You're speaking in general terms now, instead of sticking to the topic, but I'm going to assume that when you say, "wrecking things like the First Amendment," what you're actually talking about is, "putting some restraints on political advertising funded by corporate donations." You do get specific in implying that stopping Citizens United from broadcasting their advertisement during the proscribed period is the goal of people who object to this decision... I don't know why you believe this, but my confusion is irrelevant.
I came into this thread to correct you: You said that the application of this law was partisan. That was untrue. You've equated Moor's film and the CU film in the eyes of this law. That was invalid. You are now claiming that people who disagree with you are thinking short-term. This is also untrue.
Really, the least you could do here is try and understand why people argue against this decision. To put this as unambiguously as I can: the goal in opposing this decision is not about Citizen's United, or their advertisements, or advertisements in general, or Hillary Clinton, or partisan politics. This is all about stopping corruption and anything else (limiting corporate political donations, etc.) are means to that end.
You may disagree with the method if you like. You may also disagree with the goal, maybe you love corruption or something. That's your prerogative. But whatever you may think of opposing corruption in this manner, it is not a short-term goal. It is not a partisan goal. And it's also, according to the Supreme Court, not an unconstitutional violation of the first amendment.
The Citizen's United decision didn't strike down the laws for violating the first amendment, it struck down those laws for going further than the court believed was necessary. The court was perfectly okay with putting limits on speech in the interest of preventing corruption, it just felt that preventing communication between the donor and the politician was sufficient in meeting that goal. So it struck down the further limitations enacted by the laws as being unnecessary.
Not successful, successful doesn't matter, it just had to be commercial activity. I was using Moor's success as an example of that activity, not as a prerequisite for being commercial. The law also didn't say that the government could ban films, only that political advertisements were prohibited from broadcast during a certain period in proximity to elections. This also has nothing to do with Trump's ability to muzzle the media, since the media consists of commercial activity (I gave the example of Fox News above).
I see lots of problems with lots of things, I have said nothing here in defense of this law (though, since you ask, my feelings on it are mixed). However, the problem that is most evident to me in this case is your eagerness to see conspiracies when all of the officials involved here have acted in good faith. The dems at the FEC who you said were causing all of this partisan evil were nonexistent, and the republicans there applied the law as it was written accurately and by all appearances in a fair and non-partisan fashion. There is nothing to indicate that the lawmakers who wrote the law had any goal in mind, other than limiting one more avenue for corruption. It is apparent that they were making an effort to mitigate one way in which companies with deep pockets influence politicians.
The fact that you would see this and assume villainy is a big problem. It concerns me much more than any misgivings that I may have about how the law was implemented.
You started by actually addressing the topic of political speech, in your way, and then devolved into a "Clinton is teh evil" diatribe... So I'm going to pretend that you stayed on topic, and I'll address the one thing and not the other:
The question is not whether Michael Moore's documentary was politically motivated, ha said repeatedly and explicitly that it was, there were two questions: Was the film advertised via broadcast within the period in which political broadcast advertisements are prohibited, and did those advertisements in and of themselves constitute political advertising? And second: Did the film constitute a corporate monetary contribution in favor of a candidate?
The to the first question was no - the film was not advertised via broadcast during the prohibited period, rendering the second part of that question moot. The answer to the second question was no - the film was commercial activity (the most profitable documentary ever, in fact) and so was not a contribution. There are any number of right-wing examples of this same rule, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. were all flagrantly right-wing but did not qualify as contributions. This contrasts with Citizens United, who existed only for political reasons.
Also, this happened in 2005 so those "dems at the FEC" that you're complaining about were Republican appointees.
My bet: something else happened. Specifically, we're not manufacturing large numbers of nuclear bombs anymore and so the incentive for having lots of nuclear plants has dried up.
You remember back in the day, when they were predicting that nuclear plants would make electricity free? Do you remember why that was? It wasn't because nuclear plants were free, it was because the bombs were supposed to pay for the plants and the electricity was just a bonus.
The iPod touch can also be important to iOS developers. A far less expensive device to test on.
