The "2015 FCC Open Internet" thing has this under their clear bright-line rules:
"A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management."
The question, then, is whether throttling video- which is a very high bandwidth application- counts as "reasonable network management". That seems very likely. A web page is a large burst of transfer, but with a small amount of total transfer. A video game is a small number of packets that are each pretty damned important and need low latency, but are not much bandwidth. A torrent wants as much bandwidth as possible but isn't a high priority. A video needs a certain amount of bandwidth and doesn't care about latency.
So no, even under net neutrality as it existed in the USA, videos could be slammed by ISPs under network management, or at least, they'd have a case in doing so.
The conflict comes from the fact that there's no solidly excellent way to enforce or discover what a given ISP is providing, and as such every ISP lies, and doesn't want to be accountable. Conversely, if two consumbers want to purchase 50 mbs down and 10 mbs up, and one of them streams netflix constantly and the other plays games and does web stuff, these two are going to look completely different from the perspective of the provider- the former is going to be angry if he doesn't get his advertised speeds 24/7, the latter is going to be angry if he doesn't have his comparably few packets privileged over the technology that can buffer, but for each of those who understands that, plenty don't.
The "correct" thing would be to get better educated consumers while simultaneously forcing the ISPs to be completely honest, giving none the ability to float bullshit and testing them in hard to circumvent ways. The first may be out of our power, the second should not be- but given regulatory capture, it may well be.
No one is fucking forcing them to shit out DX12 instead of switching to Vulkan like a non-predatory actor would have done. Maybe they can't open source the Windows kernel, but like, whatever. When Microsoft sees an opportunity to enforce lock-in, they do it, by any means necessary.
Stealing source code is 20th century. In the 21st century, you steal entire communities.
Sometimes you do it by embrace/extend or even replace. Certainly Microsoft got plenty of data from their Skype purchase. And, not to blame just Microsoft, finding gamers who lived on Mumble was trivial a few years ago, but nowadays proprietary chat replacements such as Discord and Curse (now just Twitch, which is Amazon) are host to a variety of actual real conversations, all loggable, seachable, and whateverable.
I think they'll do what they can to make github useful, because their real gains are the second order effect of holding the beating heart of the free and open source communities.
Showing uses of "regulated", in natural language, in historical context.
Ok, here's another link. This one is more wordy, on account of it being the Virginia ratification of the constitution. https://www.usconstitution.net...
One of the biggest pieces of drama was the lack of a bill of rights; drafting one up was of utmost important. George Mason, who is the coauthor of the bill of rights, spoke during this (relevant quotes on topic: "I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people." and "To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."). The ratification linked includes the demand: "That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state. That standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power."
So plenty of the founders in Virginia, at least, including the coauthor of the bill of rights, were absolutely clear on what they meant about "the people have a right to keep and bear arms". Remember, the second amendment wasn't just dropped on everyone's heads apropos of nothing: it was well understood that keeping and bearing arms was necessary to resist tyranny, because *they had just done exactly that*. Certainly, no one reading at the time was confused about a fucking comma (that confusion is a 20th century construct manufactured by gun control advocates; one with no historical basis).
> I don't think that they intended everyone to be running around with weapons all the time
They literally fucking did. Not to belabor the point, but that exact thing was how they just won a revolutionary war.
"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies."
So the people should have a "uniform and well-digested plan". They should be "not only armed, but disciplined". And of course they should be "independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies". If his paramount concern- or really, any fucking concern at all- was in controlling or laying laws down upon the "free people", then maybe he would have brought that up, instead of exhorting all Americans to be able to take up arms, ideally without relying on any others for military supplies.
> I think they meant that each city, county, state, etc should be able to defend itself with a recognized designated fighting force that is actually regulated
With no guarantee of how those pieces will eventually be integrated into a final product.
Right now, the pvp sim part is pretty fair. Do you really think it will be fair if I spend a hundred bucks and you spend ten thousand bucks? They aren't going to want to screw over whales of that magnitude.
