A good rule of thumb: if you have to use a video vendor's app to play the video (instead of the usual "use your favorite player"), then you're better off just pirating.
I just can't take Amazon video seriously yet (any more than Netflix). These companies need to use standards if they want my money. If you limit what it can be played on, then you're limiting who can be a paying customer.
It sounds like you're saying that I'm not just speculating on what exactly Trump offered (and I totally admitted that tax breaks, influence in our government, etc were just example ideas, but hey, those are both pretty common ones so they're at least plausible), but that I'm imagining that he offered anything at all.
Is that right? We're not arguing about the details are, but rather, we're arguing that details even exist? I think I'm probably misunderstanding you.
My whole complaint was that the article was vague, saying things like
Taiwan-based Foxconn did not give details of the plan
and
"...we will announce the details of any plans following the completion of direct discussions between our leadership and the relevant U.S. officials," Foxconn said in a statement. "Those plans would be made based on mutually-agreed terms."
and so everyone is going to wonder what Foxconn's terms/details are. But if you needed a citation that there will be terms -- that TANSTAAFL is still a thing in our world -- then I guess the above quotations are the evidence. I cite TFA.
I'm not getting it, am I? What am I not understanding?
Stories are leaving out what concessions Trump offered, which made Foxconn decide that this would be an improvement from the status quo.
The "magic" wand might not be magic at all; maybe it's a tax break or the company gets a free "write whatever law you want, and I promise to sign it" or something like that.
Until we know how the trick works, we're going to be speculating all kinds of crazy things (as I did above). This would be a good job for journalists. You know that once people find out the cost, there's going to be another flamefest about whether the payment was a good idea or a bad one.
This labeling pisses me off, because it used to be The Daily Show, SNL's Weekend Update, etc were what "fake news" meant. Fake news just meant satire or hoaxes of exposure done in a certain style.
And not only was the term "fake news" already taken, but also, the stuff we're talking about here already had a name too: "lies."
They're simply lies. WTF was wrong with "lies?" And what was wrong with letting "fake news" keep its meaning? Why fix what isn't broken?
Death to the 2016 meaning of "fake news." Ye Olde English (how people spoke in 2015) was better than this. Yes, language evolves, but it doesn't need to happen this stupidly. This is the kind of crap that makes me think I'm going to have to re-learn what "hacker" means again, in 2017. Hacker: a person who carries a mobile phone.
Tell me how this is any different than what China does, then. You might as well have a Ministry of Truth.
That's kind of an easy assignment, don't you think?
The Chinese government censors. If you don't use their filters, they view that as circumvention and reserve the right to force you to use the filter.
The listed companies, on the other hand, would use a word like "competition" instead of "circumvention." They totally and completely lack the ability to censor, and in fact don't even have the mindset and attitude for it. They aren't even going to try to censor; they're just announcing a project to make it easier to moderate the content on their own websites.
Just to give you an example, imagine if you posted a comment here on Slashdot that some VP at Twitter didn't like. What would they do about it? Add your name to a list of people whose tweets are shadow-banned? That doesn't help them with your Slashdot comment even a little bit.
Why did it become such a bad thing to express disappointment in a company you support.
I think I just figured out the true controversy here.
The "it's no big deal" people just assume that Facebook is already a company that you don't support. It isn't possible for Facebook to disappoint these people, so they wonder, "why all the bitching? So what if someone added a benzene off-taste to a shit-flavored shake? It's not like you were going to drink it, anyway. The benzene is irrelevant."
But for people who still use Facebook, having it get worse makes things worse. It is possible for Facebook to disappoint these people. They're thinking, "this shake is 90% chocolate with only 10% raw human feces in it. And I don't like the new benzene off-taste they added, which clashes with the fecal flavors."
Except they simply can't effectively censor anything. If spam were an easy problem, it would have been solved in the mid 1990s.
If they really want to try, then Facebook and Twitter are basically non-players in this game, and the ball is in Youtube (Google's) court to expand its malware protection to include brain malware. But if they ever push too hard, people can just use another browser.
