Why does the US continue to try to make voting as difficult and complex as possible?
If you don't make it complicated, then it doesn't make sense to pay private companies a bunch of money to sell you a way of managing it. Then how would government officials solicit kickbacks from those companies?
I disagree that there "needs to be some sort of government agency" - we have PLENTY of government agencies under whose jurisdiction this COULD fall: FDA, Commerce, FTC, CPSC,
I didn't say there needed to be a *new* agency. Only there needed to be an agency with both the resources and mandate to do it.
BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH FUNDS TO HAVE EVERYTHING WE WANT... in the same sense your household might be cutting the breakfast cereal budget along with everything else because you're deeply in debt, Republicans regularly try to drain bloated and eternal programs.
First, the federal government's budget is not the same as your personal budget. It doesn't work the same way, and it's just not a sensible comparison. Your decision to cut back on going out to eat doesn't effect the global economy in a way that might cause your salary to go down. But fine, let's admit to cut "bloated programs". I would just want to suggest that the best place for those cuts is not in the agencies that make sure that our food isn't poisoned or that toxic materials aren't being dumped into our water sources.
Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats are correct that ever-increasing corporate subsidies and tax cuts for billionaires aren't helping the budget either.
Who's to stop people from putting misleading logos on their bottles? If people can claim there's aloe in products that don't have it, they can also put a sticker on it that says, "contains aloe". Someone still needs to check up on those things, set standards, and enforce them.
Right, a federal fudge. A federal judge is going to run around gathering up bottles of aloe in the future, run tests, gather evidence, investigate who is actually at fault, prosecute the guilty party, as well as preside over the trial. Is that what we're saying?
One might also notice that this exposure alone would either incentivize the spread of the rule of law, or bringing back more industry to the US. All without a new government agency, new powers, or a bevy of new laws - but instead government just DOING WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE DOING in the first place.
In order to investigate, test, and do something about these kinds of instances, there does need to be some kind of government agency with the resources and mandate to do it. They need to have an appropriate legal framework to empower them to do it effectively.
Frankly, the problem is your political party, the Republicans. (I'm not a Democrat. They're generally not focused on this kind of problem either, unfortunately, but at least they don't actively oppose consumer protection.) Anything that could be described as the big bad dirty "R" word (regulation!) gets quashed under the pretense that all regulation is communist and stupid, and designed to hurt America. "Poor Wal Mart. The reason they're forced to buy substandard aloe products is because they just don't have enough money! We shouldn't punish them or regulate them. Instead we should be giving them more tax breaks. I'm sure having more money in their pockets will force them to spend it on quality control and additional jobs for Americans!"
Consumer protection measures that allow consumers to make educated (and non-fraudulent) choices actually makes for a market that is more free. Empowering companies to manipulate market forces does not make the market more free.
This. We don't need some kind of special regulatory committee for aloe products specifically to address products like this. Claiming to sell one thing and then actually delivering something is already a crime, one of the most elementary crimes out there next to things like murder or theft: fraud.
I don't think anyone is claiming that we should have a special regulatory committee for aloe products. More like some people feel we should have a better regulatory framework in general for consumer protection, which might include testing of questionable products and some ability to apply punitive measures for bad actors.
I get the joke, but I wonder if you see what's significant here. Sans regulation, the fraud was discovered.
It was discovered, but now who's going to make sure it doesn't continue? Even knowing this fraud has occurred, how do I know what's in the "Aloe" when I go to buy it? (assuming I don't have the resources or inclination to do my own testing)
I'm not a Trump supporter at all (not a Clinton supporter either, but I really think Trump and his followers are dangerous), To be perfectly honest, I've never known exactly what to think of the TPP. I've heard smart people say it's good and I've heard smart people say it's bad, and I'm sure there are reasons why it would be good and reasons why it would be bad, but I've never really heard a real debate based on it's merits, between a smart person who's for it and a smart person who's against. I wish we'd spend more time actually discussing issues instead of making everything about cult of personality.
Ethics reform - five year ban on administration officials becoming lobbyists, can never lobby for foreign nations. I wonder how cozy corporations are to YOUR government...
You want to talk about corporations being cozy with government?
1) Trump is trying to get his children positions in the White House while they're operating the non-blind "blind trust"
2) Trump is having one of those children attend his political meetings
3) Trump is also continuing to attend his company's business meetings alongside that same child
I don't see him as being credible in terms of ethics reform. If he wants to "drain the swamp", he should start by removing his own conflicts of interest.
