..that this has to happen at the behest of a government agency. Why didn't google just foresee this was going to happen and implement it originally?
Because nothing else involving public broadcasts of personal information works this way in the USA. For example, I'd like to opt out of ANPR - automatic license plate reading systems but I don't have that option short of not using my car (same as not using wifi).
A website can be had for a LOT less money than a moderator. $10/month gets you a website. Know anyone willing to moderate a website for $10/month?
Again you are choosing to ignore reasonable options. You are stuck on this "it costs too much" jag. It's not a valid excuse and the fact that you are ignoring other proposed options, never mind trying think of some more yourself, shows you are more interested in punishing this guy, consequences be damned, than you are in finding a solution that works.
Take your pick.
Yeah, jail or beating are the only two options here. Making obviously disingenuous arguments isn't particularly convincing.
OK, I'll bite - what opinion can he possibly be expressing about a person he doesn't know, has never met, and *can* never meet?
Well, in this case it sounds like he thinks the girl was wrong for committing suicide and the family wrong for not condemning her for it. Such opinions are still pretty common even if they are pretty shitty. But you know what? Your criteria is irrelevant. There is nothing in the definition of "opinion" that says it has to be meaningful, rationale or anything else.
For one, the family still ends up having psychological pain inflicted on them by trolls who intended to do just that (or do you think they have money shooting out of their ears to hire a moderator?)
You are looking to the law to solve a problem first and foremost when the law should always be the last resort.
If the family expects well wishers to actively use the website it isn't a stretch to ask those people to delete anything that they think is inappropriate. It isn't like some dinky memorial website is going to have to worry about edit wars. That plus something to prevent message flooding seems like a very reasonable minimum standard.
On "money shooting out of their ears" bit - how'd they pay for the website in the first place? I'm guessing it was ad-supported. If ads can pay for the website it seems reasonable that the same service provider could provide some sort of moderation service - perhaps as part of posting to one website you have to moderate a message from another website on the same host.
It is sociopathic nonsense to believe that an unmoderated forum deserves in any way the trolling it gets.
You are arguing for victimhood and almost a learned helplessness. Your constant use of the word "deserves" to describe the situation is emotional and misleading. Nobody "deserves" what happened here. But neither does anyone "deserve" to be shielded from offense by the law.
Trolling someone's web forum is little different than going to their home and shouting obscenities from the sidewalk.
It is hugely different. There is no "off" button for someone yelling at your house. These people had all kinds of options to make the asshole go away that don't exist in your sidewalk analogy.
Protecting people from this kind of harassment is not a new item in law.
Really? Maybe so. In the US we recently had a supreme court ruling that those people who show up at funerals and say the dead people deserved to die are completely within their rights.
Posting a video on youtube and posting crap on some website - a website that actively accepts the crap - are far closer in kind to what those people do. "Mailing" death threats gets special treatment, at least in the US because the postal service gets special treatment for all kinds of things - for example it is a felony to put anything other than stamped mail into someone's mailbox.
Other than being digital, how? Really. How is it different? That you don't see the face of the commenter? Like you don't see the face of someone on a party line?
Sure, great examples. I think you answered your own question sufficiently. Or in other words a "personal assertion" is good enough when its truth is obvious even to those who are trying their hardest to disagree.
Another personal assertion, which due to my personal experience, I feel is incorrect.
Well then, you should take that up with the guy who's entire argument depended on fenced in front yards not being the norm. All I did was agree with him.
It wasn't opinion. It wasn't censoring expression.
Of course it was. Just because you disagree with the opinion being expressed doesn't make it any less censorship.
It was stopping a person who knew he was causing harm from continuing to cause harm.
Because the idea that we need to stop anyone and everyone from every inflicting pain on another person is the proverbial path paved with good intentions. A line has to be drawn somewhere, but drawing it to include hurtful speech is so far to the side that it encompasses practically everything anyone might do at all.
What, everyone should be a Vulcan? We should aspire to be uninsultable and inhuman.
Just because something is not illegal does not make it endorsed. We can still aspire to be humane without the heavy burden that comes with institutionalised censorship.
The argument that people who leave open tribute pages should expect to be trolled is the sort of sociopathic nonsense we can expect from geeks. People had front gardens without barbed wire fences, but don't expect people to shit on the middle of the lawn.