Article-reading abstinence isn't the answer! This is a perfect case in point, where practicing abstinence with regard to reading the article, simply adds noise to the discussion, and makes it so that many of the people who did read the article, now think you are totally retarded fuckwit since apparently you can't remember anything for even a few seconds.
To me, this obviously isn't true. I personally think you only said such a mind-boggling stupidly-retarded numbskulled thing, simply because of your agenda of cultivating your ignorance, not because of a memory failure. You didn't forget what the article said; you never read it in the first place! But nooo, not everyone is going to believe that, so now we're going to have to have a digression into why you blather empty-headed idiocy like a brain-damaged imbecil whose mother drank too much when she was pregnant.
And one of the arguments the Indy1-is-a-retarded-fuckwit camp is going to say, is that even if you shot your mouth off due to not reading the article, practicing abstinence when it comes to reading, is itself something that only a retarded fuckwit would do. So they're going to say you're a retarded fuckwit regardless of whether the failure is in your memory, vs your desire to remain stupid. Now your defenders (people such I myself) are put on the spot, having to explain that maybe there is some kind of non-stupid merit to stupidity.
And I don't have any fucking idea how to argue that. Do you? (Think of what your dull-witted shit-for-brains comment has just done to your friends here.)
Don't you see how "why does Indy1 say such insipid, half-baked nonsense?" is just going to turn into the stupidest flamewar ever, on par with the level of stupidity of your own speech?
You can prevent this. It turns out that it is easy to avoid saying amazingly stupid things like mentioning the Ford/Nixon thing that the article addresses: just READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE first.
I wonder if maybe there is a way to put on some kind of mental condom, if you have to. Could you maybe have knowledge of the article on hand when you comment on the article, but then forget it later? If you can do that, it might offer most of the advantages of reading-abstinence, while also preventing shockingly-moronic statements which leave us all guessing as to why you say say such stupid things.
What's this "your data" thing? AFAICT we're talking about peoples' game identity, right? e.g. if you get locked out of your Google Play account, then maybe you lose control of your Clash of Clans base and have to start over.
Yes, that sucks insofar as how much you value grind-progress in a game, and I understand that can be a quasi-real thing that people get attached to, so I'm not going to dickishly blow it off.
But calling it "your data" is kind of stretching things. My data is on my computers' disks, not Google's.
there is no evidence that Homeopathic products are effective
Evidence, schmevidence. What does your faith tell you? You're not going to trust your life and your body to people who don't have the right feelings, are you?
It's pretty funny how file-sharers can't be bothered to.. uh.. share the file-sharing. (The database.) Taking a site offline ought to accomplish relatively little, but it seems like lots of torrent sites want their eventual shutdowns to cause their catalogs to be lost too.
Just because they have it, they have no obligation to sell it.
They wouldn't, but one might argue that the entire intent of copyright is to get them to provide it.
And then if they chose to publish in a country which has copyright, then they become obligated, whereas prior to publishing, they were not obligated. They accepted the deal and have benefited from government-granted privilege. It's too late for backsies.
In my current house, I don't think we paid anything for the wiring between the tiles. Now that I think of it, we might have even skipped the process altogether. So obviously I'm pretty excited that it can be done even more cheaply now.
Is there a handy glossary somewhere? (Don't point me at a dictionary if it was published over ten years ago; you know that's going to be totally obsolete by the rapid change of what these terms mean.) Were the neo-cons absorbed by one of them, or is that still a thing?
Actually, wait a minute. It makes sense, but it has jack shit to do with the electoral college nonsense.
The day before the election, there was one thing that every one of us knew: whoever won, would not have the support anywhere close to half of the country. Had Clinton won, nobody would be kissing her ass either, you know.
One of the very best reasons to vote for Trump, was to try to prevent Clinton from becoming president. Just as the best reason to vote for Clinton was to prevent Trump from becoming president. I realize people in those camps might have had other reasons for voting the way they did, but they were a minority. (Don't blame me; I voted for Johnson. I tried to help both efforts and also get a great president too. Yeah, call me unrealistically greedy.)
