On a business level, denying Parler service is super-straightforward.
You know they are going to be a magnet for DDoS attacks out the wazoo, and you can expect the legal department will have to be frequently accommodating law-enforcement requests to investigate whatever particular lunacy the members are up to that week.
And, of course, on a visceral level, since the most prominent voices there are those that were so repulsive, they got kicked off of other platforms, even those with long-standing commitments to free speech... who wants to give these clowns the time of day?
But like it or not, the Internet is the proverbial street-corner of today. And while a content-driven service certainly has easy justification for policing what is and is not available, an infrastructure provider is not in a position as strong. I think AWS kicking these guys off may have been a short-term gain, long-term loss sort of situation. I could totally see laws coming out mandating that infrastructure providers remain content-neutral, laws that Amazon would have been able to avoid had they simply held their nose and let these clowns Do Their Thing.
(That said, if I take my Internet Freedom hat off my head, I can't say I'm losing sleep over the amount of money and effort Parler is about to have to spend to get their site back online, and I take a certain amount of schadenfreude in how difficult it is going to be to keep it online, protected from people who think destruction is a good way to achieve their ends...Goose, meet Gander.)
"When was the last time allopathic medicine cured anything?"
Hmm... Let's see, wiping out Smallpox from the face of the earth, nearly doing the same thing with polio, saving countless millions of lives with antibiotics (I can thank my not dying at the age of 20 for that one myself), the miracles of modern surgery (which no longer has to be done while the patient's awake), the vast improvements in death rates from cancer (I'm very glad my wife's cancer was nipped in the bud), the list goes on, and on, and on...
Even asking this question is the sign of an unthinking idiot who hasn't devoted more than a half-dozen brain cells to answering, and just believes whatever garbage they "learned" from Dr. YouTube or something...
A couple years ago, Amazon deleted all my reviews, a couple hundred going all the way back to 1997. I asked them why, and it was because they suspected I had been paid for one (or more?) of them. They didn't say which one, and I have no idea what they were talking about. They specifically stated no appeal was possible.
I didn't press the issue; if they don't want my input available to customers, that's their right I guess. (Many of my reviews were quite highly-rated.)
If all you get from Spectrum is Basic Cable (which includes only Broadcast, CSPAN, Shopping Channels, and the local govt. stations... no CNN, ESPN, Discovery, etc.) Is $24/mo in my area. So the bullshit "Broadcast Fee", even when the package is almost nothing beyond broadcast, costs 60%-ish more than advertised.
In addition to the legal aspects (this is obviously Nintendo's IP), the takedown also made sense from a business perspective.
If you "can't imagine" that the revenue lost from pirating Mario64 vs. buying a new copy "isn't substantial", you don't have a very good imagination. I can certainly conceive of quite a bit of overlap between people who played Mario64 20 years ago, and those who might download a free copy to run on their PC in lieu of paying Nintendo for a legit copy on a new Switch.
It makes sense that the patent will be held by the company that brought a drug to market, not the agency/organization that developed the initial compound.
Compounds are usually patented even before it hits clinical trials Most compounds fail to reach even that stage, and of those that enter trials via an IND, an astounding 90% never make it to being an approved drug. (Your average large drug company will have thousands of unused compounds in their library, most of which are, and will remain forevermore, useless.)
It costs relatively little to develop a compound; it's a common low-$$$ project for NIH grants. Most of the money (and therefore risk) that goes into the development is in the clinical trial process; the initial compound development is a worthy task (and one well-suited for government funding), but unless those trials (with all the cost and risk) are also government funded, it makes sense that most of the reward will go to whomever brought the drug to market.
I'm not saying the Gilead isn't trying to pull a fast one here, just that some of the outrage is misplaced. The fact that the compound was originally developed through a govt. grant doesn't detract much from what we'd expect Gilead to collect on selling the drug.
Those "This product/premises contains chemicals known to the State of California to..." labels are nothing but a way for lawyers to win easy victories against companies that forgot to put the warning on their product / businesses not posting the warning on their premises.
The labels appear on so many things/businesses that they are entirely, 100%, pointless.
