If the government simply puts back the NN rules as before, then it's broken.
How were the previous rules broken? The excuse that made the rounds was not that there was any flaw in the rules, but rather that congress should make the rules rather than the FCC. (Never mind that that congress did this albeit indirectly, excuses don't have to make sense.)
I haven't heard any claim about the previous rules being broken.
Why do Comcast, Verizon, et al have near-monopolies? Because the local goverments gave it to them.
No, this is thanks to the FCC. There's a provision in the telecommunications act which requires line sharing (instead of the terrible system of redundant infrastructure that you're promoting), but it only applies to telecommunications services and not to information services. So when the FCC finally classified ISPs as telecommunications services, increased competition was one of the many things that we hoped to get out of it. Then the current commissioners were appointed and started reversing everything good that the previous commissioners did.
Google is asserting nothing of the sort. First of all, this can't come from Android data alone: since Android vs. iPhone ownership varies by demographic that would give a skewed misrepresentation of traffic patterns. It probably isn't coming from Android data at all, it's probably coming from the telcos. Congress specifically legalized data collection and sale by ISPs back in March of 2017, and that would be the most complete dataset for doing something like this.
The problem is less that the question was ridiculous from a technical standpoint, and more that the question was explicitly: "How can we redirect a fantastic amount of public funds, for no other purpose than to get me reelected?"
Politicians always redirect funds, but the premise is that they're doing so for the benefit of their constituents. This is really what separates a populist from a demagogue.
I looked at the guy's argument for your first comment, thought it was really interesting. Here it is in full:
There are better arguments. “No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,” john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me. “What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.” Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. “I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,” he said. “My family was not pleased with me, but I said, ‘Look, they have First Amendment rights, too.’ So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?”
Yiannopoulos and many of his defenders like to call themselves free-speech absolutists, but this is hyperbole. No one actually believes that all forms of expression are protected by the First Amendment. False advertising, child pornography, blackmail—all are speech, all are illegal. You’re not allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, make a “true threat,” or incite imminent violence. These are all exceptions to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court has made—made up, really—over time. The boundaries can and do shift. In 1940, a New Hampshire man was jailed for calling a city marshal “a damned Fascist.” The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, ruling that the words were not protected by the First Amendment, because they were “fighting words,” which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
Are some of Yiannopoulos’s antics—say, his attempts to intimidate undocumented and transgender students—closer to fighting words than to intellectual discourse? Maybe. But the fighting-words doctrine has fallen out of favor with the courts. In 2006, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed a soldier’s funeral, carrying signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “You’re going to Hell.” Even factoring in almost seven decades of epithet inflation, this would seem more injurious than “damned Fascist.” And yet the Supreme Court ruled that the signs were protected by the First Amendment.
In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. “These days, we’d say, ‘That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,’ ” powell said. “But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was ‘Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.’ ” He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. “The knee-jerk response is ‘Nothing we can do, it’s speech.’ ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ ‘What harm? It’s just words.’ That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.”
Because it's The New Yorker it takes way too many words to say anything, but the point abut the legality of "fighting words" is interesting. I didn't know that speech which is intended to provoke is not protected. Despite the Westboro decision, this is apparently still true.
And yes: one person's right is another person's obligation, that's an acknowledged truth. "No right without its duties, no duty without its rights." So the value of any right needs to be weighed against the harm that it causes. (Not the harm that it may cause, it always causes harm.)
I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over again in these threads, but: don't pick out Google and Facebook as though they're unique. They are just two of the largest players in a whole industry of corporate spying, and while they have access to an enormous amount of your data it's still less than the ISPs have access to.
Further, by destroying network neutrality the ISPs have won the right to manipulate public opinion to their own ends just as you fear Google and Facebook are doing. (I haven't seen any actual evidence of any of these tech companies doing this yet, but all of these companies have the ability and the legal cover to do it. Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcasting has been doing this for many years.)
I suspect that it wouldn't be necessary to bring in new subscribers. I don't have any numbers, but it seems entirely plausible that revenue from ads could more than double their per-subscriber revenue.
Also: this is a UK survey. British people are accustomed to watching TV without ads, so it seems likely that a larger portion of them would ditch Netflix under that circumstance than people would in the United States, for example.
On the other hand, Netflix loses more than just revenue if they lose such a large chunk of their customers. They really can't afford to lose momentum: a lot of their marketing is word of mouth and their competitors are big, established media companies with huge back catalogs. In other words their competitors can't really be beaten, Netflix can only try and stay ahead of them by retaining market share. Any momentum that they lose is likely to be irrecoverable.
