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Comment Re:Gun owners in North America have the same probl (Score 1) 532

there are lots of advertisers that do want to be associated with it. Half the youtube gun videos are associated with a bigname gun, ammo, or supply related company, and many of them are outright branding. However, if Youtube is going to discriminate against them, I am happy to watch gun videos elsewhere, and take my paying "user" eyes to enrich one of their competitors.

Comment Re:Gun advocates heads explode (Score 1, Flamebait) 532

Enforcing training requirements, "licensing", ever increasing levels of background checks, are all a slippery slope on a path towards removal of gun rights.

For those of us with military, or police experience, asking us to "certify" when we've fired tens of thousands of rounds, and, or, ran ranges, is a step in futility.

Not going to do it.

Comment Re:Good (Score 2) 547

Trade barriers are a bonehead move. Always were, always will be. Even when dealing with dealing with Fascist Regimes, Communist Dictatorships, Massive Genocidal Maniacs, Murderous Muslim Theocracies, State Sponsors of Terrorism, Countries deploying State-sponsored Hackers to loot IP, companies forced to share their IP merely to sell in the country, Human Rights Abusers, and Kleptocracies.

Remember, Trade barriers are a bonehead move. Always were, always will be.

Comment The unfortunate facts... (Score 4, Informative) 405

Reddit has been waging a war against free speech, and against certain demographics, for the sake of political correctness, for many years now.

Merely recounting some of the facts of journalistic ethical missteps with regards to Gamergate was sufficient cause for massive Orwellian Bannings, Shadowbannings, and Mass censorship. They will also do the same across Reddit for terrorist bombings that dare to mention a privileged group that bombed or killed, such as with the London terrorist knifings, or the Orlando Massacre

If you bring up inconvenient facts that are not politically correct, you can expect to receive the same treatment. You can also expect to have the Inquisitors of SRS downvote brigading your small subreddit. SRS is quite open about being against free speech, and actively opposing non-SJW outlooks. SRS receive active admin support, so they are rarely, if ever, punished. If you resist Admin control over a subreddit, your subreddit is removed.

Furthermore, there is a massive conspiracy of leftist moderators that, in cahoots with the Administrators of Reddit, actively attempt to squelch and censor the views of the Right, and Libertarians. This is not unlike the situation with Wikipedia, and the moderation wars that have occurred there, or the regular invasion of SJW material here, into Slashdot.

Why is this?

Politically Correct speech stands in direct opposition to Free Speech.
The privatization of the Commons
Corporate attempts to push Feel Good communication codes everywhere, to sell More Advertising.
Demonization of Men (White & Asian mainly), like Google
Active attempts to silence political opposition outside the Silicon Valley Worldview

Comment Re:Google will be.... (Score 0) 104

Hello Google Apologist. Apparently you drank the Koolaid

Please, if you are going to defend Googal at every turn, by all means, come out and admit you are a shareholder, a fanboi, or employed there. No doubt their tools are useful, but they are corrupting some signficant processes e.g. Democratic nominations and open conversations on policy.

Comment Google will be.... (Score 0, Flamebait) 104

Spying on everything you can possibly do with this chromebook, because Google is in the business of marketing your personal information to advertisers. This will probably better enable them to link your credit card to your devices to your viewing preferences, to your buys, to your everything.

Considering that Google is an anti-science SJW organization, I wouldn't be surprised if they disabled these devices for libertarians and right wingers.

However, this isn't just a left or right thing. If there is an upcoming election, you can count on this piece of ..... to be pushing Hillary Clinton ads, and suppressing Bernie content, yet again.

Google is an amoral company. Don't buy their products, or use their services. Block all their crooked websites, their performance-sapping ad campaigns, and their duplicitous products.

http://www.newsweek.com/assang...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.salon.com/2014/02/...

Submission + - New Think Tank Emails Show "How Google Wields its Power" in Washington (theintercept.com)

brennz writes: Barry Lynn, the critic of monopolies fired this week from the New America Foundation, insisted in emails to his superiors that pressure from Google got him and his Open Markets program terminated. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the think tank’s CEO, has denied that Google played any role in Lynn’s termination from the think tank. Last night, New America released three emails from Slaughter to Lynn. They reference two separate events: an anti-monopoly conference organized by the Open Markets program in June 2016 that featured Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as the keynote speaker, and a series of communications in June and July 2017, involving the termination of Lynn and his group.

Comment Re:Translating the FOIA requests (Score 1) 103

Point missed completely...

There is a vast chasm of difference between a Secretary of State's emails, and those of a consulting graphics artist, a few lower level budget analysts, or even some engineers.

The assumption for a Senior Executive directing an organization of > 60,000 personnel, with a > $40,000,000,000 budget is that much, or most of that email are records because it contains "organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of the data in them". Lower level flunkies at the working level lack direct reports, do not supervise anything, control nothing, and have little impact. They don't have the decision material, don't control resources, and don't dictate policy, and therefore would have little to no federal records.

This also explains why pretty much all of a President's official correspondence is considered federal records, captured, then released in time, subject to classification release schedules.

