In the eyes of the law, it might hold a different definition
I'm not an expert, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Also, that's not really what Bethesda is claiming here. They're not saying that they're doing this because the product isn't new, they're saying they're doing this because they don't know whether or not the product is new. In other words, they're divesting the seller of any responsibility and trying to seize control over the entire sales chain.
There's a question of why they'd be doing this. I'd imagine it's because they've gotten on board the software activation bandwagon, and this is a way to reduce the resulting support costs. It could also be about branding - with the Fallout case they showed themselves to be very sensitive to maintaining full brand control.
Regardless of the reason, the important thing to note here is that Bethesda is a horrible company and people should stop giving them money.
People always blame the president for everything, though a large portion of the time (most of the time) they should be directing their ire at congress.
Which is what has happened every time anyone has tested it.
The parent's link above says otherwise. Limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans, from studies of exposures, and convincing evidence of carcinogenicity in laboratory animals. The World Health Organization rates glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans."
Quid pro quo corruption is unusual. It dangerous to be that obvious about it, and it's unnecessary. Consider the McDonnell case of a couple years ago - the governor took bribes from a local businessman, and did some favors for the local businessman, but neither of those things by themselves constitute a quid pro quo arrangement. So it's not corruption for the governor to accept bribes, and it's not corruption for the governor to do favors for a person who gives him bribes. It's only corruption if the prosecution can show that he did those favors in exchange for those bribes. (And only if those favors qualify as "official acts" - an additional requirement that the supreme court conjured up for that case.)
In other words, if you're an official then you can accept all the bribes you want, and you can do all the favors you want, and the only way anyone can ever put you in jail for it is if there's some explicit agreement between yourself and your beneficiary. Why would you ever make such an agreement, when a nudge and a wink is sufficient?
Peer-to-peer purchases. The idea here is that there will be multiple hosts and multiple software vendors, and you might buy a song from a random host using software which is unaffiliated with Audius. The idea seems to be to use blockchain to insure that the right parties receive the money.
Of course, it also insures that everyone, not just Audius, can see what music you're listening to.
I might have missed something here, but this does not seem to be what they're discussing. They're not talking about making a new crypto currency, they're talking about selling people tokens that those people can trade for music, and using a blockchain system to manage those transactions. Since people are buying the tokens, not mining them, of course the price is standardized.
The relevant line from Citizen's United is: “independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” By this, the court was indicating that quid pro quo corruption was the only kind of corruption which qualified as corruption. The fact that the decision was not really about this, but was rather about yadda yadda doesn't matter. This sets the standard for what corrupt acts are prosecutable in court within the United States.
Okay, apparently if you search for #HumpDay you get (unsurprisingly) lots of pictures of boobs and butts. So naturally no respectable person should search for this. (It's a hashtag, so that's always true.)
However, apparently it's really supposed to be referring to Wednesday - that being the "hump" of the work week that you need to get over, before the downhill slide to the weekend.
there is simply no money out in the market to spend more on content consumption
This isn't true at all. We've seen a pretty massive increase in spending on content in the last ~15 years, a good portion of that driven by new revenue streams. The video games market has roughly doubled in that time, for example, driven in significant part by unregulated gambling (loot boxes).
Your suggestion that only rich people are actually spending on those loot boxes is untrue, it's well established that poorer people are more vulnerable to gambling addiction. Wales are pretty evenly spread across the socio-economic spectrum.
I don't see what any of this has to do with corrupt politicians though.
Credit is not due, this is his current excuse for killing network neutrality - that net neutrality isn't necessary in a competitive marketplace, and that competition will somehow materialize if only they regulate this one little thing. It's a stalling tactic. It'll be years before the ISPs' politicians are willing to admit that this doesn't work, and then maybe they'll come up with some other stupid little thing to blame instead of actually addressing the problem.
The mainstream media that we know for a fact was colluding with the Democrats to throw the election for Hillary? We have hard proof; Wikileaks confirms.
