Usually it's more than a few cents (i think 0.5 to 2 euros).
This is actually a great way to vote and fund the contest at the same time.
There's little financial incentive to cheat (it's not like a lottery) so if you spend more money, on average, you care more. Also the amount each individual spends in generally very small (ie a handful of votes) so it's about as democratic as this can get without involving some kind of state-id based authentication.
Also worth pointing out there is a cap on the number of votes you can make (maximum 20), and a time limit of 10 - 15 minutes during which you're able to vote. So no one can vote without paying, but they can't spend more than $8 USD on votes either. (In Australia, a vote costs 55c, about 40c US.)
Of course there's people who can try buying SIM cards & running bots, but in theory that's what the PwC vote auditing and Digame's systems are meant to detect & block.
Would you say the same thing about actual elections? Should billionairres be allowed to buy millions of votes because they care more? Should nations buy votes as a from of propaganda?
The stakes for Eurovision are about as low as a doorstop. If someone cares about it as much as they do about national elections, well quite frankly they deserve the opportunity to buy the vote :) there’s worse things people can obsess about.
It’s a game, it’s a show. Technically, so are politics, but so far Eurovision has not cost any human lives, nor have pensions evaporated. To my knowledge.
Then again, judging by the reaction of some people, that might change soon :)
Real elections have real stakes. Eurovision is just a song contest. Who really cares who wins? You get some glory, and in exchange you have to organise the event the next year.
During the 1990s, Ireland won so much that at some point they were hoping to lose, because they couldn't afford to win again.
But win a real election and you get to set laws and make decisions worth billions of dollars, and influence the lives of millions of people. They couldn't be more different.
As a customer, NN does not benefit me. The opposite. I will lose access to zero-rated services if it's implemented. I don't want that to happen because then I will have to pay more money for the same service.
I don't understand this. Can someone explain to me the argument of "ISPs in the US are monopolies, so more regulation is worse for the customer"?
If your ISP is a monopoly, they can do whatever they want if left unregulated. They can literally charge you whatever they want.
Zero-rated services are zero-rated because you pay for them indirectly. I guess losing access to them would be a downside, and would prevent Facebook from becoming even more entrenched, which they certainly don't want. It doesn't do anything for internet freedom, though. You might as well say "well the internet to me is Facebook, so I don't care if the internet is free, I just want it to run Facebook".
As you rightly pointed out, ISPs are monopolies in the US. That's the issue. Break them up, force them to compete, remove the monopolies. Trying to fix the monopoly problem, that arose due to government interference, with more government regulation is not right.
PS: an advice: If you cannot think of a single argument against your own position you're not ready to have a dialog.
Breaking them up does not do anything. If there is one cable to your house, breaking up the company that owns it does not change that there is one cable to your house. Last-mile networks are natural monopolies. You wouldn't expect breaking up your local utilities would lead to a choice in sewer pipes, would you?
I live in the first world so I have many many choices to get a wired or 4G connection. The government forces ISPs to share their infrastructure. I understand that kind of stuff does not apply to countries like the US, but I'm talking about my own case here.
You do understand that ISPs do implement zero-rated service because it makes them money, right? Who do you think this money comes from if it's not from you? Who is the nice person who decided they wanted to subsidize your internet connection?
If you think that zero-rated services save you money, all that is happening is that you don't understand how you pay for it. So, maybe it is time to find out how you do pay for it?
I don't know why Mozilla thinks it's okay to politically align themselves. Shouldn't they stay neutral if they want to make a browser for everybody and all of that? Reminds me of the Tor project calling themselves a "human rights project"
Mozilla's mission is not to make a browser for everybody and all of that, it's to make the internet open and accessible to all. See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
So... people who are lobbying for a neutral infrastructure supporting their browser for everybody are not being neutral?
Every software project has values, even if they're only implicit in the idea that the function of the software will have value for people. So even if there were something wrong with a non-profit having a set of other values (and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with Mozilla having such values any more than there's anything wrong with the EFF having such values), it'd be perfectly consistent for someone making software to facilitate a given activity to also have a position about what kinds of legal, social, and economic policies facilitate that activity.
Mozilla makes a web browser based on a vision of the web. Net neutrality is a policy that serves that vision of the web, and there's a boatload of well-considered argument that vision facilitates a lot of economic enterprise and personal freedom better than the alternatives.