Is it only geeks that can see that the emperor has no clothes? Your analogy completely falls apart for at least two reasons:
1) Fences with barb wire aren't feasible for front gardens, it makes the neighborhood ugly, barb wire violates safety codes in practically every city in every 1st world country. But moderation online is easily feasible.
2) Online culture is different from real-world culture. Moderation in one form or another is the norm, not the exception online. Just like open front gardens are the norm, not the exception in the real world.
As an example of cultural norms varying by location, look at back yards. In the New England area of the USA fencing in back yards is pretty rare. But in the desert southwest walled in back-yards are pretty much standard and the difference is for no other reason than the cultures of the two areas are different. Same thing goes here - moderation is just the way people who care about how their websites look do things online. It's no more "sociopathic nonsense" to expect moderation online than it is to build a concert wall around your back-yard in Arizona.
That said, I'm highly offended by your entire post. It harmed me as much as it would have if you would have punched me! Therefore, you should be thrown in jail.
Indeed. As a member of the "NOOOO! Censorship!" crowd, his denigration of that ethnic group was both personally injurious and socially destructive. I will not be able to recover for days if not weeks. F69631 needs to pay for the harm he's done.
What the fuck are you talking about? What response? The one where I just reiterated to you what I've said like three times already? Yeah "infintely better" Lol. I knew a friended you for a reason - you are a fucking riot.
We're supposed to believe that you've purchased 1200 servers, 2400 six core CPUs and all the associated hardware without deciding basic things like how you're going to connect it all or what distribution you're going to use?
If they can get a ruling on this being legal, then there is nothing stopping you from using that very same ruling in court if someone tries to go after you.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that settlements do not establish precedent and settling seems to be all that Google has been trying to do.
As a netral observer, you're basically an asshole. And like every other asshole in existence, doesn't seem to realize that.
Of course I realize it. I deliberately choose to be an asshole in response to an asshole. That's what I've been saying all along.
The original responder was a smart ass, which is a completely different and infinitely less annoying kind of ass. I hire smart asses while I fire assholes.
Who some AC hires and fires in his mom's basement doesn't really matter all that much now does it?
I am in favor of an egalitarian solution where we are all free to do what google is doing now, I just recognize that the roadblocks to that (and thus, the enemies of the egalitarian ideal) come from the courts, legislature, and the likes of the Author's Guild, not from google.
And what you aren't recognising is that google is just as much part of the problem.
As a member of society it is incumbent on google to pursue a fix through the democratic process. That is the way our society is designed.
You keep talking about putting the blame on the courts and legislature for standing in google's way. They are only standing in google's way because google is facing in the wrong direction. The right direction is the democratic process, the wrong direction is buying their way around it.
I really don't know what else to call such circumvention other than "might makes right."
Since you specified no qualifiers, contexts or limitations otherwise, this can only be interpreted as applying to any and all situations.
Yeah, no other context except the freaking article at the start of this entire discussion. You know the one where the CEO said, "Everything has been a carbon copy of the Apple devices, and Android has largely been that." A carbon copy that's cheaper, that's not better at all.
Consistency, hobgoblin, I think you get the picture by now.
If I am wronged, I am wronged by anyone who would keep me from doing the same thing.
No. You are wronged because someone with a lot of money gets to ignore the laws that you don't get to ignore. The law is not supposed to be some other entity outside of society - it is part of society. That "anyone" who keeps you from doing the same thing is you, and me, and google and your neighbor down the road and everyone else in this country. At least it is in a functioning democracy. But not in an oligarchy. Google's move to spend their way out of being equal before the law is inherently undemocratic.
I think we are at the point where it is obvious that you are good with a might makes right argument and its obvious that I am not. I say your attitude is not viable in a democracy, I suspect you actually agree. That you think egalitarianism is over-rated. So we are unlikely to ever see eye to eye because we don't have the same beliefs as to what is most important in a society.
Here you dismiss the poster's argument by questioning his understanding of the word "need" in the phrase 'Do people *need* power windows and power locks [in a car]' - that by your argument, he only has one narrow definition of and that this must be his interpretation, rather than addressing the argument itself.