You seem to have linked the wrong document here, this is just a campaign strategy document. It doesn't say anything like what you're suggesting. I would like to see this proof though, after all of the bullshit accusations it would be nice to see something concrete.
I'm not going to go through all of your links, especially not the video ones, but let's see here... I see a picture of a woman holding a printout of an email with "Your Question" written at the top. And that is proof of... something. Proof of CNN vetting questions I guess? I don't know anything about this particular event, but I'd be surprised if they didn't do that at all of the presidential debates. The only totally unmoderated debate that I know of is the Fancy Farm picnic in Kentucky, and it's just a bunch of people screaming at each other. It's totally useless, as you might expect.
The rest of your list is mostly the same, though I find this one kinda funny: "The entire media endorsed Hillary." You do understand that the media's job is to be objective, right? Objective does not mean nonpartisan, that's not the same thing. If one candidate is an absolute disgrace, then it's the job of the media to call that person out and expose their misdeeds. It's no surprise that all of those newspapers supported Hillary, when Trump was the alternative.
Is there some reason why we need to have a competition here? Russia's a little ahead of China in terms of an individual assuming dictatorial power and taking direct action to influence Western democracies. China is a little ahead of Russia in terms of controlling information and maybe slightly ahead in seizing foreign territory. Can we not just agree that they both have merit? Can't that be good enough?
Sometimes naming and shaming can work in the short term, even in a monopoly situation. They'll do something bad, there will be an outcry, politicians will publicly threaten the company to show that they're defending the people, and the company will partially roll back what it did in order to demonstrate their contrition. Wait a few years for everyone to get used to the new normal, and repeat.
Naming and shaming is totally ineffective in the long run, but it can slow down the deterioration a bit.
Is that true? Setting aside the fact that the grandparent is European, even if he were American there are two other credit agencies. I don't know exactly how it works, but it doesn't seem as though you would need to have information at all three.
::sigh:: You're being too optimistic here, this does not represent some new commitment to privacy. Trump (and perhaps his sycophants as well) sees Facebook and Google as the enemy, and so is searching for a way to punish them. This is very much the Trumpian status quo. No exploding heads.
Remember back in March of last year, when congress removed any limitations to ISPs spying on their customers? One of the justifications for that action was the fact that these rules didn't apply to Google or Facebook and so were "unfair." Now, a year later, we have the other shoe dropping - first we had the reward for Trump's allies (the ISPs), now we have the punishment for Trump's perceived enemies.
That is not the topic at hand. The ad was flagged for potentially violating their advertising policy, and ultimately reinstated when they determined that it did not violate that policy. This thread about Twitter is not the place to discuss the merits of Facebook's advertising policy.
For the record, there are many many examples of legal things which companies ban anyway. Pornography, which is perfectly legal, is banned with far greater ubiquity than guns are, and not because companies are trying to make some kind of political statement. If you can't think of a legitimate commercial reason why a company might ban guns, or pornography, or alcohol, or coming onto the premises without a shirt and shoes, even where those things are legal, and you instead just decide that it must be a big persecution conspiracy... then you are making the same lazy assumption that the parent made.
First, and I can't believe I have to say this, Twitter is not Facebook. This isn't hard, it's right there in the name.
Second, Matt Caldwell is not Ronna McDaniel, or Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesman, or any of the prominent Republicans mentioned in the article.
Third, Facebook (which is not Twitter), apologized for misflagging Caldwell's ad and had it back up within hours of his complaint.
Fourth, Facebook’s advertising policy states that ads cannot “promote the sale or use of weapons, ammunition, or explosives." It's not hard to see why a political ad featuring a man shooting a gun and saying that he likes guns might be flagged for further review, with the idea that it could be promoting the use of weapons.
So not only are you lambasting Facebook for a minor mistake, you're using that mistake, Facebook's mistake regarding Matt Caldwell, as a counter to the grandparent's explanation of Twitter's treatment of a bunch of people who are not Matt Caldwell. And the glue that joins these two unrelated events together for you seems to be nothing but a persecution complex.
