Online Payment Firm Stripe Boots 3D Gun Designer Cody Wilson's Companies 353
SonicSpike writes with this news from Reason magazine: Cody Wilson, famous for making the first usable fully plastic 3D printed handgun and for his new project "Ghost Gunner" which mills metal lower receivers (the milling machine itself is of course not a weapon, and what it makes is not itself legally a weapon) for AR-15s, [informed me Monday] that his online payment processor Stripe has decided that his companies, all of them, qualify as forbidden "weapons and munitions; gunpowder and other explosives" services. This includes the Ghost Gunner and Defense Distributed.
Bitcoin... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bitcoin... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah! Screw those paper bills that can't be traced back and gives you anonymity, let's do something illegal with Bitcoins and its wonderful blockchain instead!
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I think the article should be updated.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I too am 100% positive things that I conjecture about with no evidence.
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I too am 100% positive things that I conjecture about with no evidence.
We agree that it is conjecture, and therefore we must agree that the phrase "100% positive" is semantically awkward, but there is definitely ample evidence to make the conjecture credible. Or to put more appropriately, I would not be at all surprise that the government has leaned on Stripe here, and only a fool would assume otherwise in the face of that government's recent behavior.
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Yeah, but it's not just awkward, it's antithetical to being honest. Whatever trends you might mentally extrapolate into a mental model are never going to justify 100% certainty about this sort of thing.
I mean, let's at least acknowledge the obvious alternate case: an internal lawyer raising liability concerns.
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Keeping in mind the news these days, it seems obvious to me that we should apply Occam's Razor to the situation. Either:
A) the company doesn't want to do business with him anymore in case they get in trouble with the government, or
B) the government directly told them to stop.
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And this is different from the IRS threatening audits for those that participate in multilevel marketing pyramid schemes how?
Mr Wilson wasn't trying to defraud anyone.
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Mind you, I wouldn't participate in those pyramid schemes as I value my time far too much to go through the hassle and hustle that someone attempting to make a living that way has to, but it's not simply selling the right to sell more rights.
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The person getting ripped off my Amway and the like is not the person buying the products. Granted those products are overprice junk you could have gotten at walmart, but at least they get something out of it. The person getting ripped off is the salesperson. Amway nickle and dimes them into bankruptcy with classes, starter packs, yadda yadda.
Not cool, Stripe (Score:5, Insightful)
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Foisting your politics on your customers, eh?
What makes you think this is about politics and not just business?
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It's just business - nothing personal (Score:5, Insightful)
Foisting your politics on your customers, eh? Stripe was one of my favorite services - to the point I never even thought about using any other payment processor. I see that may need to change...
Who said it has anything to do with politics? I support gun rights and I probably would have made the same decision. The potential liability and government oversight is simply not worth it. They are making a very sane and reasonable business decision. Just because it conflicts with your political beliefs doesn't mean it is a political decision. They might even share your political beliefs but still have come to the same reasoned business decision that the downside outweighs the upside.
Plus I should point out that you are trying to foist your politics off on Stripe. Why should they be forced to share your political beliefs? Why should they be forced to pick a side?
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They did pick a side, he just doesn't agree.
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The potential liability and government oversight is simply not worth it
The only reason for this is because of politics.
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Foisting your politics on your customers, eh? Stripe was one of my favorite services - to the point I never even thought about using any other payment processor. I see that may need to change...
Who said it has anything to do with politics? I support gun rights and I probably would have made the same decision. The potential liability and government oversight is simply not worth it. They are making a very sane and reasonable business decision. Just because it conflicts with your political beliefs doesn't mean it is a political decision. They might even share your political beliefs but still have come to the same reasoned business decision that the downside outweighs the upside.
Plus I should point out that you are trying to foist your politics off on Stripe. Why should they be forced to share your political beliefs? Why should they be forced to pick a side?
