Except that neither Facebook nor Twitter are owned by the U.S. government. If they were, then absolutely, you couldn't ban a U.S. citizen from using them.
But they're not. They're publicly traded. And they have Terms of Service. If you violate the Terms of Service, then they can ban your account. Now, the question should be, are they applying those Terms of Service equally and in an unbiased manner?
I'll admit, I have a Twitter account. I mostly use it to troll politicians, and I use the word 'fuck' like it's punctuation. I won't be a bit surprised if my account gets banned. I've certainly gotten a few 'timeouts' on Twitter.
That being said, I don't want people banned just because I disagree with them. If someone is posting conservative stuff (I consider myself fairly liberal), I'm not going to report it just because it's conservative. That's silly. But I have reported people on Twitter for posting death threats, attacks on religions, etc. Because that is a violation of Twitter's ToS.
Twitter is not required to give people a platform for such things.
We're not talking about some people arguing over which Star Wars movie is the best one, where it's a matter of opinion, and each side may have valid points.
Some of these Twitter accounts regularly call for extermination of peoples, like Jews or black people, or whoever. There's no "middle ground" to be had there. There's no, "well, you have a point, but...."
Fuck that noise. They don't deserve a seat at the table.
Did.... did anyone tell the alt-right that? Because, you know, they seem to be operating under the idea that they're really conservative. (And a fair number of them are racist asshats as well.)
So, you're wrong. But you probably already knew that.
In the case of the baker/cake/gay-wedding:
When you operate a business of public accommodation, that is, a business that is open to the public, you have to operate under certain rules and laws. One of those laws is that you cannot deny service to a person solely based on that person's inclusion in a protected class.
Now, federally, there are several protected classes. They include, sex, age, nation of origin, and race. (This list is not exhaustive.)
Now, that means, if you operate a business open to the public, you cannot refuse service to someone simply and solely because they are a woman, or because they are black.
States can add to the list of federally protected classes, but may not remove anything from that list.
Colorado, where the bakery/gay-wedding case took place has added sexual orientation to that list.
Which means that the bakery could not, legally, refuse service to the couple simply because they are gay.
If the bakery had been booked solid, and could not have produced the wedding cake in the time required, it wouldn't have been a discrimination case.
If the bakery didn't even offer wedding cakes as one of the services they offered, it wouldn't have been a discrimination case.
But because they do make wedding cakes, and because the owner made it clear he wasn't selling the couple a wedding cake because they were gay, it was discrimination, and it was illegal under Colorado's laws.
I personally don't care for stories on pretty much anything Apple does, but they still should be posted. Nobody is making you read them or comment on them.
Except that with Net Neutrality, even if you only have one choice of ISP, there are certain things that ISP is still not legally allowed to do.
Without Net Neutrality, congratulations, you still only have that one ISP, but they can choose to make tiered content brackets such that unless you pay for the higher tiers, you can't get access to Facebook. Or CNN. Or whatever.
Now, I don't know if any of the ISP are really going to go that far. I suspect that it might be more along the lines of "You haven't paid for this tier of service, therefore Facebook is in the slow lane", rather than blocking it altogether.
Except that if you do a bunch of small pledges, you're being hit repeatedly with this.
Let's say, under this new plan, I make a $1 pledge a month to an artist whose work I like. Well, I don't get charged $1. I get charged $1 + ($1 * 0.029) + $0.35, for a total of $1.379 (rounded up to $1.38).
Now, let's expand on that. Let's say that there's 20 artists on Patreon I like. I do the same $1 a month pledge to each of them. That's that $1.38 times 20, or $27.60.
Before this change to the fee scale goes live (I don't believe it goes into effect until later this month), if I did 20 $1 pledges, it cost me $20.
Now, that's a bit of a difference there.... $20.00 vs $27.60. It's not much to me, but it can mean the difference between supporting certain artists or not.
Now, in neither case (either before these fee changes or after), was the artist I was supporting getting the full $1. Patreon was taking a minor cut out of that as well.
With this fee change, they're charging donors a fee for pledging money, and charging recipients a fee for receiving money.
More to the point, when they run my (from the example above) 20 separate $1 charges, they're not doing it as 20 separate transactions to the credit card companies. Because then they (Patreon) would be hit for 20 transaction charges. They're running it as one transaction.
