rangda 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: French Government Says Google Must Pay French News Agencies For Sending Traffic Their Way

    rangda ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2020 @ 11:52am

    Re:

    I'm not someone normally to favor any large corporation but this is extortion, and then again, I don't favor governments either. If I were on the Google's board my recommendation would be to go totally nuclear, immediately terminate all google services to French ip's, delist all French sites from all of search worldwide, immediately terminate all jobs in France (if any), and tell the French government to go fuck itself.

  • On the post: Why Is The FDA Giving A Potential COVID-19 Treatment 'Orphan' Status?

    rangda ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2020 @ 10:20am

    "can someone at Gilead or the FDA explain how the fuck COVID-19 should qualify?"

    Because not doing so would make them guilty of the capital crime of denying a corporation all the monies.

  • On the post: Supreme Court Says It's OK For Border Patrol Agents To Kill Mexican Citizens As Long As They Die In Mexico

    rangda ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2020 @ 10:31am

    Re:

    While I agree the child exhibited some very poor judgement, you'll be totally ok when the kid's dad and several friends show up with AK-47's and hose down Jesus Mesa, Jr. and any border patrol agents that happen to be with him right? Because "don't murder a child if you don't want a Darwin Award".

  • On the post: Supreme Court Says It's OK For Border Patrol Agents To Kill Mexican Citizens As Long As They Die In Mexico

    rangda ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2020 @ 10:27am

    By this logic it would be perfectly acceptable for Mexicans to murder border patrol agents as long as they die in the USA.

    Armed Americans who have been documented to murder Mexicans should be enough to present a clear and present danger for the Mexicans to open fire, right?

  • On the post: Ring Says It Helps Cops Fight Crime But The Data Shows It's No Better At This Than Any Other Security Camera

    rangda ( profile ), 21 Feb, 2020 @ 10:54am

    Re: Open doors

    I don't think you can FOIA request a private party, those requests would have to be sent to whatever law enforcement agency is receiving the data in question as that is the only government entity that could respond. And I'm sure their response would be to sit on the request for a few years then eventually give you a 20 minute video of a blank screen as all the actual video footage is redacted.

  • On the post: College Student Gets Thrown On The Ground And A Gun Pointed At His Head For Committing The Crime Of 'Taking A Selfie While Black'

    rangda ( profile ), 19 Feb, 2020 @ 05:24pm

    As one of my facebook friends says "99% of cops are giving the rest a bad name". Sadly sometimes I think his estimate is too low.

  • On the post: As The World Frets Over Social Media Tracking For Advertising, Young People Are Turning Fooling Sites Into Sport

    rangda ( profile ), 11 Feb, 2020 @ 08:31am

    If these users are geographically disperse, that too adds confusing data for Instagram's tracking.

    I unintentionally did this to facebook when I first joined. I joined 10'ish years ago under pressure from my sister-in-law (she uses it for invites to family events). But I also created a presence there for my DJ hobby. My friends list on facebook consisted of family and DJ friends, except I live in the US and all the DJ friends were in Europe. This completely destroyed facebook's tracking and it was completely confused about where I was geographically. It would constantly try to get me to tell it where I lived and the multiple choices it offered would be something like "city where my sister in law lives", random city in The Netherlands, random city in Italy.

  • On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With…More Price Hikes

    rangda ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2020 @ 07:28am

    Re: Seriously though...

    "WHAT is it going to take for these companies to get broken up" Well the problem is that as things stand now these companies are free to buy the votes they need to get the laws they want. So you'd need that situation to change.

    • A sufficient number of people are voted into office that have a strong moral compass and don't act like puppets.
    • The cable company financials drop to the point where they cannot spend as much on lobbying^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H bribes.
    • A revolution occurs and the new government is more resistant to legalized bribery.
    I'll leave it to you to determine how likely any of those choices are.

