why do banks get to pick and choose who to do business with?

Well first of all, they shouldn't be required to do business with someone who repeatedly commits fraud...

However what is happening here is not the choice of the business. It's the government saying "we can make life very unpleasant for you in terms of audits etc. unless you cease doing business with this list of people". The government has been going after many adult businesses in the same way for a while now, google Operation Chokepoint

I'm still dubious about the end effect of net neutrality regulations being passed (remember that none of us have seen the actual regulations to take effect, and none will until they are finalized).

That said, the real road to true Net Neutrality is and always will be in allowing real competition for your ISP provider, and that's the kind of thing that this allows for. If a community cannot be well served by a "real" networking company it makes no sense to block them from taking matters into their own hands.

So I applaud this action, I just wish they would be open in other regards rather than limiting.

I don't know if it's in this article, but in an article I read before they planned to do exactly that - put three seismographs in the region, as currently whatever caused the holes did not register on the seismographs elsewhere in Russia (since it appears they are not really explosions but pressure caused ejections, the earth would not be as shaken).

The thing is not the background but what your brain intreprets the light colour as. Tweaking the background is not the only way to achieve it but it is a way to do it reasonably reliably.

As I said though, it's not really the same effect. The dress looks Blue/Black to me in the XKCD comic on both sides, on the dark background it just looks like a lighter shade of blue.

At times the original dress image to me (and others) has looked pure white, not just a light blue. I agree it's about interpretation of the light color, the surprising thing is how strong the interpretation is - either way. That's something the XKCD comic does not convey at all.

I agree, the amazing thing to me is the same person can see it differently at different times (but very close together) given different cues before they see the picture.

As you say, all around it's right between two possibilities and the brain can take it one way or the other.

Everyone seems to have a singular theory as to why the dress looks different, but each one by itself normally does not have such a dramatic effect as this.

In the interest of science I am going to lay out all of the various aspects of the dress I think together contribute to the ability of the dress to appear strong blue/black or strongly white/gold:

Main aspects:
White balance of course, lending a slight yellow cast to the blacks.
Pure white background.
Hint of golden object to far left bottom.
Gradient strength of lighting from top to bottom, that is to say the bottom blacks are purer black than the very top.

Questionable but probable:
Brain itself deciding to lock into a specific color instead of a washed out color.
Possibly frequency of stripes?

I think the brain is the wildcard here, I think all of the other conditions contribute to leading the image to a place where it's exactly on the cusp between two possibilities for the brain to register.... either the brain sees a washed out blue, thinks of white in shade and thinks of the dress as white so then the black gets shifted along with it to gold.

Or the brain latches on to the black first, darkens that, and then the blue gets pulled along with it and seen as a strong blue.

It is blue and black, but if you up the lighting, and/or display it against a white background the black lace part looks golden.

In the XCKD comic the dress on the BLUE background has "black" that appears golden. In the original image the dress is on a white background, but apparently to 75% of people it appears white/gold...

Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.

I looked at the image on my phone. It appeared strongly blue/black.

I showed the image to my wife, straight on. Same angle. To her the image appeared STRONGLY white/gold, when I asked her if there was any blue at all she said no...

Same image on the same display at the same angle, within a minute or so.

It's primarily an effect of the camera fooling around with the white balance and contrast/light to try to get a correct image and failed.

This is not the whole story - the first time I saw it I saw a strongly blue/black dress, which no apparent white balance issues..

The white balance being off is part of the effect to be sure. But so is the surroundings (as XKCD refers to). But that's not the main story either, because no matter what I do both sides of the XKCD image look at least light blue. In some conditions the dress in the original photo appears pure white.

I think it's combination of all those factors but then at the end, a large push from the brain one direction or the other.

The individual theories are like the blind man around the elephant, each convinced it knows what is there from a part...

Add to it that the picture looks different depending on which display you have

That's the thing - looking at the EXACT SAME DISPLAY from minute to minute can show you different colors. I've seen it flip multiple times, on the same monitor in the same lighting conditions. That's the aspect that is amazing to most people, is they can see it change under almost any condition.

And it would be trivial to keep any "clean" account(s) they have on a separate IP,

Trivial, perhaps... but over time it's easy to slip and use an IP that's more traceable to you, which is why I said to publish all of the IP's that handle has posted from.

I'd bet that many trolls are not that sophisticated though, or figure it would not be worth that level of effort. At the very least you'd weed out the casual trolls.

Just because a layer of security is not perfect, does not mean it's not worth adding.

You'd only win anything

It's not about winning anything though - it's about enough reason NOT to dox that we'd see a lot less of it.

There is no real "victory" on the internet. Just waves of nearly-pointless bickering. So the best we can do is limit collateral damage.

I seem to be voted down for my concept. Before anyone else does so also, consider that I do not come at this from an ideological standpoint - I have seen people on BOTH sides of Ganrergate (for example) effected negatively by doxxing, so I would like to see that tool removed from trolls that work to hurt people of all ideologies.

What I think would be great to see, is if someone is found guilty of doxxing by Twitter to have the Twitter handle and IP addresses they have posted from put out in public (and the original doxxing removed of course), along with all other twitter handles that have posted from that IP.

Perhaps two wrongs don't make a right, but at least it makes things even.

One of the developers gave a talk (in a link I posted earlier) that said they would have Dolby support in iOS in just a few months, I think that's when the patents expire.

Hide the Decline

You can live in purposeful ignorance if you like; I choose not to, because I can understand better what will or may happen.