Tech-Noir

> The "legal in the EU" part distracts from the true injustice of this kind of activity being criminalized.

It also creates unnecessary confusion since it implies an American was jailed in Europe for something that's legal in Europe. For the reason you give - countries have different laws - there's no reason to mention Europe otherwise.

> You can be convicted in most EU states [...] for getting an abortion.

I'd love to know where you got this from.

My mistake. The "quote" was originally a reponse from me, based on what you said. Corrected.

How do I check Bloomberg's title change history? Are you saying within the 5 minutes you posted they changed it?

> please make sure your facts are correct.

Likewise.

Edit: removed the word "own" from "please make sure your own facts are correct."

    Mueller Accuses Russians of Aiding Trump, Assailing Clinton

    U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced an
    indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian 
    entities, accusing them of interfering in the 2016
    presidential election and operating fake social media
    accounts.

    They used false personas and social media while also 
    staging political rallies and communicating with
    “unwitting individuals” associated with the Trump 
    campaign, it said.

Which seems to be the entire story.

> [Google executive Scott Spencer] said that less than 1% of the web’s most visited sites—under 1,000 of them—are currently out of compliance with the rules

So it's an ad blocker that doesn't block over 99% of ads?

As with many small nitpicks, very interesting. Do I understand correctly that "girl" is a similar thing, where it might naturally be expected to be female, so die Maedchen, but is actually das (neuter) due to the -chen? And/or that all -chen words would be das?

> Besides, who remembers the British concentration camps?

Everyone, because it's the answer to the question "who invented the concentration camp".

Unfortunately it's the incorrect answer, because nobody remembers the American, Spanish, French and Paraguayan (the possibly correct answer) concentration camps that came earlier.

It's quite strange/interesting that atrocities in the "wars before WWI" got turned into atrocities in the "British colonial era" though; maybe people remember what they want to remember.

Or if you believe the superior power will not respond militarily, as in the Falklands in 1982.

Unfortunately for the junta, they weren't the only unpopular right-wing government who saw warfare and jingoism as a handy distraction from internal economic and social problems.

For privacy's sake I won't link to the story, which is not hard to find since the Channel Tunnel doesn't get closed that often, particularly over bomb scares, and I will delete/edit this post if the poster wants, but wow:

    The bomb went undetected as he travelled back to the
    UK through the Tunnel but later, as he attempted to 
    return to France to show the device to a war expert 
    friend, he was stopped for a routine check.

> names don't matter and if you see someone with that name it doesn't even slightly mean that they are the same person you met last week

If this is your belief why have you stuck to a specific name, to the point of signing up to random sites just to take possession of it?

I don't know how accurate any of this is, or how supercomputers or Bitcoin have changed in the past half decade, or how seriously such comparisons can or should be taken, but:

    The suspects had tried to use one of Russia's
    most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoins

4-5 years ago:

    the entire bitcoin network is roughly 256 times
    faster than all the top 500 supercomputers around
    the globe combined.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/28/global-b...

If my comments are derogatory, what are comments like this?

"Mark Zuckerberg just walked into Funny or Die and laid off all my friends."

"Facebook has completely destroyed independent digital comedy and we need to fucking talk about it."[1]

"[Facebook is] a lamer, shittier looking internet"[1]

"Facebook is essentially running a payola scam"[1]

"Facebook feels like this dingy, disgusting, rapacious place to me."[1]

[1] But it was "fine" when he was making a living from their traffic.

He's not saying memes are the future of comedy, he's complaining that people are making jokes for free:

> the whole point of [Pitch] is to pay people for jokes because I hated seeing people just giving work away for free

Perhaps people want to crack jokes for free, because it makes them feel good. Not everyone wants to monetize basic human interaction.

If anything is killing anything it's monetization uber alles.

So instead of people cracking jokes on internet forums or their local pub, he'd prefer it if they confined their material to his app instead, so he can financially benefit from it.