Stop trying to be reasonable, this is /. I agree that companies often make decision based on risks to the company; decisions that are independent of politics. For example, many of the local gun shops do not allow firearms to be carried by the customer, yet they certainly support gun rights. Many gun shows do not allow people to carry as well. Even the NRA does not allow visitors to carry firearms into their building, though they may have changed that policy recently. I think it is clear that business decisi
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The potential liability and government oversight is simply not worth it.
What potential liability and government oversight? Cite me a single example of a payment service being named in a firearm-related lawsuit, or being a target of a BATFE investigation, for anything other than actual lawbreaking on the part of the service provider.
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Why should [Stripe] be forced to pick a side?
The reality is they probably were [wikipedia.org]. Agreed it is probably not Stripe's choice -- but if it is, I feel that all payment processors have a duty to not pick and choose the businesses they will cut off. Trade and the economy are too important to allow payment gateways to act as a choke point for morality enforcement. If the business is illegal, it should be shut down. If it is not, all businesses should have equal right and opportunity to engage in trade.
Privately ope
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That being said, where exactly do you draw the line between personal ethics and business ethics? I've been thinking about that a lot in the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision by the Supreme Court. On the one hand, we want equal treatment for all. On the other hand, people shouldn't be required to sacrifice their personal principals just to go in
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Bitcoin. (Score:2)
This is one of the many problems that Bitcoin solves.
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This is one of the many problems that Bitcoin solves.
How does Bitcoin force a company to do business with another company if they don't want to?
One company makes a decision about another... (Score:2)
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Because it's kinda like Entity A (a company) doesn't want to do business (hire) Entity B (a black homosexual 65 year old man). Do you still not see a problem?
You're really not comparing apples to apples, here. However if you really want to play that particular - and disconnected - card, then you need to ask why your mythical company A did not hire person B. If there was someone else who was better qualified for the position, then there is no problem. There are even intangible qualifications that can be counted in the process, such as fitness for the physical requirements or availability of reliable transportation to the site.
In other words you cannot win
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Cody's 2nd project = DarkWallet (Score:4, Insightful)
Look it up. He saw this coming over a year ago. DarkWallet = anonymity for Bitcoin.
The guy is not stupid by a long shot. Also listen to him speak, he's a great philosopher with the wisdom of an immature teenager.
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The guy is not stupid by a long shot. Also listen to him speak, he's a great philosopher with the wisdom of an immature teenager.
... but I thought you said the guy is not stupid?
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You can be smart enough to figure out how to implement a cryptocurrency system, but not wise enough to understand the ethical arguments.
Cf. those phone phreakers who broke into stuff for kicks, but many of them had no hostile intent.
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Now I'm really confused.
Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Geeks (and other people, but us more than normal) love to analyze things, and think we're remarkably clever when we find a loophole in specific wording.
If laws were enforced by djinn that would be a useful skill, but laws are enforced by judges who are supposed to evaluate the spirit behind a law and the intent of your actions, not merely the letter. And they hate when people get 'clever'.
I assure you, the argument "But I'm not selling an X, I'm selling a magic box that spits out X when you press a button" will not go over well with a judge.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that the laws regarding home-built firearms are very well established and have been well fleshed-out. Believe me, a lot of the corner cases have been adjudicated. Wilson is selling a milling machine. People put hunks of metal in it. A CNC program runs on it. A home-built firearm comes out. That makes Wilson's machine no different from any other CNC milling machine. Look, illiterate craftsmen in Pakistan build AK-47's from scrap metal with hand tools. Are you going to require licenses for metal files now?
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Except this isn't a metal file, or even a generic CNC milling machine. It's explicitly built and marketed as a single-purpose tool.
From a legal perspective it's one thing if I make BitTorrent but quite another if I make "MetallicaShare - click a button, get your favorite Metallica songs!".
I'm not saying the device is illegal or should be banned, but he will almost certainly have the same liability as if he were selling the AR-15 lower receivers himself.
