Yes we know this, that's what we have right now. You seem to have left out the second part of that thought though: "...and if they don't regulate the internet then there won't be squat, because the only access remaining will be whatever the ISPs choose to allow."

What is this? The reason why the FCC reclassified internet service as a telecommunications service is known, it's not a secret: the court blocked them from implementing network neutrality rules without that classification. It has nothing to do with the FTC, I have no idea where you got that from. I would like to know where you got that from. The people in government most interested in undermining privacy seem to be congress, with the recent vote to eliminate any shred of online privacy being pretty good evidence of that.

Incidentally: an "information service" is something like email or online storage. Classifying the transmission of non-specific data is nebulous, but in my opinion it more closely matches what phone companies have done than what email providers have done. Regardless, the FCC has the authority to make that distinction.

You're trying to imply that the FCC makes things which are equivalent to laws. This is not the case. Congress delegated this responsibility to the FCC because first: congress lacks the expertise, and second: it's too big a job for congress to handle properly, in addition to everything else they do.

However, despite being empowered to act on congresses' behalf, the FCC can not pass laws. Everything that the FCC does is subject to congressional approval, and can be overridden at any time by congress.

Netflix is employing this approach right now quite effectively, most VPN services have given up on supporting Netflix for this reason.

The fact that some Chinese families have relatives abroad and will jump through a lot of hoops to get around this is irrelevant. It doesn't have to work perfectly to be effective.

You're talking about a Model M15. And yes, you're not the only one who would like one of those. You can try ebay, but expect to pay $800+ - they are rare and highly sought after.

If this guy would do the F internals with the M15 form factor, I'd be completely sold.

Been using a Model M for a long time, for some reason I've never heard of the F until now. Maybe the feel is slightly different, maybe it isn't, as long as it's close I don't care about that. What I do care about is the N-key rollover. If you've ever done much gaming on a Model M, you have experienced this problem. An M-like keyboard with N-key rollover would be a godsend.

That said, it's the M15 that's the real prize. I wonder if this guy could be talked into doing F-style internals with an M15-style ergonomic form-factor.

You're missing the most important market: Chinese third-party app stores. That's where the money is actually coming from, jailbreaking is big business in China.

I'm not assuming that you would think that, I'm drawing a parallel between anonymous political speech (advocating on a message board) and anonymous political speech (giving money to a SuperPAC. Which is speech now. This is not illegal, by the way - one of the consequences of Citizens United.), and another parallel between threatening violence on someone you don't like (a bomb threat - illegal) and publicly celebrating violence on someone you don't like (creating an effigy getting beaten up - not illegal, but the idea was that you would be able to see how these two things are kind of similar anyway. It's an analogy, after all.).

Also: "He doesn't have to explain himself for anything, unless he's actually charged with inciting violence (which he won't, because it wasn't)." I didn't say that he needed to do anything. I said that they needed to give him the opportunity to explain himself if he chose to do so.

Anyway, we're partially in agreement at the outset of this: there's a trend in journalism to add information to a story which may not be strictly necessary. Something I notice often is when they add a person's age and occupation, when those things have nothing to do with the event that they're reporting on. e.g.: "I'm here at the scene of a remarkable meteor strike, with an eye witness. Jon Johnson, 68, is a retired choreoanimator who was just walking down the street picking his nose when he says he heard a loud noise. Jon, how did that noise make you feel?"

They don't do this because the person's age or occupation are important, but because it adds a little bit of background. The audience can connect to a story a little bit better when it's fleshed out, when they're given a little more information, so that the characters and events aren't presented in a vacuum.

This annoys me because I don't generally read the news. I skim the news. I'm not looking for a story when I'm going over a news article, I'm looking for the facts and nothing else. However, I do understand why journalists do this. I don't resent them for it, and I don't think they're doing a bad job by adding extra information.

That is part of what I think happened in this case. I'm imagining something like this:

"Trump posted a meme attacking us, we should say something about it."
"Okay, we'll point out that Trump is being Trump again."
"... And?"
"And... That's bad."
"Maybe we could dig a little deeper."
"We could do a story about the role of the press, and how his constant attacks on anyone who questions him are sabotaging one of the basic requirements of democracy - namely, that the voting public be informed."
"Again? How many of those can we do in a week? We're doing a story on one particular tweet: what can we say about that?"
"Well... we don't know where Trump got this meme, but it's been making the rounds on social media. Maybe we could try and figure out where it came from."
"Okay then. We're supposed to be doing full diligence on Trump's tweeting anyway."

That's where you want to make that distinction? You can only be held accountable for what you say to the public in public on a public forum, as long as you say that you said it? This seems like it's inviting abuse, but anyone who's ever done anything on the internet already knows that.