For some strange reason, people expect to get their news for free on the internet.
I really think the problem is, there's not yet a good model for paying for news. People get their news from various sites, one story at a time. They don't want to pay an expensive subscription for the whole site to read one story that they found a link to. Just as big a problem: even if the price was right, people don't want to set up and manage 50 different subscriptions, giving their credit card info to 50 different sites, not knowing whether 40 of those sites are competent enough to safeguard your info.
I don't know what the solution is, but I suspect part of the answer is some kind of paid aggregation/curation, with standardized payout to the content provider. Something like (though not quite the same as) a Spotify for news. Imagine maybe if you paid for a subscription to Slashdot, and Slashdot has to pay (according to some allocation of the subscription funds) to the sites that it links to. Slashdot would then need to hire real editors who could vet the news source and story in order to make sure the stories on their site are reputable and accurately presented. Something like this would have the benefit of paying news sources. Also, if people are paying, maybe it will decrease the need for, or get rid of, advertising and all the problems that come along with that.
Of course, there are some problems with that model. For one, while it would allow us to pay for news, it doesn't really prevent the fake news problem, since people can just as easily look at fake news articles from Facebook or crappy news aggregation. It also doesn't fix the "bubble" phenomenon where people only see news that agrees with their current opinion. There would still be partisan "Spotify for news" aggregation sites, and people would tend to subscribe to the crappy aggregation site of their choosing.
The biggest problem, however, would just be formulating an arrangement among these "Spotify for news" sites and all the various news sources. It may not be as hopeless as it seems. Apple, for example, has a news aggregation app for iOS, which links to various news sites. Among those sources is the New York Times, which also has an app offered for iOS, which includes an in-app purchase for a digital subscription to the times. So Apple is already offering articles in an aggregation, processing subscriptions for those sources, taking a cut and passing the rest on. It's not unthinkable that Apple could offer a reduced-rate subscription to the same sources through their own app-- a subscription that didn't offer access to the whole periodical, but just the articles that show up in the app. They could turn their app into a sort of virtual newspaper, with stories syndicated and curated from other sources.
With that single story a national of deplorables can trivially take CNN off the credible list.
Can you explain why? Obviously the title is controversial, implying that mat *itself* is racist, but that's not what the story seems to be about if you actually read/watch it. The little video associated is mostly showing that some statistics that show continued disparity between whites and blacks. The written article is arguing that the increasing use of mathematical predictive models create an unfair slant against the poor and disadvantaged, which has a disproportionate effect on black people. It does acknowledge that there is some value in these models, but reports that Cathy O'Neil argues that they're being used badly
It doesn't even seem to me that the article is claiming that Cathy O'Neil is objectively correct. It clear that the article is reporting, "This is what Cathy O'Neil claims," rather than, "This is the case." I'm not seeing the problem, but maybe you're picking up on something that I'm glossing over. What's wrong with it?
Unless you are a tyrant, they should be allowed to choose for them self what they want to use.
Nothing to do with being a tyrant. Businesses can decide what runs on business computers. But as a matter of fact, I don't block them from using Edge, I just tell the users to use Chrome instead. Which is exactly the problem here. Microsoft is telling my users that I'm lying, and telling them not to use the browser I'm telling them to use. That's seriously overstepping their bounds.
Besides google.com, gmail and google+ says they should use Chrome, so it evens out...
I'm not a huge fan of that either, but to be fair, it's very different. In one case, you have websites telling the people who choose to visit the site which browser the site is designed to work well on. In the other case, the OS is telling people to use a particular browser for no reason whatsoever, regardless of which sites they're visiting.
To me, that's entirely beside the point. I manage a bunch of Windows 10 machines, and I've told the users to use Chrome (for a variety of reasons). Not Microsoft is going to send out a "tip" saying that Edge is "safer"?
Fuck off, Microsoft. I don't want you to give my users tips. I have to set a policy for which browser people should use, and I don't need you undermining that with your propaganda.
I honestly think it's worth getting some passing familiarity with Powershell. If you're just running one-off commands, then most of those commands will still work in a Powershell window. If you're scripts to do much of anything, you can do more, better and more easily, once you get used to Powershell.
I'll grant you it's a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it.
But let's not forget that doing this is considered a security risk, which is why it's disabled by default. Basically, the message from Microsoft is, "We created this great new scripting language, but you really shouldn't use it because it's insecure."
Hasn't Trump said that he thinks Snowden is a traitor and should be executed, or something to that effect? Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I thought he did.