So tell me then, what exactly is his argument without his deliberately narrow definition of "need?" Go ahead. You can even reference his follow-up posts where all he does is double down on his self-serving definition of "need" by literally spelling it out:
Where's the pedantry? In noting the difference between "need" and "want"
And when that doesn't pass the dictionary pedant test he tries to double down yet again by declaring his own self-serving definition for an entire phrase:
When people talk about buying the "cheapest thing that meets their needs", that naturally excludes niceties and extras. It refers to basics.
Never mind that tablets, being luxury goods, everything about them is a nicety. Just like his own examples of Starbucks and TV.
If his entire argument doesn't depend on wilfully misunderstanding the word "need" then why is that all ever does in the entire thread? Obviously the answer is that there is no other argument. Look all you want, it ain't there. All he had was that smug pedantry and having seen that sort of shit a thousand times before I called him on it.
Since you seem to want to try and "put me in my place"
That's funny coming from someone who's entire participation in this thread has been nothing but trying to "put me in my place." At least that deuce was on-topic in his logical fallacies. All you've done is throw a hissy fit because I used a naughty word.
They are wronging everybody else in our society. We all still have to suffer those restrictions but Google doesn't simply because they "have the big bucks." They are effectively changing rule of law to rule of man and that is not how a democracy works. An oligarchy yes, but not a democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
..that this has to happen at the behest of a government agency. Why didn't google just foresee this was going to happen and implement it originally?
Because nothing else involving public broadcasts of personal information works this way in the USA. For example, I'd like to opt out of ANPR - automatic license plate reading systems but I don't have that option short of not using my car (same as not using wifi).
I'd love to be able to reach my home connection from that distance, but do we really want 10,000 "linksys" APs showing up when doing a scan?
The article is talking about something more like wimax rather than personal access points.
How, you haven't suggested any!
I haven't? You mean, I didn't suggest this:
Letting others delete posts seems to be justy begging for some pointy headed moron to delete all but his own filth.
I didn't even think through the implications and address your objection regarding edit wars either.
When your own arguments boil down to two sentences that contradict each other I think its time to throw in the towel.
A website can be had for a LOT less money than a moderator. $10/month gets you a website. Know anyone willing to moderate a website for $10/month?
Again you are choosing to ignore reasonable options. You are stuck on this "it costs too much" jag. It's not a valid excuse and the fact that you are ignoring other proposed options, never mind trying think of some more yourself, shows you are more interested in punishing this guy, consequences be damned, than you are in finding a solution that works.
Take your pick.
Yeah, jail or beating are the only two options here. Making obviously disingenuous arguments isn't particularly convincing.
OK, I'll bite - what opinion can he possibly be expressing about a person he doesn't know, has never met, and *can* never meet?
Well, in this case it sounds like he thinks the girl was wrong for committing suicide and the family wrong for not condemning her for it. Such opinions are still pretty common even if they are pretty shitty. But you know what? Your criteria is irrelevant. There is nothing in the definition of "opinion" that says it has to be meaningful, rationale or anything else.
Calling someone and idiot is not opinion it is an insult.
It is both. There is nothing exclusive about either.
For one, the family still ends up having psychological pain inflicted on them by trolls who intended to do just that (or do you think they have money shooting out of their ears to hire a moderator?)
You are looking to the law to solve a problem first and foremost when the law should always be the last resort.
If the family expects well wishers to actively use the website it isn't a stretch to ask those people to delete anything that they think is inappropriate. It isn't like some dinky memorial website is going to have to worry about edit wars. That plus something to prevent message flooding seems like a very reasonable minimum standard.
On "money shooting out of their ears" bit - how'd they pay for the website in the first place? I'm guessing it was ad-supported. If ads can pay for the website it seems reasonable that the same service provider could provide some sort of moderation service - perhaps as part of posting to one website you have to moderate a message from another website on the same host.
It is sociopathic nonsense to believe that an unmoderated forum deserves in any way the trolling it gets.
You are arguing for victimhood and almost a learned helplessness. Your constant use of the word "deserves" to describe the situation is emotional and misleading. Nobody "deserves" what happened here. But neither does anyone "deserve" to be shielded from offense by the law.
Trolling someone's web forum is little different than going to their home and shouting obscenities from the sidewalk.