As it happens, one of the efforts failed and the other succeeded. But let's not pretend that plenty of people who voted for Trump weren't gagging as they did it. You damn well know it's true, just as there was plenty of Clinton-voter vomit found in the voting booths also.
Everyone needs to keep the same attitude that they had when they thought Clinton was going to win: president-elect, you're our bitch. The president is still going to be our bitch, and nobody should forget that. Getting the election results didn't change that.
Issue orders. Everyone should be issuing orders. The Clinton/Trump president-elect, who we now just call Trump, is going to have to do a lot to start getting credit with anyone.
And anyone who thinks this is arrogant, either isn't American or needs to take a deep breath. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, Americans, but do this: take a deep breath and then say, "The government is my bitch. The government will always be The People's Bitch. That is what America is." Just say it. It's not as flowery as what Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 but it's shorter and easier to memorize. Go on, do it. Let it be your new Pledge of Allegiance if it isn't already.
"So what?!" Entire web stores were down for several hours to deal with the bans. You can think you have done everything right, have all the "nines" you want, and then something totally silly can still take down your site.
Maybe it's not a big deal to you for a store to be down (me neither, since I don't happen to work there or own a piece of the business), but think about the reason it happened and the lack of limits to government power, which allowed it to happen. You also point out that it can be downloaded, but if you can take a store offline to deal with the fact that a book is for sale, then the very same justification could be used for taking away access to the Internet for the same reason. And this is in UK, where there's already shitloads of precedent for limiting Internet access. You laugh, but they literally try to go that far for other kinds of information.
Instead of saying "so what?" put this in your file of reasons for UK citizens to enact something like US' First Amendment. Even basic human rights issues aside, what happened is just plain wasteful. Even our uncaring plutocratic robot overlords would see the advantages in outlawing book bans.
Do you want states to elect presidents, or do you want people to do it? Does the president represent the people, or the states?
Since you're a person, I can guess your answer to that! But I'm asking anyway, because I'm going to what-if the "you're a person" part.
Suppose you were a state. Step into those meta-shoes. Might your opinion be different? You might say, "Here I am, n million people. I should have n million votes, exactly twice as many votes as that guy over there who has n/2 people." Ok, that makes sense too, right?
But now look at it from the PoV of the guy who is the n/2-people state. He has half as many people, but nearly the same amount of overhead forced upon him due to being a state, amortized over fewer people. He has to have his own legislature, governor, etc. He's going want more than half as much representation (power) as you, just to cover his additional costs. And his case is pretty good, isn't it?
The only way to remove the discrepancy is to get rid of states. And since every conceivable economic activity that you can possible imagine is Interstate Commerce, you might be right that there isn't a single power that anyone can think of, which actually does belong to the states. Ever since the 1790s when the constitution was written, states were a totally obsolete idea and it's just that nobody figured it out until WW2. Yet we still have states. Why?
Solve the riddle of the state's purpose and I think you'll solve the riddle of the electoral college's purpose.
Killing Obama care. Causing many people to uninsured or under insured.
Everyone keeps forgetting that ObamaCare is a Republican plan. Not only was it their idea, but they sure-as-fuck don't want to be known as the congressperson who voted to take away all their constituents' health insurance. That's how you lose re-election.
They only acted the mock repeals because they knew for sure that they would lose, so there was no danger in angering their constituents. I think you are about to see a serious toning down on the anti-ObamaCare rhetoric by these fakers.
(I'm not saying they won't find plenty of ways to piss you off, but I really don't think this is one of them.)
Isn't that his point? He (and I won't even tell you if I'm talking about GP or Trump) has tied two totally-unrelated things together, in a reasonable and plausible-sounding way. If anyone is listening to one of these arguments, the other argument is just as good. OTOH if you're smart enough to call bullshit on one of them, the other one's bullshit leaps out at you, too.
There's some evidence that because illegal aliens are much harder to track that the crimes they commit are underreported and they are not properly prosecuted for their crimes. That's undeniable.