The grandparent argued that these people who Twitter has shadowbanned might have not been delisted for their content, but rather for the inflammatory nature of their rhetoric. I don't know whether this is true, but you have provided a wonderful example of inflammatory rhetoric.
If you had that many cows and bulls then you were rich and every day was a special occasion. A typical family might have a single cow, and they only killed that cow for meat when it was too old to produce milk for cheese making.
I'm pretty sure that paper's a joke. The author is basing his conclusion on the idea that cows foraging in a pasture will produce the same volume of food per unit of land as intensive crop production does. This is, of course, absurd. It's like that "animals have evolved to be tasty so that we will preserve their species" notion - it's just some silly nonsense.
Maybe you meant it as a joke too, but you were modded "insightful" for some reason.
So, this started with you slandering environmentalists. Throughout this conversation you have continued to stereotype them: giving anecdotal examples of the actions of a few and claiming repeatedly that because some of them did something you don't like, or because you believe that this is happening more often than it used to, that all of them are bad.
I have so far tried to ignore this behavior of yours, because that was never the point. I did not come here to defend environmentalists from your bigotry, I came here as a defender of language. I skew very conservative when it comes to language, and I find it disheartening (but not surprising) that this same right-wing media, which claims to be conservative, would take such a anti-conservative stance on language whenever it suits their agenda.
However, right here: "Well, that might be actual environmentalists that are tired of all the anti-capitalist, pro-communism crap that's been going on since the 1980's." you seem to finally acknowledge that environmentalists are not a homogeneous group, that they are not all the same. This is progress. Maybe some day you will take that to its logical conclusion, and recognize that the kind of stereotyping that you've been doing in this thread is an ineffective approach to describing human behavior. But, for the moment, I am going to call this "good enough."
Yes yes, I'm getting enough of the "All environmentalists are the same, and I know their secret agenda." crap from the other guy. I don't need this from a second person, thank you.
I read that and assumed that this was similar to Stuxnet - they compromised the trusted vendor, who had physical access, and when the vendor went to work on the machine they brought with them some kind of compromised software update or something. It was a compromised USB key that was used for Stuxnet.
calling themselves other things because it's become so tainted.
There, finally you've gotten to something which actually touches on what I was talking about. Who is doing the labeling? Who has declared that this group of environmentalists shall be called "environmentalists" and that group of environmentalists have to be called something else? And why are they doing this?
Actually the why question is pretty easy, you've already answered that yourself: they do it in order to taint the word, so that people will be reluctant to call themselves environmentalists, even when that's clearly what they are. Reluctance to call themselves environmentalists implies reluctance to be called environmentalists, which means that whichever action that they might take to protect the environment will probably be weaker and less decisive than it otherwise could be, in order to avoid having people call them by that label.
This is a divide and conquer strategy - if we all agree, as the grandparent said above, that a clean environment is good, then this poses a formidable barrier to the mining and drilling companies mentioned in the article. But if they can taint the idea of environmentalism, if they can label environmentalists as the outgroup, then people will avoid words or actions which might get them put into that group.
It's the same thing that's been done to atheists, for example. Neil deGrasse Tyson said a while back that he's unwilling to call himself an atheist, because people focus too much on the word. Atheists are the outgroup - they're all baby-eating villains, as you know if you've ever watched the news. (By which I mean news from the right sources, of course.) Instead he calls himself "non-religious."
You have utterly missed the point. The parent, and you, have bought into the idea that "environmentalist" means totalitarian. So much so that when the parent was talking about another group of environmentalists, he couldn't call them that. He had to call them hunters instead, because they didn't fit into this crazy notion of what environmentalism is, even though that's clearly what they are.
I said that I could tell that he consumed too much right-wing media, because it is right-wing media which pushes this redefinition of environmentalism.