That's the thing about a lot of Facebook haters. They don't really hate Facebook, they hate that they're not Facebook.

Unlike others here, I don't sympathise with this at all, so this may be unpopular with some people.

The complaint however seems to be: "we wanted Facebook to serve our interests, but Facebook wanted to serve their own interests for some inexplicable reason, so they suck".

I loathe Facebook and think the internet and the world would be a better place without it. I also - for that reason - don't fucking use it (support it) and certainly don't work on content and then put it on Facebook, because it's bleedin' obvious you don't get to 1.5 billion users by supporting other sites.

To cap it all, after all his whining, he's still a Facebook user to this day, simply kidding himself that he's sticking it to the man by impotently criticising it. As if anyone at Facebook cares what you do, so long as you do it on Facebook.

Facebook is - still - not the internet. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it, and definitely don't put your hard work there.

Meanwhile, if people stop visiting your site, maybe look closer to home instead of trying to lay the blame elsewhere.

He's basically a million other dinosaurs who had early success with something and is now reduced to self-pity about the 'good old days' because his 15 minutes are up, and people have moved on to something else.

Funny or die? Adapt or die.

Idea for a Black Mirror episode (from the past):

In the future, people of the internet are unable to write about new technology without resorting to increasingly tiresome, lazy and spurious references to a popular British Twilight Zone remake.

It's an argument for not overreacting about it.

The tech is just a special effect, and I find it weird that so many people go straight to the most fucked up use case, or even imagine new possibilities (deep aging? Jesus) or even (elsewhere) start arguing for more laws because of it.

Meanwhile nobody fixates on all the horrible stuff that can be done with cameras or Photoshop or Poser.

You can, or will be able to soon, do previously Hollywood standard effects at home. You could put Tom Cruise in your wedding video. You could put yourself in Mission Impossible. You could have the cast of the Magnificent Seven in the movie you created with a few mates. You could do tons of imaginative, funny, creative stuff.

Celeb porn, sticking the head of a baby on the body of an adult porn star or any other sad/weird porn related use - all of which has done with images for a quarter of a century - are the least interesting things about this.

As to the reddit ban, I doubt anyone is surprised.

> I read some where there was going to be a TLD for porn (.xxx I think).

There were ideas about that for years, maybe even in the late 1990s, and eventually about 5-10 years ago it was set up.

Ironically, many in the "porn industry" were strongly against it; I think more to do with the company running it, though, than the idea of being confined to an online ghetto.

Most porn still remains on .com or on country TLDs and few people have probably even heard of .xxx, let alone visited a .xxx site. Now there are hundreds of new general TLDs, several more are porn related (.sexy, .porn) that basically nobody uses.

> Sadly it creeps into TV shows and movies nowadays.

I'm not a fan of depictions of simulated sex on TV/movies, since it's often for shock/viewing figures and/or holds up the plot, but I think irresponsible gun usage, torture/violence and military propaganda, which occur far more often than sexual content in TV and movies, are much worse for kids in particular to be exposed to.

> Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term.

I'd hardly call the video where he calls it "hijacking" showing him "bent on disowning the Internet variety":

https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s

Nor his attitude to the word being "reappropriated by the internet"[1]:

    The meaning is not that far away from the original.
    It's anything that goes viral.

    In the original introduction to the word meme in the 
    last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use
    the metaphor of a virus.

    So when anybody talks about something going viral on
    the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it 
    looks as though the word has been appropriated for a
    subset of that.

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes

Why bother with money at all?

The headline (and subheadline) of this article is actually:

"Trump’s Shadow Hangs Over NATO"

"A year since Trump entered office, European allies are relieved the alliance is still standing, but U.S. leadership remains in doubt."

I don't know where that's famous (I've never heard it before) but I think the name Bolshevik simply derives from an internal party vote which Lenin's faction won (against what became known as the Mensheviks (minority)).