But every other planet is already a barren wasteland utterly inhospitable to life. If we could survive at all on any other planet, we could also survive anything that happens to Earth.
There are still two reasons that I can think of, for why it would still make sense to at least spread out to other planets. The first is the additional resources. If Earth becomes overpopulated or scarce of resources, spreading to another planet could mitigate that problem. The other is to serve as a kind of backup. If something truly sudden and catastrophic happens to Earth (e.g. struck by a comet) there would be another population of humans to carry on.
But neither of those provide an argument as to why we should all leave Earth. Generally you're right, if we can make all the scientific breakthroughs we need to live sustainably in space, we should also be able to use those technologies to live sustainably on Earth.
I'm not a Democrat and don't consider myself to be "liberal" (though I don't know what these terms mean anymore). However, private companies and individuals are allowed to have their own rules and standards. Your freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can't kick you out of my house for insulting my wife. Your freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can't fire you from my company for telling me to go fuck myself. Your freedom of speech does not prohibit me from deleting your comment from my blog for using foul language. And your freedom of speech does not require that Twitter allow you to post whatever you want, without restriction or filtering.
Sure, you can say all of these things are censorship. They're not remotely a violation of the first amendment. You're not being barred from saying what you want publicly to whoever will listen. No one is under any obligation to listen, and no one else is under any obligation to distribute or broadcast what you say. Complaining that Twitter is removing your comments is like... if you got interviewed by a news show, and they either bleeped out what you said or cut your interview from the segment. It's a private company that broadcasts information. They're not required to broadcast it just because you want to say it.
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a Republican couple?
First, there is a difference between being a Republican and being black. You chose to become a Republican, and you could choose not to be. That's a huge difference.
Second, let's agree, the baker shouldn't be able deny baking a cake for a Republican couple for being Republican. However, if the Republican couple asks the baker to write, "I hate blacks" on their wedding cake, the baker should be able to say, "I don't want to write that." If the Republican couple hangs out in the bakery and harasses other customers, the baker should be able to kick them out. Being Republican shouldn't be grounds for denying service, but being an offensive asshole should be, and being a Republican shouldn't shield you from that.
“While we all agree that religious freedom is important, no one’s religious beliefs make it acceptable to break the law by discriminating against prospective customers,” said Amanda C. Goad, staff attorney with the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project. “No one is asking Masterpiece’s owner to change his beliefs, but treating gay people differently because of who they are is discrimination plain and simple.”
Let me do a little word swapping:
“While we all agree that freedom of speech is important, no one’s speech make it acceptable to break the law by discriminating against prospective customers,” said staff attorney. “No one is asking Twitter’s owner to change their beliefs, but treating political opponents differently because of what they say is discrimination plain and simple.”
It's not quite the same thing. For one thing, in the first example, it's saying that "While my freedom to practice my religion is important, my religious beliefs don't make it acceptable to discriminate against you." In your quote, the implication is instead, "While my freedom of speech is important, nothing I say can make it acceptable for you to discriminate against me." See what I mean?
To make it more explicit, a real swap would be, "While we all agree that the far-right's freedom of speech is important, the far-right's freedom of speech does not make it acceptable for them to break the law by discriminating against people." (which is true!)
Or if you wanted to reflect what you wrote back to the original sentence, it would allow you to say something like, "While we all agree that the freedom of religion is important, Satan worshipper's freedom of religion does not make it acceptable for churches to bar them from holding animal sacrifices on their property." (which is dumb)
Second, just look at your last sentence. In the first, it says, "who they are" and in your example you change it to "what they say". You see the difference, right? You choose what you say. You control what you say. Who you are is just who you are.
That or are you OK with the phone companies all not selling to black people, women, homosexuals, and other groups... as they are simply a 'private platform'?
A couple of things:
1) Phone companies aren't really a private platform. It may be owned by private companies, but it's regulated because it's public infrastructure.
2) You're talking about refusing to sell to people because of who they are. Twitter is talking about suspending accounts because of how they use the service. It's a big difference. It doesn't seem to be the case that Twitter is suspending accounts because the owners are far-right activists, but because those owners are using Twitter against the Twitter terms of service.
Ok, but just to point it out: That was 10 years ago. If you had the latest version at the time, that was still 10.4, and we're now at 10.12. At the time, Windows XP was still the latest version of Windows. Some things have changed since then.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the US continue to try to make voting as difficult and complex as possible?
If you don't make it complicated, then it doesn't make sense to pay private companies a bunch of money to sell you a way of managing it. Then how would government officials solicit kickbacks from those companies?