While training is helpful, the wording regarding the guaranteed availability of firearms is pretty clear- you need to be well equipped, so you can't make a law banning arms. If you were trying to make some case that only small groups of people who are well trained could have arms, you (1) wouldn't have used "well regulated", understood to be in working order and well equipped and (2) wouldn't have used "militia", understood to be the whole of the people. You'd also not have guaranteed a right of the people. Meanwhile, you can see quite clearly from everything else they said, what they were up to.
"Only a libtard would get offended by the word libtard."
It kinda offends me a little, and I definitely enjoy being called a liberal by everyone who is vaguely right wing, and called way more names than that by anyone who is even a hint to the left of center. I have friends who are pretty fucking liberal, and while I apparently offend them by accident simply by existing and/or thinking, I prefer to not do so like, directly.
"But the second someone makes a word for them, they get all butthurt."
Like you do bring up a real problem. The words you list carry content, however, and refutable content at that. A deliberate insult just reduces the permeability of the message. And if you think the liberal name-calling thing is such a powerful weapon in their hands, I'd argue that it's a big part of why they lost the center so badly, and will probably continue to do so for awhile- or at least until they can get someone to say one thing and do another.
Baizuo is a good link in general, btw. But notice that such a word isn't deployed by, for instance, Donald Trump- who is generally just fine with insulting his opponents, to great effect. The actual truth is, Trump (and to a lesser extent successful Republicans, right wingers, whatever) isn't politically correct, but is concise with word choice, leaving out broad smears in exchange for a much more targeted smacking.
"Good, as long as you're part of a well-regulated militia then I'll believe you're trying to adhere to the Constitution. "
Well, given the obvious meaning of well-regulated: http://constitution.org/cons/w... And the fact that the militia is the whole of the people, then yes, definitely.
Of course, the right to keep and bear arms is not subordinate to some clause about a militia. The right of the government to raise armies is detailed in the constitution. It would obviously not be in a list of amendments that extensively detail individual rights, and mention the people specifically and repeatedly, if it were a restatement of "hey, the government can arm people". That's lunacy- and quite debunked by the thoughts of the men who wrote the fucking thing in the first place.
"If you think people shouldn't be allowed to own fighter planes with bombs and missiles or a mini gun or hand grenades, then we're only arguing about where the line should be drawn."
The line is probably "ordnance". A mini-gun SHOULD be allowed- it's a damned shame that it's been unconstitutionally found to be ok to ban automatic weapons. Bombs, grenades, missiles, and arming them on fighter planes would not fall under "arms", just as cannons and bombs and other ordnance did not at the time. That's not to say that all of these things should definitely be banned, but that the banning of them is not constitutionally prohibited.
That's the whole of the people. Regulated in this sense probably means well supplied. In any event, nothing about the second amendment's actual writing, nor its intention from those who wrote it, imply that being in a militia (and CERTAINLY not being in an army- the second amendment doesn't suddenly switch from detailing individual rights to detailing that the government should be able to raise armies, a detail covered in the main body of the constitution) has anything to do with the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
There was a time in law when the fiction about the second amendment somehow jumping about nimbly-bimbly and declaring the national guard to be a thing, and also that government troops are allowed to have weapons, was in fashion amongst revisionists. This has been pretty well thrown out all over the place, but there's still a few vanguards holding to a fiction.
> It also doesn't define what type of arms, so any weapon restrictions violate it.
Ordnance is distinct from arms. WMDs, cannons, destructive devices, bombs, would qualify as ordance.
Swords and automatic weapons are protected by the second amendment. There's currently a federal law against much of the constitutionally protected automatic weaponry, and IMO it is quite unconstitutional. There's no federal law against swords and other arms common at the time, but there are plenty of state laws- but there's not really anyone going through the efforts of establishing precedent there either.
> Seems kind of limp-dicked when you've already made some pretty heavy concessions in the past.
Restrictions on automatic weaponry is pretty bullshit and should be fought. The other stuff you mention was not understood (in historical analog or in strict history as "arms"- the second amendment doesn't ban a cannon, but it doesn't guarantee your right to own one, because it is ordnance).
> Every time any member of my family in Texas has gone hunting, the rifle was bolt-action.
