, but they certainly aren't completely blatant about it.
Do they actually advertise that they have "free speech" forums with no restrictions whatsoever, and that anything goes? I doubt that.
Besides, if you're unhappy with their service, you can always request a full refund of the money you paid to have an account there. I'm sure they'd be happy to do better, and refund you 1 million times your membership fee.
Actually if you own a shopping mall in the USA and a self-appointed preacher enters and starts to sermon about the end of world being nigh, you have to tolerate that. Since the mall floor is open to the general public, including those who just want to admire the shop window displays for free, you can't discriminate
That's total bullshit. If that were true, there's be tons of preachers at malls every night, bothering shoppers. No, the mall does not have to tolerate that; that's why they have private security. Anyone who causes a disturbance (and public speaking is a disturbance in a mall) is thrown out. Malls are private property, no different from a Walmart. You're not allowed to go into a Walmart and preach either. You're only allowed to stay there as long as the management decides you're not a problem. Every business open to the public in America is like this.
This is why you only see those annoying preachers on street corners in areas with lots of pedestrians. Those are actual public spaces where people are allowed to exercise their freedom of speech. Not on privately-owned property.
The "private club" thing only affects who you can allow in. If you're "open to the public", you can't discriminate. That's why some golf courses are "private clubs", so they can only have white people.
'Freedom of speech' is an awesome and wonderful thing. But where do you draw the line?
It's simple: you don't. It's right there in the First Amendment: any speech is legal, as long as it isn't something along the lines of yelling "fire" in a theater.
However, the thing everyone keeps missing is that some random internet site (in this case, Reddit) is owned by some other person or entity, and they can censor stuff on their own site as much as they want. If you don't like it, find another site, or buy your own.
So, if you're talking about legality, the line is speech which constitutes an actual threat of harm or causes people to get hurt (this is case law dating back decades or more). If you're talking about privately-owned forums, the line is wherever the owner of that forum decides it to be. If the owner of that forum wants to just ban people and posts arbitrarily, for no good reason at all, that's their right.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you're entitled to use someone else's podium for your speech.
So, to address your other points:
Is it as OK for someone to have a discussion forum where they talk about all the sexual fantasies they have about children
Answer: yes. It doesn't put anyone in immediate harm (the fire-in-theater-test), so it's legal. You probably won't find many public forums willing to host that kind of discussion, so you'll have to set up your own forum and pay for it yourself.
Is it as OK to have a place where people are talking about how blacks and immigrants are awful and how they shouldn't be 'allowed' to live as well as white people
Answer: yes, with the same caveats as above. Stormfront did exactly that; they have their own site, so no one can censor them there. If you want to participate in racist discussions with a bunch of low-foreheads, point your browser there.
How about religious extremists promoting violence as a way of spreading their (version of their) 'faith'
Answer: yes, with the same caveats as above. There's countless churches that preach this crap every Sunday in person too.
There has to be a balance
So you're arguing for government censorship? Are you forgetting that about half the people in Congress are from a party that sides with religious people who advocate violence? This is the government you want censoring things?
Does anyone remember the time when software just WORKED?
I remember those days well. It was just like yesterday.
However, back in those days, our computers ran MS-DOS, and weren't connected to the internet. For the few people who did have internet access (mainly college students), they usually didn't have their own computer hooked up to the internet, they shared some VAX or Unix machine, and mainly used it just for email, USENET, and maybe exchanging files via FTP. Some people used Gopher, though I don't remember what for. Since so few people used networked computers, hacking wasn't much of a problem, and was mostly an activity done by bored college students to see if they could.
Also, I do remember some updates back then, mainly to DOS games. Even back then, the games were buggy, but not too much. I remember some of them using some kind of utility (was it called "Patch"?) to update their software, so the updates could be distributed on BBSs. This software actually worked quite well: it only contained the parts that had changed, and the utility would actually modify the binaries on-disk as necessary. I haven't seen anything like it since, which is a shame since we do so many updates these days. For some strange reason, all our updates now involve distributing a bundle that includes all the changed files (rather than just the changed part of a file), so the update bundle is much larger than it needs to be. If some pathetically slow circa-1992 DOS machine could handle modifying binaries on-disk, why can't modern machines? It would save a huge amoung of bandwidth.