Slashdot Mirror
In the eyes of the law, it might hold a different definition
I'm not an expert, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Also, that's not really what Bethesda is claiming here. They're not saying that they're doing this because the product isn't new, they're saying they're doing this because they don't know whether or not the product is new. In other words, they're divesting the seller of any responsibility and trying to seize control over the entire sales chain.
There's a question of why they'd be doing this. I'd imagine it's because they've gotten on board the software activation bandwagon, and this is a way to reduce the resulting support costs. It could also be about branding - with the Fallout case they showed themselves to be very sensitive to maintaining full brand control.
Regardless of the reason, the important thing to note here is that Bethesda is a horrible company and people should stop giving them money.
People always blame the president for everything, though a large portion of the time (most of the time) they should be directing their ire at congress.
Which is what has happened every time anyone has tested it.
The parent's link above says otherwise. Limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans, from studies of exposures, and convincing evidence of carcinogenicity in laboratory animals. The World Health Organization rates glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans."
Quid pro quo corruption is unusual. It dangerous to be that obvious about it, and it's unnecessary. Consider the McDonnell case of a couple years ago - the governor took bribes from a local businessman, and did some favors for the local businessman, but neither of those things by themselves constitute a quid pro quo arrangement. So it's not corruption for the governor to accept bribes, and it's not corruption for the governor to do favors for a person who gives him bribes. It's only corruption if the prosecution can show that he did those favors in exchange for those bribes. (And only if those favors qualify as "official acts" - an additional requirement that the supreme court conjured up for that case.)
In other words, if you're an official then you can accept all the bribes you want, and you can do all the favors you want, and the only way anyone can ever put you in jail for it is if there's some explicit agreement between yourself and your beneficiary. Why would you ever make such an agreement, when a nudge and a wink is sufficient?
Peer-to-peer purchases. The idea here is that there will be multiple hosts and multiple software vendors, and you might buy a song from a random host using software which is unaffiliated with Audius. The idea seems to be to use blockchain to insure that the right parties receive the money.
Of course, it also insures that everyone, not just Audius, can see what music you're listening to.
I might have missed something here, but this does not seem to be what they're discussing. They're not talking about making a new crypto currency, they're talking about selling people tokens that those people can trade for music, and using a blockchain system to manage those transactions. Since people are buying the tokens, not mining them, of course the price is standardized.
The relevant line from Citizen's United is: “independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.” By this, the court was indicating that quid pro quo corruption was the only kind of corruption which qualified as corruption. The fact that the decision was not really about this, but was rather about yadda yadda doesn't matter. This sets the standard for what corrupt acts are prosecutable in court within the United States.
Okay, apparently if you search for #HumpDay you get (unsurprisingly) lots of pictures of boobs and butts. So naturally no respectable person should search for this. (It's a hashtag, so that's always true.)
However, apparently it's really supposed to be referring to Wednesday - that being the "hump" of the work week that you need to get over, before the downhill slide to the weekend.
there is simply no money out in the market to spend more on content consumption
This isn't true at all. We've seen a pretty massive increase in spending on content in the last ~15 years, a good portion of that driven by new revenue streams. The video games market has roughly doubled in that time, for example, driven in significant part by unregulated gambling (loot boxes).
Your suggestion that only rich people are actually spending on those loot boxes is untrue, it's well established that poorer people are more vulnerable to gambling addiction. Wales are pretty evenly spread across the socio-economic spectrum.
I don't see what any of this has to do with corrupt politicians though.
Credit is not due, this is his current excuse for killing network neutrality - that net neutrality isn't necessary in a competitive marketplace, and that competition will somehow materialize if only they regulate this one little thing. It's a stalling tactic. It'll be years before the ISPs' politicians are willing to admit that this doesn't work, and then maybe they'll come up with some other stupid little thing to blame instead of actually addressing the problem.
You're not thinking big enough. With enough of our lawmakers in their pockets, there's no reason why they can't have their cake and eat it too.
The mainstream media that we know for a fact was colluding with the Democrats to throw the election for Hillary? We have hard proof; Wikileaks confirms.