Great example! You have just stated a very plausible-sounding idea. A non-critical reader wouldn't bother to check, and wouldn't be likely to notice that the "there is evidence" part of your example statement is just as bogus as the rest. Once someone starts pulling things out of their ass, they can pull support out of their ass too. Why merely lie when you can elaborately lie? Have your bogus PGP key be signed by lots of other bogus keys. It looks more "genuine" that way.
At this level of discussion, we've moved beyond how we normally solve real-world problems, and into faith-based discussions, countering religious preaching with religious preaching, contests in who best presses the emotional buttons of their audience, or.. to boil it down to a single word: art! Who doesn't seriously ENJOY that? I know I do.
WTF is a "fake story?" Is The Lord of the Rings one of the fake ones or one of the real ones?
People believe stupid shit, and they also believe plausible-but-incorrect shit. Just say that.
Implying that stories come in two categories sounds like something a media company would say, to make you think they are somehow better than everyone else. Oh wait.. turns out the bullshit words are from this "bgr.in" rather than Obama himself. Well, isn't that an amazing coincidence?
This law does not abridge the freedom of speech or the press.
Even with this law, you are still allowed to publish a photograph of a marked ballot. The government is not doing anything to interfere with that. All they're saying, is that you can't take the photograph at the voting place.
You can take your photo in front of a waving American flag, while a marine salutes a passing eagle, from atop of a majestic purple mountain overlooking a plain of wheat. You can take your photo in front of a burning cross, where a close view of the ballot reveals the circles are filled with little swastikas. You can take the photo in your special effects studio, showing Neal Armstrong placing your ballot on a pole on the moon. You can take the photo in a meticulously-detailed Hollywood set that was made to look exactly like your neighborhood highschool gym where the actual voting happens, with a bunch of extras standing in lines waiting to "vote" in the background. You can fake your photo with CGI. Whatever speech you want to make, won't be interfered with. Any political statement that you can possibly imagine, remains legal and completely unthreatened by this law.
The only catch, is that everyone will know that your speech was merely your speech, that it wasn't necessarily a depiction of objective truth. But that's the nature of all speech anyway, so it's not even a real "catch." Truth is not expression: that's why nobody can copyright facts themselves.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. Damn-fucking right! *high five* If anyone ever tries to shut you up, all Americans agree to stand by your side and work with you, in killing the offender and putting his head on a pike as a warning to other would-be tyrants.
If enough people photographed their ballots such that we could use the people's numbers as a check against The Man's numbers, that would mean that the people care. But if the people cared even a few percent as much as that, we simply wouldn't have insecure voting machines in the first place. The whole reason we have insecure voting machines is that most people don't care.
BTW, do you know how incredibly easy it is to volunteer to work on the election, where you could personally make sure the election is performed with integrity? Guess why you see so many senior citizens doing that job: It's because nobody else could be fucking bothered. And now you're pretending enough people who can't be bothered to work the election, can be bothered to.. do what? Upload their photos to a competing ballot-photo-counting service which publishes its own election numbers as a check on the "official" system? And this second service is secure, of course! Nobody would dare to attack it (either by technical means or propaganda), upload fake votes, etc.
It's a lot more difficult to photograph something and alter it later in an undetectable manner than it is to just photograph something.
Not if the rules for voting are that every single voter is required to go into a certain room alone. "Alone," that is, except for the fact that the room will be staffed with professional forgers, graphics experts, etc: paid election workers who will be happy to arrange whatever photograph the voter desires. No voter is allowed to leave the room for at least n minutes, so that it's impossible for an observer to know whether or not they took advantage of the forgery service.
If idiots are convinced that showing a marked ballot is a political expression,, then in spite of their stupidity, we can accommodate the idiots without compromising democracy. Just change the voting procedures such that everyone is guaranteed a chance to photograph an unused ballot, so that no photograph has the slightest chance of being perceived as "proof." Any time there's a photo, everyone needs to know for sure that the voter definitely had the means and opportunity to fake it, without exception. If ballot photos are allowed, then means and opportunity to produce forgeries must be supplied, and it needs to be impossible for any observer to know whether or not it was used.