Now, I get it, Patreon is a business. They need money to stay afloat so they can continue to offer this service. But they're basically screwing everyone involved in using Patreon and trying to float it like it's oh so fucking amazing.
Hell, I've already seen multiple creators ask if there's a way to take on the fees themselves instead of the people donating the money, because that way, the donators aren't the ones being hit for the extra charge.
This morning, 0.001 Bitcoins would have been worth about $13.70. Right now, that same 0.001 Bitcoin is worth about $15.65. (It's down from it's earlier high.)
That's $1.95 in difference.
What's the cost to cash out? Okay, I don't know that. So I can't say how much of that $1.95 you'd lose to that. (And that's not even taking into consideration any costs associated with mining that Bitcoin, if you were even the one mining it.)
But nobody's retiring on $1.95.
Even if you had 1 whole Bitcoin, that would only be $1950. Still not enough to retire. Sure, that's not the goal of every transaction. No one reasonably looks at a single stock market transaction as "this will set me up for life".
Sure, there's currency speculators involved in this. It's a given. And they might have enough money behind them to make some serious money on this. But most people? They can't. They don't have the money lying around to invest/speculate in this at the scale where any profit would mean more than a down payment on a new car.
I don't have 17 large handy and free to spend on a cryptocurrency today. I didn't have 12.5 large handy and free yesterday, to buy that same one Bitcoin.
So, I'm going to sit back and laugh. Because someone out there (likely more than one someone) is gambling foolishly on continued value jumps. Yes, some people stand to make a tidy profit on this. Some people are going to stay on this a little too long. Sure, that's a danger with the stock market too, but the stock market typically does not fluctuate this much. (To this scale, I mean.)
I believe NASDAQ plans on introducing trading on Bitcoin futures in the first half of 2018. That's assuming that Bitcoin doesn't crash and burn before then.
Yes, but at least if you bought tulip bulbs, you could point to them and say "Those are indeed tulip bulbs. They are physical. They exist. They're right there."
Well, yeah. I mean, according to https://www.coindesk.com/price/ it's gained over $2000 in value today. But it could just as easily drop $2000 in value tomorrow.
When it fluctuates that much in the short term, there's much less incentive for businesses to use it.
"Oh, I accepted this fraction of a Bitcoin as payment, but it just dropped so much that I lost money."
- or for the holders of Bitcoins -
"Oh, I just spent that fraction of a Bitcoin as a payment for this product, but it just jumped so much that I effectively overpaid for the product."
So, normally, I don't respond to the blindingly stupid (like you), but you do realize that a number of people on your list aren't in Congress any more, right?
For fuck's sake, you list Eric Cantor on there, and he resigned in 2014. So, if you can't even manage to have a list that is current, how much else are you wrong about?
I honestly think that Trump just wanted to get into office,
See, that's a point we have to differ on. I don't think Trump actually wanted to win. Did he want the attention he got by running for the nomination? Sure. He loves being in the spotlight. I think he enjoyed all the free press he got while he was running for the nomination. But I don't think he ever planned on winning the election.
And the responsibilities of being President? I think we can safely say, not even eleven months into his term, that he really doesn't like the responsibilities. He doesn't like that he can't snap his fingers and get things done like he might be used to. He can't fire Senators and Representatives.
And he flat out hates the criticism. I mean, it was fine for him to criticize Obama. Because Trump is never wrong, just ask him. But how dare anyone criticize him? I mean, he got some back when he was just a real estate mogul. But he could ignore it, then. And then when he was the host of "The Apprentice", he could always blame an episode's ratings on someone else.
Now? Hell, even Fox News drags him on occasion. (The last Fox News job approval poll on Trump had him at -19 points, that is to say, 38% approval, 57% disapproval.)
A la carte cable channels isn't the same thing. Look, through my apartment building, I get basic cable (however that's defined). That gives me a bunch of channels, many of which, I never watch. I pay a little extra for some more channels, but I'm not paying just for those extra three or four channels that I watch. I'm paying for a bundle of channels that include those three or four.
The equivalent, with regards to the internet, would be paid access sites. Right now, with the internet access I have, I can go to CNN, Slashdot, whatever webcomics I read, etc.
I can choose to pay for extra access to the Washington Post, though. (I don't, that's just the first example of a paywalled site that I could think of.)
