See Freedom of the press in the United States.

That entry starts with a long exposition on the fact that corporations do not have more freedom of the press than citizens. I do not disagree with that. I think corporations should be treated more skeptically regarding their invocation of freedom of the press than should individual citizens.

All rights are inherent to individuals and when individuals organize, as in the formation of the LA Times, these rights are not lost.

No, the individuals do not lose their rights. But whether the corporation is allowed to engage in trade is a very different question. Paying people to write opinions which are pleasing to the corporation is very different than those people freely engaging in that activity. The entire point of the Declaration of Independence is that individuals can be trusted more than collectives, so The People must remain the sole sovereigns.

Citizens United was wrong. Paid speech is not free speech. Paid press is not free press. Corporations are not citizens.

What?!? I don't know which constitution you're referring to, but the Constitution of the United States of America certainly doesn't specify duties or obligations for citizens.

The LA Times is not a citizen. You can tell because it doesn't have nipples. It is the press. See the first amendment to the Constitution. For more info on why that specific industry gets special constitutional treatment, see fourth estate.

Let me see if I get your argument:

Their business model is failing, so it's understandable that they are shirking their Constitutionally specified duty, despite the legal privileges they enjoy in furtherance of that obligation.

I mean, I see what you're saying -- a dying animal bites its master -- but that's when you get out the dart gun full of tranquilizer and address the problem. You don't just shake your head and tsk-tsk, wrap your bloody arm in a t-shirt, and go get a rabies shot.

11:25 "Don't bring any proprietary software to this class." So which cell phone running free software should students be putting in their bags instead?

Depends what your primary objective is. If your primary objective is to have a cell phone with you, you sacrifice freedom. If your primary objective is to give no comfort to those who are harmful to that end, you sacrifice carrying a cell phone.

Me? I'm pretty serious about Free Software, but being connected is also important to me. So I have a CyanogenMod phone, and I'll keep going more Free as it becomes practical and as my budget allows.

12:48 "So how to help? Well you can write free software." So how would you go about feeding yourself while you write a free video game?

Depends what your higher priority is. If financial responsibility, to your lifestyle or to support your family, is most important to you, write proprietary video games. If freedom is most important, you can sell your games through Humble Bundle, have embedded ads and ask people not to disable them, ask for voluntary payments, use one of the crowdfunding systems, live a modest lifestyle and work some other job to pay the bills, or whatever you want; there's lots of ways to make a living while writing Free Software.

Me? I work a pay-the-bills job consulting, working less than full time, live a modest lifestyle, and work on pro-social projects the rest of the time (not Free Software for me at the moment, but with similar goals).

He's not telling you that you must always blindly obey the principles that lead to freedom. He's telling you what principles must be satisfied to be free. He says very clearly, early in the presentation, that being free requires sacrifices. Whether you choose freedom or convenience in any particular choice you make in life is up to you. Just make it with your eyes open; be aware of your personal opportunity cost and the cost to society.

Almost all adult "open world" style games feature prostitutes, for example. Okay, they exist in real life so they are just being realistic, right? ... War movies could show realistic violence and the effects of weapons, but that would give half the audience PTSD so despite it being an easy way to make them real and edgy they tone it down. It's about using the medium responsibly.

I think you've got a non-sequitur there. The prostitution that I have seen in games is toned down far more than the war violence in movies or games. War violence typically shows at least some blood and the person dying, with some critically acclaimed movies like Saving Private Ryan going way more real. Video game prostitution often doesn't even show the participants during the event, and if it does, what is shown is usually PG-13, and only R in a very few cases.

Misogyny exists and it is bad and we need to continue to improve. But when you misrepresent the case, it makes people skeptical of the entire message. Backlash is harmful to our cause. So unless you are trying to stir up antagonism, get a grip on your anger and make sure you are creating an accurate portrayal of the situation before you hit "Submit".

This is especially important for you, specifically, because you are well spoken and I've seen your posts on this topic hit +5 before. You are one of the big voices in this community. That voice can be used to build consensus or to drive a wedge. The latter will not help further the cause of equality.

It gets even better. Marketing that panders to girls is no less misogynistic. It's actually even WORSE. Marketing for women is all about making women feel like sh*t, especially about their bodies.