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it actually is a generic milling machine. It is *marketed* as a CNC mill with a work envelope adequate to complete a cast aluminum AR-15 lower receiver, and the CNC program to do that comes with it. The law here is very well defined. You are right in that selling a "MetallicaShare" machine is questionable, because violating the Metallica copyrights is illegal. But homebuilt firearms are completely legal as long as all applicable laws are followed. Wilson is selling a legal machine that can do many legal things other than build firearms, and can also completely legally mill a completely legal AR-15 lower receiver.
You may not like it. You may not like the way I cook fish. That doesn't matter -- it is legal. The essence of freedom is letting other people do things you don't so much like, as long as they are doing no harm to you.
As to Wilson having the same liability as selling AR-15 lowers, pfffft. According to FBI statistics, more people are killed every year by blunt trauma (a hammer to the head) than by rifles of all types. Go look it up, it's on line. The hardware store isn't liable for selling hammers. Hammers aren't serialized. You don't need a license to carve your own hickory handle for a hammer head. The hardware store isn't liable for selling you a carving chisel if you kill someone with a hammer using a hand-carved handle that you made with a chisel you bought from them. Murder is already a crime. Knowledge of how to build firearms is not a crime.
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I assure you, the argument "But I'm not selling an X, I'm selling a magic box that spits out X when you press a button" will not go over well with a judge.
In this case, the judge won't even blink. We're talking about very well-established, well-proven law here. For many years people have been selling not just machines that manufacture X, but X itself, lacking only some finishing touches, plus instructions, access to equipment, etc... You can get someone to sell you an 80% lower receiver, set it up in the drilling jig, position the drill press, turn it on, put your hand on the lever and say "pull to finish your receiver".
There is no question whatsoever about
This Is Pretty Much De Rigeur... (Score:3)
Not just for Stripe, but for most (all?) of the CC payment processors. They generally do this sort of thing for a wide array of businesses and business models. The worst part is that often they will sign you up. accept your customers' money, then freeze your account, claiming your business is either too fraud prone and/or deals in illegal/inappropriate products/services.
Nothing to see here. Just business as usual. Move along, consumer.
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Just to clarify what I'm talking about:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/su... [forbes.com]
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.co... [cryptocoinsnews.com]
https://www.quora.com/Why-does... [quora.com]
https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]
http://www.thefrisky.com/2014-... [thefrisky.com]
What do traditional firearm shops use (Score:4, Interesting)
Having never been in a firearms store, let alone purchase one, what do "real" firearm shops use as a payment processor? Surely they take credit cards, don't they?
Stripe makes it clear [stripe.com] that they don't want to participate in transactions for regulated products and services. I don't see what the problem with that is.
Totally legal (Score:3)
If I use a CNC mill, a file and hand drill, a 3D printer or this guy's tool on an unfinished lower it doesn't matter.
It is also totally illegal to build anything you are prohibited from owning.
Guns are and always have been, easy to build
The fearmongering over this subject is amazing.
Another evil by Obama Administration (Score:5, Insightful)
This is yet another manifestation of the tactics employed by Obama's Justice Department. Unable to outlaw a particular activity (such as ammunition sales, or escort services — or even cigar-sales [townhall.com]) itself, they lean on banks and payment-processors threatening them with audits if they don't stop serving the "undesirable" merchants and services-providers. The name is "Operation Chokepoint" [wikipedia.org] and it has been in the news [theguardian.com] for a while. About time it made it to Slashdot too.
This — "the most technologically-advanced Administration in history" — is what all the cool kids (not a few /.-ers among them) voted for in 2008 and 2012...
Note, the DoJ is not even alleging any illegality — only "high likelihood" thereof. Nor are they threatening actual prosecution — only an audit. Unfortunately, the audits themselves — even if you end up fully clean at the end — are sufficiently painful and expensive, that banks choose to drop the few clients to avoid the experience.