If these photos are so important and constitutionally sacred, I'm sure its advocates will have no problem with some increased expenses and wait times. Freedom isn't free, after all. What, you don't want to pay more money or more time to vote? Then STFU about your 1st Amendment rights being something that you value. Or else admit that photographing a ballot is not truly a political expression, because that assertion is the fuckwittery here.
Slashdot Mirror
A good rule of thumb: if you have to use a video vendor's app to play the video (instead of the usual "use your favorite player"), then you're better off just pirating.
I just can't take Amazon video seriously yet (any more than Netflix). These companies need to use standards if they want my money. If you limit what it can be played on, then you're limiting who can be a paying customer.
It sounds like you're saying that I'm not just speculating on what exactly Trump offered (and I totally admitted that tax breaks, influence in our government, etc were just example ideas, but hey, those are both pretty common ones so they're at least plausible), but that I'm imagining that he offered anything at all.
Is that right? We're not arguing about the details are, but rather, we're arguing that details even exist? I think I'm probably misunderstanding you.
My whole complaint was that the article was vague, saying things like
and
and so everyone is going to wonder what Foxconn's terms/details are. But if you needed a citation that there will be terms -- that TANSTAAFL is still a thing in our world -- then I guess the above quotations are the evidence. I cite TFA.
I'm not getting it, am I? What am I not understanding?
Stories are leaving out what concessions Trump offered, which made Foxconn decide that this would be an improvement from the status quo.
The "magic" wand might not be magic at all; maybe it's a tax break or the company gets a free "write whatever law you want, and I promise to sign it" or something like that.
Until we know how the trick works, we're going to be speculating all kinds of crazy things (as I did above). This would be a good job for journalists. You know that once people find out the cost, there's going to be another flamefest about whether the payment was a good idea or a bad one.
This labeling pisses me off, because it used to be The Daily Show, SNL's Weekend Update, etc were what "fake news" meant. Fake news just meant satire or hoaxes of exposure done in a certain style.
And not only was the term "fake news" already taken, but also, the stuff we're talking about here already had a name too: "lies."
They're simply lies. WTF was wrong with "lies?" And what was wrong with letting "fake news" keep its meaning? Why fix what isn't broken?
Death to the 2016 meaning of "fake news." Ye Olde English (how people spoke in 2015) was better than this. Yes, language evolves, but it doesn't need to happen this stupidly. This is the kind of crap that makes me think I'm going to have to re-learn what "hacker" means again, in 2017. Hacker: a person who carries a mobile phone.
That's kind of an easy assignment, don't you think?
The Chinese government censors. If you don't use their filters, they view that as circumvention and reserve the right to force you to use the filter.
The listed companies, on the other hand, would use a word like "competition" instead of "circumvention." They totally and completely lack the ability to censor, and in fact don't even have the mindset and attitude for it. They aren't even going to try to censor; they're just announcing a project to make it easier to moderate the content on their own websites.
Just to give you an example, imagine if you posted a comment here on Slashdot that some VP at Twitter didn't like. What would they do about it? Add your name to a list of people whose tweets are shadow-banned? That doesn't help them with your Slashdot comment even a little bit.
I think I just figured out the true controversy here.
The "it's no big deal" people just assume that Facebook is already a company that you don't support. It isn't possible for Facebook to disappoint these people, so they wonder, "why all the bitching? So what if someone added a benzene off-taste to a shit-flavored shake? It's not like you were going to drink it, anyway. The benzene is irrelevant."
But for people who still use Facebook, having it get worse makes things worse. It is possible for Facebook to disappoint these people. They're thinking, "this shake is 90% chocolate with only 10% raw human feces in it. And I don't like the new benzene off-taste they added, which clashes with the fecal flavors."
Except they simply can't effectively censor anything. If spam were an easy problem, it would have been solved in the mid 1990s.
If they really want to try, then Facebook and Twitter are basically non-players in this game, and the ball is in Youtube (Google's) court to expand its malware protection to include brain malware. But if they ever push too hard, people can just use another browser.