Mozilla as a website, and as a service, can be completely effected by NN, so why can't they advocate for or against? It's like saying to anyone else effected laws 'Why are you politically aligning yourself?'. Because laws, and the lack of laws, has effects. We can agree or disagree on those effects, but the argument should not be discussing some merit of opinion.
I am not from the US so I don't know if it's a partisan issue, but I don't agree with NN, so them implying everybody agrees on that because it's the common good is completely bonkers.
>A company is free to align themselves with any goal they wish to have. They see that their strategy aligns with the majority of their users and the user's they wish to attract. You have the freedom to not use their product if you don't align with them.
They are just virtue signalling.
>If you're not from the US what country are you from that would have a benefit from eliminating net neutrality? What are your reasons for not supporting it?
I am from a country in the EU. I don't support NN because I want to have access to zero-rated services. As a consumer, they make my life easier and my bill lower. I want to have the freedom of choosing whether I want NN in my connection or not. I don't want the government to take that freedom away from me.
>Are you saying the only companies that can take a stance are ISPs? And they can lobby governments but an independent company cannot?
They surely can. I was just surprised because Mozilla pride themselves so much in diversity and the common good. I suppose their diversity does not include diversity of thought.
They've filed court cases against the FCC.
They're activly trying to change legislation.
If that's virtue signalling then it's a stupid phrase that means nothing.
>I am from a country in the EU. I don't support NN because I want to have access to zero-rated services. As a consumer, they make my life easier and my bill lower. I want to have the freedom of choosing whether I want NN in my connection or not. I don't want the government to take that freedom away from me.
An ISP zero rating facebook, Netflix or Spotify just entrenches a big player in their dominant position.
That's bad for the market and shouldn't be encouraged.
How can a new entrant into a market compete when the ISP or mobile operator is giving the major player preferential treatment.
As a consumer sure you don't care but these are exactly the scenarios that a government should ensure a level playing field in.
Even in the sense of if a mobile operator is Zero rating a music provider then the operator must allow a choice and all music vendors must be able to easily join the programme.
Hacker news is quite focused on startups, creating barriers for market entry isn't very startup friendly.
>I suppose their diversity does not include diversity of thought.
LOL. So a company can't stand for anything because they might upset someone?
Have a bit of self awareness.
Having a persecution complex when you're on the winning side is pathetic.
>They've filed court cases against the FCC. They're activly trying to change legislation.
Of course... they have to spend the donations on something. Anything but improving Firefox or Thunderbird, lol
>An ISP zero rating facebook, Netflix or Spotify just entrenches a big player in their dominant position.
No because in the EU by legislation ISPs are forced to zero-rate all services in the same category. If they zero-rate Netflix they have to zero-rate YouTube and everything in between.
>LOL. So a company can't stand for anything because they might upset someone?
Exactly. They should not alienate possible users or customers.
>Have a bit of self awareness. Having a persecution complex when you're on the winning side is pathetic.
I, and all customers, are on the winning side by now. But we have to keep fighting so evil doesn't win, :)
> No because in the EU by legislation ISPs are forced to zero-rate all services in the same category. If they zero-rate Netflix they have to zero-rate YouTube and everything in between.
You know what the technical term for that kind of legislation is, right? Yeah, you guessed it, that is net neutrality regulation!
So, I suppose you are against this type of legislation then, correct?
>"No because in the EU by legislation ISPs are forced to zero-rate all services in the same category. If they zero-rate Netflix they have to zero-rate YouTube and everything in between."
Which is government regulation, which you claim to be against.
Why not just enforce neutrality, eliminate the silliness that is zero rating, and offer reasonable data allowances instead?
It was a technical project with the goal of proxifying your stuff via the onion network. They made it about human rights. Accessing forbidden websites is just one of all the things you could ever use Tor for. You could also use it to buy drugs or hire a hitman or troll online or watch child pornography. Why not call it a "hitmen for everybody" project?
The goal is to make an uncensorable method for everyone to send and receive information with. Without it, thousands of people in authoritarian regimes would be disadvantaged.
> I don't know why Mozilla thinks it's okay to politically align themselves.
Being pro equal access to internet for every party is not politically aligning themselves anywhere else in the world, but in the U.S. where the right-wing has been successfully co-opted into thinking that every bit of regulation is a communist plot to take over Nebraska.