It is particularly evil, because it is not the result of a prosecution, that is used to cow the victims to comply with the government's whim, but the very process itself. Results, you see, require the Executive to argue its point in front of the skeptical Judiciary. The process, however, can be made very painful without any repercussions — DoJ don't need to prove anything to cause a person or a company as much pain as they please.
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I'm not sure of the specifics of this case, but legally you can sell an 80% completed lower that isn't classified as a weapon in the US because "significant" work still needs to be done to make it a usable lower receiver
Re:I thought the lower receiver is the weapon.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The more relevant weapons in this situation are the IRS audit and the FBI raid, two BFG's that Stripe definitely wants to avoid.
Re:I thought the lower receiver is the weapon.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Also the "operation chokepoint "government pressure on bank transactions for businesses that they consider undesirable. that may be the heart of what's going on here.
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Meh, it takes all kinds though doesn't it? Sure he is more provocateur than innovator but, do we really just need one and not the other? Rosa parks was an activist who provoked response purposefully with a mostly symbolic act; but knowing that she wasn't just another tired and opinionated black woman doesn't diminish my respect for her. If anything it increases my respect for her, being willing to actually be the lighting rod.
This CNC mill is not so much special technologically, whats special about it was h
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BUT BUT BUT I thought Companies don't have the right to deny people's rights simply because they don't agree with them.
Substitute Gay Marriage for Guns in this case and see if your position changes.
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"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
This constrains the US Government. It does NOT constrain Stripe. Repeat after me. This constrains the US Government. It does NOT constrain Stripe.
As for your attempt to co-opt LGBT issues, a payment provider would not be able to discriminate on the basis of sexuality. It would have a very hard time proving it was not doing so should it refuse payment processin
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Depends whether you're dealing with a protected class. Gun receivers are not, last time I checked, a protected class.
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There is actually a huge difference in the argument you are making. There's a difference between choosing *who* you do business with (or employ) and *what kind* of business you are willing to be in. If you're a gun store and you refuse to sell someone a gun because they're gay, that should be illegal (whether it actually *is* illegal is still being debated). If you're, say, a department store and you don't wish to be in the business of selling guns, you should have a right not to be. I think this case i
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(Now if Stripe is applying their rules differently for different people, that *is* a problem. If, for instance, they'd happily process payments for a gun store/manufacturer owned by a Democrat but not a Libertarian or a Republican, *that* I'd have a problem with even though I tend to be a Democrat).
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Why the hell is this flagged as interesting. It's not even vaguely interesting from a logical argument sense. As others have pointed out there's a fundamental difference in *who* you choose to do business with based on race, color, religion etc and *what* you choose to do business with (e.g. gun part manufacturers, clown costume manufacturers, taco distributors).
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At the end of the day, the guy is selling a tool...a basic CNC milling machine. Those are available all over the place and serve many more purposes than allowing the owner to mill gun parts. I guess the next step is to prohibit people from selling files and drill bits because they can also be utilized for gunsmithing purposes. Where does it end?
I'm sure he can find another payment processor that doesn't have a political agenda.
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Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no provision in the U.S. Constitution protecting the civil rights of gays. There is a whole amendment for protecting the civil right to own guns.
Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:4, Informative)
The protection is for being able to own (and carry) a weapon, it doesn't say anything about who has to sell one to you.
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Can you point to any place in the Constitution where people have to sell you things because of a right you have? If you can, wouldn't it apply equally to wedding cakes for gay people and services sold to gun makers?
If not, could you please explain the difference between right to marry and right to keep and bear arms in rendering services to the public?
Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:4, Informative)
Can you point to any place in the Constitution where people have to sell you things because of a right you have?
Yes. It is the Equal Protection Clause [wikipedia.org] of the 14th Amendment.
Can you point to the wording of that amendment which applies to private citizens? Here is the full text of the 14th Amendment: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." I am sorry, I do not see anything about where people have to sell you things.However, I do see it as making the argument the person you responded to was making.