I don't recall this being so much of an issue. I was never worried for Han, but I was plenty worried for that team he was with, and all of them died, and for his girlfriend, who technically survived but was apparently irrevocably traumatized. That provided sufficient dramatic tension, I thought. My biggest gripes with Solo were the appearance of Darth Maul at the end (why on earth did they make the cartoon show cannon? I had to look that up after the movie was over) and the weak tie-in to the start of the rebellion. That was just an unnecessary callback which cheapened things some. Not deal breakers though.
It doesn't have to be "anti-SJW" hate, the DC fanbase is notoriously vocal to critics of the movies. I watch the RedLetterMedia guys sometimes, and every time they review a DC movie they have to address all the letters that they get, and reiterate that they're not Marvel fanboys, the DC movies just suck.
I'm not disputing what the parent said about the anti-SJW crowd, I don't know, but the DC fanbase has been doing this since well before Wonder Woman.
I can think of a ton of reasons why publicly-funded social media would be better than advertiser-funded social media. So many reasons.
This is an old argument though, and TV is usually the example given: why is British television objectively better than American television? Because it's made to appeal to viewers instead of advertisers. British television is publicly funded.
What you just said: "The tragedy of the commons is no tragedy, because fuck the commons: it's totally fine to just take and take and take, everything that the law will allow. People who try to maintain the commons, or contribute to the common good, are simply suckers who should have kept what they had private in order to maximize their profits."
Also ISPs. Remember that Rubio cosponsored the resolution to strip away privacy protections which limited ISPs from spying on you and selling your data. And he did so with the excuse that these protections were "unfair" since the they didn't apply to other unrelated tech companies like Google / Facebook / Apple, etc.
Now here he is introducing "privacy protections" (never mind that this actually reduces your effective privacy, since it stops states from introducing real protections) which would limit only Google / Facebook / Apple, etc. and would not apply to ISPs.
The middle part of the chain has not been skipped, it just hasn't been explained. The article says:
tropical insects, having evolved in a very stable climate, would be much more sensitive to climate warming. “If you go a little bit past the thermal optimum for tropical insects, their fitness just plummets,” he said.
The article does say why insects have declined so much, it just doesn't take the next step to say why their fitness plummets. Higher heat can more more humidity in the air, or less rainfall, or different wind patterns... many possibilities. That is, not doubt, an interesting topic. I share your curiosity, but I'm not going to criticize the author for declining to go off on a barely-related tangent.
Let's say the article did answer why their fitness plummets. Let's say it went into great detail about a specific insect which requires enough moisture in specific places in order to procreate, and how the decline of that insect effects some others who rely on the first as a food source. And a third group who rely on the structure-building practices of the second group for shelter. And a fourth group who... and on and on down the cascade effect. What would that accomplish? You can always ask another "why" question, there's no end to that.
No need to limit yourself: The cause of global warming is directly related to rapid human population growth. Since the bulk of additional CO2 in the air has come from industrialized countries, it's misleading to omit them.
The article makes a decent case for global warming as the culprit, you have made no case whatsoever. Not even shitty anecdote, you have offered nothing at all and yet here you are disputing this guy's research. You need to do better.
It's a WWII game. Why the heck would it have women soldiers with cybernetic prosthetics in it ?
Obviously: because it's cool.
This isn't about promoting diversity, not really, this is about marketing: an attempt to sell more games by appealing to a broader audience. If you know anything about the games industry, you know that EA is all about money. That is their sole motivator. They sometimes claim to have other motivations, you would be a foolish person to believe them.
So, with that in mind, you could have complained about a transparent marketing tactic for being a transparent marketing tactic, in which case you would have been the person being offended by a marketing tactic, but instead you took this opportunity to complain about diversity, in which case you're still the person being offended by a marketing tactic. Only this way you get to additionally be offended by the fact that there are people in this world who don't see it as you see it, and you would never want to miss an opportunity to complain about them.
I realize that this was supposed to be funny, but... people who eat meat are responsible for more plant-deaths than vegans (probably 2-3x as many, though that's just a guess) in addition to the animals.
You're confused, freedom of speech is a civil right (sometimes categorized under political rights). The human rights that the parent is talking about are things like life and liberty, both of which are things that the United States deprives its citizens (and non-citizens) of at a rate higher than China.
Care to elaborate? The worst I can think of from Epic is that lawsuit with Silicon Knights, and that was decided entirely in Epic's favor. They have nothing like Bethesda's or EA's records for screwing their customers and business partners.