  • On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With…More Price Hikes

    rangda ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2020 @ 07:16am

    I've been saying this for a while, and it's the elephant in the room that everyone has been ignoring. In the US your cable provider is generally your internet provider, they are going to get their ~$250 / month out of you no matter what it takes. If everyone drops cable, then they just jack up the internet access fees so you're still paying them $250 / month. And as they point out, this works out better for them since they then won't have to pay fees to the channels.

    And since many cable providers are also content creators, they will get to double dip and charge you to stream their content as well.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: YouTube Says That Frank Capra's US Government WWII Propaganda Violates Community Guidelines

    rangda ( profile ), 15 Jan, 2020 @ 11:15am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Some back of the napkin math should be fun. 300 hours = 18,000 minutes per minute
    18,000 minutes per minute = 8,640,000 minutes per 8 hour shift. Let's assume that 10% of the content gets flagged by an automated system, that's 864,000 minutes of content that needs to get double checked per 8 hour shift. Let's further assume that a human can review on average 1 minute of content in 5 minutes. 864,000 * 5 = 4,320,000 minutes worth of moderator time per 8 hour shift. We can assume our poor moderators get no break time at all (the floggings will continue until morale improves) and work 8 hours straight so that gives us 480 minutes of moderation time per moderator. 4,320,000 / 480 = 9,000 moderators per shift. Based on this quick math youtube would need 27,000 moderators working nonstop to keep up with content circa 2017, assuming my optimistic numbers are even possible. And even if you had these 27,000 moderators you'd have to train them so they all have some idea what they are doing. And keep in mind that moderation rules might vary wildly from country to country and that might affect moderation[1]. You also need a system to moderate the moderators (who watches the watchmen?) to ensure that any individual moderator isn't applying some sort of inherent bias and not following your guidelines. [1] For example the USA and UK have radically different libel rules and what is considered libel in the UK would just be an opinion in the USA.

  • On the post: Disney+ Titles Disappear Without Warning, Bringing Confusion To The Streaming Wars

    rangda ( profile ), 07 Jan, 2020 @ 08:37am

    Re: Re: This makes no sense for Disney

    "Unless the whole plan is to annoy would-be-paying customers with artificial scarcity, anyway" In the era of tape and shiny disc sales, that was exactly the plan. Tell everyone it's going away, get a rush of sales, hold it back for a bit, release a new "special" edition, get another rush of sales. But in the era of streaming this seems more like a variant on the underpant gnomes business model:

    1. vault titles to prevent streaming.
    3. profit

  • On the post: Judge Orders Man Who Violated Recording Ban To Publish An Essay About Respecting The Court AND To Delete All Negative Comments From Readers

    rangda ( profile ), 11 Dec, 2019 @ 09:25am

    Re: compelled speech?

    Ignoring the compelled speech issues (which I think are very real), I detest writing so much I'd seriously ponder the 30 day incarceration instead. Regarding the compelled speech issue: "You have been found guilty of slandering the President of the United States. You must write an essay on why President Trump is the greatest President in the history of the United States, post it on social media, and delete all negative comments. Or face X jail time". Does that make it clear?

  • On the post: Too Many Streaming Exclusives Is Already Starting To Piss Users Off

    rangda ( profile ), 08 Nov, 2019 @ 10:58am

    "Again, the rise of streaming competition is an indisputably good thing."

    It's not really competition when every show is only available from one provider. Streaming is really a collection of mini-monopolies as each provider locks their own content behind their own paywall. They compete vs. cable but do not compete vs. themselves.

  • On the post: GAO Report: TSA Has No Idea How Effective Its Suspicionless Surveillance Program Is

    rangda ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2019 @ 11:54am

    Re: Re: Still Trying

    What is truly mind-boggling is how large a percentage of the population that actually reasons that way.
    The only thing mind boggling is that more people don't do it. Faith is the lazy person's way out. If you are in a situation you don't like, faith lets you do nothing and expect it to change. If things don't work out, it gives you an out to avoid looking at your own personal faults. It lets you justify actions that deep down you know are morally wrong. It also allows you to be easily manipulated and controlled by those associated with the object of your faith, but that's more of a benefit for people who manipulate the faithful rather than the faithful themselves.

