There is no comparison between what this administration is doing and any that have come before it. Attempting to draw that false equivalence is just pure foolishness.
> Are you saying the entirety of the DOJ apparatus could be politically steered to look for non-existent evidence or make frivolous referrals?
Yes, absolutely and unquestionably. This fact is blatantly, blindingly obvious to anyone who hasn't had their head buried in the sand for the past year.
I remember being more astonished that it took so long for it to finally happen. If he hadn't been the president, he would have been banned ages earlier. Same exact thing with this settlement - if he wasn't the president it wouldn't be happening. Based on merit alone, he'd stay banned for life.
> In what other public, online discussion forum format can anybody without admin powers, arbitrarily and unilaterally ban others from publicly replying to public posts? That idea sounds insane to me.
Regardless of all your other arguments here, the change being made to twitter here does nothing to prevent that. Blocking a user still prevents them from interacting with your posts in any way. Now they can just see the post without being able to reply to it. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.
The point of blocking is to prevent harassment, no? Hiding the blocker's posts from the blockee puts up an additional barrier to interaction. Even if it can be circumvented, it still requires some effort and may dissuade the person from continuing the harassment. There is a reason why this is the standard implementation for almost every social media site, and petulance has nothing to do with it.
> Super-niche use-case: our game studio prototyped a multiplayer horror game where we played with cloning player voices to be able to secretly relay messages to certain players as if it came from one of their team-mates (e.g. "go check out below deck" to split a pair of players up, or "I think Bob is trying to sabotage us" to sew inter-player distrust, etc).
That's an insanely cool idea, and one I hadn't really considered before. Out of curiosity, how well did it work? Was it believable enough to fool players?
> but most humans can understand that people have different senses of humor
I agree completely. And I would think that someone with greater than zero empathy would have a hard time arguing that there is one and only one correct way to interpret a piece of writing. An author with a non-zero amount of empathy should be well aware that their work will be interpreted in a variety of ways by a varied audience, and won't seek to hide behind the flimsy shield of "satire" when they publish something intentionally provocative and incendiary.
> When Hillary called 1/2 of Trump supporters "deplorables" isn't that hate speech?
No, it is unequivocally, objectively not hate speech. Nowhere in there is there a threat of violence. I don't really care if it hurts your feelings. Make better choices in life.
Assuming that most of what was in the article is true, then I guarantee that the government now knows exactly who the leaker is and has no need to contact the person who was the source for this article. Message logs, ip addresses, user account info, and whatever else needed to identify this person all exists on Discord's servers, and I doubt law enforcement will have any trouble getting access to it (assuming they didn't already have it through other channels).
I agree, but sadly it's getting harder and harder to do that sort of thing. It seems that almost inevitably, along with those fancy framework abstractions come tighter restrictions on how much the user is allowed to do things which are not explicitly supported by the UI. All in the name of "security", of course.
This is exactly why I like to use a gaming keyboard with extra programmable function keys off to the left side. All the flexibility without having to override any default functionality that the standard keys might have.
Edit:
Also, dedicated media keys and a volume control wheel/knob are a must!
I think you're misunderstanding. The "myth" being referred to in that third link is that it's beneficial to warm up your engine by letting it idle for a long time. This was previously true for cars with carburetors, but is no longer useful for modern cars.
The idea that idling the engine for an extended time after a cold startup can cause damage is correct, and that idea is consistent in all three articles you're referring to.