Meanwhile, Unity not only spies on their customers but also spies on their customers' customers. A premium user can disable the first thing, but not the second. That's pretty damning, from my perspective.
They already did something about private mis-use of private info, that was in March of 2017. It was that bill which gave permission for ISPs to sell your information to people like, for example, bounty hunters.
If you want them to prevent rather than enable the mis-use of private info, you're going to have to wait for a different president and a consequently better FCC.
Loss of public trust for Washington or politicians in general is a boat that sailed a long time ago.
No one cares about Trump's tax returns.
Does anyone really believe that Nancy Pelosi is speaker again for any other than she has the goods on so many people that they're afraid to vote against her?
You seem to be projecting your own beliefs onto everyone else. You should work on that, it's a big country with a lot of people who disagree with you.
Also: I did not invoke Hillary Clinton. I find it darkly amusing that you would suggest I did.
I have a few directories filled with stuff I've found around the internet over the years. I do this to relieve stress though, and I'm fairly confident that it works in this capacity. The problem is that when I find something cool or insightful I don't want to just click past and forget about it, the instinct is that I want to preserve it somehow. Often with the idea that I'll show it to someone else at some point in the future and get points for being the person who knew about this cool or insightful thing. Making me cool by association.
This is dumb, but it nonetheless causes me some stress. Often what happens is I'll have Cool Thing in a tab for a very long time (I have hundreds of tabs), and I keep seeing it and thinking I should close that tab, but... you know, that thing is really pretty cool. Hoarding is my way of getting rid of it, putting it out of my mind. Once I save it somewhere then I no longer have to worry about losing it when I close the tab. It's safely stored away, just in case, and I'm free to move on to something else.
Slashdot Mirror
If the government simply puts back the NN rules as before, then it's broken.
How were the previous rules broken? The excuse that made the rounds was not that there was any flaw in the rules, but rather that congress should make the rules rather than the FCC. (Never mind that that congress did this albeit indirectly, excuses don't have to make sense.)
I haven't heard any claim about the previous rules being broken.
Why do Comcast, Verizon, et al have near-monopolies? Because the local goverments gave it to them.
No, this is thanks to the FCC. There's a provision in the telecommunications act which requires line sharing (instead of the terrible system of redundant infrastructure that you're promoting), but it only applies to telecommunications services and not to information services. So when the FCC finally classified ISPs as telecommunications services, increased competition was one of the many things that we hoped to get out of it. Then the current commissioners were appointed and started reversing everything good that the previous commissioners did.
Google is asserting nothing of the sort. First of all, this can't come from Android data alone: since Android vs. iPhone ownership varies by demographic that would give a skewed misrepresentation of traffic patterns. It probably isn't coming from Android data at all, it's probably coming from the telcos. Congress specifically legalized data collection and sale by ISPs back in March of 2017, and that would be the most complete dataset for doing something like this.
The problem is less that the question was ridiculous from a technical standpoint, and more that the question was explicitly: "How can we redirect a fantastic amount of public funds, for no other purpose than to get me reelected?"
Politicians always redirect funds, but the premise is that they're doing so for the benefit of their constituents. This is really what separates a populist from a demagogue.
There are better arguments. “No one is disputing how the courts have ruled on this,” john a. powell, a Berkeley law professor with joint appointments in the departments of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies, told me. “What I’m saying is that courts are often wrong.” Powell is tall, with a relaxed sartorial style, and his manner of speaking is soft and serenely confident. Before he became an academic, he was the national legal director of the A.C.L.U. “I represented the Ku Klux Klan when I was in that job,” he said. “My family was not pleased with me, but I said, ‘Look, they have First Amendment rights, too.’ So it’s not that I don’t understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?”
Yiannopoulos and many of his defenders like to call themselves free-speech absolutists, but this is hyperbole. No one actually believes that all forms of expression are protected by the First Amendment. False advertising, child pornography, blackmail—all are speech, all are illegal. You’re not allowed to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, make a “true threat,” or incite imminent violence. These are all exceptions to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court has made—made up, really—over time. The boundaries can and do shift. In 1940, a New Hampshire man was jailed for calling a city marshal “a damned Fascist.” The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, ruling that the words were not protected by the First Amendment, because they were “fighting words,” which “by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
Are some of Yiannopoulos’s antics—say, his attempts to intimidate undocumented and transgender students—closer to fighting words than to intellectual discourse? Maybe. But the fighting-words doctrine has fallen out of favor with the courts. In 2006, the Westboro Baptist Church picketed a soldier’s funeral, carrying signs that read “Thank God for dead soldiers” and “You’re going to Hell.” Even factoring in almost seven decades of epithet inflation, this would seem more injurious than “damned Fascist.” And yet the Supreme Court ruled that the signs were protected by the First Amendment.