Good Lord, this place is awful! A regular exam and x-rays looks for cavities and gum disease, and obtains bitewings and maybe a panorex.
Proper orthodontic records, which ensure your mouth is ready for orthodontic treatment, able to sustain the stresses, and that you don't have any facial deformities complicating the picture, require the following:
A series of particular face and mouth photos (some of these are taken with lip-spreaders and/or a mirror practically jammed down your throat.)
mm-precise measurements of particular reference points.
A pair of cephalograms (head x-rays) so measurements can be taken of the skeletal anatomy of your face.
None of that is part of a regular exam and x-rays, and all of it is important to make sure you are receiving the proper treatment. You can sort-of correct many cosmetic issues with SmileDirect's method, but the final result may not be healthy or stable. (e.g. You'll look pretty for a bit, and then suffer from tipping or gum/bone recession when the angles are all off.)
I'm not sure how RFID tags are fundamentally different from widespread ANPR, or, for that matter, EZ-Pass transponders, which, unsurprisingly, often get pinged from installations besides tollbooths. (And some toll installations in the US already use RFID stickers instead of active transponders.)
And if you Google "RFID License Plate", you'll find that this has been kicked around for years, apparently already deployed in a couple other countries. It's certainly the logical successor to ANPR.
Google is a great company with engineering, but they are awful when it comes to selling things to individual consumers. They simply don't have anyone, anywhere in the company, that understands scaling customer service operations. It's not an easy task, and it takes a special skillset to do well. They appear to do it by the seat of their pants, and it's not surprising they suck at it.
"And it was a lot more interesting and challenging than I initially thought."
"I'm still quite uncomfortable with the idea that a media organization would agree to go back and change stories to remove names (or, in some cases, to delete entire stories), as that is (again) a rewriting of history."
Surprise! The real-world is a nuanced and complicated place with a lot of grey areas.
Lets say you've been arrested for a crime for which you are unambiguously innocent. (Not "Innocent Until Proven Guilty"-Innocent, but "Mistaken Identity/Frameup/Complete Stupidity by Police or DA"-Innocent) If it's a lurid crime, it can be extremely harmful to one's personal life if the first two pages of Google results for your name is a mugshot of you in Jail Orange and "John Doe Arrested for {PMITA-Prison Crime]", complete with a boilerplate statement from the police or DA, and maybe even a video clip of you doing the perp walk.
I don't think it's a tough call at all for such a story to be memory-holed from a newspaper's website. Even if a follow-up story was posted saying "Doe innocent of all charges" (that doesn't always happen), it might be buried deep-down in the search results.
Yes, the original story is "history", but it's also something that can cause real harm to the subject of the story.
I agree that a law mandating the deletion ranges from problematic to nearly-impossible. But a private process for such a thing? Sounds like a great idea to me.
There is not some grand conspiracy to "spread out the popular content"; it's not surprising that some providers have chosen a narrow "can't miss exclusive content" model (it's worked out pretty well for HBO) and others have chosen a "throw a whole pot of content spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" model (Netflix).
Neither model is inherently good or bad. It's a business decision, for an indiviudal provider, one you are more than welcome to agree with (by subscribing) or not (by refusing to do so.)
For years, many consumer-advocacy outlets (including this one) have been demanding a la carte cable service.
Well, while this isn't cable service, a bunch of disparate online streaming services, each with their own sets of programming and exclusives, is certainly the online equivalent of a la carte cable.
If you want a single subscription with just about everything you want to watch? Why, that's called a content bundle, and it's just what places like this have been saying they don't want for years now, because it's so expensive. (That content doesn't create itself!)
And, of course, there's usually (if not always) the option of purchasing content one program at a time, but that's expensive. (It's expensive because the content providers need to cover their losses on non-hits with the stuff people end up choosing. Yes, there's ways around that subsidize-the-losses model, but that doesn't involve content ever being cheaper for consumers.)
Under money-laundering laws, the bank most certainly can be held liable for my transactions. Fines in the $B have been levied against banks that don't pay enough attention.
I don't think it's entirely out of line to declare that a transaction/money-handling intermediary is, in fact, selling something, and that this speech is not as deserving the same level of protection as a content pass-thru like a forum, search engine, or social media site.
