Only because as a society we've decided that abject poverty is not acceptable. You hear lots of talk about government anti-poverty programs "failing" when in fact they are successes precisely because being poor in America rarely means the same thing it does in any 3rd world country when less than 100 years ago there was practically no difference.

Same way those who support murdering doctors who perform abortions rationalize away "thou shalt not kill."

I would like to believe that it is impossible for facebook to do that. I think targeted marketing is just snake oil being sold to snake oil salesmen. I think that whatever success facebook has had with "targeted" ads so far is nothing more than a manifestation of regression to the mean. In other words - facebook ads have worked reasonably well because facebook is new, not because all that of demographic information makes a substantial difference in the effectiveness of advertising. People like new stuff - including new forms of advertisements, but once the novelty wears off they just tune out and response rates fall back to near nominal levels.

And why is that fundamental assumption important?

I'm saying overt discrimination has been significantly reduced while soft discrimination has not, it may even have increased as the bigots learned what they could get away with if they just keep their mouths shut in front of non-bigots.

Why? Specifically to measure if discrimination is occuring. Like the way arrest reports are required to indicate race of the arrestee and that data has shown a disproportionate number of arrests of blacks vs whites.

Unearned privileges are rarely obvious to those who posses them, that's why they get so nasty when they lose them - they don't see it as no longer getting special treatment, they see it as others getting special treatment. Witness all of the pissing and moaning about gay marriage "destroying the sanctity of marriage." It doesn't matter how it happens, those losing their place at the top will always be unhappy about it, so coddling them is not a priority.

Yeah, well, in the best of all possible worlds, that would actually be possible. In the world most of us live in, that's a pipe dream. Quotas - which, if you actually look into it in the USA are rarely actual quotas - don't carve out different groups, they just recognize that society in general already treats members of these groups differently.

Seems to me that you are avoiding the question of WHY discriminiation is wrong. Simply stating that it is fundamentally wrong without a rationalization for why it is wrong isn't particularly useful. Sure, it is nice and simple to say that and ignore the whys, but it isn't really all that helpful to getting us to a place that fixes the problems that discrimination causes.

That there is the problem with your analysis, you think that it is feasible to make discrimination hard. That, I contend, is an unfounded assumption. So unfounded that we even have a name for discrimination that is not feasible to prevent - soft bigotry. The majority of discrimination in the US is the soft kind because it is so incredibly hard to prove.

Emphasizes or recognizes? Your position sounds a lot like "if we ignore it, it will go away." My experience has been that there is no one more bitter than someone facing the loss of unearned privilege. No matter how you do it, any attempt to take away that unearned privilege is going to provoke all kinds of nastiness.

And what if government is unable to ensure that? That the cost of documenting and enforcing penalties against unfair discrimination is too high to be practical. What then? Give up? Or go for an imperfect but affordable solution?

The problem is that advertising has usurped the role of micropayments - visit a page and the owner gets about a tenth of a cent for each ad displayed. We need a ubiquitous system of micropayments in order to cut out the advertiser middleman on the web because everything is so decentralized that the old subscription model doesn't really fit.

For good reason, there is no such thing as a "secure back door" - just ask the prime minister of greece - they even ordered the equipment without the backdoor featureset, and they were still vulnerable.

What? Are you trying to say that because the tax burden for the police is not shared evenly then the police have less of a requirement to serve the public in general? Sounds like you are arguing for the cops being replaced with Pinkertons.

This isn't about fairness, it is about abuse of power. None of your other examples involve the public trust. The cops get all kinds of special privileges to enable them to do their jobs, so they have a higher standard to up hold than some guy driving to the grocery store in his company car.

The reason there is little sign that this kind of abuse of power will stop is in part due to people making false equivalancies to excuse it.

When they lead with the guy is a "friend of Obama" you know they are more interested in playing politics than in a meaningful examination of the problems.

The problem is access. The corps always couch their arguments in "what is good for society" rationalizations and the people running the government don't get to hear from any other viewpoints because everybody else can't afford the lobbyists. Even with the "revolving door" between industry and government, most of the people who take that obviously corrupt path justify it as doing good for themselves while doing good for the public.

The best we can hope for is that corps with opposing economic interests will also come up with rationalizations for their own benefit. For example, Netflix finally started a PAC to lobby for network neutrality - previously they thought they could avoid playing politics and it would all just magically work out for them.

She gave you a warning about her tribalist leanings with her rationalizations based on bad math, you chose to excuse them rather than recognize them as the tip of the iceberg. Wanting to chip people in order to more easily recognize members of what she thinks is a "good tribe" is entirely consistent with her previous position.

A lot of the Cassini imagery was used for the animated, 3D IMAX movie Quantum Quest which, incidentally, stars both Captains Kirk, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. It is a kids movie, so don't expect too much.

It does change when the original compromise - in this case license plates - was made in a context where such technology not only did not exist, it wasn't even conceivable at the time. Context is everything.

That's tangent bait that I will take - the RIAA had just as much of a shit-fit about 80s tape trading as they have had about p2p. The context at the time was that taping was the worst possible thing for the music industry - just for starters they basically neutered DAT and they nearly got themselves a blank tape tax (they did get one in Canada). And then there is the famous quote from Jack Valenti of the MPAA - "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." So, any argument that MAFIAA types may make today about how the 80s tape trading wasn't really a threat needs to be seen in context with what they actually said back in the 80s.