To me, if something is part of the system then it should be part of the operating system, and not a separate app. Every app should be removable.
The problem with that is that it would mean updating any of these apps would require an OS update, which is a much more heavy-weight operation (with considerably more risk and more moving parts) than simply updating an installed app.
IMO the correct solution to that is a dependency system, however; let each app declare "I need X in order to operate correctly", and optionally declare "I provide X for any other apps that need it". That way, if you try to uninstall your last app that provides X while another still-present app still needs X, the system can either stop you (and explain why) or warn that the uninstall will cause this other thing to stop functioning (and possibly point you to an app-store list of all apps which provide X).
That's considerably more complicated, of course, but IMO worth the trade-off.
(The alternative would be to make every app self-contained, with embedded copies of everything it depends on, at the expense of increased resource usage and worse security-update problems. The latter could be mitigated by a "use external copy if present, fall back to internal if not" system, but that would be making things even more complicated.)
I parsed that description as being applied not to users who stick with the defaults, but to users who don't and (at least without education) possibly can't understand how to change from the defaults, or possibly even what the thing which they're changing away from its default is - the level of lack of technical understanding shared by those people who used to refer to the blue E icon on their desktops as "the Internet", and think that if that icon went away they didn't have access to the Internet anymore.
Not that it's any more polite or helpful as applied to them, either, but that's a much less broad brush than "users who stick with the defaults".
While those are valid objections, and may be enough to be conclusive on their own, they seem to be based on "one identity, multiple people" (because biometric identifiers aren't actually unique to the person involved) - not on "one person, multiple identities", which is what the fragment you quoted was talking about.
For example, at my workplace, I have multiple user accounts - one with the same access as everyone else, which I use for day-to-day activities, and one with elevated access (since I'm somewhere in the middle of the sysadmin hierarchy), which I use occasionally for tasks that need it. I also know the credentials for multiple generic accounts, shared between numerous people, used when person-specific access is not needed.
That's "multiple identities in the same system for a single person"; if biometrics were used for the identity, there'd be no practical way to have my two distinct access levels for different circumstances (and using generic accounts at all might be hard), so that system is one where using biometrics for identification wouldn't do.
But it's certainly possible to imagine a system which prohibits setting up more than one account per person - a voter-registration or driver's-license database, for example - and enforces that, at least in part, by using biometric identifiers as the "username" for the account. If properly implemented, that would mean that you'd be able to safely assume that - returning to my original phrasing - no one person ever has more than a single identity in the system.
If biometric identifiers are in fact not sufficiently unique to rely on for this purpose, using them in such a way would probably still be a bad idea, of course. But that's a different basis for objection from the "biometric identifiers can't be changed" argument I was responding to.
I could see mandating biometrics... as the identity, not the authentication.
I.e., instead of a username you scan your finger / eye/ whatever, but you still have to put in a password or suchlike in order to be allowed in.
I'm not sure that would be beneficial enough to warrant the trouble it would take to implement it, but the use case of identification would seem to be one where the "can never be changed" characteristic of biometrics isn't a problem - at least for cases where no one person should ever have more than a single identity in the system.
It seems fairly clear to me that he thinks "common law" means "the common person's understanding of what the law is" (or, perhaps, "should be" rather than "is").
The logic underlying his position that common law is supreme over all other laws is less clear to me, but I think it has something to do with a combination of the idea of common sense ("if the idea of X not being the rule would seem strange to the common person, then obviously X should be the rule, because something that's that obvious to the common person is clearly accepted by the majority") with the idea that since all law derives its validity from the consent of the governed, and the common person is the majority, clearly any law which doesn't fit what the common person thinks the law should be is invalid because the people don't consent to it.
Problems with that include defining "the common person" (on which point I don't have any articulable insights at present) and - at least for the implications for his other positions - the fact that it seems quite likely that a majority of the populace don't have any problem with casual copyright violation...
No, that sentence is almost certainly phrased as intended.