In the nineteen-seventies, when women entered the workplace in large numbers, some male bosses made salacious comments, or hung pornographic images on the walls. “These days, we’d say, ‘That’s a hostile workplace, that’s sexual harassment,’ ” powell said. “But those weren’t recognized legal concepts yet. So the courts’ response was ‘Sorry, nothing we can do. Pornographic posters are speech. If women don’t like it, they can put up their own posters.’ ” He drew an analogy to today’s trolls and white supremacists. “The knee-jerk response is ‘Nothing we can do, it’s speech.’ ‘Well, hold on, what about the harm they’re causing?’ ‘What harm? It’s just words.’ That might sound intuitive to us now. But, if you know the history, you can imagine how our intuitions might look foolish, even immoral, a generation later.”
Because it's The New Yorker it takes way too many words to say anything, but the point abut the legality of "fighting words" is interesting. I didn't know that speech which is intended to provoke is not protected. Despite the Westboro decision, this is apparently still true.
And yes: one person's right is another person's obligation, that's an acknowledged truth. "No right without its duties, no duty without its rights." So the value of any right needs to be weighed against the harm that it causes. (Not the harm that it may cause, it always causes harm.)
I feel like I'm just repeating myself over and over again in these threads, but: don't pick out Google and Facebook as though they're unique. They are just two of the largest players in a whole industry of corporate spying, and while they have access to an enormous amount of your data it's still less than the ISPs have access to.
Further, by destroying network neutrality the ISPs have won the right to manipulate public opinion to their own ends just as you fear Google and Facebook are doing. (I haven't seen any actual evidence of any of these tech companies doing this yet, but all of these companies have the ability and the legal cover to do it. Meanwhile, Sinclair Broadcasting has been doing this for many years.)
I suspect that it wouldn't be necessary to bring in new subscribers. I don't have any numbers, but it seems entirely plausible that revenue from ads could more than double their per-subscriber revenue.
Also: this is a UK survey. British people are accustomed to watching TV without ads, so it seems likely that a larger portion of them would ditch Netflix under that circumstance than people would in the United States, for example.
On the other hand, Netflix loses more than just revenue if they lose such a large chunk of their customers. They really can't afford to lose momentum: a lot of their marketing is word of mouth and their competitors are big, established media companies with huge back catalogs. In other words their competitors can't really be beaten, Netflix can only try and stay ahead of them by retaining market share. Any momentum that they lose is likely to be irrecoverable.
So the energy brands from the UK, Italy, France, and the gov of China should be "free" to explore around the USA?
How on earth did you get this from what the parent said? How are you connecting those things? Your comment just doesn't make sense, you're ranting.
I don't recall this being so much of an issue. I was never worried for Han, but I was plenty worried for that team he was with, and all of them died, and for his girlfriend, who technically survived but was apparently irrevocably traumatized. That provided sufficient dramatic tension, I thought. My biggest gripes with Solo were the appearance of Darth Maul at the end (why on earth did they make the cartoon show cannon? I had to look that up after the movie was over) and the weak tie-in to the start of the rebellion. That was just an unnecessary callback which cheapened things some. Not deal breakers though.
It doesn't have to be "anti-SJW" hate, the DC fanbase is notoriously vocal to critics of the movies. I watch the RedLetterMedia guys sometimes, and every time they review a DC movie they have to address all the letters that they get, and reiterate that they're not Marvel fanboys, the DC movies just suck.
I'm not disputing what the parent said about the anti-SJW crowd, I don't know, but the DC fanbase has been doing this since well before Wonder Woman.
I can think of a ton of reasons why publicly-funded social media would be better than advertiser-funded social media. So many reasons.
This is an old argument though, and TV is usually the example given: why is British television objectively better than American television? Because it's made to appeal to viewers instead of advertisers. British television is publicly funded.
What you just said: "The tragedy of the commons is no tragedy, because fuck the commons: it's totally fine to just take and take and take, everything that the law will allow. People who try to maintain the commons, or contribute to the common good, are simply suckers who should have kept what they had private in order to maximize their profits."
Rogue One, but Solo really wasn't that bad. People should give it more credit than they're giving it.
Also ISPs. Remember that Rubio cosponsored the resolution to strip away privacy protections which limited ISPs from spying on you and selling your data. And he did so with the excuse that these protections were "unfair" since the they didn't apply to other unrelated tech companies like Google / Facebook / Apple, etc.