> In the UK programming was taught on BBC Micros in pretty much every school from the age of 5-6 years old as part of the school curriculum.

I'm sorry, that may have been your experience, but that statement is simply not true.

In the early 80s - when you say you were being taught BASIC at an age when most people are still learning to read - I was in middle school, and the only thing anybody was allowed to do on the school's single BBC was play Frak a handful of times.

Not only were there no computer lessons in middle school there were none in my high school either, until 1988, at which time we did not learn BASIC or C, but whatever database software the BBC was using.

The 1980s was a heyday of British kids being into computers and programming (creating a massive games industry), but it has essentially nothing to do with the piss-poor education system of the UK or a computer that had virtually no users outside of state institutions.

Kids in that decade were doing it for themselves, at home, not in school, primarily on the ZX Spectrum.

I don't think this is a particularly big deal, and certainly less serious than other publicly known events in the 1960s (and 1980s) that almost started WWIII, however...

> But note that the documents do not describe the mental status of the authors, they're just listing facts.

Do government documents normally describe the mental status of the authors, rather than sticking to facts (whether true or not)?

> The US government is a very, very large organization, that asks a lot of questions and produces a lot of documents.

What percentage are serious enough to get discussed by the National Security Council and/or Attorney General?

> Within the Soviet government, someone else investigated what it would cost to procure some F-86 and F-4 aircraft

I haven't seen any documents on that, but did the Politburo discuss how US planes could be used in a false flag attack? If they did, how would it justify or excuse the US doing so?

> it would be irresponsible not to check

It's irresponsible of the US government to not look into the possibility of murdering Americans in order to start WWIII?

They meant smartphone as opposed to the classic Nokia-style 'dumbphone'.

> having an uncontested documented case is a bigger win over a denial

I agree. The mistake is crediting that to CK ("at least he...") when in the wake of an article as damning as the one in the NYT, in the current climate where the story was not going to go away, as before, he had absolutely no other option than admit it.

> That’s the whole point, they don’t have to ever admit it, regardless of the publicity, short of hidden camera footage.

I think that was true before (pre-Weinstein), and will unfortunately probably become true again, but right now there is too much attention being paid to showbiz abuse/harrassment for someone to get away with ignoring/denying truthful allegations against them.

> Judge [Louis CK’s] apology/non apology anyway you like, at least he ended it decisively, instead of propagating it for enternity by sowing doubt.

What are you talking about? It was "ended" by the NYT publishing, in this current Weinstein/Spacey climate, an article about his offences[1] and leaving him absolutely no other choice but to finally come clean.

He was publicly painting his victims as liars (which you quite rightly condemn in your second paragraph) as recently as a couple of months ago[2]:

    NYT: So [the accusations are] not real?

    CK: “No. They’re rumors, that’s all that is.” 

Even now, not only does he not apologise, he tries to excuse his completely inexcusable behaviour by trying to pretend he thought it was even remotely acceptable.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/arts/television/louis-ck-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/movies/louis-ck-rumors-wo...

Both campaigns were guilty of misinformation but the most blatant outrage was the UK government itself spending £9 ($12) million of the British people's money producing and delivering one-sided pro-EU propaganda to every address in the UK.

Edit: For people downvoting the above factual post:

Government's £9m EU 'propaganda' leaflet has left public LESS well informed, study shows:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/governments-9m-eu-propa...

EU referendum: PM 'makes no apology' for £9m EU leaflets:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35984991

The propaganda itself:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

What point or argument are you making here? Old and terminally ill people shouldn't have a vote?

> Most referenda are run on the basis that a super-majority is required for any significant constitutional change.

What percentage was required in the Scottish independence referendum?

What percentage was required in the EU/EC exit/remain referendum of 1975?

What percentage was required in the referendum to join the EU/EC in the first place, in 1973?

(The latter being a trick question. There was no referendum to join at all, zero, yet a majority being required (and achieved) to leave is deemed a "horrific travesty of democracy" by people who voted differently.)