ThorsProvoni 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (697)

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 05:42am

  Says the Guy Who Does Not Understand That Everything on a Program Executing Device is Interpreted

  A computer is useful because it interprets. Perhaps the scholar would prefer to rewire every time a new problem needs to solved. If I remember correctly, the Atanasoff–Berry computer of 1937 was used in that way.

• On the post: This Is Really, Really Dumb: Ohio Court Says Google May Be A Common Carrier

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 05:30am

  Determination of Common Carriage Does Not Depend on Nature of Carriage Offered

  Amusement park rides like a roller coaster ride have consistently been held to represent common carriage.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 05:23am

  Escaping Common Carriage Obligation

  A website can exempt itself from common carriage obligations if:

  1. it does not monetize "eyes-on-a-page" (work),
  2. it does not exchange user content for carriage (barter),
  3. it uses "letters to the editor" model of print journalism in putting comments, tweets, posts, etc. on its website.

  If a website charges for website access and wishes to avoid common carriage obligation, it need only avoid holding out to the public or apply individualized terms. An abusive shithead swears and refuses to engage the arguments.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 05:18am

  Learn Some Law

  Facts are established during the discovery and trial phase of the proceeding. A Complaint need only state a claim on which relief can be granted and meet the Twiqbal plausibility standard.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 05:05am

  If a company provides mass message carriage, it might be a common carrier

  The court examines whether it holds out carriage: to the public, under uniform terms, for a fee. It does not matter whether the company uses a horde of bicycle couriers, its own truck, Fedex, the USPS, or a combination thereof.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 04:41am

  An Entity that Provides Common Carriage Need Not Be the Phone Company

  It appears that analogy is too difficult for the scholar of computer science. Swap the Circuit Switched Network out -- Swap a Packet Switched Network in. You get the Internet. In the 80s I helped develop Alliance Teleconferencing, which included services comparable to those that Twitter provides. I worked on all the FCC filings related to telecommunications common carriage. Some of the enhanced services were examples of common carriage that was not telecommunications common carriage and were not regulated by the FCC. In theory, the FTC or another regulatory agency regulated such a service. All the Alliance services were offered through a local phone company. (AT&T did not provide phone service to an individual phone customer.) The individual customer obtained service from a local phone company, which for intrastate common carriage was regulated by the state in the role of a public utility, common carrier, and public franchise.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 04:20am

  In order to lower legal exposure

  I must state that I was not a participant in any of my ex-wife's research activities of the early 1980s.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 04:16am

  So Claims the Guy

  -- who has a degree in computer science from a maybe 5th rate college and -- who does not seem to understand that practically everything procedural in modern computer/program-executing device is interpreted from the lowest level of microcode to a high-level compiled program language. I guess there is a BS and there is BS.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:58am

  Are There Only Local Phone Calls in Your World?

  The local phone company controls nothing after the call leaves the local phone network. Yet, the local phone company provides his customer with common carriage in the case of a long distance phone call and bills end-to-end.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:52am

  Exactly -- Limiting programs to stand-alone pieces of code as you originally did was clearly wrong.

  "Most CISC machines are microcoded, so pretty much everything is interpreted at that level." For want of a better word, I used to explain that hardware logic translated an instruction of a RISC processor into lower level operations.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:47am

  Twitter is Not a Phone Company!

  It is a Quasi-Common Carrier that provides end-to-end message common common carriage of digital person literary property along with other services.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:44am

  Nothing at All New except the Aggregation

  I was at one point consulted on patentability. An aggregation (old terminology) is not patentable.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:40am

  A Common Carrier Can Make Use of another Carrier

  It's right there in the Massachusetts Common Carrier statute. MGL c. 159

  Section 1. Every common carrier of merchandise or other property shall receive, transport and forward all property offered for such purposes by other such carriers as promptly, faithfully and impartially, at as low rates of charge, and in a manner and on terms and conditions as favorable to the carrier offering such property, as he on the same day and at the same place receives, forwards and transports, in the ordinary course of business, property of a like description offered by persons other than such carriers. Such carrier shall not discriminate against any particular person or subject him to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage. The supreme judicial or superior court shall have jurisdiction in equity to enforce this section.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:34am

  The vast majority of what would become “the Internet” was actually developed in the 60s and 70s.

