Is this the gaming PC version of you find a dental floss that you really like, but if you want to buy more, you have to pay 10X price on Ebay?

The very first episode of Star Trek I ever saw was Duet. Have you seen it? It was Season One and by the end of the episode we're pretty far removed from "Terrorist Kira." It did not take seven years for her to view the Cardassians as people or to think that a political solution was possible.

> I challenge you to find an example of any federal court ruling
> wherein it has been decided that foreign governments, have
> the rights granted in the US constitution. They don't.

And furthermore, if they did, some of the treaties we've made at
the ends of wars, would be violations of our constitution. The
agreement we made with Japan at the end of WWII, and the
constitution we forced them to adopt (certain points of which we
later regretted due to the Cold War), are a prominent example.
But no, the German inter-war and Japanese post-war governments
don't have second-amendment rights. If foreign governments had
fourth-amendment rights, most of what the CIA does would be
unconstitutional.

If you don't understand the constitutional basis for who has rights,
maybe look at the wording in the ninth and tenth amendments.
Maybe you will find a clue there.

I will say it again: the Chinese Communist Party does not have
rights under the US constitution. They have certain rights under
international law, but running propaganda companies in other
countries isn't one of those rights.

> I don't see any "except for foreign corporations" clause in there,

The word "corporation" here is disengenuous. We're talking about a genocidal government that has materially subsidized the platform's growth specifically so they can use it for propaganda purposes, not some kind of normal for-profit company. (In fact, converting TikTok _into_ a normal for-profit company is the entire point of the bill. That's why the Chinese government hates it so much. They don't want to give up control.)

And I challenge you to find an example of any federal court ruling wherein it has been decided that foreign governments, have the rights granted in the US constitution. They don't.

> not to mention all the users who are going to have their speech unconstitutionally
> abridged by this bill if it becomes law.

How does requiring a foreign government to divest their controlling share in a company, abridge the free speech rights of individuals? Have you even read a short *summary* of what the bill does? The bill does not in any way shape or form attempt to limit what opinions can be published. (It's the other side in the debate that wants to do that, by having the executive branch tell tech companies what "misinformation" they need to curtail.) It just requires ByteDance to sell the platform to a genuinely private company that's *not* run by the CCP. That's all.

But they really, really, really don't want to do that, because as far as they're concerned that would defeat the whole entire purpose of developing the thing in the first place.

If Cox is liable for user's copyright infringement then Tesla is liable for drivers speeding.

Not if there's a federal law that explicitly declares that middlemen are liable if they don't comply with the DMCA process, while there isn't a federal law saying car manufacturers are liable for speeding.

You might be looking at the underlying principles and making common sense value judgements, instead of reading what the law says.

This is ultimately why politics exists: to influence what the law is, in an attempt to make it more like your common sense value judgements. And it's really hard because these are issues that your congressional candidates probably aren't talking about at all, because they're talking about someone else's "important" [eyeroll] issues instead. We needed to stop DMCA in 1997/1998 and we failed.

The jury seemed to decide that accusations qualify as infringement

However regrettable, it's easy to understand how that can happen.

The jury could have just been told testimony that "we saw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was seeding our movie" (with screenshots of MPAA's torrent client showing a seeder at that address and the packets they got from that address correctly matching the torrent's checksum). Meanwhile, Cox wouldn't have any evidence refuting it (even though the assertion isn't proven; the "screenshots" could have been made in GIMP for all we know). And then the jury might have ruled based on "preponderance" of evidence.

Kind of like 3 cops saying "the perp resisted arrest" and the perp saying "no I didn't" and a criminal jury (where the bar is much higher) still deciding that the perp resisted arrest. Sigh. You know that happens.

Had Cox ratted their customer out (or gotten a DMCA counternotice from them), then the customer could have been sued instead, and raised doubts by saying "I have an open wifi" or something like that. But Cox didn't, and they certainly aren't going to say "we have an open wifi" since they're in the network business so of course they don't offer free networking to strangers. It sounds like a difficult situation for Cox.

The story is light on details so I ass/u/me some things. The copyright infringement was likely due to torrents, i.e. from the internet's point of view, addresses owned by Cox were publishing/hosting content (under the hood: really Cox's customers seeding torrents).

So if I were an MPAA/RIAA -member company, I'd send Cox a DMCA notice ("Cox, stop sharing my copyrighted work") which really means "Cut that customer off or otherwise make them stop, or else get a DMCA counternotice from them, so I can go after them instead of you." And if that's what happened, then it sounds like Cox said no (didn't make it stop and also didn't pass the buck to their customers. So they sued Cox instead of Cox's customers.

But that's based on assumptions and speculation, hence my question. But yes, I know what a DMCA notice is and I think that mechanism was likely in involved at some point in the story.

Get off the quadrangle in front of the building!

Forcing ByteDance out doesn't violate the first amendment because ByteDance isn't the American public; it's part of the narrative-shaping aparatus of a hostile foreign power, which has no legal rights at all under US law. We should've had them on an entity list ten years ago.

> And yet, how many people who have served in the military or one of the
> three letter intelligence services, or administrations, or anything similar,
> have been prevented from telling what they know when writing a book?