I think you're right, but I think that's beside the point. It would have been wrong for him to do it, and so it'd be equally wrong for her to do it.
I disagree that there "needs to be some sort of government agency" - we have PLENTY of government agencies under whose jurisdiction this COULD fall: FDA, Commerce, FTC, CPSC,
I didn't say there needed to be a *new* agency. Only there needed to be an agency with both the resources and mandate to do it.
BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH FUNDS TO HAVE EVERYTHING WE WANT... in the same sense your household might be cutting the breakfast cereal budget along with everything else because you're deeply in debt, Republicans regularly try to drain bloated and eternal programs.
First, the federal government's budget is not the same as your personal budget. It doesn't work the same way, and it's just not a sensible comparison. Your decision to cut back on going out to eat doesn't effect the global economy in a way that might cause your salary to go down. But fine, let's admit to cut "bloated programs". I would just want to suggest that the best place for those cuts is not in the agencies that make sure that our food isn't poisoned or that toxic materials aren't being dumped into our water sources.
Maybe, just maybe, the Democrats are correct that ever-increasing corporate subsidies and tax cuts for billionaires aren't helping the budget either.
Who's to stop people from putting misleading logos on their bottles? If people can claim there's aloe in products that don't have it, they can also put a sticker on it that says, "contains aloe". Someone still needs to check up on those things, set standards, and enforce them.
Right, a federal fudge. A federal judge is going to run around gathering up bottles of aloe in the future, run tests, gather evidence, investigate who is actually at fault, prosecute the guilty party, as well as preside over the trial. Is that what we're saying?
One might also notice that this exposure alone would either incentivize the spread of the rule of law, or bringing back more industry to the US. All without a new government agency, new powers, or a bevy of new laws - but instead government just DOING WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE DOING in the first place.
In order to investigate, test, and do something about these kinds of instances, there does need to be some kind of government agency with the resources and mandate to do it. They need to have an appropriate legal framework to empower them to do it effectively.
Frankly, the problem is your political party, the Republicans. (I'm not a Democrat. They're generally not focused on this kind of problem either, unfortunately, but at least they don't actively oppose consumer protection.) Anything that could be described as the big bad dirty "R" word (regulation!) gets quashed under the pretense that all regulation is communist and stupid, and designed to hurt America. "Poor Wal Mart. The reason they're forced to buy substandard aloe products is because they just don't have enough money! We shouldn't punish them or regulate them. Instead we should be giving them more tax breaks. I'm sure having more money in their pockets will force them to spend it on quality control and additional jobs for Americans!"
Consumer protection measures that allow consumers to make educated (and non-fraudulent) choices actually makes for a market that is more free. Empowering companies to manipulate market forces does not make the market more free.
This. We don't need some kind of special regulatory committee for aloe products specifically to address products like this. Claiming to sell one thing and then actually delivering something is already a crime, one of the most elementary crimes out there next to things like murder or theft: fraud.
I don't think anyone is claiming that we should have a special regulatory committee for aloe products. More like some people feel we should have a better regulatory framework in general for consumer protection, which might include testing of questionable products and some ability to apply punitive measures for bad actors.
I get the joke, but I wonder if you see what's significant here. Sans regulation, the fraud was discovered.
It was discovered, but now who's going to make sure it doesn't continue? Even knowing this fraud has occurred, how do I know what's in the "Aloe" when I go to buy it? (assuming I don't have the resources or inclination to do my own testing)
I'm not a Trump supporter at all (not a Clinton supporter either, but I really think Trump and his followers are dangerous), To be perfectly honest, I've never known exactly what to think of the TPP. I've heard smart people say it's good and I've heard smart people say it's bad, and I'm sure there are reasons why it would be good and reasons why it would be bad, but I've never really heard a real debate based on it's merits, between a smart person who's for it and a smart person who's against. I wish we'd spend more time actually discussing issues instead of making everything about cult of personality.
Ethics reform - five year ban on administration officials becoming lobbyists, can never lobby for foreign nations. I wonder how cozy corporations are to YOUR government...
You want to talk about corporations being cozy with government?
1) Trump is trying to get his children positions in the White House while they're operating the non-blind "blind trust"
2) Trump is having one of those children attend his political meetings
3) Trump is also continuing to attend his company's business meetings alongside that same child
I don't see him as being credible in terms of ethics reform. If he wants to "drain the swamp", he should start by removing his own conflicts of interest.
For some strange reason, people expect to get their news for free on the internet.