  I agree. I remember it all. I started programming in 1960 on an IBM 7090.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:32am

  I was there in 1959 When the Arpanet was a Gleam in Leonard Kleinrock's Eye

  You guys seem to know little about the history of computer technology, network technology, and data transmission technology.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 02:27am

  Is a Social Medium a Charity?

  I focused on "eyes-on-a-page" because it's the more valuable item. Let's look at the whole picture. Does a social medium platform provide a service for free? What does a social medium receive in return for its service? A user provides "eyes on a page" and "user content", which will bring other "eyes to a page" to the website. To marketers and advertisers, "eyes on a page" and "user content" are valuable commodities. Without the "user content", most users would not come to the social medium webpage. Unlike broadcast TV social medium content is practically all user generated and handed over to the social medium in exchange for social medium services. It's like Nielsen Ratings and viewership. Viewership is much more passive than "eyes on page" and "provision of user content". "Eyes-on-page" is provided to a social medium because the technology of a social medium collects all sorts of statistics on "eyes on a page" and use the statistics to increase the value of the social medium and its offerings. Viewership ratings for broadcast TV belong to an independent agency. Here is the nexus where the common carriage service, the blogging service (or more generally information mediation service), and the quasi-newspaper store service all intertwine. Is it possible to be more oblivious than a fanatic, who denies in the face of reality that a social medium platform is a common carrier and not a charity?

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 27 May, 2022 @ 12:00am

  How Long Did You Prepare Telecommunications Common Carriage Filings For the Internet?

  I did so for 40 years. I know common carriage law.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 26 May, 2022 @ 11:57pm

  An ISP Has to Transport Packets in a Way So That the Internet Works

  It's an implied contract of fact. When you go to a doctor for a checkup, he does an exam, and you give him money. It's called an implied contract of fact. If the ISP stops transporting a packet so that the internet works and if the ISP continues to accept payment, it is probably committing fraud. At the very least, it has a lot of pissed off customers including ISPs.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 26 May, 2022 @ 04:33pm

  Please Continue to Show Your Complete Ignorance

  Once again I point you to VOICE common carriage. When I sought common carriage from my local phone company, which held out voice common carriage. I picked up the handset and dialed the destination number, the local phone company guaranteed best effort at end-to-end common carriage. The call might not complete. The national network beyond the local network might be busy. The destination local network might be busy. The destination might never pickup, but if the conditions are right the circuit will connect, the voice common carriage succeeds. Twitter common carriage of digital personal literary property is analogous. The JavaScript program in the Twitter webpage collects the tweet from the source and probably exchanges JSON with the Twitter server program which stores the tweets and sets up notifications for all the Twitter users for whom the tweet is destined. When a Twitter user links to the Twitter home page, the user is logged in, and the home webpage program is transmitted to the user computing device. I have never seen the source for the Twitter Frontend but it seems to be a mostly single-page application (SPA) that exchanges JSON with server. The JSON exchanges probably include notifications and tweets to be displayed as the page is dynamically rewritten. The user will never receive new tweets directed to him if he never turns on the computing device or never links to the web page. It's analogous to the phone customer, who never answers a call or who doesn't pay his bill.

• On the post: The Problem With The Otherwise Very Good And Very Important Eleventh Circuit Decision On The Florida Social Media Law

  

  ThorsProvoni ( profile ), 26 May, 2022 @ 03:58pm

  Unless You Are Working With a Programmable Logic Device --

  -- Everthing is interpreted including an instruction of the instruction set of a computing device. Do you even know how an instruction processor works? Have you every tried to understand how a program-executing device works. Instructions can hardwired or they can be microprogrammed. Your obsession with the word program is bizarre. [In the case of RISC the interpretation of an instruction is fixed in the logic circuitry and is not interpreted by a microprogram.]

Next >>