Under the worst-case scenario should the Net Neutrality rules go away, I'd still be paying for internet access, but I'd be limited to whatever Spectrum feels like is included in their "basic package". Okay, they're probably not so dumb and greedy as to micromanage every single site access out there, but it's easy to bet that things like Netflix will be in a tiered package. (Although that wouldn't affect me at all, as I don't have Netflix, but I digress....)
"We need a strong federal law in place to hold companies truly accountable for failing to safeguard data or inform consumers when that information has been stolen by hackers,"
....and....
If an organization "reasonably concludes that there is no reasonable risk of identity theft, fraud, or other unlawful conduct," the incident is considered exempt from the legislation.
Yeah, I'm sure no organizations will abuse that gray area at all.
What's keeping me from uploading a picture of someone else if I'm asked to? More to the point, how do they know it's a picture of me?
Same applies to bots. Yes, I'm completely and earnestly sincere in my belief that this will wholly stop bots from placing advertisements. At least until the people that run the bot networks find a workaround. You know, just like with other CAPTCHA methods.
I'm certain that Facebook has taken into consideration that people who run bot networks certainly would never use stock photos, online yearbook photos, or hell, pay people in a Third World shithole pennies to get a photo of them.
I only have a couple friends who play. Frankly, the lack of certain features, like in-game chat, even if it's only active at the Tower, really don't help with things.
I mean, normally, I don't care for shooter games to begin with. With the fact that I don't have to be super accurate (I typically equip rapid-fire weapons with large magazines), it was fun for a bit. And the story was compelling.... but it was way too short.
I started playing Destiny 2 when it released for the PC (I had pre-ordered it), and within a week or two, playing casually, I had hit the level cap, finished the main story arc, and had started gearing up. I think my light level (overall measure of how well geared you are) is in the 280s.
But I haven't played in several days. Because.... I don't know. It's not that there's nothing to do. I've got missions and strikes, and so forth that I could do. But... eh..... it just doesn't seem to be that fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that neither Facebook nor Twitter are owned by the U.S. government. If they were, then absolutely, you couldn't ban a U.S. citizen from using them.
But they're not. They're publicly traded. And they have Terms of Service. If you violate the Terms of Service, then they can ban your account. Now, the question should be, are they applying those Terms of Service equally and in an unbiased manner?
I'll admit, I have a Twitter account. I mostly use it to troll politicians, and I use the word 'fuck' like it's punctuation. I won't be a bit surprised if my account gets banned. I've certainly gotten a few 'timeouts' on Twitter.
That being said, I don't want people banned just because I disagree with them. If someone is posting conservative stuff (I consider myself fairly liberal), I'm not going to report it just because it's conservative. That's silly. But I have reported people on Twitter for posting death threats, attacks on religions, etc. Because that is a violation of Twitter's ToS.
Twitter is not required to give people a platform for such things.
Here's the thing.
We're not talking about some people arguing over which Star Wars movie is the best one, where it's a matter of opinion, and each side may have valid points.
Some of these Twitter accounts regularly call for extermination of peoples, like Jews or black people, or whoever. There's no "middle ground" to be had there. There's no, "well, you have a point, but...."
Fuck that noise. They don't deserve a seat at the table.
Wait... alt-right are populist leftists?
What?
Did.... did anyone tell the alt-right that? Because, you know, they seem to be operating under the idea that they're really conservative. (And a fair number of them are racist asshats as well.)
It's up to 280 characters now, but otherwise, yes.
So, you're wrong. But you probably already knew that.
In the case of the baker/cake/gay-wedding:
When you operate a business of public accommodation, that is, a business that is open to the public, you have to operate under certain rules and laws. One of those laws is that you cannot deny service to a person solely based on that person's inclusion in a protected class.
Now, federally, there are several protected classes. They include, sex, age, nation of origin, and race. (This list is not exhaustive.)
Now, that means, if you operate a business open to the public, you cannot refuse service to someone simply and solely because they are a woman, or because they are black.
States can add to the list of federally protected classes, but may not remove anything from that list.
Colorado, where the bakery/gay-wedding case took place has added sexual orientation to that list.
Which means that the bakery could not, legally, refuse service to the couple simply because they are gay.
If the bakery had been booked solid, and could not have produced the wedding cake in the time required, it wouldn't have been a discrimination case.
If the bakery didn't even offer wedding cakes as one of the services they offered, it wouldn't have been a discrimination case.