It refers to the idea that the dog alerted on the car, which (per court rulings, as I recall) is enough evidence of the presence of drugs to trigger sufficient suspicion for evidence the officers acquire when searching the car to be admissible in court even if they didn't get a warrant first.
The reason why doing that would be problematic is that in some cases - particularly with smaller, less market-behemoth companies - by the time the bad behavior is detected, the process is gone through, and the fine is applied, the company may not have enough uncommitted funds to be able to pay a fine of even that base break-even size.
What you propose would very probably work fine for the companies which are biggest and most inclined to offend in this way, although even they may not necessarily keep spare cash on those scales.
But it would also probably wind up destroying smaller companies, even in cases where the "completely unintentional and couldn't reasonably have been foreseen" scenario would lead to only that base fine being imposed.
If you can find a way to scale it back enough to account for that, while still maintaining penalties against the more egregious offenders at a suitably yeah,-they'll-feel-that level, I'm all for the proposal.
The argument is that being in the same market is not a necessary requirement for the public to consider two things with similar names to be related, and therefore the legal analysis should not treat lack of that element as definitively resolving the question.
On the one hand, I can see how the lack of a same-market requirement would expand the scope of trademark to the point where it would wreak havoc in a number of ways.
On the other hand, speaking as a member of the public in question, I do see how the public may indeed not take in-the-same-market into account in considering whether to think of two things as related - because I have sometimes seen two names in unrelated markets where my initial default assumption would have been that it was either one company getting into two different businesses, or one entity endorsing another by lending the use of its name. (The first example that comes to mind is the one from the article on this site, some time back, in which one side of the dispute involved "Land O' Lakes" butter.)
This is one of those subjects where I'm honestly not sure what the perfect way to resolve the problem is, nor indeed whether such a way even exists.
I'd guess that the rationale would be "just because people do it all the time, that doesn't make it OK, and trying to argue in court that it should be allowed because people do it all the time is not legitimate, so presenting evidence which only serves to show that people do it all the time is not permitted".
In other words, trying to prevent the defense from convincing the jury to rule based on what they think the law "should" be, rather than what the law is.
I'm pretty sure he's not trying to demand that YouTube do it; I'm pretty sure he's trying to say "the fact that complying with the requirements of copyright law (or what those requirements should be) can't be done by computers doesn't mitigate YouTube's obligation to comply with those requirements", with the implication that if YouTube can't comply with those requirements - whether by computer or by other means - then that is a problem whose burden should be borne entirely by YouTube, on the basis of YouTube having voluntarily chosen to get into a situation where it can't comply with the law, even if the weight of the burden puts YouTube out of business.
The difference being that he'd probably be just as satisfied if YouTube went out of business as if YouTube found a way to do all the copyright checking which he thinks is, or should be, required by law.
What your looking at in CA, is legislators trying to negotiate a price for their constituents rights, after their donors are already balls deep in federal and state constitutions ass. There is no purpose served in trying to limit the damage. It has already been done.
If this is the legislation I think it is, my understanding is that the reason the California legislature even considered this bill at all - never mind passed it, never mind passed it so quickly - is because there's an impending "citizens' ballot initiative" referendum which would do pretty much all the bad things this bill does only worse.
What's more, if the initiative passes by referendum, it can only be repealed or modified by another referendum; the legislature can't amend it to fix problems which get identified later, either by analysis (such as this article covers) or in practice.
If the legislature passes this bill, and the initiative doesn't go on the ballot because it's seen as redundant (which I understand its sponsor has indicated he hopes for, because he only has so much money to fund the campaign), and problems are discovered later, in theory the legislature could then amend or repeal the problematic law.
But if the legislature doesn't pass something close enough to the initiative to satisfy its supporters, and the initiative winds up being adopted at the ballot box, and problems are discovered later, we're stuck - short of another multimillionaire funding another ballot initiative, and getting people to support it over the same forces that are pushing this one.
So people in the CA legislature who don't even like the idea at all have still worked to pass a bill like this one, because the alternative outcome is likely to be significantly worse.