My experience: if you're not buying new then it's cheaper to buy an iPhone than an iPod Touch. Probably due to market glut, I don't know, but check both before you buy. The difference was substantial when I did it most recently.
Why should tech CEO's or celebrities be a better source of general political ideas than Joe Sixpack?
What are you, a communist? The answer is unambiguous: because they have more money. We had a much-publicized supreme court decision on this very issue - having lots of money entitles your opinions to maximum visibility. This may seem unreasonable or unfair to a legal layperson, but lessor people are still allowed to speak in their tiny little voices, or to plug their ears if they don't like what they're hearing, so clearly we all still all have free speech and blah blah blah.
The point is: if you want a say in politics, you can have it. It's available to everyone, including Joe Sixpack, because this is a free country full of free people. Like everyone else, Joe just needs to spend a few tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and political campaigning.
What if you find yourself in a protest, with a few people misbehaving? Then what do you do?
This isn't a rhetorical question, every large protest is this way. People are protesting, after all, because they're angry about something, and with any large group of people there are going to be some with anger issues. Saying, "Just leave." isn't any different from saying, "Just give up. Abandon whatever cause has brought you out here today, protests are an unacceptable form of political expression."
Allow me to anticipate your response: "So, what, you're saying that rioting mobs are just misunderstood people who have gotten a little overly passionate? So all of that is just A-okay?" No, of course I'm not saying that. What I'm really saying is that rioting is unacceptable behavior whether everyone is doing it or only a few people are doing it, but that when you're prosecuting people it's necessary (it should be necessary) to establish guilt on an individual basis and not merely claim that a person was part of a mob and therefore guilty.
It's a minimum of 9%. This problem was, of course, recognized by the researchers. From the NYT article:
The set of players posthumously tested by Dr. McKee is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees. “There’s a tremendous selection bias,” she has cautioned, noting that many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.
But 110 positives remain significant scientific evidence of an N.F.L. player’s risk of developing C.T.E., which can be diagnosed only after death. About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.
The parent was making reference to one of the realities of current American politics: no one cares what you have to say if you're from the other party. This guy can make all of the sensible, logical, truthful, insightful statements that he likes, but as long as he's a Democrat only Democrats are going to listen to him.
It's a bit of an exaggeration to say this, but sadly not too far from the truth.
This is just a triviality of the manufacturing process. That's like saying milk isn't milk because they separate out the cream and then add it back in, or orange juice isn't orange juice - it's just a way of ensuring a consistent product.
Yes the brown sugar is more processed than refined sugar, but why are you saying that it's more unhealthy? Just the added molasses? I suppose that would marginally increase the calories if measured by volume, but wouldn't that also marginally decrease the calories if measured by weight?
I don't know anyone who upgraded from XP to 7 and was then sorry, I only heard positive things.
Well I suppose I'm not a counter example, since XP was my last MS operating system, but: mandatory Windows Genuine Advantage is what did it for me. So... there's a negative thing.
You're thinking too small. Remember the TSA's VIPER teams at train stations? If people don't push back on this, we can expect it implemented at every train station, bus station, and any other transportation hub you can think of, and probably soon(ish). The security cameras are already there. Maybe they don't all have the resolution to do decent facial recognition right now, but they all need to be replaced eventually. And while they're being replaced, why not future proof them a little? You know, just in case.
This could be broadly implemented within ten years, easily, and it wouldn't even cost that much. Drop in the bucket, comparatively.
Yeah, I got the gist of what you were saying in your comment above. I'm expecting this to be a law about what government agencies are allowed to do, and nothing to do with the population at large. If you're really worried about this then you can look up the text of the bill, it shouldn't be too hard to find.
That's even assuming that this ever gets passed though, and I can't imagine that happening.
Probably not. This is a law with three goals: preventing Trump from doing something specific, calling attention to the fact that Trump wanted to do this, and perhaps creating a law for Trump to break (and thus be more easily removed from office). In other words, this is all about Trump and will likely be written so as to effect the rest of us not at all.
If the gov. or anyone regulates the internet......there will be an encrypted version of the internet available on another level.