It is hugely different. There is no "off" button for someone yelling at your house. These people had all kinds of options to make the asshole go away that don't exist in your sidewalk analogy.
Protecting people from this kind of harassment is not a new item in law.
Really? Maybe so. In the US we recently had a supreme court ruling that those people who show up at funerals and say the dead people deserved to die are completely within their rights.
Posting a video on youtube and posting crap on some website - a website that actively accepts the crap - are far closer in kind to what those people do. "Mailing" death threats gets special treatment, at least in the US because the postal service gets special treatment for all kinds of things - for example it is a felony to put anything other than stamped mail into someone's mailbox.
Other than being digital, how? Really. How is it different? That you don't see the face of the commenter? Like you don't see the face of someone on a party line?
Sure, great examples. I think you answered your own question sufficiently.
Or in other words a "personal assertion" is good enough when its truth is obvious even to those who are trying their hardest to disagree.
Another personal assertion, which due to my personal experience, I feel is incorrect.
Well then, you should take that up with the guy who's entire argument depended on fenced in front yards not being the norm. All I did was agree with him.
The analogy doesn't depend on it being barbed wire, you buffoon.
And neither did my criticism. Reguilar chain-link fences are just as ugly, you ass.
"People have front gardens without white picket fences, but don't expect people to shit on the middle of the lawn" means the same thing.
Same thing except for that fact that plenty of places have white picket fences around their front yards.
It wasn't opinion. It wasn't censoring expression.
Of course it was. Just because you disagree with the opinion being expressed doesn't make it any less censorship.
It was stopping a person who knew he was causing harm from continuing to cause harm.
Because the idea that we need to stop anyone and everyone from every inflicting pain on another person is the proverbial path paved with good intentions. A line has to be drawn somewhere, but drawing it to include hurtful speech is so far to the side that it encompasses practically everything anyone might do at all.
What, everyone should be a Vulcan? We should aspire to be uninsultable and inhuman.
Just because something is not illegal does not make it endorsed. We can still aspire to be humane without the heavy burden that comes with institutionalised censorship.
The argument that people who leave open tribute pages should expect to be trolled is the sort of sociopathic nonsense we can expect from geeks. People had front gardens without barbed wire fences, but don't expect people to shit on the middle of the lawn.
Is it only geeks that can see that the emperor has no clothes? Your analogy completely falls apart for at least two reasons:
1) Fences with barb wire aren't feasible for front gardens, it makes the neighborhood ugly, barb wire violates safety codes in practically every city in every 1st world country. But moderation online is easily feasible.
2) Online culture is different from real-world culture. Moderation in one form or another is the norm, not the exception online. Just like open front gardens are the norm, not the exception in the real world.
As an example of cultural norms varying by location, look at back yards. In the New England area of the USA fencing in back yards is pretty rare. But in the desert southwest walled in back-yards are pretty much standard and the difference is for no other reason than the cultures of the two areas are different. Same thing goes here - moderation is just the way people who care about how their websites look do things online. It's no more "sociopathic nonsense" to expect moderation online than it is to build a concert wall around your back-yard in Arizona.
That said, I'm highly offended by your entire post. It harmed me as much as it would have if you would have punched me! Therefore, you should be thrown in jail.
Indeed. As a member of the "NOOOO! Censorship!" crowd, his denigration of that ethnic group was both personally injurious and socially destructive. I will not be able to recover for days if not weeks. F69631 needs to pay for the harm he's done.
Where was this response before?
What the fuck are you talking about? What response? The one where I just reiterated to you what I've said like three times already? Yeah "infintely better"
Lol. I knew a friended you for a reason - you are a fucking riot.
We're supposed to believe that you've purchased 1200 servers, 2400 six core CPUs and all the associated hardware without deciding basic things like how you're going to connect it all or what distribution you're going to use?
Sounds like they got some of that 75 billion dollars per year of anti-terrorism money.
Even though he's dead, Osama still knows how to make it rain!!
If they can get a ruling on this being legal, then there is nothing stopping you from using that very same ruling in court if someone tries to go after you.
Are you sure about that? My understanding is that settlements do not establish precedent and settling seems to be all that Google has been trying to do.
Oh, wow you replied anonymously! That'll save your reputation. No body will ever know how much of an asshole you are now! Good Jorb!