There's no right to hunt in the constitution. The second amendment is about the right to keep and bear arms. Arms are effective weaponry. No right to hunt, no right to target shoot. The right to keep and bear arms.
> However it also highlights that there's a need to also be able to invalidate cryptocurrency obtained through illegal means.
Illegal according to whom? The Chinese government? If you shook your head no, then why wouldn't they be able to, if a government you approve of is able to do so?
> BTW Snaps are basically containers so some of the damage is contained.
The malware in question doesn't eat your files or snoop your keyboard or any of the more traditional vectors that a bad actor asks "what would be good lulz and/or allow me to steal data from the owner that I can use elsewhere". It will probably still allow you to be part of a botnet for a DDOS or something like that, but in this case it wasn't network shenanigans either- it was cryptocurrency. It's very unusual to try to preserve your clock cycles and GPU usage, because a given download that is using a ton of computational resources very probably is doing so at the behest of the user- I think across all computing, the only commonly available thing that tries to shut this down is Chrome, and for a similar reason, a cryptocurrency miner.
> I wouldn't want a "robot" that didn't enjoy going to monster truck rallies with me.
The point is that the super-intelligence will share the politics of it creator, presumably up to and including a hatred of those who do not agree or share its values. It should be a lot easier to shun and economically punish those with different values if they depend on the largesse of an all-powerful mind, after all.
> I'm afraid though, if this is their wedge issue this go around
Net Neutrality and Federal Cannabis Decriminalization are pretty good "wedge" issues, if they want them, and if the Republicans don't just evaporate them by suddenly flipping. Net Neutrality seems like it would be really hard for the Republicans to flip on, so maybe that's the strat- I don't know.
So far they have seemed to be running on "take all the guns", even having plenty of their people openly demanding the destruction of the second amendment. So if nothing else, campaigning for an open internet replacing the destruction of liberties might actually get votes.
This vote obviously won't pass; it has a non-zero chance of passing the Senate, but it would then need to pass a majority vote in the House, where it will die. It will never see Trump's desk. It's still not a bad call for the Democrats to go in this direction, because it's a popular enough issue.
Without knowing anything about where other galaxies are, the odds of one shooting a star directly at us struck me as odd- if galaxies were emitting stars occasionally, shouldn't there be a bunch more lone stars zipping all around?
In any event, apparently the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is both reasonably close as far as galaxies go, is in *orbit* around the milky way, and is about 1% the mass of the milky way.
So maybe we stole the star, eh? "Kidnapped star" would sound just as fun as "Invading star", after all, and gravity is gravity.
> Isn't that what.... the Clinton foundation was doing? Send us money now, for a big pay off once I'm in office!
Not really, I'm pretty sure the Clintons would have paid their debts to their friends and financiers if they had won, and everyone funneling money to a political family or candidate understands that there is a substantial risk of failure in a democracy. It's probably why the money needed to pay off Democrats and Republicans is so small, especially considering how mighty the USG actually is, compared with someone who wields more absolute power over a smaller area, such as seen in a monarchy, fascism, communist "utopia", or whatever else inevitably devolves into a totalitarian hellhole.
> That lends credence to the theory that the fractured English of the classic "Nigerian Prince scam" was deliberate, to filter out the less gullible.
Agreed. I think that about half a decade of that would have filtered out the poor English and obvious scammy nature of that stuff if it wasn't actually the correct way for them to filter out non-rubes quickly. Because of the nature of email (reasonably anonymous, inability to view who others have emailed, inability to contact other potential dupes- none of which would apply to a man scamming on the streets), it's really really plausible that this is the case.
Slashdot Mirror
The "2015 FCC Open Internet" thing has this under their clear bright-line rules:
"A person engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service, insofar as such
person is so engaged, shall not block lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful
devices, subject to reasonable network management."
The question, then, is whether throttling video- which is a very high bandwidth application- counts as "reasonable network management". That seems very likely. A web page is a large burst of transfer, but with a small amount of total transfer. A video game is a small number of packets that are each pretty damned important and need low latency, but are not much bandwidth. A torrent wants as much bandwidth as possible but isn't a high priority. A video needs a certain amount of bandwidth and doesn't care about latency.