Why on earth does it make one damn bit of difference which store(s) which games are available from? Seems like an utterly ridiculous thing to get so worked up about.
I can certainly sympathize with a developer that says "Store X pays us more, we won't be selling in Store Y unless they match."
They sold billions and billions of additional shares. To the point where an investor who dumped in $1M when Ted Farnsworth was appointed CEO, you'd have about enough now to buy a bottle of come from a reasonably-priced vending machine, because the shares have been so impressively diluted.
Let me start by saying that the law allowing re-transmission fees to be charged within a station's service area are stupid. A public broadcast license should carry with it a waiver of the ability to charge anybody (within the licensed service area) a cost to access it, no matter how they receive the signal.
But within the context of that crappy law, the Aereo decision made sense.
Aereo's infrastructure was a cumbersome, expensive, kluge that existed solely to create a de-facto cable network that didn't pay the fees cable providers must pay. Think of it as the copyright equivalent of tax shelters. (Which are disallowed if they consist of transactions that are of no substance and make no sense except for their utility as a tax-avoidence measure.) Aereo's setup (and it pains me to type this) put the cable/satellite providers at an unfair disadvantage.
Again, let me emphasize that the correct fix is to get rid of re-transmission fees. But until that happens, I think the Supreme court made a defensible decision that Aereo qualified as a cable system within the context of the law requiring those fees.
Oh, and P.S....
Calling RT a "News Outlet"? It's on a similar level of reliability as InfoWars or Trump's twitter feed. RT publishes enough outright propaganda to not belong as part of a serious discussion about anything at all, other than about propaganda.
I don't envy Amazon's position here
On a business level, denying Parler service is super-straightforward.
You know they are going to be a magnet for DDoS attacks out the wazoo, and you can expect the legal department will have to be frequently accommodating law-enforcement requests to investigate whatever particular lunacy the members are up to that week.
And, of course, on a visceral level, since the most prominent voices there are those that were so repulsive, they got kicked off of other platforms, even those with long-standing commitments to free speech... who wants to give these clowns the time of day?
But like it or not, the Internet is the proverbial street-corner of today. And while a content-driven service certainly has easy justification for policing what is and is not available, an infrastructure provider is not in a position as strong. I think AWS kicking these guys off may have been a short-term gain, long-term loss sort of situation. I could totally see laws coming out mandating that infrastructure providers remain content-neutral, laws that Amazon would have been able to avoid had they simply held their nose and let these clowns Do Their Thing.
(That said, if I take my Internet Freedom hat off my head, I can't say I'm losing sleep over the amount of money and effort Parler is about to have to spend to get their site back online, and I take a certain amount of schadenfreude in how difficult it is going to be to keep it online, protected from people who think destruction is a good way to achieve their ends...Goose, meet Gander.)
"When has medicine cured something?" That's even a question?
"When was the last time allopathic medicine cured anything?" Hmm... Let's see, wiping out Smallpox from the face of the earth, nearly doing the same thing with polio, saving countless millions of lives with antibiotics (I can thank my not dying at the age of 20 for that one myself), the miracles of modern surgery (which no longer has to be done while the patient's awake), the vast improvements in death rates from cancer (I'm very glad my wife's cancer was nipped in the bud), the list goes on, and on, and on... Even asking this question is the sign of an unthinking idiot who hasn't devoted more than a half-dozen brain cells to answering, and just believes whatever garbage they "learned" from Dr. YouTube or something...
Meh; they deleted mine for no reason a couple years ago
A couple years ago, Amazon deleted all my reviews, a couple hundred going all the way back to 1997. I asked them why, and it was because they suspected I had been paid for one (or more?) of them. They didn't say which one, and I have no idea what they were talking about. They specifically stated no appeal was possible.
I didn't press the issue; if they don't want my input available to customers, that's their right I guess. (Many of my reviews were quite highly-rated.)
It's even worse
If all you get from Spectrum is Basic Cable (which includes only Broadcast, CSPAN, Shopping Channels, and the local govt. stations... no CNN, ESPN, Discovery, etc.) Is $24/mo in my area. So the bullshit "Broadcast Fee", even when the package is almost nothing beyond broadcast, costs 60%-ish more than advertised.