Re: Oh, Hollywood and morals to blame. -- Find the new sites, then.
"Yeah, we put a cop on this street corner and now all the drug-dealers and prostitutes moved to the next block! What are we to do?"
More like:
"We found a street corner where the drug dealers and prostitutes were hanging out, and when we sent a cop over, the local chamber of commerce was happy to tell us what we needed in order to arrest the dealers and pimps, even though it was making money from them being around. But now the dealers and pimps have moved to another corner whose chamber of commerce just ignores us, so we can't arrest the dealers and pimps anymore."
That's not a perfect analogy - it doesn't cover the jurisdiction-of-the-relevant-police bit which helps make the "ignores us" part viable - but improving it much would probably require making it quite a bit longer and more involved.
Given that it was in a response to a quote about video clips, I think he was defining "part" as "segment which is used as input to the editing tool which the author is trying to use". In other words, if you can't prove - to the satisfaction of the (presumably proprietary) editing tool - that you're the one who created the video clip, you don't get to use that clip in making another video.
(I think his "Split the content to parts" was meant to mean "If you split the content into parts" - conditional, not imperative; he's done odd grammatical things like that before.)
That doesn't reduce any of the numerous negative aspects you point out, of course; in fact, it probably makes some of them worse.
I think the actual rationale was something more like "someone too smart is more likely to become bored in the job, and either start breaking the rules, or quit (after expensive training) and need to be replaced".
Although, in the real world, the "more likely to question rules/orders" analysis is almost certainly also a factor.
(I do doubt that the "plausibility of good faith exception" angle was considered, at least consciously.)
On the post: Some Thoughts On The EU's Latest $5 Billion Google Antitrust Fine
Re: My Issues With Android
The problem with that is that it would mean updating any of these apps would require an OS update, which is a much more heavy-weight operation (with considerably more risk and more moving parts) than simply updating an installed app.
IMO the correct solution to that is a dependency system, however; let each app declare "I need X in order to operate correctly", and optionally declare "I provide X for any other apps that need it". That way, if you try to uninstall your last app that provides X while another still-present app still needs X, the system can either stop you (and explain why) or warn that the uninstall will cause this other thing to stop functioning (and possibly point you to an app-store list of all apps which provide X).
That's considerably more complicated, of course, but IMO worth the trade-off.
(The alternative would be to make every app self-contained, with embedded copies of everything it depends on, at the expense of increased resource usage and worse security-update problems. The latter could be mitigated by a "use external copy if present, fall back to internal if not" system, but that would be making things even more complicated.)
On the post: Some Thoughts On The EU's Latest $5 Billion Google Antitrust Fine
Re: Re: Re:
I parsed that description as being applied not to users who stick with the defaults, but to users who don't and (at least without education) possibly can't understand how to change from the defaults, or possibly even what the thing which they're changing away from its default is - the level of lack of technical understanding shared by those people who used to refer to the blue E icon on their desktops as "the Internet", and think that if that icon went away they didn't have access to the Internet anymore.
Not that it's any more polite or helpful as applied to them, either, but that's a much less broad brush than "users who stick with the defaults".
On the post: Netflix CEO Proclaims The Death Of Net Neutrality Is No Big Deal
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: yeah
For example, at my workplace, I have multiple user accounts - one with the same access as everyone else, which I use for day-to-day activities, and one with elevated access (since I'm somewhere in the middle of the sysadmin hierarchy), which I use occasionally for tasks that need it. I also know the credentials for multiple generic accounts, shared between numerous people, used when person-specific access is not needed.
That's "multiple identities in the same system for a single person"; if biometrics were used for the identity, there'd be no practical way to have my two distinct access levels for different circumstances (and using generic accounts at all might be hard), so that system is one where using biometrics for identification wouldn't do.
But it's certainly possible to imagine a system which prohibits setting up more than one account per person - a voter-registration or driver's-license database, for example - and enforces that, at least in part, by using biometric identifiers as the "username" for the account. If properly implemented, that would mean that you'd be able to safely assume that - returning to my original phrasing - no one person ever has more than a single identity in the system.