It's called not bothering to log in from my ipad. Or do you only have one computer down in your mom's basements?
As a netral observer, you're basically an asshole. And like every other asshole in existence, doesn't seem to realize that.
Of course I realize it. I deliberately choose to be an asshole in response to an asshole. That's what I've been saying all along.
The original responder was a smart ass, which is a completely different and infinitely less annoying kind of ass. I hire smart asses while I fire assholes.
Who some AC hires and fires in his mom's basement doesn't really matter all that much now does it?
I am in favor of an egalitarian solution where we are all free to do what google is doing now, I just recognize that the roadblocks to that (and thus, the enemies of the egalitarian ideal) come from the courts, legislature, and the likes of the Author's Guild, not from google.
And what you aren't recognising is that google is just as much part of the problem.
As a member of society it is incumbent on google to pursue a fix through the democratic process. That is the way our society is designed.
You keep talking about putting the blame on the courts and legislature for standing in google's way. They are only standing in google's way because google is facing in the wrong direction. The right direction is the democratic process, the wrong direction is buying their way around it.
I really don't know what else to call such circumvention other than "might makes right."
This has been their plan all along. Get Gold Man-Sacks to pay for world-beating ping-times.
Screw hedgefunds, those guys are going to rule in deathmatch mode.
Since you specified no qualifiers, contexts or limitations otherwise, this can only be interpreted as applying to any and all situations.
Yeah, no other context except the freaking article at the start of this entire discussion. You know the one where the CEO said, "Everything has been a carbon copy of the Apple devices, and Android has largely been that." A carbon copy that's cheaper, that's not better at all.
Consistency, hobgoblin, I think you get the picture by now.
If I am wronged, I am wronged by anyone who would keep me from doing the same thing.
No. You are wronged because someone with a lot of money gets to ignore the laws that you don't get to ignore. The law is not supposed to be some other entity outside of society - it is part of society. That "anyone" who keeps you from doing the same thing is you, and me, and google and your neighbor down the road and everyone else in this country. At least it is in a functioning democracy. But not in an oligarchy. Google's move to spend their way out of being equal before the law is inherently undemocratic.
I think we are at the point where it is obvious that you are good with a might makes right argument and its obvious that I am not. I say your attitude is not viable in a democracy, I suspect you actually agree. That you think egalitarianism is over-rated. So we are unlikely to ever see eye to eye because we don't have the same beliefs as to what is most important in a society.
Here you dismiss the poster's argument by questioning his understanding of the word "need" in the phrase 'Do people *need* power windows and power locks [in a car]' - that by your argument, he only has one narrow definition of and that this must be his interpretation, rather than addressing the argument itself.
So tell me then, what exactly is his argument without his deliberately narrow definition of "need?" Go ahead. You can even reference his follow-up posts where all he does is double down on his self-serving definition of "need" by literally spelling it out:
Where's the pedantry? In noting the difference between "need" and "want"
And when that doesn't pass the dictionary pedant test he tries to double down yet again by declaring his own self-serving definition for an entire phrase:
When people talk about buying the "cheapest thing that meets their needs", that naturally excludes niceties and extras. It refers to basics.
Never mind that tablets, being luxury goods, everything about them is a nicety. Just like his own examples of Starbucks and TV.
If his entire argument doesn't depend on wilfully misunderstanding the word "need" then why is that all ever does in the entire thread? Obviously the answer is that there is no other argument. Look all you want, it ain't there. All he had was that smug pedantry and having seen that sort of shit a thousand times before I called him on it.
Since you seem to want to try and "put me in my place"
That's funny coming from someone who's entire participation in this thread has been nothing but trying to "put me in my place." At least that deuce was on-topic in his logical fallacies. All you've done is throw a hissy fit because I used a naughty word.
Sayonara.
His premise is that cheaper is not always better, as indicated by opposing your "cheaper is better" claim,
Lol.
So I don't use the word "always" you add it in.
He leaves out the word "never" and you don't add it in.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, eh?
Who are they wronging?
They are wronging everybody else in our society. We all still have to suffer those restrictions but Google doesn't simply because they "have the big bucks." They are effectively changing rule of law to rule of man and that is not how a democracy works. An oligarchy yes, but not a democracy.