Because the Democrats on the congressional committee that released them released them as 300+ MB PDFs. This site just printed them all as images and posted as-is.
Said by @ssxio, the guy who built tweeklyfm, a site that would post your weekly lastfm stats to your twitter account... and then follow him without your permission or knowledge.
This is, he took your private information (your Twitter authorisation keys) and used it without your consent to do something shady (follow someone you don't know to inflate his follower numbers).
Definitely a somewhat shady thing to do. To play devil’s advocate, though, I would argue that inflating your follow numbers is less “evil” than building a machine that takes in user data and spits out profit.
I am exactly like you. I hate videos. Videos are a loss of time compared to text. They are slower, you can’t consume them at your own pace, you can’t go back easily or read a particular part slowly and then read the rest faster or skip sections or paragraphs or...
Also I can’t imagine anything lamer than YouTube personalities.
I think it depends on the type of content. I'm totally with you for content that should be text (e.g. most things related to programming), but some content lends itself to the video form factor and doesn't work as plaintext content.
For example, imagine CinemaSins or Movies with Mikey as plaintext. That would take all of the fun out of it.
Or imagine reading transcripts of Stephen Colbert's monologues. Those would probably be quite tedious since a lot of Colbert's quality is his pantomimic object work.
This. It kind of depends on my mood or what I'm doing, but reading is generally so much faster. Though I realized a while back that this is mostly true for people who read quickly. Some of my older family members prefer videos to having to put on reading glasses. And a lot of people just read slowly in general.
Now that I think about it, it's usually when my eyes are kind of aching (long days at screens) that I start to prefer videos even for things that don't require a visual.
I used to think exactly like yourself, until I found some really good channels of passionate people. It's clear when the author is doing videos because he enjoy in contrast when they're doing for the short term money.
>Keighley made no mention of Balogun’s specific actions at the rally, but noted the marchers’ anti-police statements, such as “oink oink bang bang” and “the only good pig is a pig that’s dead”. The agent also mentioned Balogun’s Facebook posts calling a murder suspect in a police officer’s death a “hero” and expressing “solidarity” with the man who killed officers in Texas when he posted: “They deserve what they got.”
Yeah he obviously does not know why they were paying attention to him!
Keighley, however, later admitted the FBI had no evidence of Balogun making any specific threats about harming police.
That's the next sentence. It's not about why they were looking at him, it's about why they arrested him, and kept him detained.
“Sometimes when you couldn’t prove somebody was a terrorist, it’s because they weren’t a terrorist,” he said, adding that prosecutors’ argument that Balogun was too dangerous to be released on bail was “astonishing”.
“It seems this effort was designed to punish him for his political activity rather than actually solve any sort of security issue.”
I'm not sure how this wasn't dismissed fairly quickly as an infringement of his first amendment rights.
"You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
This was extrajudicial punishment for expressing anti-police sentiments. They were able to take away his freedom, job, home, vehicle, and family, without even going to trial. By the time the prosecution was forced to drop the case for lack of evidence, their mission had already been accomplished.
They abused the justice system to punish prior to conviction, all based on their perception of his unforgivable blackness.
Dude was posting on FB. In the absence of a specific threat, he's like a million other people every day saying stuff on social media. I'm sure plenty of police officers posted horrific jokes in public and private channels and they are authorized to use deadly force and are totally unaccountable.
The cops here are the brave thin blue line going after an internet poster because their posts hurt their feelings.
That's what they nailed him for. I'm 100% sure this isn't the only thing he did to be investigated. You don't end up in jail for saying "fuck the cops", otherwise half the US would be in jail for that.
> I'm 100% sure this isn't the only thing he did to be investigated. You don't end up in jail for saying "fuck the cops", otherwise half the US would be in jail for that.
So you assertion is that if this happened once, it must be happening everywhere?
For that to be true, it would mean there is absolutely no change in any of these systems, otherwise there could never be a first time.
It also means that all laws have to be applied correctly and evenly across the united states, and that exceptions can't happen, and law enforcement can't make a mistake
Because if laws are applied unevenly in some locations, or in some circumstances, or are applied incorrectly, or if this is the first (or the first of a few to get widely publicized), then it's very easy for this to be entirely about his publicized views combined with something above (or something else not covered).
I see no reason why this can't be a localized overreach, or the beginning of a new trend. I'm not sure it is, but I'm definitely not 100% sure it's not.