Now here he is introducing "privacy protections" (never mind that this actually reduces your effective privacy, since it stops states from introducing real protections) which would limit only Google / Facebook / Apple, etc. and would not apply to ISPs.
tropical insects, having evolved in a very stable climate, would be much more sensitive to climate warming. “If you go a little bit past the thermal optimum for tropical insects, their fitness just plummets,” he said.
The article does say why insects have declined so much, it just doesn't take the next step to say why their fitness plummets. Higher heat can more more humidity in the air, or less rainfall, or different wind patterns... many possibilities. That is, not doubt, an interesting topic. I share your curiosity, but I'm not going to criticize the author for declining to go off on a barely-related tangent.
Let's say the article did answer why their fitness plummets. Let's say it went into great detail about a specific insect which requires enough moisture in specific places in order to procreate, and how the decline of that insect effects some others who rely on the first as a food source. And a third group who rely on the structure-building practices of the second group for shelter. And a fourth group who... and on and on down the cascade effect. What would that accomplish? You can always ask another "why" question, there's no end to that.
So who exactly is the target audience?
People who aren't single. This is a compromise device.
No need to limit yourself: The cause of global warming is directly related to rapid human population growth. Since the bulk of additional CO2 in the air has come from industrialized countries, it's misleading to omit them.
The article makes a decent case for global warming as the culprit, you have made no case whatsoever. Not even shitty anecdote, you have offered nothing at all and yet here you are disputing this guy's research. You need to do better.
It's a WWII game. Why the heck would it have women soldiers with cybernetic prosthetics in it ?
Obviously: because it's cool.
This isn't about promoting diversity, not really, this is about marketing: an attempt to sell more games by appealing to a broader audience. If you know anything about the games industry, you know that EA is all about money. That is their sole motivator. They sometimes claim to have other motivations, you would be a foolish person to believe them.
So, with that in mind, you could have complained about a transparent marketing tactic for being a transparent marketing tactic, in which case you would have been the person being offended by a marketing tactic, but instead you took this opportunity to complain about diversity, in which case you're still the person being offended by a marketing tactic. Only this way you get to additionally be offended by the fact that there are people in this world who don't see it as you see it, and you would never want to miss an opportunity to complain about them.
I realize that this was supposed to be funny, but... people who eat meat are responsible for more plant-deaths than vegans (probably 2-3x as many, though that's just a guess) in addition to the animals.
You're confused, freedom of speech is a civil right (sometimes categorized under political rights). The human rights that the parent is talking about are things like life and liberty, both of which are things that the United States deprives its citizens (and non-citizens) of at a rate higher than China.
Care to elaborate? The worst I can think of from Epic is that lawsuit with Silicon Knights, and that was decided entirely in Epic's favor. They have nothing like Bethesda's or EA's records for screwing their customers and business partners.
Meanwhile, Unity not only spies on their customers but also spies on their customers' customers. A premium user can disable the first thing, but not the second. That's pretty damning, from my perspective.
They already did something about private mis-use of private info, that was in March of 2017. It was that bill which gave permission for ISPs to sell your information to people like, for example, bounty hunters.
If you want them to prevent rather than enable the mis-use of private info, you're going to have to wait for a different president and a consequently better FCC.
Loss of public trust for Washington or politicians in general is a boat that sailed a long time ago.
No one cares about Trump's tax returns.
Does anyone really believe that Nancy Pelosi is speaker again for any other than she has the goods on so many people that they're afraid to vote against her?
You seem to be projecting your own beliefs onto everyone else. You should work on that, it's a big country with a lot of people who disagree with you.
Also: I did not invoke Hillary Clinton. I find it darkly amusing that you would suggest I did.
I have a few directories filled with stuff I've found around the internet over the years. I do this to relieve stress though, and I'm fairly confident that it works in this capacity. The problem is that when I find something cool or insightful I don't want to just click past and forget about it, the instinct is that I want to preserve it somehow. Often with the idea that I'll show it to someone else at some point in the future and get points for being the person who knew about this cool or insightful thing. Making me cool by association.
This is dumb, but it nonetheless causes me some stress. Often what happens is I'll have Cool Thing in a tab for a very long time (I have hundreds of tabs), and I keep seeing it and thinking I should close that tab, but... you know, that thing is really pretty cool. Hoarding is my way of getting rid of it, putting it out of my mind. Once I save it somewhere then I no longer have to worry about losing it when I close the tab. It's safely stored away, just in case, and I'm free to move on to something else.