Yes we know this, that's what we have right now. You seem to have left out the second part of that thought though: "...and if they don't regulate the internet then there won't be squat, because the only access remaining will be whatever the ISPs choose to allow."
You're trying to imply that the FCC makes things which are equivalent to laws. This is not the case. Congress delegated this responsibility to the FCC because first: congress lacks the expertise, and second: it's too big a job for congress to handle properly, in addition to everything else they do.
However, despite being empowered to act on congresses' behalf, the FCC can not pass laws. Everything that the FCC does is subject to congressional approval, and can be overridden at any time by congress.
Netflix is employing this approach right now quite effectively, most VPN services have given up on supporting Netflix for this reason.
The fact that some Chinese families have relatives abroad and will jump through a lot of hoops to get around this is irrelevant. It doesn't have to work perfectly to be effective.
You're talking about a Model M15. And yes, you're not the only one who would like one of those. You can try ebay, but expect to pay $800+ - they are rare and highly sought after.
If this guy would do the F internals with the M15 form factor, I'd be completely sold.
Been using a Model M for a long time, for some reason I've never heard of the F until now. Maybe the feel is slightly different, maybe it isn't, as long as it's close I don't care about that. What I do care about is the N-key rollover. If you've ever done much gaming on a Model M, you have experienced this problem. An M-like keyboard with N-key rollover would be a godsend.
That said, it's the M15 that's the real prize. I wonder if this guy could be talked into doing F-style internals with an M15-style ergonomic form-factor.
You're missing the most important market: Chinese third-party app stores. That's where the money is actually coming from, jailbreaking is big business in China.
I don't think any of those things should be legal, and I'm not sure why you're assuming that I would.
I'm not assuming that you would think that, I'm drawing a parallel between anonymous political speech (advocating on a message board) and anonymous political speech (giving money to a SuperPAC. Which is speech now. This is not illegal, by the way - one of the consequences of Citizens United.), and another parallel between threatening violence on someone you don't like (a bomb threat - illegal) and publicly celebrating violence on someone you don't like (creating an effigy getting beaten up - not illegal, but the idea was that you would be able to see how these two things are kind of similar anyway. It's an analogy, after all.).
Also: "He doesn't have to explain himself for anything, unless he's actually charged with inciting violence (which he won't, because it wasn't)." I didn't say that he needed to do anything. I said that they needed to give him the opportunity to explain himself if he chose to do so.
Anyway, we're partially in agreement at the outset of this: there's a trend in journalism to add information to a story which may not be strictly necessary. Something I notice often is when they add a person's age and occupation, when those things have nothing to do with the event that they're reporting on. e.g.: "I'm here at the scene of a remarkable meteor strike, with an eye witness. Jon Johnson, 68, is a retired choreoanimator who was just walking down the street picking his nose when he says he heard a loud noise. Jon, how did that noise make you feel?"
They don't do this because the person's age or occupation are important, but because it adds a little bit of background. The audience can connect to a story a little bit better when it's fleshed out, when they're given a little more information, so that the characters and events aren't presented in a vacuum.
This annoys me because I don't generally read the news. I skim the news. I'm not looking for a story when I'm going over a news article, I'm looking for the facts and nothing else. However, I do understand why journalists do this. I don't resent them for it, and I don't think they're doing a bad job by adding extra information.
That is part of what I think happened in this case. I'm imagining something like this:
"Trump posted a meme attacking us, we should say something about it."
"Okay, we'll point out that Trump is being Trump again."
"... And?"
"And... That's bad."
"Maybe we could dig a little deeper."
"We could do a story about the role of the press, and how his constant attacks on anyone who questions him are sabotaging one of the basic requirements of democracy - namely, that the voting public be informed."
"Again? How many of those can we do in a week? We're doing a story on one particular tweet: what can we say about that?"
"Well... we don't know where Trump got this meme, but it's been making the rounds on social media. Maybe we could try and figure out where it came from."
"Okay then. We're supposed to be doing full diligence on Trump's tweeting anyway."
