The Wanderer 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Kim Dotcom Wins Human Rights Tribunal Case Over Kiwi Government Withholding Info

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 26 Mar, 2018 @ 07:59pm

    Re: Re: Re: You mean... Business as Usual?

    I think the question is, "Since you're saying all the humans on the planet are bad like this, who are you saying should be in government instead of them?".

    If you can't suggest any alternatives that would be better, attacking people for not choosing a better alternative is hardly a reasonable or productive line to take.

  • On the post: Mark Zuckerberg Finally Speaks About Cambridge Analytica; It Won't Be Enough

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2018 @ 06:38pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    From what I've heard, Obama's team told people they were engaged in political and election research (etc.), and let them opt in to that process.

    By contrast, Cambridge Analytica et al. apparently told people they were engaged in a personality survey, and when people opted in to that survey, pulled data unrelated to the survey without telling the subjects about it.

    The difference is transparency, and for all the quite legitimate and deserved bashing the Obama administration gets over "most transparent administration in history", that does IMO make all the difference.

  • On the post: How 'Regulating Facebook' Could Make Everyone's Concerns Worse, Not Better

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2018 @ 06:31pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Completely unregulated markets have existed at various points in history, in various places around the world. I was not attempting to assert that any such exist (at least at any meaningful scale) in today's world. My point is that inability to take business elsewhere does not arise exclusively from (over-)regulation; it would arise at least as much (and quite possibly much worse) in the absence of all regulation, and that's a large part of why regulations exist in the first place.

  • On the post: House Staples Extraterritorial Search Permissions Onto 2,232-Page Budget Bill; Passes It

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 23 Mar, 2018 @ 02:40pm

    Re: I'm not sure the Supreme Court is out of it

    The Supreme Court sometimes takes cases that aren't about the constitutionality of a law, but about which of two conflicting lower-court interpretations of a law is correct, or about whether a decision made by a lower court comports with the law, or about whether a law or regulation established by a lower authority is compatible with overriding law passed by Congress, or indeed about whether a law or regulation overrides other (e.g. state) laws or not.

    If, while the Court is hearing one of those latter types of cases, Congress changes the law in a way that would govern the outcome of the case, my understanding is that the Supreme Court can't overrule them - unless the newly-changed law is itself overruled by something higher, the Constitution being the main candidate.

  • On the post: Senators Say The FCC's Broadband Maps are a Bad Joke

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 23 Mar, 2018 @ 12:20pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: RED ALERT! RECORD-BREAKING ZOMBIE! "BAlbrecht or Bru

    Oh, it took me way too long and too many tries before I figured out a way to explain your idiocy about this in terms which would actually be understandable; I've been attempting it, off and on, for weeks. (Without actually posting any of those attempts, mind you, because not posting when one doesn't have anything to say is just plain good sense.) Have you considered the possibility that outside events related to the sorts of stories which Techdirt covers may have drawn people who used to read (and occasionally comment) here, but had drifted away since that time, back to start reading (and occasionally commenting) again?

  • On the post: Senators Say The FCC's Broadband Maps are a Bad Joke

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 23 Mar, 2018 @ 09:33am

    Re: Re:

    He doesn't think those are real, distinct people anyway, so his blaring rants aren't directed at them; they're intended to alert anyone who reads the site to the fact that this account hasn't posted in so long that (he thinks) it's more plausible that the site's administrators are resurrecting the long-dead account to make sock-puppet posts than that the person behind the account either has been away for a (possibly long) while, or just hasn't felt the need to say anything for that same while. (Or some combination of the two, I suppose.)

    Even he would probably admit that one long-dead account posting again isn't beyond the bounds of believability, which is why he keeps pointing it out every time he notices another such account doing so; the idea is that the plausibility of it being something other than admin sock-puppeting reduces with every additional account which pops back up that way.

  • On the post: SESTA's First Victim: Craigslist Shuts Down Personals Section

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 23 Mar, 2018 @ 09:40am

    "That's already been proven wrong"

    I suspect people will argue that this doesn't prove any such thing.

    The rationale would be something like "just because Craigslist (claims to) believe that SESTA would be used against it if it doesn't shut down its personals section, doesn't mean Craigslist is right; the fact that SESTA doesn't target sites not willfully engaged in sex trafficking means that Craigslist is either wrong, or engaged in grandstanding". (Taking that "fact" as true on the same basis as the previous assertions of it did.)

