Union contributions are, more or less, under the control of the people who are in the unions, and if you don't agree with a union's political agenda, you have a legal right to withhold that portion of your dues, so your portion of that contribution is 100% under your control.

Corporate contributions, by contrast, are entirely under the control of its board of directors. As a shareholder or normal employee of that corporation, you have no control over your portion of the contribution. Corporate contributions represent a concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, which makes them fundamentally different.

Real-world LTE speeds only qualify as broadband if you're very close to the tower. By the time you get into two-bar territory (where their LTE network is "available"), you'll be lucky to get EDGE speeds, and at one bar, you'll be lucky to get any data at all. Yet technically, LTE is available in all those places. That's the problem with wireless; the speed falls off a cliff as distance increases.

To be equally pedantic: the meaning of words change over time, most especially when technical terms are adopted by the common population. When speaking of frequencies, transmissions, filtering, etc, broadband means exactly what you describe. When speaking of internet access, broadband means "high speed".

In a curiously ironic twist, the hardware designed to protect consumer-grade disks from damage ends up destroying them. As I understand it, a number of fairly recent consumer drives exhibit a higher than normal failure rate because the heads break off of the arms when they collide with the park ramp. This is, at least in part, a consequence of making the arms smaller and lighter to improve seek times.

... go back in time and produce TFA in a smaller font. Seriously, the NSA could probably read that from space.

I output Toast.

...pooh-pooh the entire idea, but then I realized a recent project of mine was putting various aspects of my salt aquarium's systems on my LAN using an RPi+.

So I'll just crawl back in my hole now.

At least I became aware of a new (to me) acronym. :)

I was saying that it makes a lot of sense for Facebook not to allow pictures of Mohammad in Turkey. Just like they don't allow boobies in the USA.

It doesn't "make sense", it simply retards social progress by keeping neurotics from considering the darker corners of their own thought processes. I mean, seriously. "Boobies bad"? That's just... pitiful. I am perfectly ready to describe anyone who isn't pleased by the sight of a nice pair of boobies in any neutral, humorous, peaceful, appreciative or loving context as a broken human being. One for whom I have sympathy and pity, but in no way does this engender any urge to force the world into a form that serves to insulate them from the toxic processes of their own twisted psyches.

As for drawing Mohammad, your assertion that there is no purpose but offense is wrong out of the gate. Art is one reason, political commentary is another, historical illustration is another, simple choice is another, and yes, offense is one but that doesn't make it an invalid use.

What offends you may not offend me. And vice-versa. What serves no purpose for you, may serve a purpose for me. Be it intended offense, or otherwise, or both at once.

No one in the USA has the "right to not be offended." Being offended is subjective. It has everything to do with you as an individual, or as part of a particular group; it varies due to your moral conditioning, your religious beliefs, your upbringing, your education; what offends one person or group (of any size) may not offend another, nor a person of another grouping; and in the final analysis, it requires one person to attempt to read the mind of other persons they do not know in order to anticipate whether a specific action will cause offense in the mind of another.

And no, codifying an action in law is not in any way sufficient... it is well established that not even lawyers can know the law well enough to anticipate what is legal, and what is not -- any more than you can guess what is offensive to me, or not.

Sane law relies on the basic idea that we try not to risk or cause harm to the bodies, finances and reputations of others without them consenting and being aware of the risks. It does not rely on the idea that we "must not cause offense."

Law that bans something based upon the idea that some individual or group simply finds the behavior objectionable is the very worst kind of law, utterly devoid of consideration or others, while absolutely permeated in self-indulgence.

i stopped reading there

And I stopped reading there. See how that works?

Obligatory Henry Ford reference: The Nook Simple Touch can display any color you want, so long as it is black... or grey.

what have you "won" exactly?

You "win" Turkish citizens annoyed with their government -- a win in the only venue likely to be able to create change there.

so you're for not opening diplomatic relations with cuba? we should just never ever ever reconcile or talk with cuba?

Diplomatic relations are not on the same level as corporate sponsorship of repression. Yes, we should talk to other governments, definitely including cuba, and yes, we should allow our citizens access if they wish to go there, and vice-versa.

But no, I don't think it is a positive thing when corporations adopt behavioral restrictions that are antithetical to freedom in general. It's not that I expect them to change, it's just that I don't like it, and as I am free to object and explain here, I do so.

we don't talk to iran? what is iran's attitude going to be then?

This is a straw man. I am all for talking to, and mutual visitation of, Iran (Cuba, etc.) These things allow cultural values to spread -- because generally, the dialog is quite open. I am not for FB repressing speech. These are not the same issues.

you are a dogmatic rigid ideologue

It's always entertaining to watch someone slinging mud at their own straw man.

If you want to know what I think, ask me. Don't put words in my mouth.

the absence of facebook won't make those problems go away.

I missed addressing that; responded a bit too quickly, sorry.

I consider this assertion to be flawed; here's why. FB has a very high public profile. Any visitor to the US that is exposed to social media is likely to be aware of both the institution and its reach. They can also learn that the reason "they can't have nice things" is because their government has stepped in the way of their citizens using religion as an excuse. Likewise, US family members who cannot connect with Turkish family members are likely to hold strong opinions, and share them.

If anything is going to make things change, I think that's far more likely than a FB presence that is repression-compliant.

Of course, this would require Zuckerberg and crew to operate using a metric quite different from the "maximize users as ad viewers" model, and that doesn't seem to be in the cards.