He's either a public figure and his identity is important information for the public, or he's a private citizen whose identity should be protected unless he agrees to go on record.
That's where you want to make that distinction? You can only be held accountable for what you say to the public in public on a public forum, as long as you say that you said it? This seems like it's inviting abuse, but anyone who's ever done anything on the internet already knows that.
How do you feel about anonymous donations to SuperPACs then? What about anonymous bomb threats? CNN made the claim that this gif was inciting violence against journalists, that doesn't seem so different.
Granted, the idea that this gif was inciting violence is about as plausible as the claim that CNN was trying to blackmail this guy. But you've obviously bought into this idea that CNN's statement was a threat, rather than a hedge against someone who's clearly willing to change his story at the drop of a hat.
Your argument seems to be centered around the idea that this guy is unimportant, which was true. Following up an obvious lead and calling the guy who made the meme in the first place was a small part of the story, not really important but a nice little thing to flesh it out. And since Trump is involved, being thorough is expected and generally necessary. The guy's reaction was what turned this into a story in its own right.
But seriously, you keep skipping the obvious: "It is relevant where the President found the meme before retweeting it, because it gives you an insight on where the President gets his information." What are you expecting them to do here? You acknowledge that the source matters, but you don't want them to examine it. The president posted the meme unattributed (like any good redditor), so figuring out where the meme comes from is the completely obvious approach. I tried to illustrate this in a slightly humorous way above, but apparently the point wasn't made.
You say your question is: what do you get by tracking down names? The answer is: someone to talk to. The point was never the name, the point was to flesh out the story a little and maintain some standard of journalistic ethics. Look, it's #8 on the SPJ Code of Ethics:
Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.
If they're going to claim that this guy is inciting violence, or that he's racially motivated, then they need to give him a chance to explain himself.
I'm sorry, I think I still haven't quite addressed what you said. There are basically two issues here: the first is that researching where memes come from is soft news and good journalists should be trying to find something more important to report on. The second is that they've taken a story about Trump and then wandered off on a tangent instead of sticking with Trump.
I hoping I'm characterizing your complaint accurately. For the first point: this is an instance where soft news and hard news overlap. Calling Trump on his bullshit has turned into it's own little industry at this point, and everything that he says gets researched. I'm not saying this is exceptional, it's possible that if a different president posted a meme then maybe that would get researched too. But when this president posts a meme, you can be damn sure that it's going to get examined. Examining what the president says, thoroughly, falls under the "important hard news" category.
For the second point: maybe. Maybe they did wander off on a tangent, but the story kind of created itself. They called this guy and didn't get in touch with him right away, left a message on his voicemail or something, and he apparently freaked out. He wrote the apology on his own initiative, edited his old comments on reddit to make himself seem a little less racist, and then called them begging them not to reveal his identity. What are they supposed to do with that? Just ignore it? What happens when people start asking about what happened to this guy? What happens when someone else starts looking into this meme that the president tweeted?
Setting those questions aside, it's probably worth pointing out that the president is apparently listening to outspoken racists. You do acknowledge this above, but just saying this without identifying who you're talking about is pretty useless. Worse than that, it's inviting denial.
Okay, you also said that you didn't think they should have tracked him down in the first place. And that CNN was behaving like a tabloid, and that you weren't sure that CNN was practicing responsible journalism. You're suggesting that it would have been more responsible for them to critique the president without doing any background investigation into what it is that he was saying? "Today the president has continued being awful. Where does he get this stuff anyway? Who knows? Not us. Let's not find out."
I get what you're saying about trying to keep the story on Trump instead of on this dude, but when the president says something then finding out as much as you can about that thing is what a journalist does. But fine, regarding your criticism of CNN changing the narrative: it's not CNN doing it. Maybe read the actual source article, it's pretty tame. The one line that people are complaining about could have been phrased better, but this story exists the way it does because interested parties have jumped on this opportunity. Not because CNN really did anything wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
You're speaking in general terms now, instead of sticking to the topic, but I'm going to assume that when you say, "wrecking things like the First Amendment," what you're actually talking about is, "putting some restraints on political advertising funded by corporate donations." You do get specific in implying that stopping Citizens United from broadcasting their advertisement during the proscribed period is the goal of people who object to this decision... I don't know why you believe this, but my confusion is irrelevant.