But because they do make wedding cakes, and because the owner made it clear he wasn't selling the couple a wedding cake because they were gay, it was discrimination, and it was illegal under Colorado's laws.
"News for nerds" includes anime nerds.
I personally don't care for stories on pretty much anything Apple does, but they still should be posted. Nobody is making you read them or comment on them.
Except that with Net Neutrality, even if you only have one choice of ISP, there are certain things that ISP is still not legally allowed to do.
Without Net Neutrality, congratulations, you still only have that one ISP, but they can choose to make tiered content brackets such that unless you pay for the higher tiers, you can't get access to Facebook. Or CNN. Or whatever.
Now, I don't know if any of the ISP are really going to go that far. I suspect that it might be more along the lines of "You haven't paid for this tier of service, therefore Facebook is in the slow lane", rather than blocking it altogether.
Hell, I don't even get a bill. My internet access is rolled into my rent, and I don't receive an itemization of that.
So yeah, my rent could go up because of my internet bill going up, and I wouldn't even know whether I should be mad at the ISP or the Landlord.
Except that if you do a bunch of small pledges, you're being hit repeatedly with this.
Let's say, under this new plan, I make a $1 pledge a month to an artist whose work I like. Well, I don't get charged $1. I get charged $1 + ($1 * 0.029) + $0.35, for a total of $1.379 (rounded up to $1.38).
Now, let's expand on that. Let's say that there's 20 artists on Patreon I like. I do the same $1 a month pledge to each of them. That's that $1.38 times 20, or $27.60.
Before this change to the fee scale goes live (I don't believe it goes into effect until later this month), if I did 20 $1 pledges, it cost me $20.
Now, that's a bit of a difference there.... $20.00 vs $27.60. It's not much to me, but it can mean the difference between supporting certain artists or not.
Now, in neither case (either before these fee changes or after), was the artist I was supporting getting the full $1. Patreon was taking a minor cut out of that as well.
With this fee change, they're charging donors a fee for pledging money, and charging recipients a fee for receiving money.
More to the point, when they run my (from the example above) 20 separate $1 charges, they're not doing it as 20 separate transactions to the credit card companies. Because then they (Patreon) would be hit for 20 transaction charges. They're running it as one transaction.
Now, I get it, Patreon is a business. They need money to stay afloat so they can continue to offer this service. But they're basically screwing everyone involved in using Patreon and trying to float it like it's oh so fucking amazing.
Hell, I've already seen multiple creators ask if there's a way to take on the fees themselves instead of the people donating the money, because that way, the donators aren't the ones being hit for the extra charge.
Okay, let's say you do that.
This morning, 0.001 Bitcoins would have been worth about $13.70. Right now, that same 0.001 Bitcoin is worth about $15.65. (It's down from it's earlier high.)
That's $1.95 in difference.
What's the cost to cash out? Okay, I don't know that. So I can't say how much of that $1.95 you'd lose to that. (And that's not even taking into consideration any costs associated with mining that Bitcoin, if you were even the one mining it.)
But nobody's retiring on $1.95.
Even if you had 1 whole Bitcoin, that would only be $1950. Still not enough to retire. Sure, that's not the goal of every transaction. No one reasonably looks at a single stock market transaction as "this will set me up for life".
Sure, there's currency speculators involved in this. It's a given. And they might have enough money behind them to make some serious money on this. But most people? They can't. They don't have the money lying around to invest/speculate in this at the scale where any profit would mean more than a down payment on a new car.
I'd like to think that most credible investment firms are not heavily plunging into Bitcoin.
I'd really like to think that.
I don't have 17 large handy and free to spend on a cryptocurrency today. I didn't have 12.5 large handy and free yesterday, to buy that same one Bitcoin.
So, I'm going to sit back and laugh. Because someone out there (likely more than one someone) is gambling foolishly on continued value jumps. Yes, some people stand to make a tidy profit on this. Some people are going to stay on this a little too long. Sure, that's a danger with the stock market too, but the stock market typically does not fluctuate this much. (To this scale, I mean.)
I believe NASDAQ plans on introducing trading on Bitcoin futures in the first half of 2018. That's assuming that Bitcoin doesn't crash and burn before then.
Yes, but at least if you bought tulip bulbs, you could point to them and say "Those are indeed tulip bulbs. They are physical. They exist. They're right there."
Well, yeah. I mean, according to https://www.coindesk.com/price/ it's gained over $2000 in value today. But it could just as easily drop $2000 in value tomorrow.