This was a reasonable takedown
In addition to the legal aspects (this is obviously Nintendo's IP), the takedown also made sense from a business perspective.
If you "can't imagine" that the revenue lost from pirating Mario64 vs. buying a new copy "isn't substantial", you don't have a very good imagination. I can certainly conceive of quite a bit of overlap between people who played Mario64 20 years ago, and those who might download a free copy to run on their PC in lieu of paying Nintendo for a legit copy on a new Switch.
This would cause anti-trust problems
Under long-standing anti-trust practice, studios cannot have a significant ownership of theaters, and vice-versa.
Most of the money/risk is not in the initial compound
It makes sense that the patent will be held by the company that brought a drug to market, not the agency/organization that developed the initial compound.
Compounds are usually patented even before it hits clinical trials Most compounds fail to reach even that stage, and of those that enter trials via an IND, an astounding 90% never make it to being an approved drug. (Your average large drug company will have thousands of unused compounds in their library, most of which are, and will remain forevermore, useless.)
It costs relatively little to develop a compound; it's a common low-$$$ project for NIH grants. Most of the money (and therefore risk) that goes into the development is in the clinical trial process; the initial compound development is a worthy task (and one well-suited for government funding), but unless those trials (with all the cost and risk) are also government funded, it makes sense that most of the reward will go to whomever brought the drug to market.
I'm not saying the Gilead isn't trying to pull a fast one here, just that some of the outrage is misplaced. The fact that the compound was originally developed through a govt. grant doesn't detract much from what we'd expect Gilead to collect on selling the drug.
They *really* want to imitate CA's toxin labels?
Those "This product/premises contains chemicals known to the State of California to..." labels are nothing but a way for lawyers to win easy victories against companies that forgot to put the warning on their product / businesses not posting the warning on their premises.
The labels appear on so many things/businesses that they are entirely, 100%, pointless.
Pinky-swear you've gotten an exam and x-rays?
Good Lord, this place is awful! A regular exam and x-rays looks for cavities and gum disease, and obtains bitewings and maybe a panorex.
Proper orthodontic records, which ensure your mouth is ready for orthodontic treatment, able to sustain the stresses, and that you don't have any facial deformities complicating the picture, require the following:
A series of particular face and mouth photos (some of these are taken with lip-spreaders and/or a mirror practically jammed down your throat.)
mm-precise measurements of particular reference points.
None of that is part of a regular exam and x-rays, and all of it is important to make sure you are receiving the proper treatment. You can sort-of correct many cosmetic issues with SmileDirect's method, but the final result may not be healthy or stable. (e.g. You'll look pretty for a bit, and then suffer from tipping or gum/bone recession when the angles are all off.)
It's not much different from what we use here
I'm not sure how RFID tags are fundamentally different from widespread ANPR, or, for that matter, EZ-Pass transponders, which, unsurprisingly, often get pinged from installations besides tollbooths. (And some toll installations in the US already use RFID stickers instead of active transponders.)
And if you Google "RFID License Plate", you'll find that this has been kicked around for years, apparently already deployed in a couple other countries. It's certainly the logical successor to ANPR.
Google's *bad* with paid consumer products
Google is a great company with engineering, but they are awful when it comes to selling things to individual consumers. They simply don't have anyone, anywhere in the company, that understands scaling customer service operations. It's not an easy task, and it takes a special skillset to do well. They appear to do it by the seat of their pants, and it's not surprising they suck at it.
Of course it's complicated
"And it was a lot more interesting and challenging than I initially thought."
"I'm still quite uncomfortable with the idea that a media organization would agree to go back and change stories to remove names (or, in some cases, to delete entire stories), as that is (again) a rewriting of history."
Surprise! The real-world is a nuanced and complicated place with a lot of grey areas.