  • On the post: New Report Further Clarifies Foxconn's Wisconsin Deal Was An Unsustainable Joke

    rangda ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2019 @ 10:41am

    Re:

    Why? The contract has done exactly what was intended. Wealth has been shifted from the taxpayers/state to the corporation and politicians. You didn't think this was actually supposed to benefit the peons did you? Let them eat cake.

  • On the post: Wireless Carriers Fight Rules Preventing Them From Screwing Firefighters During Emergencies

    rangda ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2019 @ 09:35am

    Re: Devil's Advocate

    "Please remember also, that the CA voters accepted the Verizon dependency by their election choices." This is most likely untrue. It depends on several assumptions that aren't necessarily accurate:

    1. That the decision was made or overseen by an elected official rather than an unelected government employee.
    2. That any public official would campaign on this particular topic and then actually follow through with whatever they said when in office. (The system is setup with incentives for this desired result to not happen.)
    3. That in the absence of #2 there would be a viable way for voters to elect someone who would tackle this issue in the desired way. I have no idea if CA state law allows write-ins for elections but even if it does, everyone would have to get together and agree to pick the same someone to write-in. And that someone would then have to have sufficient moral fiber to not cave in to the inevitable pressures and temptations. That sounds an awful lot like a political party and we have evidence of how well such a process is likely to turn out.
    The reality is that we have setup a system where getting elected requires giant bags of money. Since it's always better to spend someone else's giant bags of money than your own (assuming you have said giant bags at all) it pretty much means candidates are required to accept bribes (err, campaign contributions) to get elected. This naturally incentives the morally bankrupt to run for office and discourages the morally strong from doing so. Even if the odd morally strong person does get elected, it all but ensures that the level of corruption is high in aggregate and is "just the way things get done". Until this reality changes then the kind of government we see now is unlikely to change.

  • On the post: Wireless Carriers Fight Rules Preventing Them From Screwing Firefighters During Emergencies

    rangda ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2019 @ 09:20am

    Re:

    "Perhaps Verizon would have felt differently had it been their assets in peril." Having first responders sit and watch while Verizon corporate offices burned to the ground because their data connection was throttled would generate immense levels of Schadenfreude.

  • On the post: Appeals Court: Idiot Cop Can Continue To Sue A Protester Over Actions Taken By Another Protester

    rangda ( profile ), 29 Apr, 2019 @ 07:55am

    Re: Re: Re:

    "I suspect the definition of incitement is going to expand as more and more cases arise where things like this happen." If by that you mean members of the government are going to "expand" laws to try to exert control over and chilling effects on the populace to stifle protest then yes I agree with you. I don't understand why they don't just make "disagreeing with a government employee" a crime punishable by instant death and then just shoot anyone that annoys them. I mean it works for Judge Dred so clearly it would be great for 'Murica right?

  • On the post: NCSoft Has A Great Opportunity To Be Awesome And Human To 'City Of Heroes' Enthusiasts

    rangda ( profile ), 25 Apr, 2019 @ 09:36pm

    Re: Lifetime

    if you aren't using it why should you be able to stop others
    It's the same logic as piracy. Every pirated copy is a lost sale, and every user playing a game that isn't one of your current games is also a lost sale. In effect they are competing with their old shut down game. The temptation is to use copyright to put a competitor out of business.

  • On the post: A Seamless Journey Awaits You On The Outbound Flights: All You Have To Give Up Is Your Face

    rangda ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2019 @ 02:33pm

    Re: "Don't fly."

    While I have taken a similar approach (haven't been on a plane since 2007) that won't get you away from facial recognition as the technology moves forward.

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