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Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:4, Informative)
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So, you're supporting the idea that certain rights are for certain people are more important than other rights for everyone. Gotcha. So much for "equal protection" being equal.
Animal House was a cautionary tale, not an instruction book.
Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:5, Funny)
Animal Farm is a dystpoian, allegorical novella about government overreach and oppression, which is what I think you're going after here.
Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:5, Insightful)
It is also not a zero sum game. Believe it or not, a society of 300+ million people can both address 2nd amendment issues AND civil rights. The classic argument of 'we shouldn't do anything about XYZ issue I do not care about until ABC issue I do is completely settled!' is just another way of never getting around to XYZ.
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Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:5, Insightful)
What were you thinking about my post? Where is pot/Kettle?
My Libertarian views are that people should be able to deny service as they see fit. Works equally for Cakes and guns. And for the same reason. It is entirely consistent.
My personal view on Marriage, is that it is none of the government's business, and there should be no laws either supporting or denying status based on marriage. Period.
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I would much rather see the government drop marriage from teh language and develop domestic partnerships. Essentially contracts between people, regardless of whether or not they wish to engage
Re:Lucky for Stripe (Score:4, Insightful)
Marriage in the US is a government institution, not a religious one. It is a government managed contract between individuals that grants automatic extensive contractual relationships that are recognized and enforced by the government. There are people in this country that want to keep those government contracts but deny them to groups of people and pretend that there is no equal protection. Equal protection requires that everyone be treated the same.
What that means is that either we allow everyone to marry anyone they want and obtain those government contracts or we do away with government marriage entirely. The former will only impact (mostly positively) people that are now able to execute those government contracts, the latter will have broad reaching and sustained impacts on all American families, and most of those impacts will be severely negative.
Personally, I'd rather we just honor our constitution rather than dramatically unwind hundreds of years of legal precedent and automatic protections granted by government recognized marriage.
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Although this does make me curious as to what other questionable products Stripe continues to process payments for, because the maker didn't piss off the wrong people in government.
I am of the opinion that I'm paying you for a service, not to spy on me and my clients on Uncle Sam's behalf.
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START Devil's advocate
Did you hear about that guy who stabbed like 15 of his classmates to death? Or the dude in Norway who went to an island retreat with his trusty knife, and murdered over 100 people with it?
END Devil's Advocate
granted crimes like that represent the absolute rarest form of homicide, but they generate the eyeballs for media.. and as usual, alarmism will win the day.
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Anything can be a weapon if placed in the right hands in the right situation.
I'd still rather have murderous psycopaths with lumps of rock than nuclear weapons.
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I think we need a corollary to Godwin's Law just for people who mention nuclear weapons in gun ownership debates.
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I think your argument is flawed in that you say we "would rather have a non-zero number of kids and adults die each year from gun violence than give up hand guns and other firearms." since the option of having zero people of any age die of gun violence is not and never was actually an option that even could be honestly on the table.
Its really just not correct to put it in those terms at all.
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| Quite simply, guns did not create our gang problem
Guns of course increase the substantial collateral damage from the gang problem.
Re:No man is an island (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people who lose here are stripe
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Dogecoins, of course.
Contingent liability (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people who lose here are stripe
You think they lose? Let me introduce you to a little concept called contingent liability [wikipedia.org]. They are making the perfectly sane decision that the potential liability and government scrutiny that could arise from facilitating these payments is not worth it. Honestly I might have made the same decision. Has nothing to do with approving or disapproving of the product being sold. It's simply an actuarial analysis that says the costs outweigh the benefits. They are in business to make money, not to facilitate business models that could cause them legal heartburn later.