I came into this thread to correct you: You said that the application of this law was partisan. That was untrue. You've equated Moor's film and the CU film in the eyes of this law. That was invalid. You are now claiming that people who disagree with you are thinking short-term. This is also untrue.
Really, the least you could do here is try and understand why people argue against this decision. To put this as unambiguously as I can: the goal in opposing this decision is not about Citizen's United, or their advertisements, or advertisements in general, or Hillary Clinton, or partisan politics. This is all about stopping corruption and anything else (limiting corporate political donations, etc.) are means to that end.
You may disagree with the method if you like. You may also disagree with the goal, maybe you love corruption or something. That's your prerogative. But whatever you may think of opposing corruption in this manner, it is not a short-term goal. It is not a partisan goal. And it's also, according to the Supreme Court, not an unconstitutional violation of the first amendment.
The Citizen's United decision didn't strike down the laws for violating the first amendment, it struck down those laws for going further than the court believed was necessary. The court was perfectly okay with putting limits on speech in the interest of preventing corruption, it just felt that preventing communication between the donor and the politician was sufficient in meeting that goal. So it struck down the further limitations enacted by the laws as being unnecessary.
Not successful, successful doesn't matter, it just had to be commercial activity. I was using Moor's success as an example of that activity, not as a prerequisite for being commercial. The law also didn't say that the government could ban films, only that political advertisements were prohibited from broadcast during a certain period in proximity to elections. This also has nothing to do with Trump's ability to muzzle the media, since the media consists of commercial activity (I gave the example of Fox News above).
I see lots of problems with lots of things, I have said nothing here in defense of this law (though, since you ask, my feelings on it are mixed). However, the problem that is most evident to me in this case is your eagerness to see conspiracies when all of the officials involved here have acted in good faith. The dems at the FEC who you said were causing all of this partisan evil were nonexistent, and the republicans there applied the law as it was written accurately and by all appearances in a fair and non-partisan fashion. There is nothing to indicate that the lawmakers who wrote the law had any goal in mind, other than limiting one more avenue for corruption. It is apparent that they were making an effort to mitigate one way in which companies with deep pockets influence politicians.
The fact that you would see this and assume villainy is a big problem. It concerns me much more than any misgivings that I may have about how the law was implemented.
You started by actually addressing the topic of political speech, in your way, and then devolved into a "Clinton is teh evil" diatribe... So I'm going to pretend that you stayed on topic, and I'll address the one thing and not the other:
The question is not whether Michael Moore's documentary was politically motivated, ha said repeatedly and explicitly that it was, there were two questions: Was the film advertised via broadcast within the period in which political broadcast advertisements are prohibited, and did those advertisements in and of themselves constitute political advertising? And second: Did the film constitute a corporate monetary contribution in favor of a candidate?
The to the first question was no - the film was not advertised via broadcast during the prohibited period, rendering the second part of that question moot. The answer to the second question was no - the film was commercial activity (the most profitable documentary ever, in fact) and so was not a contribution. There are any number of right-wing examples of this same rule, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc. were all flagrantly right-wing but did not qualify as contributions. This contrasts with Citizens United, who existed only for political reasons.
Also, this happened in 2005 so those "dems at the FEC" that you're complaining about were Republican appointees.
My bet: something else happened. Specifically, we're not manufacturing large numbers of nuclear bombs anymore and so the incentive for having lots of nuclear plants has dried up.
You remember back in the day, when they were predicting that nuclear plants would make electricity free? Do you remember why that was? It wasn't because nuclear plants were free, it was because the bombs were supposed to pay for the plants and the electricity was just a bonus.
The iPod touch can also be important to iOS developers. A far less expensive device to test on.
My experience: if you're not buying new then it's cheaper to buy an iPhone than an iPod Touch. Probably due to market glut, I don't know, but check both before you buy. The difference was substantial when I did it most recently.