How do you feel about anonymous donations to SuperPACs then? What about anonymous bomb threats? CNN made the claim that this gif was inciting violence against journalists, that doesn't seem so different.

Granted, the idea that this gif was inciting violence is about as plausible as the claim that CNN was trying to blackmail this guy. But you've obviously bought into this idea that CNN's statement was a threat, rather than a hedge against someone who's clearly willing to change his story at the drop of a hat.

Your argument seems to be centered around the idea that this guy is unimportant, which was true. Following up an obvious lead and calling the guy who made the meme in the first place was a small part of the story, not really important but a nice little thing to flesh it out. And since Trump is involved, being thorough is expected and generally necessary. The guy's reaction was what turned this into a story in its own right.

But seriously, you keep skipping the obvious: "It is relevant where the President found the meme before retweeting it, because it gives you an insight on where the President gets his information." What are you expecting them to do here? You acknowledge that the source matters, but you don't want them to examine it. The president posted the meme unattributed (like any good redditor), so figuring out where the meme comes from is the completely obvious approach. I tried to illustrate this in a slightly humorous way above, but apparently the point wasn't made.

You say your question is: what do you get by tracking down names? The answer is: someone to talk to. The point was never the name, the point was to flesh out the story a little and maintain some standard of journalistic ethics. Look, it's #8 on the SPJ Code of Ethics:

If they're going to claim that this guy is inciting violence, or that he's racially motivated, then they need to give him a chance to explain himself.

I'm sorry, I think I still haven't quite addressed what you said. There are basically two issues here: the first is that researching where memes come from is soft news and good journalists should be trying to find something more important to report on. The second is that they've taken a story about Trump and then wandered off on a tangent instead of sticking with Trump.

I hoping I'm characterizing your complaint accurately. For the first point: this is an instance where soft news and hard news overlap. Calling Trump on his bullshit has turned into it's own little industry at this point, and everything that he says gets researched. I'm not saying this is exceptional, it's possible that if a different president posted a meme then maybe that would get researched too. But when this president posts a meme, you can be damn sure that it's going to get examined. Examining what the president says, thoroughly, falls under the "important hard news" category.

For the second point: maybe. Maybe they did wander off on a tangent, but the story kind of created itself. They called this guy and didn't get in touch with him right away, left a message on his voicemail or something, and he apparently freaked out. He wrote the apology on his own initiative, edited his old comments on reddit to make himself seem a little less racist, and then called them begging them not to reveal his identity. What are they supposed to do with that? Just ignore it? What happens when people start asking about what happened to this guy? What happens when someone else starts looking into this meme that the president tweeted?

Setting those questions aside, it's probably worth pointing out that the president is apparently listening to outspoken racists. You do acknowledge this above, but just saying this without identifying who you're talking about is pretty useless. Worse than that, it's inviting denial.

Okay, you also said that you didn't think they should have tracked him down in the first place. And that CNN was behaving like a tabloid, and that you weren't sure that CNN was practicing responsible journalism. You're suggesting that it would have been more responsible for them to critique the president without doing any background investigation into what it is that he was saying? "Today the president has continued being awful. Where does he get this stuff anyway? Who knows? Not us. Let's not find out."

I get what you're saying about trying to keep the story on Trump instead of on this dude, but when the president says something then finding out as much as you can about that thing is what a journalist does. But fine, regarding your criticism of CNN changing the narrative: it's not CNN doing it. Maybe read the actual source article, it's pretty tame. The one line that people are complaining about could have been phrased better, but this story exists the way it does because interested parties have jumped on this opportunity. Not because CNN really did anything wrong.

Not too much of a story, it seems likely that CNN took notice of this guy in particular because of Trump and because this guy was specifically targeting CNN with his posting.

Think about what you're saying here though. You're saying that what the President of the United States says to the public is not only not worth reporting on, but that it lessens a news organization for doing so. It is not the role of the press to ignore politicians and let them do whatever they want, or say whatever they want. This is specifically their job: to call out the president when he does stupid shit.

The summary and article are giving events backwards in order to make CNN look like the villains. It wasn't CNN tracking down this guy and threatening to dox him and then him agreeing not to do this anymore. It was him begging them not to reveal his identity, and then CNN agreeing not to do that in light of his apology.

What CNN did actually do: they tracked down an internet poster, and then called him for a statement. They could have just published his name without calling him first, but that's irresponsible journalism. They could have ignored his request not to be identified, which... I guess they should have done, as heartless as it may be. They're getting a lot of shit for their compassion right now.

In the US this could easily be possible, but this is a British company so that probably isn't true. Link. Typical CEO pay ratio in the UK is 22 times the salary of the median employee.

Unlikely. Mythbusters did a lot on this: I don't recall that they tested with a .22, but it takes an awful lot of book in order to stop a bullet. Multiple phone books placed back-to-back.