Article-reading abstinence isn't the answer! This is a perfect case in point, where practicing abstinence with regard to reading the article, simply adds noise to the discussion, and makes it so that many of the people who did read the article, now think you are totally retarded fuckwit since apparently you can't remember anything for even a few seconds.
To me, this obviously isn't true. I personally think you only said such a mind-boggling stupidly-retarded numbskulled thing, simply because of your agenda of cultivating your ignorance, not because of a memory failure. You didn't forget what the article said; you never read it in the first place! But nooo, not everyone is going to believe that, so now we're going to have to have a digression into why you blather empty-headed idiocy like a brain-damaged imbecil whose mother drank too much when she was pregnant.
And one of the arguments the Indy1-is-a-retarded-fuckwit camp is going to say, is that even if you shot your mouth off due to not reading the article, practicing abstinence when it comes to reading, is itself something that only a retarded fuckwit would do. So they're going to say you're a retarded fuckwit regardless of whether the failure is in your memory, vs your desire to remain stupid. Now your defenders (people such I myself) are put on the spot, having to explain that maybe there is some kind of non-stupid merit to stupidity.
And I don't have any fucking idea how to argue that. Do you? (Think of what your dull-witted shit-for-brains comment has just done to your friends here.)
Don't you see how "why does Indy1 say such insipid, half-baked nonsense?" is just going to turn into the stupidest flamewar ever, on par with the level of stupidity of your own speech?
You can prevent this. It turns out that it is easy to avoid saying amazingly stupid things like mentioning the Ford/Nixon thing that the article addresses: just READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE first.
I wonder if maybe there is a way to put on some kind of mental condom, if you have to. Could you maybe have knowledge of the article on hand when you comment on the article, but then forget it later? If you can do that, it might offer most of the advantages of reading-abstinence, while also preventing shockingly-moronic statements which leave us all guessing as to why you say say such stupid things.
What's this "your data" thing? AFAICT we're talking about peoples' game identity, right? e.g. if you get locked out of your Google Play account, then maybe you lose control of your Clash of Clans base and have to start over.
Yes, that sucks insofar as how much you value grind-progress in a game, and I understand that can be a quasi-real thing that people get attached to, so I'm not going to dickishly blow it off.
But calling it "your data" is kind of stretching things. My data is on my computers' disks, not Google's.
Evidence, schmevidence. What does your faith tell you? You're not going to trust your life and your body to people who don't have the right feelings, are you?
It's pretty funny how file-sharers can't be bothered to .. uh .. share the file-sharing. (The database.) Taking a site offline ought to accomplish relatively little, but it seems like lots of torrent sites want their eventual shutdowns to cause their catalogs to be lost too.
They wouldn't, but one might argue that the entire intent of copyright is to get them to provide it.
And then if they chose to publish in a country which has copyright, then they become obligated, whereas prior to publishing, they were not obligated. They accepted the deal and have benefited from government-granted privilege. It's too late for backsies.
In my current house, I don't think we paid anything for the wiring between the tiles. Now that I think of it, we might have even skipped the process altogether. So obviously I'm pretty excited that it can be done even more cheaply now.
Is there a handy glossary somewhere? (Don't point me at a dictionary if it was published over ten years ago; you know that's going to be totally obsolete by the rapid change of what these terms mean.) Were the neo-cons absorbed by one of them, or is that still a thing?
Actually, wait a minute. It makes sense, but it has jack shit to do with the electoral college nonsense.
The day before the election, there was one thing that every one of us knew: whoever won, would not have the support anywhere close to half of the country. Had Clinton won, nobody would be kissing her ass either, you know.
One of the very best reasons to vote for Trump, was to try to prevent Clinton from becoming president. Just as the best reason to vote for Clinton was to prevent Trump from becoming president. I realize people in those camps might have had other reasons for voting the way they did, but they were a minority. (Don't blame me; I voted for Johnson. I tried to help both efforts and also get a great president too. Yeah, call me unrealistically greedy.)
As it happens, one of the efforts failed and the other succeeded. But let's not pretend that plenty of people who voted for Trump weren't gagging as they did it. You damn well know it's true, just as there was plenty of Clinton-voter vomit found in the voting booths also.