So no, even under net neutrality as it existed in the USA, videos could be slammed by ISPs under network management, or at least, they'd have a case in doing so.
The conflict comes from the fact that there's no solidly excellent way to enforce or discover what a given ISP is providing, and as such every ISP lies, and doesn't want to be accountable. Conversely, if two consumbers want to purchase 50 mbs down and 10 mbs up, and one of them streams netflix constantly and the other plays games and does web stuff, these two are going to look completely different from the perspective of the provider- the former is going to be angry if he doesn't get his advertised speeds 24/7, the latter is going to be angry if he doesn't have his comparably few packets privileged over the technology that can buffer, but for each of those who understands that, plenty don't.
The "correct" thing would be to get better educated consumers while simultaneously forcing the ISPs to be completely honest, giving none the ability to float bullshit and testing them in hard to circumvent ways. The first may be out of our power, the second should not be- but given regulatory capture, it may well be.
No one is fucking forcing them to shit out DX12 instead of switching to Vulkan like a non-predatory actor would have done. Maybe they can't open source the Windows kernel, but like, whatever. When Microsoft sees an opportunity to enforce lock-in, they do it, by any means necessary.
Stealing source code is 20th century. In the 21st century, you steal entire communities.
Sometimes you do it by embrace/extend or even replace. Certainly Microsoft got plenty of data from their Skype purchase. And, not to blame just Microsoft, finding gamers who lived on Mumble was trivial a few years ago, but nowadays proprietary chat replacements such as Discord and Curse (now just Twitch, which is Amazon) are host to a variety of actual real conversations, all loggable, seachable, and whateverable.
I think they'll do what they can to make github useful, because their real gains are the second order effect of holding the beating heart of the free and open source communities.
paraphrase: "Plants vs. Zombies is too hard to play on a small screen"
I think this is how they sell you an iPad :/
> While I appreciate your ability to bend things to fit your ideas
First, I'll respond with a link:
http://constitution.org/cons/w...
Showing uses of "regulated", in natural language, in historical context.
Ok, here's another link. This one is more wordy, on account of it being the Virginia ratification of the constitution.
https://www.usconstitution.net...
One of the biggest pieces of drama was the lack of a bill of rights; drafting one up was of utmost important. George Mason, who is the coauthor of the bill of rights, spoke during this (relevant quotes on topic: "I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people." and "To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."). The ratification linked includes the demand:
"That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state. That standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power."
So plenty of the founders in Virginia, at least, including the coauthor of the bill of rights, were absolutely clear on what they meant about "the people have a right to keep and bear arms". Remember, the second amendment wasn't just dropped on everyone's heads apropos of nothing: it was well understood that keeping and bearing arms was necessary to resist tyranny, because *they had just done exactly that*. Certainly, no one reading at the time was confused about a fucking comma (that confusion is a 20th century construct manufactured by gun control advocates; one with no historical basis).
> I don't think that they intended everyone to be running around with weapons all the time
They literally fucking did. Not to belabor the point, but that exact thing was how they just won a revolutionary war.
Here's the first ever state of the union:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu...
"To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace. A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies."
So the people should have a "uniform and well-digested plan". They should be "not only armed, but disciplined". And of course they should be "independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies". If his paramount concern- or really, any fucking concern at all- was in controlling or laying laws down upon the "free people", then maybe he would have brought that up, instead of exhorting all Americans to be able to take up arms, ideally without relying on any others for military supplies.
> I think they meant that each city, county, state, etc should be able to defend itself with a recognized designated fighting force that is actually regulated
That's all your revisionism. Read their words.
No, the militia is the whole of the people. You need that militia to have, among other things, supplies, such as arms.
They don't use "everyone" because of word choice. They do say "the people", however, and not just in the second amendment.
With no guarantee of how those pieces will eventually be integrated into a final product.
Right now, the pvp sim part is pretty fair. Do you really think it will be fair if I spend a hundred bucks and you spend ten thousand bucks? They aren't going to want to screw over whales of that magnitude.