Why should tech CEO's or celebrities be a better source of general political ideas than Joe Sixpack?
What are you, a communist? The answer is unambiguous: because they have more money. We had a much-publicized supreme court decision on this very issue - having lots of money entitles your opinions to maximum visibility. This may seem unreasonable or unfair to a legal layperson, but lessor people are still allowed to speak in their tiny little voices, or to plug their ears if they don't like what they're hearing, so clearly we all still all have free speech and blah blah blah.
The point is: if you want a say in politics, you can have it. It's available to everyone, including Joe Sixpack, because this is a free country full of free people. Like everyone else, Joe just needs to spend a few tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and political campaigning.
What if you find yourself in a protest, with a few people misbehaving? Then what do you do?
This isn't a rhetorical question, every large protest is this way. People are protesting, after all, because they're angry about something, and with any large group of people there are going to be some with anger issues. Saying, "Just leave." isn't any different from saying, "Just give up. Abandon whatever cause has brought you out here today, protests are an unacceptable form of political expression."
Allow me to anticipate your response: "So, what, you're saying that rioting mobs are just misunderstood people who have gotten a little overly passionate? So all of that is just A-okay?" No, of course I'm not saying that. What I'm really saying is that rioting is unacceptable behavior whether everyone is doing it or only a few people are doing it, but that when you're prosecuting people it's necessary (it should be necessary) to establish guilt on an individual basis and not merely claim that a person was part of a mob and therefore guilty.
The set of players posthumously tested by Dr. McKee is far from a random sample of N.F.L. retirees. “There’s a tremendous selection bias,” she has cautioned, noting that many families have donated brains specifically because the former player showed symptoms of C.T.E.
But 110 positives remain significant scientific evidence of an N.F.L. player’s risk of developing C.T.E., which can be diagnosed only after death. About 1,300 former players have died since the B.U. group began examining brains. So even if every one of the other 1,200 players had tested negative — which even the heartiest skeptics would agree could not possibly be the case — the minimum C.T.E. prevalence would be close to 9 percent, vastly higher than in the general population.
The parent was making reference to one of the realities of current American politics: no one cares what you have to say if you're from the other party. This guy can make all of the sensible, logical, truthful, insightful statements that he likes, but as long as he's a Democrat only Democrats are going to listen to him.
It's a bit of an exaggeration to say this, but sadly not too far from the truth.
99.9999999999% of phone users do not use those
This is 1/125th of a person.
This is just a triviality of the manufacturing process. That's like saying milk isn't milk because they separate out the cream and then add it back in, or orange juice isn't orange juice - it's just a way of ensuring a consistent product.
Yes the brown sugar is more processed than refined sugar, but why are you saying that it's more unhealthy? Just the added molasses? I suppose that would marginally increase the calories if measured by volume, but wouldn't that also marginally decrease the calories if measured by weight?
I don't know anyone who upgraded from XP to 7 and was then sorry, I only heard positive things.
Well I suppose I'm not a counter example, since XP was my last MS operating system, but: mandatory Windows Genuine Advantage is what did it for me. So... there's a negative thing.
You're thinking too small. Remember the TSA's VIPER teams at train stations? If people don't push back on this, we can expect it implemented at every train station, bus station, and any other transportation hub you can think of, and probably soon(ish). The security cameras are already there. Maybe they don't all have the resolution to do decent facial recognition right now, but they all need to be replaced eventually. And while they're being replaced, why not future proof them a little? You know, just in case.
This could be broadly implemented within ten years, easily, and it wouldn't even cost that much. Drop in the bucket, comparatively.
Yeah, I got the gist of what you were saying in your comment above. I'm expecting this to be a law about what government agencies are allowed to do, and nothing to do with the population at large. If you're really worried about this then you can look up the text of the bill, it shouldn't be too hard to find.
That's even assuming that this ever gets passed though, and I can't imagine that happening.
Probably not. This is a law with three goals: preventing Trump from doing something specific, calling attention to the fact that Trump wanted to do this, and perhaps creating a law for Trump to break (and thus be more easily removed from office). In other words, this is all about Trump and will likely be written so as to effect the rest of us not at all.