  • On the post: Russian Court Says Telegram Must Hand Over Encryption Keys To State Intelligence Service

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2018 @ 05:01am

    Re: Re:

    I don't think so, no; while that may be true, the original statement is at least equally true, and is a stronger point.

  • On the post: How 'Regulating Facebook' Could Make Everyone's Concerns Worse, Not Better

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2018 @ 04:59am

    Re: Re: Re:

    A company's ability to impose prices, fees and contractual obligations that diminish the value of a product, and I cannot take my business elsewhere, is the result of over-REGULATION that comes from cronyism.
    Not necessarily. If you can't take your business elsewhere, that means either you're forbidden from doing so on pain of punishment (and the people doing the punishing won't be penalized for it), or there's a monopoly in place. Examples of the former include both "there's a law forbidding you from taking your business to any other provider" and "this provider's thugs will come and beat you for trying to take your business elsewhere, and the government is either unwilling or unable to stop them from doing that". For the latter, monopolies certainly can arise from (the wrong sorts of) regulation, but they can also arise in a completely unregulated environment; in fact, when the seed of a monopoly takes shape in an unregulated market, there are perfectly natural market forces which serve almost exclusively to strengthen it.

  • On the post: How 'Regulating Facebook' Could Make Everyone's Concerns Worse, Not Better

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2018 @ 06:24pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not a shocker!

    Yep.

    If you look into my comment history, you'll see a fair number of comments which describe an explanation of a logical model which could underlie an argument someone seems to be pushing, follows that with something like "I don't know if I agree with that" or "That doesn't make a lot of sense in the real world" or "Which is clearly ludicrous", and ends with "but it is at least internally consistent".

    "Internally consistent" does not mean "correct". There are a Hell of a lot of internally-consistent models out there (probably the overwhelming majority of them not explicitly stated, even in the privacy of their adherents' minds) which have no bearing on external reality.

    (My own top-level cosmology is probably even one of the worst offenders; my only defense is that it's so irrelevant to almost everything that I pretty much only even mention it in the first place when discussing abstract philosophy.)

  • On the post: How 'Regulating Facebook' Could Make Everyone's Concerns Worse, Not Better

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2018 @ 02:15pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not a shocker!

    All else being equal, regulations to block monopolies are good. However, regulations to block natural monopolies are futile, and do more harm than good. If you understood what a natural monopoly is, and why it's called that, you would realize this. The only viable ways to deal with natural monopolies are to bypass the bottleneck in ways which render them irrelevant (e.g. by technology advancing in previously unforeseen ways), or to regulate the operation of those monopolies, so that they do as little harm as possible. To force the former to occur is impossible; that leaves us with only the latter, and regulations attempting to do the latter are among the types of regulation which you have most directly railed against.

  • On the post: How 'Regulating Facebook' Could Make Everyone's Concerns Worse, Not Better

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2018 @ 02:10pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not a shocker!

    The thing is that the real world is not that simple. Trying to apply simplistic solutions to complex problems is unlikely to solve those problems, and if it does, is overwhelmingly likely to introduce other problems - probably, in cumulative total, worse than the ones that were solved. Everything I remember seeing you suggest - which isn't much - has been overly simplistic and has ignored important nuance and detail of the real world. If you understood the complexity of the actual problems at hand, you would not be trying to suggest such simplistic approaches as if they were so self-evidently sufficient that anyone who fails to see that is either stupid or ignorant.

  • On the post: If You're Pissed About Facebook's Privacy Abuses, You Should Be Four Times As Angry At The Broadband Industry

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2018 @ 02:02pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Plenty to be pissed about...

    I'm fairly sure it's by analogue to "beta male", i.e. the sort of person who - unlike any presumed "alpha males" of the group - doesn't have the ambition/drive/force-of-personality/whatever to rise to the top of the heap in life (or at least in the person's immediate circles) and make the world do what they want it to. (But may spend significant amounts of time and effort either trying without success to do those things, or talking about how they think the world "should" be.)