When it fluctuates that much in the short term, there's much less incentive for businesses to use it.
"Oh, I accepted this fraction of a Bitcoin as payment, but it just dropped so much that I lost money."
- or for the holders of Bitcoins -
"Oh, I just spent that fraction of a Bitcoin as a payment for this product, but it just jumped so much that I effectively overpaid for the product."
This is going to crash hard, and probably fairly soon, and people will react with "We could not have foreseen this at all!"
And I will be over here, laughing at them.
So, normally, I don't respond to the blindingly stupid (like you), but you do realize that a number of people on your list aren't in Congress any more, right?
For fuck's sake, you list Eric Cantor on there, and he resigned in 2014. So, if you can't even manage to have a list that is current, how much else are you wrong about?
See, that's a point we have to differ on. I don't think Trump actually wanted to win. Did he want the attention he got by running for the nomination? Sure. He loves being in the spotlight. I think he enjoyed all the free press he got while he was running for the nomination. But I don't think he ever planned on winning the election.
And the responsibilities of being President? I think we can safely say, not even eleven months into his term, that he really doesn't like the responsibilities. He doesn't like that he can't snap his fingers and get things done like he might be used to. He can't fire Senators and Representatives.
And he flat out hates the criticism. I mean, it was fine for him to criticize Obama. Because Trump is never wrong, just ask him. But how dare anyone criticize him? I mean, he got some back when he was just a real estate mogul. But he could ignore it, then. And then when he was the host of "The Apprentice", he could always blame an episode's ratings on someone else.
Now? Hell, even Fox News drags him on occasion. (The last Fox News job approval poll on Trump had him at -19 points, that is to say, 38% approval, 57% disapproval.)
A la carte cable channels isn't the same thing. Look, through my apartment building, I get basic cable (however that's defined). That gives me a bunch of channels, many of which, I never watch. I pay a little extra for some more channels, but I'm not paying just for those extra three or four channels that I watch. I'm paying for a bundle of channels that include those three or four.
The equivalent, with regards to the internet, would be paid access sites. Right now, with the internet access I have, I can go to CNN, Slashdot, whatever webcomics I read, etc.
I can choose to pay for extra access to the Washington Post, though. (I don't, that's just the first example of a paywalled site that I could think of.)
Under the worst-case scenario should the Net Neutrality rules go away, I'd still be paying for internet access, but I'd be limited to whatever Spectrum feels like is included in their "basic package". Okay, they're probably not so dumb and greedy as to micromanage every single site access out there, but it's easy to bet that things like Netflix will be in a tiered package. (Although that wouldn't affect me at all, as I don't have Netflix, but I digress....)
So, let me see if I have this straight...
Yeah, I'm sure no organizations will abuse that gray area at all.
I'm considering, if I get this photo request on Facebook, to either upload a picture of a clown, or maybe a velociraptor.
Perhaps if I was feeling particularly sarcastic at the time, a picture of the back of my head.
Yeah, fine, this is meant to stop bots. Whatever.
What's keeping me from uploading a picture of someone else if I'm asked to? More to the point, how do they know it's a picture of me?
Same applies to bots. Yes, I'm completely and earnestly sincere in my belief that this will wholly stop bots from placing advertisements. At least until the people that run the bot networks find a workaround. You know, just like with other CAPTCHA methods.
I'm certain that Facebook has taken into consideration that people who run bot networks certainly would never use stock photos, online yearbook photos, or hell, pay people in a Third World shithole pennies to get a photo of them.
You should go and make your own news site, with hookers, and blackjack!
I only have a couple friends who play. Frankly, the lack of certain features, like in-game chat, even if it's only active at the Tower, really don't help with things.
I mean, normally, I don't care for shooter games to begin with. With the fact that I don't have to be super accurate (I typically equip rapid-fire weapons with large magazines), it was fun for a bit. And the story was compelling.... but it was way too short.
I started playing Destiny 2 when it released for the PC (I had pre-ordered it), and within a week or two, playing casually, I had hit the level cap, finished the main story arc, and had started gearing up. I think my light level (overall measure of how well geared you are) is in the 280s.
But I haven't played in several days. Because.... I don't know. It's not that there's nothing to do. I've got missions and strikes, and so forth that I could do. But... eh..... it just doesn't seem to be that fun.