If the gov. or anyone regulates the internet... ...there will be an encrypted version of the internet available on another level.
Yes we know this, that's what we have right now. You seem to have left out the second part of that thought though: "...and if they don't regulate the internet then there won't be squat, because the only access remaining will be whatever the ISPs choose to allow."
You're trying to imply that the FCC makes things which are equivalent to laws. This is not the case. Congress delegated this responsibility to the FCC because first: congress lacks the expertise, and second: it's too big a job for congress to handle properly, in addition to everything else they do.
However, despite being empowered to act on congresses' behalf, the FCC can not pass laws. Everything that the FCC does is subject to congressional approval, and can be overridden at any time by congress.
Netflix is employing this approach right now quite effectively, most VPN services have given up on supporting Netflix for this reason.
The fact that some Chinese families have relatives abroad and will jump through a lot of hoops to get around this is irrelevant. It doesn't have to work perfectly to be effective.
You're talking about a Model M15. And yes, you're not the only one who would like one of those. You can try ebay, but expect to pay $800+ - they are rare and highly sought after.
If this guy would do the F internals with the M15 form factor, I'd be completely sold.
Been using a Model M for a long time, for some reason I've never heard of the F until now. Maybe the feel is slightly different, maybe it isn't, as long as it's close I don't care about that. What I do care about is the N-key rollover. If you've ever done much gaming on a Model M, you have experienced this problem. An M-like keyboard with N-key rollover would be a godsend.
That said, it's the M15 that's the real prize. I wonder if this guy could be talked into doing F-style internals with an M15-style ergonomic form-factor.
You're missing the most important market: Chinese third-party app stores. That's where the money is actually coming from, jailbreaking is big business in China.
I don't think any of those things should be legal, and I'm not sure why you're assuming that I would.
I'm not assuming that you would think that, I'm drawing a parallel between anonymous political speech (advocating on a message board) and anonymous political speech (giving money to a SuperPAC. Which is speech now. This is not illegal, by the way - one of the consequences of Citizens United.), and another parallel between threatening violence on someone you don't like (a bomb threat - illegal) and publicly celebrating violence on someone you don't like (creating an effigy getting beaten up - not illegal, but the idea was that you would be able to see how these two things are kind of similar anyway. It's an analogy, after all.).
Also: "He doesn't have to explain himself for anything, unless he's actually charged with inciting violence (which he won't, because it wasn't)." I didn't say that he needed to do anything. I said that they needed to give him the opportunity to explain himself if he chose to do so.
Anyway, we're partially in agreement at the outset of this: there's a trend in journalism to add information to a story which may not be strictly necessary. Something I notice often is when they add a person's age and occupation, when those things have nothing to do with the event that they're reporting on. e.g.: "I'm here at the scene of a remarkable meteor strike, with an eye witness. Jon Johnson, 68, is a retired choreoanimator who was just walking down the street picking his nose when he says he heard a loud noise. Jon, how did that noise make you feel?"
They don't do this because the person's age or occupation are important, but because it adds a little bit of background. The audience can connect to a story a little bit better when it's fleshed out, when they're given a little more information, so that the characters and events aren't presented in a vacuum.
This annoys me because I don't generally read the news. I skim the news. I'm not looking for a story when I'm going over a news article, I'm looking for the facts and nothing else. However, I do understand why journalists do this. I don't resent them for it, and I don't think they're doing a bad job by adding extra information.
That is part of what I think happened in this case. I'm imagining something like this:
"Trump posted a meme attacking us, we should say something about it."
"Okay, we'll point out that Trump is being Trump again."
"... And?"
"And... That's bad."
"Maybe we could dig a little deeper."
"We could do a story about the role of the press, and how his constant attacks on anyone who questions him are sabotaging one of the basic requirements of democracy - namely, that the voting public be informed."
"Again? How many of those can we do in a week? We're doing a story on one particular tweet: what can we say about that?"
"Well... we don't know where Trump got this meme, but it's been making the rounds on social media. Maybe we could try and figure out where it came from."