You seem to have linked the wrong document here, this is just a campaign strategy document. It doesn't say anything like what you're suggesting. I would like to see this proof though, after all of the bullshit accusations it would be nice to see something concrete.
I'm not going to go through all of your links, especially not the video ones, but let's see here... I see a picture of a woman holding a printout of an email with "Your Question" written at the top. And that is proof of... something. Proof of CNN vetting questions I guess? I don't know anything about this particular event, but I'd be surprised if they didn't do that at all of the presidential debates. The only totally unmoderated debate that I know of is the Fancy Farm picnic in Kentucky, and it's just a bunch of people screaming at each other. It's totally useless, as you might expect.
The rest of your list is mostly the same, though I find this one kinda funny: "The entire media endorsed Hillary." You do understand that the media's job is to be objective, right? Objective does not mean nonpartisan, that's not the same thing. If one candidate is an absolute disgrace, then it's the job of the media to call that person out and expose their misdeeds. It's no surprise that all of those newspapers supported Hillary, when Trump was the alternative.
Is there some reason why we need to have a competition here? Russia's a little ahead of China in terms of an individual assuming dictatorial power and taking direct action to influence Western democracies. China is a little ahead of Russia in terms of controlling information and maybe slightly ahead in seizing foreign territory. Can we not just agree that they both have merit? Can't that be good enough?
Sometimes naming and shaming can work in the short term, even in a monopoly situation. They'll do something bad, there will be an outcry, politicians will publicly threaten the company to show that they're defending the people, and the company will partially roll back what it did in order to demonstrate their contrition. Wait a few years for everyone to get used to the new normal, and repeat.
Naming and shaming is totally ineffective in the long run, but it can slow down the deterioration a bit.
Is that true? Setting aside the fact that the grandparent is European, even if he were American there are two other credit agencies. I don't know exactly how it works, but it doesn't seem as though you would need to have information at all three.
::sigh:: You're being too optimistic here, this does not represent some new commitment to privacy. Trump (and perhaps his sycophants as well) sees Facebook and Google as the enemy, and so is searching for a way to punish them. This is very much the Trumpian status quo. No exploding heads.
Remember back in March of last year, when congress removed any limitations to ISPs spying on their customers? One of the justifications for that action was the fact that these rules didn't apply to Google or Facebook and so were "unfair." Now, a year later, we have the other shoe dropping - first we had the reward for Trump's allies (the ISPs), now we have the punishment for Trump's perceived enemies.
That is not the topic at hand. The ad was flagged for potentially violating their advertising policy, and ultimately reinstated when they determined that it did not violate that policy. This thread about Twitter is not the place to discuss the merits of Facebook's advertising policy.
For the record, there are many many examples of legal things which companies ban anyway. Pornography, which is perfectly legal, is banned with far greater ubiquity than guns are, and not because companies are trying to make some kind of political statement. If you can't think of a legitimate commercial reason why a company might ban guns, or pornography, or alcohol, or coming onto the premises without a shirt and shoes, even where those things are legal, and you instead just decide that it must be a big persecution conspiracy... then you are making the same lazy assumption that the parent made.
First, and I can't believe I have to say this, Twitter is not Facebook. This isn't hard, it's right there in the name.
Second, Matt Caldwell is not Ronna McDaniel, or Donald Trump Jr.'s spokesman, or any of the prominent Republicans mentioned in the article.
Third, Facebook (which is not Twitter), apologized for misflagging Caldwell's ad and had it back up within hours of his complaint.
Fourth, Facebook’s advertising policy states that ads cannot “promote the sale or use of weapons, ammunition, or explosives." It's not hard to see why a political ad featuring a man shooting a gun and saying that he likes guns might be flagged for further review, with the idea that it could be promoting the use of weapons.