Lets say you've been arrested for a crime for which you are unambiguously innocent. (Not "Innocent Until Proven Guilty"-Innocent, but "Mistaken Identity/Frameup/Complete Stupidity by Police or DA"-Innocent) If it's a lurid crime, it can be extremely harmful to one's personal life if the first two pages of Google results for your name is a mugshot of you in Jail Orange and "John Doe Arrested for {PMITA-Prison Crime]", complete with a boilerplate statement from the police or DA, and maybe even a video clip of you doing the perp walk.
I don't think it's a tough call at all for such a story to be memory-holed from a newspaper's website. Even if a follow-up story was posted saying "Doe innocent of all charges" (that doesn't always happen), it might be buried deep-down in the search results.
Yes, the original story is "history", but it's also something that can cause real harm to the subject of the story.
I agree that a law mandating the deletion ranges from problematic to nearly-impossible. But a private process for such a thing? Sounds like a great idea to me.
Re: Re: Be careful what you wish for...
There is not some grand conspiracy to "spread out the popular content"; it's not surprising that some providers have chosen a narrow "can't miss exclusive content" model (it's worked out pretty well for HBO) and others have chosen a "throw a whole pot of content spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" model (Netflix). Neither model is inherently good or bad. It's a business decision, for an indiviudal provider, one you are more than welcome to agree with (by subscribing) or not (by refusing to do so.)
Be careful what you wish for...
For years, many consumer-advocacy outlets (including this one) have been demanding a la carte cable service.
Well, while this isn't cable service, a bunch of disparate online streaming services, each with their own sets of programming and exclusives, is certainly the online equivalent of a la carte cable.
If you want a single subscription with just about everything you want to watch? Why, that's called a content bundle, and it's just what places like this have been saying they don't want for years now, because it's so expensive. (That content doesn't create itself!)
And, of course, there's usually (if not always) the option of purchasing content one program at a time, but that's expensive. (It's expensive because the content providers need to cover their losses on non-hits with the stuff people end up choosing. Yes, there's ways around that subsidize-the-losses model, but that doesn't involve content ever being cheaper for consumers.)
Re: Re: I can't say I wholly disagree with the idea
Under money-laundering laws, the bank most certainly can be held liable for my transactions. Fines in the $B have been levied against banks that don't pay enough attention.
I can't say I wholly disagree with the idea
I don't think it's entirely out of line to declare that a transaction/money-handling intermediary is, in fact, selling something, and that this speech is not as deserving the same level of protection as a content pass-thru like a forum, search engine, or social media site.
Explain to me, in small words, why *any* of this matters?
Why on earth does it make one damn bit of difference which store(s) which games are available from? Seems like an utterly ridiculous thing to get so worked up about.
I can certainly sympathize with a developer that says "Store X pays us more, we won't be selling in Store Y unless they match."
Re: We dug the hole, but got no dirt
They sold billions and billions of additional shares. To the point where an investor who dumped in $1M when Ted Farnsworth was appointed CEO, you'd have about enough now to buy a bottle of come from a reasonably-priced vending machine, because the shares have been so impressively diluted.
Aereo made sense within the context of the law around cable fees
Let me start by saying that the law allowing re-transmission fees to be charged within a station's service area are stupid. A public broadcast license should carry with it a waiver of the ability to charge anybody (within the licensed service area) a cost to access it, no matter how they receive the signal.
But within the context of that crappy law, the Aereo decision made sense.
Aereo's infrastructure was a cumbersome, expensive, kluge that existed solely to create a de-facto cable network that didn't pay the fees cable providers must pay. Think of it as the copyright equivalent of tax shelters. (Which are disallowed if they consist of transactions that are of no substance and make no sense except for their utility as a tax-avoidence measure.) Aereo's setup (and it pains me to type this) put the cable/satellite providers at an unfair disadvantage.
Again, let me emphasize that the correct fix is to get rid of re-transmission fees. But until that happens, I think the Supreme court made a defensible decision that Aereo qualified as a cable system within the context of the law requiring those fees.
Re: The basic physics here aren't that hard.
Oh, and P.S.... Calling RT a "News Outlet"? It's on a similar level of reliability as InfoWars or Trump's twitter feed. RT publishes enough outright propaganda to not belong as part of a serious discussion about anything at all, other than about propaganda.