While training is helpful, the wording regarding the guaranteed availability of firearms is pretty clear- you need to be well equipped, so you can't make a law banning arms. If you were trying to make some case that only small groups of people who are well trained could have arms, you (1) wouldn't have used "well regulated", understood to be in working order and well equipped and (2) wouldn't have used "militia", understood to be the whole of the people. You'd also not have guaranteed a right of the people. Meanwhile, you can see quite clearly from everything else they said, what they were up to.
"Only a libtard would get offended by the word libtard."
It kinda offends me a little, and I definitely enjoy being called a liberal by everyone who is vaguely right wing, and called way more names than that by anyone who is even a hint to the left of center. I have friends who are pretty fucking liberal, and while I apparently offend them by accident simply by existing and/or thinking, I prefer to not do so like, directly.
"But the second someone makes a word for them, they get all butthurt."
Like you do bring up a real problem. The words you list carry content, however, and refutable content at that. A deliberate insult just reduces the permeability of the message. And if you think the liberal name-calling thing is such a powerful weapon in their hands, I'd argue that it's a big part of why they lost the center so badly, and will probably continue to do so for awhile- or at least until they can get someone to say one thing and do another.
Baizuo is a good link in general, btw. But notice that such a word isn't deployed by, for instance, Donald Trump- who is generally just fine with insulting his opponents, to great effect. The actual truth is, Trump (and to a lesser extent successful Republicans, right wingers, whatever) isn't politically correct, but is concise with word choice, leaving out broad smears in exchange for a much more targeted smacking.
"Good, as long as you're part of a well-regulated militia then I'll believe you're trying to adhere to the Constitution. "
Well, given the obvious meaning of well-regulated: http://constitution.org/cons/w...
And the fact that the militia is the whole of the people, then yes, definitely.
Of course, the right to keep and bear arms is not subordinate to some clause about a militia. The right of the government to raise armies is detailed in the constitution. It would obviously not be in a list of amendments that extensively detail individual rights, and mention the people specifically and repeatedly, if it were a restatement of "hey, the government can arm people". That's lunacy- and quite debunked by the thoughts of the men who wrote the fucking thing in the first place.
"If you think people shouldn't be allowed to own fighter planes with bombs and missiles or a mini gun or hand grenades, then we're only arguing about where the line should be drawn."
The line is probably "ordnance". A mini-gun SHOULD be allowed- it's a damned shame that it's been unconstitutionally found to be ok to ban automatic weapons. Bombs, grenades, missiles, and arming them on fighter planes would not fall under "arms", just as cannons and bombs and other ordnance did not at the time. That's not to say that all of these things should definitely be banned, but that the banning of them is not constitutionally prohibited.
"libtard" comment aside, the point you should probably be aware of is the meaning of "well regulated" at the time.
http://constitution.org/cons/w...
The whole of the people are the militia of course- but that one you already knew.
No, it would be unregulated if it had no arms, or was non functional in some fashion.
http://constitution.org/cons/w...
"The newspaper, a never wanting adjunct to every well-regulated American embryo city."
> "well regulated militia"
That's the whole of the people. Regulated in this sense probably means well supplied. In any event, nothing about the second amendment's actual writing, nor its intention from those who wrote it, imply that being in a militia (and CERTAINLY not being in an army- the second amendment doesn't suddenly switch from detailing individual rights to detailing that the government should be able to raise armies, a detail covered in the main body of the constitution) has anything to do with the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
There was a time in law when the fiction about the second amendment somehow jumping about nimbly-bimbly and declaring the national guard to be a thing, and also that government troops are allowed to have weapons, was in fashion amongst revisionists. This has been pretty well thrown out all over the place, but there's still a few vanguards holding to a fiction.
> It also doesn't define what type of arms, so any weapon restrictions violate it.
Ordnance is distinct from arms. WMDs, cannons, destructive devices, bombs, would qualify as ordance.
Swords and automatic weapons are protected by the second amendment. There's currently a federal law against much of the constitutionally protected automatic weaponry, and IMO it is quite unconstitutional. There's no federal law against swords and other arms common at the time, but there are plenty of state laws- but there's not really anyone going through the efforts of establishing precedent there either.
> Seems kind of limp-dicked when you've already made some pretty heavy concessions in the past.