And have you seen the tough-guy themed marketing for automotive products that pander to men? It's all about making men feel inadequate if they're not manly enough. (not to mention hair club, boner pills, beer, cologne, and just about every other male-targeted product)

Making potentially defamatory claims without evidence is not just lazy, but possibly also illegal depending on where you live. Show your work.

There is a fair bit of editorializing here, but also a lot of evidence: Quinnspiracy on KnowYourMeme

At a quick perusal, it seems like; a) she has been subject to some abuse by misogynists, b) she has been engaged in some conflict of interest regarding reviews of her games, and c) she has both benefitted from and promulgated the misogyny aspect of her story.

The misogyny part is obviously bad. But if Zoe is taking advantage of -- and thereby harming -- the movement to advance the equality of women in gaming and technology, then she is bad too. If that is the case, then we who seek equality should reject her as an icon. Backlash is a perilous thing to progressive movements.

Then and now when the geek speaks about women, I can't escape the feeling that I have been teleported back to the high school locker rooms of 1964. The only pandering on this site is to the geek's own adolescent sense of manhood,

I am a geek, and I am not a misogynist. It is wrong for you to engage in prejudicial stereotyping.

1. There are far more than 4 cellular companies in the Phoenix area

"far more"? I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.

2. There are hundreds of independent stores in the Phoenix area

I was testing to see if his hypothesis was within the realm of possibility. As such, I operated on the assumption that only the carrier stores would be covered. There are a number of ways this could be true; if you engage your thinking machine for a moment, I'm sure you can come up with one.

3. It would take at least 100 locations just within the Phoenix area to put the entire population within 20 minutes of a location

Phoenix is only a hair over an hour wide, so I used 15. I think your estimate of 100 is wildly excessive, unless you are counting different carriers having duplicate coverage (which I covered with the 4 multiplier).

Verizon currently shows 34 different smartphones available for sale, most of those come in multiple colors and memory sizes. They also have 8 basic phones. Total variations, not including color, is over 50 I would wager that across providers and phones sold in the past 3 years you could come up with at least 400 phone models.

I used 160 as my figure, you're claiming 400. That's well inside an order of magnitude on the most wild-assed-guess figure in the estimate, and again, I'm trying to test whether it is within the bounds of reality, not writing pro forma financials.

You would also need to stock more than 1 of each model.

No you wouldn't. You might need to stock more than 1 of some models, but you could probably get away with not carrying others (some of the out of production ones, most likely) based on covered customers in each area, and the regulation could, in theory, only require one handset of each model per store. It could also not require carrying all colors, and they might choose to not carry the smallest memory sizes, opting instead to upgrade. They might also not carry superseded models.

Or, said differently, (obviously the math is more complicated, but there are additional factors in both directions) -- like I said in my OP.

Sounds like a major mess when a simple solution already exists: 1) Don't buy insurance 2) Replace your phone if you break or lose your current phone

Well, of course. I completely agree. That's why I don't have insurance on my phone. Like you, I am neither a sucker nor a person who can't live without Angry Birds for 24 hours. But we're not considering whether the solution makes sense for more Spartan users, we're considering whether self-indulgent twits who can't go twelve minutes without checking their Facebook status would consider such a policy to be cost effective.

I can't believe I just wasted five minutes of my life on this. You're not supposed to see if there is any conceivable way to poke little holes in my post so you can continue in your comfortable preconception. You're supposed to consider whether it is in the realm of possibility, so you can let go of your hate-on.

the larger point is that there's no reason to think that the free market necessarily arrives at the most cost-effective solution in situations like this. Companies compete on cost-effectiveness in arenas that are highly visible to the consumer and likely to factor into their purchasing decisions

That is an important point; one that is worthwhile to highlight regularly. There are many who believe that the theoretical ideal free market can be closely approximated by a laissez-faire real world market. It cannot, and until we deeply internalize that reality as a society, it is good to continue repeating the lesson.

As such, we're lucky that the insurance provider sends out the replacement phone by overnight mail at all, when they could presumably mail it out by 3- or 4-day mail instead, and no free market forces or government truth-in-labeling enforcers would probably penalize them for that.