Everyone needs to keep the same attitude that they had when they thought Clinton was going to win: president-elect, you're our bitch. The president is still going to be our bitch, and nobody should forget that. Getting the election results didn't change that.
Issue orders. Everyone should be issuing orders. The Clinton/Trump president-elect, who we now just call Trump, is going to have to do a lot to start getting credit with anyone.
And anyone who thinks this is arrogant, either isn't American or needs to take a deep breath. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, Americans, but do this: take a deep breath and then say, "The government is my bitch. The government will always be The People's Bitch. That is what America is." Just say it. It's not as flowery as what Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 but it's shorter and easier to memorize. Go on, do it. Let it be your new Pledge of Allegiance if it isn't already.
"So what?!" Entire web stores were down for several hours to deal with the bans. You can think you have done everything right, have all the "nines" you want, and then something totally silly can still take down your site.
Maybe it's not a big deal to you for a store to be down (me neither, since I don't happen to work there or own a piece of the business), but think about the reason it happened and the lack of limits to government power, which allowed it to happen. You also point out that it can be downloaded, but if you can take a store offline to deal with the fact that a book is for sale, then the very same justification could be used for taking away access to the Internet for the same reason. And this is in UK, where there's already shitloads of precedent for limiting Internet access. You laugh, but they literally try to go that far for other kinds of information.
Instead of saying "so what?" put this in your file of reasons for UK citizens to enact something like US' First Amendment. Even basic human rights issues aside, what happened is just plain wasteful. Even our uncaring plutocratic robot overlords would see the advantages in outlawing book bans.
Do you want states to elect presidents, or do you want people to do it? Does the president represent the people, or the states?
Since you're a person, I can guess your answer to that! But I'm asking anyway, because I'm going to what-if the "you're a person" part.
Suppose you were a state. Step into those meta-shoes. Might your opinion be different? You might say, "Here I am, n million people. I should have n million votes, exactly twice as many votes as that guy over there who has n/2 people." Ok, that makes sense too, right?
But now look at it from the PoV of the guy who is the n/2-people state. He has half as many people, but nearly the same amount of overhead forced upon him due to being a state, amortized over fewer people. He has to have his own legislature, governor, etc. He's going want more than half as much representation (power) as you, just to cover his additional costs. And his case is pretty good, isn't it?
The only way to remove the discrepancy is to get rid of states. And since every conceivable economic activity that you can possible imagine is Interstate Commerce, you might be right that there isn't a single power that anyone can think of, which actually does belong to the states. Ever since the 1790s when the constitution was written, states were a totally obsolete idea and it's just that nobody figured it out until WW2. Yet we still have states. Why?
Solve the riddle of the state's purpose and I think you'll solve the riddle of the electoral college's purpose.
Everyone keeps forgetting that ObamaCare is a Republican plan. Not only was it their idea, but they sure-as-fuck don't want to be known as the congressperson who voted to take away all their constituents' health insurance. That's how you lose re-election.
They only acted the mock repeals because they knew for sure that they would lose, so there was no danger in angering their constituents. I think you are about to see a serious toning down on the anti-ObamaCare rhetoric by these fakers.
(I'm not saying they won't find plenty of ways to piss you off, but I really don't think this is one of them.)
No fuckin' way. That's not going to happen.
That's exactly what I did! Why do you think I hate? They took a very simple idea and added distracting noise.
Isn't that his point? He (and I won't even tell you if I'm talking about GP or Trump) has tied two totally-unrelated things together, in a reasonable and plausible-sounding way. If anyone is listening to one of these arguments, the other argument is just as good. OTOH if you're smart enough to call bullshit on one of them, the other one's bullshit leaps out at you, too.
Great example! You have just stated a very plausible-sounding idea. A non-critical reader wouldn't bother to check, and wouldn't be likely to notice that the "there is evidence" part of your example statement is just as bogus as the rest. Once someone starts pulling things out of their ass, they can pull support out of their ass too. Why merely lie when you can elaborately lie? Have your bogus PGP key be signed by lots of other bogus keys. It looks more "genuine" that way.