Comment Translating the FOIA requests (Score 2) 103

tldr; Motherboard made several poorly worded FOIA requests, did not actually request records, or was not requesting it from an IG

Record Definition:
"Records include all books, papers, maps, photographs, machine-readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of the data in them (44 U.S.C. 3301)". from https://www.archives.gov/recor...

Asking for someone's email, the budget for a simple calendar or graphic, or trying to fish for information doesn't meet that criteria.

Submission + - Censoring of Statistic Professor raises the question: Has Google become Evil? (zerohedge.com)

brennz writes: "Freedom is not free unless corporations who exert a large influence in our lives believe in our well-being. I am a statistics professor and understand that there needs to be reasonable standards to control a large social network and make sure everyone is able to enjoy it freely. Invariably people disagree (we all see this), but some principles, such as simply showing probability and statistics with the sole hope of educating others, should be acceptable and in the middle of the distribution. I am for a higher standard, and a higher purpose. There is great care that I have taken to make sure that people treat one other well, admit faults, and present math and probability education to a wide audience. On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning. A number of us were stunned and unsure, but clearly we know at this point it wasn’t an accident. Here are some examples commented from best-selling author Nassim Taleb, and they have been retweeted by government officials, and the NYT and WSJ journalists" — Salil Mehta

Submission + - French Scientists Sue State of Delaware for Selling Their Sock (wsj.com) 4

cdreimer writes: According to a report in The Wall Street Journal (possibly paywalled, alternative source), French scientists are suing the state of Delaware for using the unclaimed assets law to seize and sell stocks belonging to foreigners to fill state coffers. If owners don't show "interest" in the stock, either voting in the annual shareholder meetings or logging into a brokerage account during a three year period, the state can seize and sell the stock. Foreign stockholders are most likely to lose their stocks this way.

A lawsuit before Delaware’s Chancery Court could have broad implications for state finances around the country and for foreign shareholders who hold more than $6 trillion of stock in U.S. corporations. Two French scientists are suing the state of Delaware for seizing and selling their stock without their knowledge, depriving them of millions of dollars in gains. French scientists Dr. Gilles Gosselin and Dr. Jean Louis Imbach allege that Delaware officials wrongfully seized their shares in Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc. and sold the stock for $1.7 million to pad the state budget in 2009. After Merck & Co. acquired Idenix in 2014, the scientists learned they no longer had stock in the company and couldn’t collect on a $13.7 million windfall from the deal because Delaware officials had sold their shares five years earlier. Unable to return the stock, officials only reimbursed the money the state received, leaving the two investors out some $12 million.


Submission + - Google needs a new CEO, but dumping Sundar Pichai is not enough (tallahassee.com)

brennz writes: "David Brooks is right. In the wake of his atrocious mishandling of the James Damore matter, Google CEO Sundar Pichai must go. Damore authored a moderate proposal, stressing that he supported diversity and thought that people should be treated as individuals, while offering some suggestions as to why Google’s efforts to recruit more women techies had failed. Various people (most of whom, as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf noted, seem not to have read Damore’s actual memo, but rather to have been responding to an imaginary document instead) demanded that Damore be fired. CEO Sundar Pichai complied and gave Damore the boot. For this egregious piece of mob-induced misjudgment, Pichai must go. But that’s the least of the problems for Google, and Silicon Valley. The Damore firing, and Pichai’s disgraceful handling of it, represents colossal damage to Google’s brand. In essence, it’s an announcement — by a company that has access to everyone’s data — that it endorses the notion of thought-crime. "That is a blatantly dishonest characterization of the memo. Damore wrote nothing like that about his Google colleagues. Either Pichai is unprepared to understand the research (unlikely), is not capable of handling complex data flows (a bad trait in a CEO) or was simply too afraid to stand up to a mob.”" — Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Submission + - Silicon Valley Tightens Its Grip on Free Speech (lifezette.com)

brennz writes: Political totalitarianism is coming to America, and it is being ushered in not by government thugs in jackboots but by progressive activists and their allies in Silicon Valley. In a chilling oped published in The New York Times on July 14, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, argued that so-called “hate speech” is the same thing as physical violence because it may possibly cause emotionally fragile individuals stress — and should be made illegal. Thankfully, the First Amendment prohibits the federal government from following such advice, but online companies are taking it upon themselves to stamp-out so-called “hate speech,” strangling free speech and the free exchange of ideas in the process. A number of troubling actions by internet companies — Google most prominent among them — are making it increasingly clear that some in Silicon Valley have proclaimed themselves defenders of the progressive, politically correct faith, and that those firms will silence any and all heretics who challenge those beliefs.

Comment Re:You got fired... (Score 1) 1256

The NYTimes has come out with several articles on the issue, I may be missing more of them though. Wanted to mention these, since they are somewhat divided, but do show support in some of them for not firing James, and they bring up interesting points.

Sundar Pichai should Resign

Thought Bullies or Right Move: A Divide Over James Damore Firing

Google Fires Engineer Who Wrote Memo Questioning Women in Tech

The Gender Gap in the Tech World

Contentious Memo Strikes Nerve Inside Google and Out

The Culture Wars Have Come to Silicon Valley

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