    It's a concept of dubious applicability to the real world, but some people do seem to adhere to that mindset - albeit usually from an "I'm one of the alphas (and therefore am better than all of you futilely struggling betas)" perspective. This is the first hint I remember having seen that Mr. Paint Chip (do we have a better name for him?) might be one of those people, though.

  • On the post: Photographer Tutorial Company Reacts To Pirates By Screwing With Them Hilariously

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2018 @ 09:06am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    A possibly-nonexistent crime which was posited (under the name of "attempted piracy") by Coyne Tibbets, about two comments upthread;; the idea appears to be "if you set out to copy something with the belief that doing so is unauthorized, that is an attempt to commit the crime of infringement, even if it turns out in this case doing so was authorized". Sort of the inverse of "ignorance of the law is no excuse".

    This subthread, as I understand matters, is about discussing the hypothetical of what would follow if such a crime is/were actually on the books.

  • On the post: Photographer Tutorial Company Reacts To Pirates By Screwing With Them Hilariously

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 21 Mar, 2018 @ 05:57am

    Re: Re: Re:

    Note that he said "the legality of this work would not be an issue" (emphasis added). This work was uploaded by the rightsholders, with the intent to distribute it; as such, that distribution of this work is authorized, and no actual infringement occurred. If the intent of the accused matters, however, the fact that distribution is authorized would be irrelevant; the fact that the accused did something which they had no reason to believe was not infringing would mean that attempted infringement did occur. If the distribution had not been authorized by the rightsholders, however, then actual infringement would have occurred, and "attempted infringement" - and, therefore, the intent of the accused - would not enter into the picture.

  • On the post: The Cable Industry Is Quietly Securing A Massive Monopoly Over American Broadband

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2018 @ 04:14pm

    Re: The FCC was invented to produce artificial scarcity

    That's quite a claim. Any citations to back it up?

  • On the post: Pedestrian Deaths By Car In Phoenix Area Last Week: 11. But One Was By A Self-Driving Uber

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2018 @ 04:05pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Human drivers outnumber autonomous by, say, 10,000 to 1...

    Yes. But what are you putting lower than what?

    As I said, I read that as "the priority on X in Y situation is lower than the priority on X in other situations".

    To respond to that by saying "the priority on X should never be lower" seems nonsensical. The only way I can think of to make sense out of it, without assuming that you misunderstood the original statement, is as a confusing way of saying "the priority of X should always be maintained at the same high level".

    The most natural way to read "the priority on X should never be lower", to my eye, is as being based on the assumption that the original statement was equivalent to "in Y situation, the priority on X is lower than the priority on something else". Since I don't read the original statement as saying that, I find this confusing, so I asked for clarification - although I may have done so in a less-than-ideally-clear way, myself.

  • On the post: Both Facebook And Cambridge Analytica Threatened To Sue Journalists Over Stories On CA's Use Of Facebook Data

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2018 @ 03:43pm

    Re:

    There's a distinction between "completely normal" and "not a data breach".

    Based on what I've heard about the events so far, I can see room for them to argue that "nobody broke our security, so it's not a data breach; someone violated their agreement governing how they could use what we permitted them to access, and that's a problem, but it's not a data breach". (Although I don't know whether they're actually making that argument.)

    Whether that distinction is important enough to be worth maintaining separate terms for the two things is another question.

  • On the post: Pedestrian Deaths By Car In Phoenix Area Last Week: 11. But One Was By A Self-Driving Uber

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2018 @ 09:06am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Human drivers outnumber autonomous by, say, 10,000 to 1...

    Er... lower than what?

    From context, I read the bit you quoted as "the priority it gives to detecting pedestrians when away from crosswalks is lower than the priority it gives to detecting them when at crosswalks", not "when away from crosswalks, the priority it gives to detecting pedestrians is lower than the priority it gives to something else".

  • On the post: 'Serious Sam' Developer Teams Up With Denuvo Cracker To Pump Up Sales For Failed Game

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 19 Mar, 2018 @ 04:40am

    Re:

    I think the idea was that traditionally, when trying to help sales with a free try-it-out release, what gets released is "only part of the game" crippleware, with some elements disabled or entirely removed - whereas they were specifically planning to release the entire game, just with this please-buy-it-if-you-like-it visible watermark.

    So they were contrasting not against the existing purchaseable release, but against the general practices of the industry.

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