Comment Re:Why is it so difficult? (Score 1) 277
All that, but I suspect the real issue is that freight is a lot more profitable in that hold than is baggage, so they're trying to reduce the amount of baggage by charging it out of existence.
All that, but I suspect the real issue is that freight is a lot more profitable in that hold than is baggage, so they're trying to reduce the amount of baggage by charging it out of existence.
No one gets 45 years for smuggling drugs, or for that matter, for smuggling live bodies. If you look at the list of charges, they're a damned long stretch, making it sound like he was a massive smuggling op, not someone who had the wrong tank in the back of his truck.
If you move your household from Mexico to Arizona and bring along your fridge, have you committed a crime?
Well that's stupid.
The entire history and purpose of "230" was to encourage sites to engage in moderation, alternatively favoring or suppressing different content, and to give them the freedom to do so without being treated anything like newspapers or other media.
I doubt that there's anything interesting that happened, and I certainly don't believe your take on it, but as a general rule there's nothing at all wrong with the government offering advice or asking people to do things and for people to agree or to voluntarily do those things.
For example: If the government puts out an Amber Alert, you don't have to read it, you don't have to watch for the child who has apparently been kidnapped, and you don't have to report sightings. You can ignore the whole thing and go about your day. You can even deliberately notice the kid and the kidnappers and not lift a finger. That's not illegal. You're committing no crime by letting kidnappings happen where you lack a duty to stop them.
But it's nice to help rescue children, so why not do what the government is asking you to volunteer to do?
Apparently the reason why is that you are opposed to anti-kidnapping, pro-saving-children government conspiracies of that sort.
They're almost always the same. If there are any that aren't, I'd be shocked. He occupies the same sort of 'designated target of hate' that the Rothschilds did. In fact, that's really where it all starts -- a couple of political consultants working for Victor Orban, the Hungarian dictator, decided that a useful political tactic would be to have an enemy to demonize, so they rather arbitrarily decided it would be Soros. Read all about it.
And so we wound up with Hungary being thoroughly fucked up, Hungary impairing the functioning of the EU and NATO, increases in anti-semitism and fascism, probably daily death threats against a guy who did nothing wrong, and all to score some cheap political points.
It's disgusting.
Still works fine, actually. And it's been closer to three decades now. 47 USC 230 is from 1996.
Good thing that wasn't the argument, then. In fact, your summary of it doesn't even make sense -- middlemen don't get in trouble for taking things down, they get in trouble for not taking things down.
What actually happened was that just before the Internet got big, two cases came down concerning different online services. CompuServe got sued for user-posted content, but was found not to be liable because they had not moderated anything and were just a middleman. Prodigy got sued for user-posted content and was found to be liable because they moderated their boards (for things like bad language; they wanted to be family friendly) but had failed to moderate every post perfectly. By letting one bad thing through, they were liable for it -- and by extension, anything else they had failed to catch.
Since Congress wanted sites to moderate user content -- they were really concerned about porn -- they passed a law that encouraged sites to do moderation but did not hold them responsible for failing to moderate every single little thing perfectly in every respect. Further, sites got to choose what they were moderating for -- could be porn, but could just as easily be off-topic posts, like talking about carrots when everyone else is talking about money.
In practice, sites don't like to moderate much -- it takes effort, it may lose engaged users, it costs money, it can't please everyone -- but they certainly can, and there's nothing wrong with it. Get rid of the protection of the CDA and sites won't be able to do mandatory moderation sufficiently, so they'll fall back on none. This is apparently okay with scum who get kicked off of boards left and right, but should not be okay with people who have standards and don't want to put up with that crap.
Variables don't; constants aren't.