At this level of discussion, we've moved beyond how we normally solve real-world problems, and into faith-based discussions, countering religious preaching with religious preaching, contests in who best presses the emotional buttons of their audience, or .. to boil it down to a single word: art! Who doesn't seriously ENJOY that? I know I do.
WTF is a "fake story?" Is The Lord of the Rings one of the fake ones or one of the real ones?
People believe stupid shit, and they also believe plausible-but-incorrect shit. Just say that.
Implying that stories come in two categories sounds like something a media company would say, to make you think they are somehow better than everyone else. Oh wait .. turns out the bullshit words are from this "bgr.in" rather than Obama himself. Well, isn't that an amazing coincidence?
This law does not abridge the freedom of speech or the press.
Even with this law, you are still allowed to publish a photograph of a marked ballot. The government is not doing anything to interfere with that. All they're saying, is that you can't take the photograph at the voting place.
You can take your photo in front of a waving American flag, while a marine salutes a passing eagle, from atop of a majestic purple mountain overlooking a plain of wheat. You can take your photo in front of a burning cross, where a close view of the ballot reveals the circles are filled with little swastikas. You can take the photo in your special effects studio, showing Neal Armstrong placing your ballot on a pole on the moon. You can take the photo in a meticulously-detailed Hollywood set that was made to look exactly like your neighborhood highschool gym where the actual voting happens, with a bunch of extras standing in lines waiting to "vote" in the background. You can fake your photo with CGI. Whatever speech you want to make, won't be interfered with. Any political statement that you can possibly imagine, remains legal and completely unthreatened by this law.
The only catch, is that everyone will know that your speech was merely your speech, that it wasn't necessarily a depiction of objective truth. But that's the nature of all speech anyway, so it's not even a real "catch." Truth is not expression: that's why nobody can copyright facts themselves.
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. Damn-fucking right! *high five* If anyone ever tries to shut you up, all Americans agree to stand by your side and work with you, in killing the offender and putting his head on a pike as a warning to other would-be tyrants.
If enough people photographed their ballots such that we could use the people's numbers as a check against The Man's numbers, that would mean that the people care. But if the people cared even a few percent as much as that, we simply wouldn't have insecure voting machines in the first place. The whole reason we have insecure voting machines is that most people don't care.
BTW, do you know how incredibly easy it is to volunteer to work on the election, where you could personally make sure the election is performed with integrity? Guess why you see so many senior citizens doing that job: It's because nobody else could be fucking bothered. And now you're pretending enough people who can't be bothered to work the election, can be bothered to .. do what? Upload their photos to a competing ballot-photo-counting service which publishes its own election numbers as a check on the "official" system? And this second service is secure, of course! Nobody would dare to attack it (either by technical means or propaganda), upload fake votes, etc.
Not if the rules for voting are that every single voter is required to go into a certain room alone. "Alone," that is, except for the fact that the room will be staffed with professional forgers, graphics experts, etc: paid election workers who will be happy to arrange whatever photograph the voter desires. No voter is allowed to leave the room for at least n minutes, so that it's impossible for an observer to know whether or not they took advantage of the forgery service.
If idiots are convinced that showing a marked ballot is a political expression,, then in spite of their stupidity, we can accommodate the idiots without compromising democracy. Just change the voting procedures such that everyone is guaranteed a chance to photograph an unused ballot, so that no photograph has the slightest chance of being perceived as "proof." Any time there's a photo, everyone needs to know for sure that the voter definitely had the means and opportunity to fake it, without exception. If ballot photos are allowed, then means and opportunity to produce forgeries must be supplied, and it needs to be impossible for any observer to know whether or not it was used.
If these photos are so important and constitutionally sacred, I'm sure its advocates will have no problem with some increased expenses and wait times. Freedom isn't free, after all. What, you don't want to pay more money or more time to vote? Then STFU about your 1st Amendment rights being something that you value. Or else admit that photographing a ballot is not truly a political expression, because that assertion is the fuckwittery here.