Re:Contingent liability (Score:5, Interesting)
The only people who lose here are stripe
You think they lose? Let me introduce you to a little concept called contingent liability [wikipedia.org]. They are making the perfectly sane decision that the potential liability and government scrutiny that could arise from facilitating these payments is not worth it. Honestly I might have made the same decision. Has nothing to do with approving or disapproving of the product being sold. It's simply an actuarial analysis that says the costs outweigh the benefits. They are in business to make money, not to facilitate business models that could cause them legal heartburn later.
That argument would be a lot stronger if there were a pattern of payment service providers being held liable for damages due to criminal acts performed with firearms purchased with payment via their services. AFAICT, not only is there no such pattern, there isn't even a single example. There are a small number of examples of gun stores being sued (with little success except where the gun store broke the law), but no case where payment providers were even named in the suits, that I can find, anyway.
Given that, this decision seems more politically than fiscally motivated.
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Ie, the way it worked back before we had electronic funds transfers.
Come to think of it, he can use actual bank electronic funds transfers independent of a payment processor, but it requires more coordination with banks to do so.
What it comes down to is that no one is required to do business with him, and no one that has done business with his is required to conti
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They're not rights when you're talking about negotiations between corporations. You are, of course, welcome to not use stripe for your payment services. I suspect Stripe is so worried about losing your non-existent business they're - at this very moment - trying to figure out how to win you back.
Re:Now we get to hear (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think that owning firearms would stop a government from being tyrannical or from attacking the population. I don't think that a lack of firearms in the population would mean that the population can't rise up. For the former, look at Iraq, which is loaded with weapons and had abuse by the government in Baghdad, and for the latter, look at the fall of the Berlin Wall, where the East German Communists didn't have the stomach for shooting tens of thousands of their own people when they interpreted an off-the-cuff comment about easing border controls as freedom to cross now.
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Re:Now we get to hear (Score:4, Insightful)
Same thing can be observed with urban gangs too. A dozen people can terrify a neighborhood of thousands.
Especially if those dozen people have military hardware and government authority.
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History is filled with examples and counter-examples, but to me the best historical example that gun restrictions can lead to a large scale rise in tyranny is that after World War I the German government was prohibited from having heavy weapons by treaty, so they in turn decided that they didn't want a civilian population as well armed as the government and began taking away people's right to own weapons. This in turn left the civilian population vulnerable to the type of thuggery that the Nazi party used
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This is part why so much concern is expressed in the United States when we see elements of fascism cropping up in political parties, when such groups start subhumanizing groups of people, where they start having information wings masquerading as news, and where issues are only allowed to be debated in black-and-white as opposed to the various greys that they really are, it's an ap
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Everyone else is.
You know, I find it quite interesting just how much press and attention ApplePay is getting. Even in /. comments it seems. I guess their marketing folks are spreading the money around pretty liberally. I wonder how much they'd pay me to shill for them?
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You know, I find it quite interesting just how much people claim anyone who appreciates something that they don't is suddenly a paid shill. And if everyone is paying attention maybe they're not paying anyone... or maybe you just don't understand how social media has changed the face of mass media?
It may well be a matter of appreciation on jfdavis668's part. However, he claims "Everyone else is" using ApplePay. Which is absurd on its face.
As for the media (online and MSM) coverage, it's been orders of magnitude larger than for any other e-wallet/e-pay platform. So I made the inference that Apple is staging a big marketing push for it. That's a reasonable conclusion, IMHO. Whether jfdavis668 is a paid shill or not, is irrelevant.
Go troll someone else, AC.
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The Ghost Gunner machine is designed to take so-called "80% registers" - incomplete lower registers that aren't legally considered weapons yet and therefore aren't tracked, numbered, or registered - and finish milling them to make them into functional components. Thus, it enables manufacture of the controlled component of an AR-15 without applying a serial number or doing any sort of registration of the weapon, allowing someone to create a completely unregistered rifle piece-by-piece.
Which is all perfectly legal.
Basically the guy made a machine that take the place of "me and my drill press." Not really sure what the hubbub is all about.