So not only are you lambasting Facebook for a minor mistake, you're using that mistake, Facebook's mistake regarding Matt Caldwell, as a counter to the grandparent's explanation of Twitter's treatment of a bunch of people who are not Matt Caldwell. And the glue that joins these two unrelated events together for you seems to be nothing but a persecution complex.
The grandparent argued that these people who Twitter has shadowbanned might have not been delisted for their content, but rather for the inflammatory nature of their rhetoric. I don't know whether this is true, but you have provided a wonderful example of inflammatory rhetoric.
If you had that many cows and bulls then you were rich and every day was a special occasion. A typical family might have a single cow, and they only killed that cow for meat when it was too old to produce milk for cheese making.
I'm pretty sure that paper's a joke. The author is basing his conclusion on the idea that cows foraging in a pasture will produce the same volume of food per unit of land as intensive crop production does. This is, of course, absurd. It's like that "animals have evolved to be tasty so that we will preserve their species" notion - it's just some silly nonsense.
Maybe you meant it as a joke too, but you were modded "insightful" for some reason.
So, this started with you slandering environmentalists. Throughout this conversation you have continued to stereotype them: giving anecdotal examples of the actions of a few and claiming repeatedly that because some of them did something you don't like, or because you believe that this is happening more often than it used to, that all of them are bad.
I have so far tried to ignore this behavior of yours, because that was never the point. I did not come here to defend environmentalists from your bigotry, I came here as a defender of language. I skew very conservative when it comes to language, and I find it disheartening (but not surprising) that this same right-wing media, which claims to be conservative, would take such a anti-conservative stance on language whenever it suits their agenda.
However, right here: "Well, that might be actual environmentalists that are tired of all the anti-capitalist, pro-communism crap that's been going on since the 1980's." you seem to finally acknowledge that environmentalists are not a homogeneous group, that they are not all the same. This is progress. Maybe some day you will take that to its logical conclusion, and recognize that the kind of stereotyping that you've been doing in this thread is an ineffective approach to describing human behavior. But, for the moment, I am going to call this "good enough."
Yes yes, I'm getting enough of the "All environmentalists are the same, and I know their secret agenda." crap from the other guy. I don't need this from a second person, thank you.
I read that and assumed that this was similar to Stuxnet - they compromised the trusted vendor, who had physical access, and when the vendor went to work on the machine they brought with them some kind of compromised software update or something. It was a compromised USB key that was used for Stuxnet.
calling themselves other things because it's become so tainted.
There, finally you've gotten to something which actually touches on what I was talking about. Who is doing the labeling? Who has declared that this group of environmentalists shall be called "environmentalists" and that group of environmentalists have to be called something else? And why are they doing this?
Actually the why question is pretty easy, you've already answered that yourself: they do it in order to taint the word, so that people will be reluctant to call themselves environmentalists, even when that's clearly what they are. Reluctance to call themselves environmentalists implies reluctance to be called environmentalists, which means that whichever action that they might take to protect the environment will probably be weaker and less decisive than it otherwise could be, in order to avoid having people call them by that label.
This is a divide and conquer strategy - if we all agree, as the grandparent said above, that a clean environment is good, then this poses a formidable barrier to the mining and drilling companies mentioned in the article. But if they can taint the idea of environmentalism, if they can label environmentalists as the outgroup, then people will avoid words or actions which might get them put into that group.
It's the same thing that's been done to atheists, for example. Neil deGrasse Tyson said a while back that he's unwilling to call himself an atheist, because people focus too much on the word. Atheists are the outgroup - they're all baby-eating villains, as you know if you've ever watched the news. (By which I mean news from the right sources, of course.) Instead he calls himself "non-religious."
You have utterly missed the point. The parent, and you, have bought into the idea that "environmentalist" means totalitarian. So much so that when the parent was talking about another group of environmentalists, he couldn't call them that. He had to call them hunters instead, because they didn't fit into this crazy notion of what environmentalism is, even though that's clearly what they are.
I said that I could tell that he consumed too much right-wing media, because it is right-wing media which pushes this redefinition of environmentalism.