Is that some sort of misplaced arrogance, or do you really not understand how easy blocking WhatsApp/Facebook would be if the German authorities wanted to do it?

People write as if the Internet is some huge network that everyone has unlimited access to, but guess what? It's not. You have an ISP, and somewhere up the line they are hooked in to a relatively small number of pipes in and out of any given country, and those pipes are controlled by a major infrastructure provider that isn't going to argue with the national government.

The political fall-out could be a different question, but somewhere like Germany the people are very cautious about excessive surveillance and profiling for obvious historical reasons, so I wouldn't bet on WhatsApp/Facebook winning the PR battle either.

Establishing that knowledge *can* be property is necessary, but not sufficient to establish that any piece of knowledge *is* property.

But at stake here isn't knowledge; it's administration.

The fascism is in the people who scapegoat third parties when their favorite party loses,

No. Not even close. Not unless you're using the term to mean "Anything I don't like" like some 1980s activist "Man, you can't MAKE me vote, that's fascism man!"

I agree it sucks we'll face the choice we're facing, but those are the breaks. In most elections I'd encourage third party voting if you really don't like the major parties - it sends a message that your vote is available if only the major party closest to you is willing to change a few policies and its behavior. In this case we have an actual fascist - that is, an authoritarian who's advocated shutting down criticism, who's supported violence against his opponents, and who is scapegoating minorities and advocating hate against them - running against an unappealing, but nonetheless democratic candidate, and the election is close, too close to be "sending a message" to the big 2.

Am I going to blame Stein voters for a Trump victory? No, I'm going to blame the Democratic establishment for nominating such a divisive uninspiring candidate. But I'm still going to encourage everyone in a swing state to vote for her, because Trump is terrible.

I was making an analogy. I hate suburbia, but just because it would be easy to escape it via certain methods (for example, going to prison) doesn't mean that alternative is better. Just because Prison would be something I could escape to NOW doesn't mean if I reject it I'm blocked from escaping to, say, a city at a later date.

Likewise, putting a fascist in charge of the USA is a pretty extreme and negative way to get rid of the establishment. It might achieve it, but the results are unquestionably worse than the alternative, especially as "not replacing the establishment now" does not mean we'll be unable to in the future.

...of course, as I've said elsewhere, Trump isn't even "not the establishment". He represents, by and large, the people who are running the country, but feel threatened by others who want to finally have some say in how their government works. And Clinton? Well, she's one of the people who threatens them - but she's spent the last few decades trying to make herself part of it.

Whether she's succeeded or not depends on whether you think she is going to spend the next four years doing ordinary politics, or whether she's going to spend the entire time fighting bogus investigations from people who clearly think she's not a legitimate President.

That our authority over DNS is legally US government property in any sense the framers would have agreed upon, even stretching that concept of property to include intangible property.

Even if you can argue that DNS is American government property, it's pretty useless property. Since it is largely administered in a decentralized fashion, if the rest of the world wants it can set up its own DNS system and have people in their country point to their preferred root servers.

Nah, that's just the natural end point of a two party system. It's not fascism to have two parties you dislike dominate the polls, it just sucks.

I think the definition above is missing something, largely because it folds it into "right wing system of government" without recognizing that right wing is a large umbrella that covers a wide range of different, often opposing, points of view. Trump's support for violence against opponents, coupled with his racial scapegoating makes him Fascist, not any pro-war attitudes. He's not Hitler, but he's definitely a low rent Mussolini in some respects, and a full rent Mussolini in others.

Germany already took action over the Facebook-WhatsApp data sharing, and probably won't be the last EU member state to do so.

Not exactly a useful suggestion. Most traffic laws aren't about intent and if they were, not seeing a stop sign is not the same thing as not intending to roll past one. I can totally see someone whose brakes fail getting stop sign violation tickets thrown out of court, for example.

This case is typical of much of the anti-Clinton rumors we've seen lately. A germ of truth - that a Clinton employee might have asked Reddit for help to change email addresses on an exported file - has been whipped up into allegations that she ordered him to delete emails (not email addresses, emails), in some kind of attempt to cover something serious up.

Going back to the real allegation: OK, he asked to change email addresses on an export. So.... what's the scandal here? No seriously, those who aren't lying about what the allegation is are at least claiming it's evidence of evidence tampering - but what actually was tampered in such a way it would have materially affected an investigation?

What was he trying to do that would prevent Clinton from being criminally prosecuted? Anything at all? He's just changing email addresses in headers, not content. A single response to a message "From" Barack Obama that quotes the sent email as being actually "from" Colonel Gadaffi would be easily spotted.

The most likely reason the email addresses were changed was to prevent certain email addresses from becoming public.

Which is fine. No scandal.

We go through this bullshit every few months. Clinton's haters seem to be incapable of spending more than a few days without inventing some other crap. It sucks because we're probably going to spend the next four years seeing Clinton constantly investigated for non-issues, with government as dysfunctional as ever. It's part of why I'm reluctant to vote for her (but will, because I live in a swing state.)

I can answer the "why" part: power. Whether it's the busybody down the street, or the DA downtown, making and enforcing laws and mores makes people feel powerful and in control. Many people cannot abide having nobody on whom they can look down in smug superiority. The drug laws were created to "keep them in their place." Which group was "them" has varied over time. With opium, it was the Chinese laborers in the West. With marijuana, it was the Latinos. With crack it was the blacks in LA. The rest are just a very rich icing of civil asset forfeiture on top of the sick, fat, and corrupt cake that is the entire US law enforcement community and criminal justice system.

To be fair, only dumbass democrats believe anything of the sort. It is politically convenient to whip up some foreign boogeyman
(Mexican rapists, Syrian terrorists) than to focus on more disturbing questions here at home, such as how child rapist Trump is the best their party has to offer.

That was easy, and just as informative.(and non-authoratative) as the original. And no, I'm not a Hillary supporter either, but you don't have to be one to see how much stupid is encapsulated in your statement.

That would make YOU the grime.

No, and neither have you. Isopropyl alcohol on the other hand...

That works/worked* in the car industry where a car that's twenty five years old isn't typically much less advanced than one twenty years old. But in our industry?

Commodore's problem was more that they took an age to substantially improve the Amiga and make those improvements available. The A500 was more or less an A1000 in a keyboard case and was still being sold as one of TWO Amiga models five years later. And the A2000, the other model, wasn't more powerful than the A1000 (or A500), it was just more expandable. In the same year they finally relented and released the A3000, a 32 bit Amiga, but priced it way out of consideration for most people.

None of this was the engineers' fault it should be pointed out. While it took a while to come up with a better base chipset to replace OCS/ECS, the engineers were still belting out some fantastic designs, most of which were squished by upper management. Commodore Management's response to the increasing obsolescence of their low end model wasn't to replace it with something better, it was to replace it, at the same price, with the A600, a machine that was worse in almost every respect (well, it did have an IDE interface...), and which had been designed as a replacement for the Commodore 64.

Had the A3000 replaced the A2000 in 1990, with a similar upgrade given to the A500, I think Commodore might have stood a chance.

* OK, there's a reason I put 20 years there and "worked" - the car industry is genuinely going through a development phase which is nice to see.

It's easy to gain a competitive advantage if you have more or less the exact same business model, but ignore the laws and regulations that govern your competitors.