"Okay then. We're supposed to be doing full diligence on Trump's tweeting anyway."
He's either a public figure and his identity is important information for the public, or he's a private citizen whose identity should be protected unless he agrees to go on record.
That's where you want to make that distinction? You can only be held accountable for what you say to the public in public on a public forum, as long as you say that you said it? This seems like it's inviting abuse, but anyone who's ever done anything on the internet already knows that.
How do you feel about anonymous donations to SuperPACs then? What about anonymous bomb threats? CNN made the claim that this gif was inciting violence against journalists, that doesn't seem so different.
Granted, the idea that this gif was inciting violence is about as plausible as the claim that CNN was trying to blackmail this guy. But you've obviously bought into this idea that CNN's statement was a threat, rather than a hedge against someone who's clearly willing to change his story at the drop of a hat.
Your argument seems to be centered around the idea that this guy is unimportant, which was true. Following up an obvious lead and calling the guy who made the meme in the first place was a small part of the story, not really important but a nice little thing to flesh it out. And since Trump is involved, being thorough is expected and generally necessary. The guy's reaction was what turned this into a story in its own right.
But seriously, you keep skipping the obvious: "It is relevant where the President found the meme before retweeting it, because it gives you an insight on where the President gets his information." What are you expecting them to do here? You acknowledge that the source matters, but you don't want them to examine it. The president posted the meme unattributed (like any good redditor), so figuring out where the meme comes from is the completely obvious approach. I tried to illustrate this in a slightly humorous way above, but apparently the point wasn't made.
You say your question is: what do you get by tracking down names? The answer is: someone to talk to. The point was never the name, the point was to flesh out the story a little and maintain some standard of journalistic ethics. Look, it's #8 on the SPJ Code of Ethics:
Diligently seek subjects of news coverage to allow them to respond to criticism or allegations of wrongdoing.
If they're going to claim that this guy is inciting violence, or that he's racially motivated, then they need to give him a chance to explain himself.
I'm sorry, I think I still haven't quite addressed what you said. There are basically two issues here: the first is that researching where memes come from is soft news and good journalists should be trying to find something more important to report on. The second is that they've taken a story about Trump and then wandered off on a tangent instead of sticking with Trump.
I hoping I'm characterizing your complaint accurately. For the first point: this is an instance where soft news and hard news overlap. Calling Trump on his bullshit has turned into it's own little industry at this point, and everything that he says gets researched. I'm not saying this is exceptional, it's possible that if a different president posted a meme then maybe that would get researched too. But when this president posts a meme, you can be damn sure that it's going to get examined. Examining what the president says, thoroughly, falls under the "important hard news" category.
For the second point: maybe. Maybe they did wander off on a tangent, but the story kind of created itself. They called this guy and didn't get in touch with him right away, left a message on his voicemail or something, and he apparently freaked out. He wrote the apology on his own initiative, edited his old comments on reddit to make himself seem a little less racist, and then called them begging them not to reveal his identity. What are they supposed to do with that? Just ignore it? What happens when people start asking about what happened to this guy? What happens when someone else starts looking into this meme that the president tweeted?
Setting those questions aside, it's probably worth pointing out that the president is apparently listening to outspoken racists. You do acknowledge this above, but just saying this without identifying who you're talking about is pretty useless. Worse than that, it's inviting denial.
Okay, you also said that you didn't think they should have tracked him down in the first place. And that CNN was behaving like a tabloid, and that you weren't sure that CNN was practicing responsible journalism. You're suggesting that it would have been more responsible for them to critique the president without doing any background investigation into what it is that he was saying? "Today the president has continued being awful. Where does he get this stuff anyway? Who knows? Not us. Let's not find out."
I get what you're saying about trying to keep the story on Trump instead of on this dude, but when the president says something then finding out as much as you can about that thing is what a journalist does. But fine, regarding your criticism of CNN changing the narrative: it's not CNN doing it. Maybe read the actual source article, it's pretty tame. The one line that people are complaining about could have been phrased better, but this story exists the way it does because interested parties have jumped on this opportunity. Not because CNN really did anything wrong.