That's different. Keeping secrets internally is not the same thing as preventing
political rivals from expressing their opinions.

The problem with the "free speech" argument is that it's completely totally
irrelevant. Foreign governments don't have a right to free speech in America,
and they never have had. The people who are in America, have the right to
free speech. Stopping the narrative-shaping branch of a hostile foreign
government from doing business in your county doesn't have anything to
do with whether your own people have free speech or not. It's just basic
counter-espionage procedure.

Let them publish their propaganda on their own websites, hosted in their
own country. (Which they also do, of course. Lots of them. The Global
Times is the most entertaining of the lot.) They don't have the right to
operate their narrative-shaping business over here.

Yeah, that argument is nonsense.

But forcing ByteDance to divest TikTok isn't a violation of free speech. If you think speech on TikTok is anything resembling free, I have a bridge to sell you. What we should be doing (about ten years ago by preference) is putting ByteDance on an entity list and making it illegal to do business with them because of their ties to the PLA.

In terms of free speech, the TikTok platform was already yanked out from under you before you ever tried to stand on it. It is easily the *most* heavily narrative-shaped social media platform ever to gain widespread adoption in the West. (Douyin and Weibo and WeChat are even worse, but nobody in America uses those platforms except to talk to family members who are located in countries with extreme levels of government censorship, where everything else is blocked.)

What we should've done, about ten years ago, is put ByteDance on the entity list and make it illegal to conduct financial transactions with them, block their access to Swift, etc. That wouldn't have had much impact on the platform's growth, but it *would* have made TikTok's main source of funding far more obvious to the casual observer, which would simplify certain aspects of this argument.

Web developers have no problem with the less-well-known browsers. We never have to do anything to support them, *they* support the relevant standards and everything just works. It's consistently whatever browser has the most market share that is a perpetual thorn in our collective sides (or to a lesser extent the browsers in the #2 and #3 slots), and that's been true ever since the #1 browser was Netscape Navigator. The people who make the leading browser never think they need to do things in the standard way, because everyone will bend over backwards to make websites work with their browser *anyway* and unfortunately most of the time they're right.

I used to test in half a dozen browsers. I stopped bothering, because I never found any problems with the lesser ones. Ever.

There's nothing in any canon I can recall that would imply that. I do recall household fusion reactors and replicators (TNG's The Survivors) which is pretty much the opposite definition of central control by the State, unless we assume the replicator has DRM or some such, which was never said or implied. There's also civilian ownership of weaponry in every show, again, opposite of central control. There are privately owned ships, privately owned restaurants, privately owned French estates, the only thing missing is currency, but what good is currency in an abundance economy?

Did you watch the same show I did? That might have made for a compelling story. The story we actually got was about a cartoon villain from a literal universe of cartoon villains. That twist ruined what was up until that point a fairly compelling character story acted brilliantly by Jason Issacs. Discovery has done this time and time again, take a concept from Classic Trek best used sparingly (Section 31) or not taken seriously (tMirror Universe) and drive it into the ground.

That's nonsense but I'm not surprised you worship at the altar of DS9 because it feels like all DS9 worshippers have to throw this shade at the other shows. You don't see any character evolution between S1 Data, Worf, or Picard vs. S7? S1 Doctor vs. S4? S4 Seven of Nine vs. S7? There were certainly characters (Harry Kim) the writers forgot about but it's nonsense to say they stayed the same as they always were. Side note: I like DS9, a lot actually, so don't mistake this as a condemnation of that show, just the more rabid parts of its fan base.

Episodic television is not mutually exclusive with character development and serialized television is not automatically superior. I would posit that it only works when the show runners actually have the whole story sketched out in advance, e.g., Babylon 5. How many B5 episodes ended on a cliffhanger? I can recall only one. How many Game of Thrones episodes ended in cliffhangers? I can't recall any. Those shows (well, GoT until they outran the source material) are how you do serialization, a novel for television, not what Discovery and Picard pull on us. Discovery and Picard take story ideas that could be told in a two hour movie or three episode television arc and try to stretch them out for 10 hours. They do it with cheap tricks, like cliffhangers (invariably resolved in the opening act of the next episode), twists to drive engagement on social media (OMG, Lorca is from the mirror universe!), manufactured interpersonal conflict on a soap opera level (what happened to the professionalism in Starfleet?), blah, blah, blah, all there just to pad the run time and keep the rubes subscribing.

This isn't uniquely a Star Trek problem. It has happened to a lot of other productions. I blame Netflix, or rather, Hollywood's reaction to Netflix. Everyone rushed to copy that production model without asking themselves if there was still room for traditional TV (e.g., Strange New Worlds) or (crazy idea) new concepts.

Blood isn't the problem my friend. It's the gore, torture, and violence for the sake of shock value that ruined Discovery and Picard for me. Something else you said:

You don't need gore porn to tell a story about the horrors of war. If you think you do you've probably never seen the horrors of war. The two Star Trek episodes that most effect my partner -- who actually served in the GWoT and came back with the TBI and PTSD to prove it -- are Chain of Command and It's Only a Paper Moon.