I really think the problem is, there's not yet a good model for paying for news. People get their news from various sites, one story at a time. They don't want to pay an expensive subscription for the whole site to read one story that they found a link to. Just as big a problem: even if the price was right, people don't want to set up and manage 50 different subscriptions, giving their credit card info to 50 different sites, not knowing whether 40 of those sites are competent enough to safeguard your info.
I don't know what the solution is, but I suspect part of the answer is some kind of paid aggregation/curation, with standardized payout to the content provider. Something like (though not quite the same as) a Spotify for news. Imagine maybe if you paid for a subscription to Slashdot, and Slashdot has to pay (according to some allocation of the subscription funds) to the sites that it links to. Slashdot would then need to hire real editors who could vet the news source and story in order to make sure the stories on their site are reputable and accurately presented. Something like this would have the benefit of paying news sources. Also, if people are paying, maybe it will decrease the need for, or get rid of, advertising and all the problems that come along with that.
Of course, there are some problems with that model. For one, while it would allow us to pay for news, it doesn't really prevent the fake news problem, since people can just as easily look at fake news articles from Facebook or crappy news aggregation. It also doesn't fix the "bubble" phenomenon where people only see news that agrees with their current opinion. There would still be partisan "Spotify for news" aggregation sites, and people would tend to subscribe to the crappy aggregation site of their choosing.
The biggest problem, however, would just be formulating an arrangement among these "Spotify for news" sites and all the various news sources. It may not be as hopeless as it seems. Apple, for example, has a news aggregation app for iOS, which links to various news sites. Among those sources is the New York Times, which also has an app offered for iOS, which includes an in-app purchase for a digital subscription to the times. So Apple is already offering articles in an aggregation, processing subscriptions for those sources, taking a cut and passing the rest on. It's not unthinkable that Apple could offer a reduced-rate subscription to the same sources through their own app-- a subscription that didn't offer access to the whole periodical, but just the articles that show up in the app. They could turn their app into a sort of virtual newspaper, with stories syndicated and curated from other sources.
With that single story a national of deplorables can trivially take CNN off the credible list.
Can you explain why? Obviously the title is controversial, implying that mat *itself* is racist, but that's not what the story seems to be about if you actually read/watch it. The little video associated is mostly showing that some statistics that show continued disparity between whites and blacks. The written article is arguing that the increasing use of mathematical predictive models create an unfair slant against the poor and disadvantaged, which has a disproportionate effect on black people. It does acknowledge that there is some value in these models, but reports that Cathy O'Neil argues that they're being used badly
It doesn't even seem to me that the article is claiming that Cathy O'Neil is objectively correct. It clear that the article is reporting, "This is what Cathy O'Neil claims," rather than, "This is the case." I'm not seeing the problem, but maybe you're picking up on something that I'm glossing over. What's wrong with it?
Unless you are a tyrant, they should be allowed to choose for them self what they want to use.
Nothing to do with being a tyrant. Businesses can decide what runs on business computers. But as a matter of fact, I don't block them from using Edge, I just tell the users to use Chrome instead. Which is exactly the problem here. Microsoft is telling my users that I'm lying, and telling them not to use the browser I'm telling them to use. That's seriously overstepping their bounds.
Besides google.com, gmail and google+ says they should use Chrome, so it evens out...
I'm not a huge fan of that either, but to be fair, it's very different. In one case, you have websites telling the people who choose to visit the site which browser the site is designed to work well on. In the other case, the OS is telling people to use a particular browser for no reason whatsoever, regardless of which sites they're visiting.
To me, that's entirely beside the point. I manage a bunch of Windows 10 machines, and I've told the users to use Chrome (for a variety of reasons). Not Microsoft is going to send out a "tip" saying that Edge is "safer"?
Fuck off, Microsoft. I don't want you to give my users tips. I have to set a policy for which browser people should use, and I don't need you undermining that with your propaganda.
I honestly think it's worth getting some passing familiarity with Powershell. If you're just running one-off commands, then most of those commands will still work in a Powershell window. If you're scripts to do much of anything, you can do more, better and more easily, once you get used to Powershell.
I'll grant you it's a bit of a learning curve, but it's worth it.
But let's not forget that doing this is considered a security risk, which is why it's disabled by default. Basically, the message from Microsoft is, "We created this great new scripting language, but you really shouldn't use it because it's insecure."
Hasn't Trump said that he thinks Snowden is a traitor and should be executed, or something to that effect? Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I thought he did.
But every other planet is already a barren wasteland utterly inhospitable to life. If we could survive at all on any other planet, we could also survive anything that happens to Earth.