Restrictions on automatic weaponry is pretty bullshit and should be fought. The other stuff you mention was not understood (in historical analog or in strict history as "arms"- the second amendment doesn't ban a cannon, but it doesn't guarantee your right to own one, because it is ordnance).
> Every time any member of my family in Texas has gone hunting, the rifle was bolt-action.
There's no right to hunt in the constitution. The second amendment is about the right to keep and bear arms. Arms are effective weaponry. No right to hunt, no right to target shoot. The right to keep and bear arms.
Shall not be infringed. I don't care how you do it in your country, AC. That's your business.
> However it also highlights that there's a need to also be able to invalidate cryptocurrency obtained through illegal means.
Illegal according to whom? The Chinese government? If you shook your head no, then why wouldn't they be able to, if a government you approve of is able to do so?
> BTW Snaps are basically containers so some of the damage is contained.
The malware in question doesn't eat your files or snoop your keyboard or any of the more traditional vectors that a bad actor asks "what would be good lulz and/or allow me to steal data from the owner that I can use elsewhere". It will probably still allow you to be part of a botnet for a DDOS or something like that, but in this case it wasn't network shenanigans either- it was cryptocurrency. It's very unusual to try to preserve your clock cycles and GPU usage, because a given download that is using a ton of computational resources very probably is doing so at the behest of the user- I think across all computing, the only commonly available thing that tries to shut this down is Chrome, and for a similar reason, a cryptocurrency miner.
> I wouldn't want a "robot" that didn't enjoy going to monster truck rallies with me.
The point is that the super-intelligence will share the politics of it creator, presumably up to and including a hatred of those who do not agree or share its values. It should be a lot easier to shun and economically punish those with different values if they depend on the largesse of an all-powerful mind, after all.
This is a funny joke, calm your tits.
> I'm afraid though, if this is their wedge issue this go around
Net Neutrality and Federal Cannabis Decriminalization are pretty good "wedge" issues, if they want them, and if the Republicans don't just evaporate them by suddenly flipping. Net Neutrality seems like it would be really hard for the Republicans to flip on, so maybe that's the strat- I don't know.
So far they have seemed to be running on "take all the guns", even having plenty of their people openly demanding the destruction of the second amendment. So if nothing else, campaigning for an open internet replacing the destruction of liberties might actually get votes.
This vote obviously won't pass; it has a non-zero chance of passing the Senate, but it would then need to pass a majority vote in the House, where it will die. It will never see Trump's desk. It's still not a bad call for the Democrats to go in this direction, because it's a popular enough issue.
> Is there some magic spell cast on the humankind recently making everybody angry about everything?
Lol, well put. I mean, it certainly seems that way.
Without knowing anything about where other galaxies are, the odds of one shooting a star directly at us struck me as odd- if galaxies were emitting stars occasionally, shouldn't there be a bunch more lone stars zipping all around?
In any event, apparently the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is both reasonably close as far as galaxies go, is in *orbit* around the milky way, and is about 1% the mass of the milky way.
So maybe we stole the star, eh? "Kidnapped star" would sound just as fun as "Invading star", after all, and gravity is gravity.
> Isn't that what.... the Clinton foundation was doing? Send us money now, for a big pay off once I'm in office!
Not really, I'm pretty sure the Clintons would have paid their debts to their friends and financiers if they had won, and everyone funneling money to a political family or candidate understands that there is a substantial risk of failure in a democracy. It's probably why the money needed to pay off Democrats and Republicans is so small, especially considering how mighty the USG actually is, compared with someone who wields more absolute power over a smaller area, such as seen in a monarchy, fascism, communist "utopia", or whatever else inevitably devolves into a totalitarian hellhole.
> That lends credence to the theory that the fractured English of the classic "Nigerian Prince scam" was deliberate, to filter out the less gullible.
Agreed. I think that about half a decade of that would have filtered out the poor English and obvious scammy nature of that stuff if it wasn't actually the correct way for them to filter out non-rubes quickly. Because of the nature of email (reasonably anonymous, inability to view who others have emailed, inability to contact other potential dupes- none of which would apply to a man scamming on the streets), it's really really plausible that this is the case.