While I tend to agree with your previous point that lack of perfect information about insurance coverage implementation at time of purchase leads to a distortion favoring poor insurance service, I think your 3- or 4-day hypothesis proves that the free market is, in fact, having a regulatory effect on cell phone coverage. And it doesn't really surprise me, either -- every time I've had a bad cell phone replacement experience, I have told everyone I know that boned me. That kind of negative publicity does have an effect, as evidenced by the overnight service.

But an in-store-replacement rule (or a replacement-from-some-store-within-a-20-minute-drive rule) would benefit customers more and, with the savings on the mailing speed for the replacements, possibly cost the carrier less. (Even if it did cost the carrier more to carry a small box of in-store replacements in the back room

You may be right, but you may be underestimating the inventory size involved and the cost of keeping so many phones in stock. If it is common for phones to remain under coverage for two years (probably an underestimate), then each store or region would have to stock every phone that is currently for sale and all those that have been out of distribution for up to two years. I live in Phoenix, figure it takes 15 regions to cover the Valley of The Sun, four providers, 20 current models and another 20 out-of-distribution. That's 2400 cell phones, or something like a quarter million dollars. Multiply that by something like 100 to cover the US (rough population multiplier), and we're up to $25m, or an annual cost of $2.5m at 10% cost of capital.

Now, how about the other side of the equation: What we'd be saving is 24 hours of cell-phone-lessness, maybe once every couple years per cell-reliant person. Call that 50m people (140m taxpayers, 3/4ths have little cost to being without a phone for a day, and some non-taxpayers have a significant cost). At once every two years, that's 25m days of high-value cell-phone-lessness per year. $2.5m annual cost over 25m saved high-value days equals $0.10 per saved day of high value cell-phone-lessness.

(obviously the math is more complicated, but there are additional factors in both directions)

Hmm, not what I was expecting. The back-of-the-envelope numbers actually make your proposal look like it is within the limits of credibility, and worthy of further investigation.

I was expecting to find your idea to be impractically expensive, but that's the great thing about science; casting doubt on my preconception is just as good as confirming it.

Outstanding post. Thank you for your time and effort!

All we need to solve the problem of the Comcasts and the Time-warners of the world is to expose them to competition.

If that were true, we wouldn't need common carrier regulation for shipping companies. That's where common carrier started (hence the term "carrier"). It was put in place to keep carriage networks, which are naturally limited in the efficient number of competitors, from exploiting their natural n-opolies by making preferred carrier deals with incumbent manufacturers.

In the case of wired data carriage networks, once there is one set of cables in the ground, the cost of putting each subseqent set in the ground faces an barrier-to-entry that rises more quickly than the natural barriers on, for example, retail stores. In the case of wireless, the limits on frequency band interference do the same thing.

Practical reality does not match the idealistic theories we wish were true, whether those be socialism, anarchy, or anything in between. Give up the -isms and consider observable reality. Learn from history, not religion-peddling pundits.

Since the earliest days of USENET and IRC Chat, the geek has a flawless record of making one-on-one communication over the Internet as painful a process as possible for the non-technical user.

Don't be facetious. One-on-one communication could be much more painful. In the specific case of secure (ie: end-to-end encrypted) communication, Tox is approaching the theoretical limit of simplicity. Key exchange has a mathematically bound minimum complexity in order to be secure. The reason Skype is not secure is precisely because it is easier to use than Tox.

Or, slightly differently: Tox is an example of geeks making one-to-one comm as easy as it possibly can be, for the given requirements.

And how do you exchange key? Do they plan a web of trust à la GPG?

That was one of my first questions. The answer is; however you want. They provide an "easy" (hence vulnerable) method for doing so, but you can check the public key hash against your securely transferred value before approving a key if you want.

Or, slightly differently; this is not a key exchange system, just a comm system you can use once you have authenticated a key to your level of security requirement.

There needs to be a way to disable the cameras for a short period of time. I don't think we need to see police officers using the restroom. Then there are times when officers have private conversations that are not work related. Do you really think it is valid to have anyone monitored every second from start of shift to end of shift? Would you work under those conditions?

It is a good question; how about this: The officer can click the "this is private" button any time they want. That segment of the video is still recorded, but is not included in routine reviews. If there is reasonable cause, IA can look at the protected video. If an officer is putting too much time in private mode, their superior or IA can ask what's going on. If an IA officer is abusing their privilege to look at private mode video, they get canned (pursuant to an IIAA investigation, presumably).