If biometric identifiers are in fact not sufficiently unique to rely on for this purpose, using them in such a way would probably still be a bad idea, of course. But that's a different basis for objection from the "biometric identifiers can't be changed" argument I was responding to.
On the post: Netflix CEO Proclaims The Death Of Net Neutrality Is No Big Deal
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: yeah
I could see mandating biometrics... as the identity, not the authentication.
I.e., instead of a username you scan your finger / eye/ whatever, but you still have to put in a password or suchlike in order to be allowed in.
I'm not sure that would be beneficial enough to warrant the trouble it would take to implement it, but the use case of identification would seem to be one where the "can never be changed" characteristic of biometrics isn't a problem - at least for cases where no one person should ever have more than a single identity in the system.
On the post: Oregon Supreme Court Sets Up New Limits For Digital Device Searches
Re: Re: Re:
The logic underlying his position that common law is supreme over all other laws is less clear to me, but I think it has something to do with a combination of the idea of common sense ("if the idea of X not being the rule would seem strange to the common person, then obviously X should be the rule, because something that's that obvious to the common person is clearly accepted by the majority") with the idea that since all law derives its validity from the consent of the governed, and the common person is the majority, clearly any law which doesn't fit what the common person thinks the law should be is invalid because the people don't consent to it.
Problems with that include defining "the common person" (on which point I don't have any articulable insights at present) and - at least for the implications for his other positions - the fact that it seems quite likely that a majority of the populace don't have any problem with casual copyright violation...
On the post: Guy Gets Tossed In Jail For Contempt Charges Because Cops Say They Need To Unlock His Phones To Get Evidence Of Drug Possession
Re: dog says what?
It refers to the idea that the dog alerted on the car, which (per court rulings, as I recall) is enough evidence of the presence of drugs to trigger sufficient suspicion for evidence the officers acquire when searching the car to be admissible in court even if they didn't get a warrant first.
On the post: The Cable TV & Broadband Sector Has A Nasty Billing Fraud Problem
Re: Re:
What you propose would very probably work fine for the companies which are biggest and most inclined to offend in this way, although even they may not necessarily keep spare cash on those scales.
But it would also probably wind up destroying smaller companies, even in cases where the "completely unintentional and couldn't reasonably have been foreseen" scenario would lead to only that base fine being imposed.
If you can find a way to scale it back enough to account for that, while still maintaining penalties against the more egregious offenders at a suitably yeah,-they'll-feel-that level, I'm all for the proposal.
On the post: How A US Burger Chain Brought 'Ruby Tuesday' Full Circle Through Trademark Bullying
Re: Re: It's not about the market space
The argument is that being in the same market is not a necessary requirement for the public to consider two things with similar names to be related, and therefore the legal analysis should not treat lack of that element as definitively resolving the question.
On the one hand, I can see how the lack of a same-market requirement would expand the scope of trademark to the point where it would wreak havoc in a number of ways.
On the other hand, speaking as a member of the public in question, I do see how the public may indeed not take in-the-same-market into account in considering whether to think of two things as related - because I have sometimes seen two names in unrelated markets where my initial default assumption would have been that it was either one company getting into two different businesses, or one entity endorsing another by lending the use of its name. (The first example that comes to mind is the one from the article on this site, some time back, in which one side of the dispute involved "Land O' Lakes" butter.)
This is one of those subjects where I'm honestly not sure what the perfect way to resolve the problem is, nor indeed whether such a way even exists.
On the post: Latest Denuvo Version Cracked Again By One Solo Hacker On A Personal Mission
Re: Re: Re: Re: The great game
On the post: Court Won't Rehear Blurred Lines Case, Bad News For Music Creativity
Re: Re: Re:
In other words, trying to prevent the defense from convincing the jury to rule based on what they think the law "should" be, rather than what the law is.