There are still two reasons that I can think of, for why it would still make sense to at least spread out to other planets. The first is the additional resources. If Earth becomes overpopulated or scarce of resources, spreading to another planet could mitigate that problem. The other is to serve as a kind of backup. If something truly sudden and catastrophic happens to Earth (e.g. struck by a comet) there would be another population of humans to carry on.
But neither of those provide an argument as to why we should all leave Earth. Generally you're right, if we can make all the scientific breakthroughs we need to live sustainably in space, we should also be able to use those technologies to live sustainably on Earth.
I'm not a Democrat and don't consider myself to be "liberal" (though I don't know what these terms mean anymore). However, private companies and individuals are allowed to have their own rules and standards. Your freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can't kick you out of my house for insulting my wife. Your freedom of speech doesn't mean that I can't fire you from my company for telling me to go fuck myself. Your freedom of speech does not prohibit me from deleting your comment from my blog for using foul language. And your freedom of speech does not require that Twitter allow you to post whatever you want, without restriction or filtering.
Sure, you can say all of these things are censorship. They're not remotely a violation of the first amendment. You're not being barred from saying what you want publicly to whoever will listen. No one is under any obligation to listen, and no one else is under any obligation to distribute or broadcast what you say. Complaining that Twitter is removing your comments is like... if you got interviewed by a news show, and they either bleeped out what you said or cut your interview from the segment. It's a private company that broadcasts information. They're not required to broadcast it just because you want to say it.
Does that mean a baker doesn't have to bake a cake for a Republican couple?
First, there is a difference between being a Republican and being black. You chose to become a Republican, and you could choose not to be. That's a huge difference.
Second, let's agree, the baker shouldn't be able deny baking a cake for a Republican couple for being Republican. However, if the Republican couple asks the baker to write, "I hate blacks" on their wedding cake, the baker should be able to say, "I don't want to write that." If the Republican couple hangs out in the bakery and harasses other customers, the baker should be able to kick them out. Being Republican shouldn't be grounds for denying service, but being an offensive asshole should be, and being a Republican shouldn't shield you from that.
“While we all agree that religious freedom is important, no one’s religious beliefs make it acceptable to break the law by discriminating against prospective customers,” said Amanda C. Goad, staff attorney with the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project. “No one is asking Masterpiece’s owner to change his beliefs, but treating gay people differently because of who they are is discrimination plain and simple.”
Let me do a little word swapping:
“While we all agree that freedom of speech is important, no one’s speech make it acceptable to break the law by discriminating against prospective customers,” said staff attorney. “No one is asking Twitter’s owner to change their beliefs, but treating political opponents differently because of what they say is discrimination plain and simple.”
It's not quite the same thing. For one thing, in the first example, it's saying that "While my freedom to practice my religion is important, my religious beliefs don't make it acceptable to discriminate against you." In your quote, the implication is instead, "While my freedom of speech is important, nothing I say can make it acceptable for you to discriminate against me." See what I mean?
To make it more explicit, a real swap would be, "While we all agree that the far-right's freedom of speech is important, the far-right's freedom of speech does not make it acceptable for them to break the law by discriminating against people." (which is true!)
Or if you wanted to reflect what you wrote back to the original sentence, it would allow you to say something like, "While we all agree that the freedom of religion is important, Satan worshipper's freedom of religion does not make it acceptable for churches to bar them from holding animal sacrifices on their property." (which is dumb)
Second, just look at your last sentence. In the first, it says, "who they are" and in your example you change it to "what they say". You see the difference, right? You choose what you say. You control what you say. Who you are is just who you are.
And then nothing else happened, and everyone was ok.
That or are you OK with the phone companies all not selling to black people, women, homosexuals, and other groups... as they are simply a 'private platform'?
A couple of things:
1) Phone companies aren't really a private platform. It may be owned by private companies, but it's regulated because it's public infrastructure.
2) You're talking about refusing to sell to people because of who they are. Twitter is talking about suspending accounts because of how they use the service. It's a big difference. It doesn't seem to be the case that Twitter is suspending accounts because the owners are far-right activists, but because those owners are using Twitter against the Twitter terms of service.
Ok, but just to point it out: That was 10 years ago. If you had the latest version at the time, that was still 10.4, and we're now at 10.12. At the time, Windows XP was still the latest version of Windows. Some things have changed since then.
When you can't have a discussion about Apple's new laptop designs without making it about Trump, you should take a long hard look at yourself.