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Re:
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Stolen property
I'm pretty sure he's not trying to demand that YouTube do it; I'm pretty sure he's trying to say "the fact that complying with the requirements of copyright law (or what those requirements should be) can't be done by computers doesn't mitigate YouTube's obligation to comply with those requirements", with the implication that if YouTube can't comply with those requirements - whether by computer or by other means - then that is a problem whose burden should be borne entirely by YouTube, on the basis of YouTube having voluntarily chosen to get into a situation where it can't comply with the law, even if the weight of the burden puts YouTube out of business.
The difference being that he'd probably be just as satisfied if YouTube went out of business as if YouTube found a way to do all the copyright checking which he thinks is, or should be, required by law.
On the post: EU Parliament's Legislative Affairs Committee Is Now Misleading Members Of Parliament In Effort To Fundamentally Alter The Internet
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Yes, Privacy Is Important, But California's New Privacy Bill Is An Unmitigated Disaster In The Making
Re: Glad you finally picked a side.
If this is the legislation I think it is, my understanding is that the reason the California legislature even considered this bill at all - never mind passed it, never mind passed it so quickly - is because there's an impending "citizens' ballot initiative" referendum which would do pretty much all the bad things this bill does only worse.
What's more, if the initiative passes by referendum, it can only be repealed or modified by another referendum; the legislature can't amend it to fix problems which get identified later, either by analysis (such as this article covers) or in practice.
If the legislature passes this bill, and the initiative doesn't go on the ballot because it's seen as redundant (which I understand its sponsor has indicated he hopes for, because he only has so much money to fund the campaign), and problems are discovered later, in theory the legislature could then amend or repeal the problematic law.
But if the legislature doesn't pass something close enough to the initiative to satisfy its supporters, and the initiative winds up being adopted at the ballot box, and problems are discovered later, we're stuck - short of another multimillionaire funding another ballot initiative, and getting people to support it over the same forces that are pushing this one.
So people in the CA legislature who don't even like the idea at all have still worked to pass a bill like this one, because the alternative outcome is likely to be significantly worse.
On the post: More Police Admitting That FOSTA/SESTA Has Made It Much More Difficult To Catch Pimps And Traffickers
Re: Oh, Hollywood and morals to blame. -- Find the new sites, then.
More like:
"We found a street corner where the drug dealers and prostitutes were hanging out, and when we sent a cop over, the local chamber of commerce was happy to tell us what we needed in order to arrest the dealers and pimps, even though it was making money from them being around. But now the dealers and pimps have moved to another corner whose chamber of commerce just ignores us, so we can't arrest the dealers and pimps anymore."
That's not a perfect analogy - it doesn't cover the jurisdiction-of-the-relevant-police bit which helps make the "ignores us" part viable - but improving it much would probably require making it quite a bit longer and more involved.
On the post: Police Union Upset Not All Books Paint Cops As Heroes, Calls For Removal Of Titles From School's Reading List
Re: Re: Re:
If so, your implied point might have some validity.
If not, you're just trolling.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Loses Latest Round In Extradition Fight, Will Try To Appeal Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Stolen property
Well, comments like that are the bottom of the part of the scale which lends weight to that theory, really. They're just the most obvious.
On the post: EU Parliament's Legislative Affairs Committee Is Now Misleading Members Of Parliament In Effort To Fundamentally Alter The Internet
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
(I think his "Split the content to parts" was meant to mean "If you split the content into parts" - conditional, not imperative; he's done odd grammatical things like that before.)
That doesn't reduce any of the numerous negative aspects you point out, of course; in fact, it probably makes some of them worse.
On the post: Kim Dotcom Loses Latest Round In Extradition Fight, Will Try To Appeal Again
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Stolen property
On the post: Police Union Upset Not All Books Paint Cops As Heroes, Calls For Removal Of Titles From School's Reading List
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: All kinds of crazy
Although, in the real world, the "more likely to question rules/orders" analysis is almost certainly also a factor.
(I do doubt that the "plausibility of good faith exception" angle was considered, at least consciously.)
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