The other thing that's weird about this bill is it Purports to Restrict how the law could be challenged in court By stating that there is a Very short time limit to file any kind of challenge against the law, and the DC Court of Appeals has exclusive jurisdiction.

why is it that companies are so reluctant to invade customers' privacy at the request of the government?

It costs them money and creates risks. The companies Cannot exactly share with the public the nature Of the orders they have to follow -- but you can bet it's gone way beyond the Phone Company having to Provide a secret room at every central office to house the government agents who get to push a button and snoop on All the fiber connections or any Phone lines they want.

We're at the point now where they can say "Hey Google; We need to see everything everybody in the US searched for yesterday"

There's significant costs involved with capturing any significant amount of surveillance.

That takes infrastructure, compute, bandwidth, and employee time.

There are also risks involved. Including Public relations risks, and security-related risks. Any surveillance backdoor they have that employees can use Can also potentially be abused by other hostile nation states to spy on Americans; having A procedure that exist that easily authorizes a person at your company to tap into customers' private conversations, and having a large team who can do that on request, is an existential risk within their company's security posture. The companies also face risks of being sued if the power is used improperly.

Yeah.. You need a legal basis to force companies to violate their customers' privacy.

Their basis for attempting to extend this further is shady as fuck.

The Law provides that existing orders will continue to be in effect, so they convinced the Special court that administers this law to hand them a blanket order that allows the intelligence gathering to continue past the end date of the law.

These transition procedures provide that any
order, authorization, or directive issued pursuant to Title VII shall remain in effect until its stated
expiration date. Consequently, if Title VII sunsets, the government can continue acquiring foreign
intelligence under Section 702 until any existing FISC authorization expires, and the FISC can continue
administering previously authorized acquisition procedures under Section 702.

Recent FISC Authorization
News outlets have reported that, on April 5, 2024, the FISC authorized government foreign intelligence
acquisitions under Section 702 for one year. If reports are accurate, the effect of this authorization is that
the government can continue foreign intelligence acquisitions under Section 702 until the authorization
expires one year from when it was issued, regardless of whether Title VII sunsets on April 19, 2024. In
addition, the FISC can continue administering authorized acquisition procedures under Section 702 until
the authorization expires.

inflation compondsand as part of the interrest ( but obly part of it) is compensation for inflation

No.. Interest is not "inflation compensation". Any depreciation of the value of dollars from the lender's perspective has to be made up for from their standard profits just like any other business. The Prime rate is always greater than inflation. I would say lenders should be able to be compensated for Inflation on the original loan balance but NOT be compensated for Inflation on their Additional profits on top of the loan balance. In other words, the banks should get profit + inflation for lending money, but a Fair amount of profit, And the profit should Not be able to compound at a borrower's expense.

They didn't pay enough of it off fast enough so the interest kept adding to their total loan cost.

Yes.. this is a travesty.

Consumers in the US should have loan relief. Not student loan relief, but general loan relief.

It's fair that people should have to pay interest for the service of borrowing money, But interest on interest, or
this notion of a "compounding loans", ought to be severely restricted to prevent Usury and insane exploitation of students.

I would suggest a federal cap on the total annual finance charges and fees related to each loan agreement as a percentage of the original principal balance MINUS any amount that had been paid on that balance in a prior year, let's say the current prime rate, 8%. A finance charge being any fee that is added to the principal balance that year OR any amount of dollars the customer had to pay that does not reduce the balance by the same number of dollars.

In other words: It ought not to be Legal to write a loan agreement at 8% that could possibly turn into costing 16% of the original borrowed amount.

Maybe the EU can specify the minimum memory that devices have to come with.

I have a counterproposal... Software vendors can specify a Minimum memory requirement to ensure a quality experience.

On Mac they specify the minimum is 8GB, recommended 16GB. They could change the Minimum to 16GB.

If enough software vendors did this, then Apple would have more pointed complaints from users of brand new 8GB devices.

Could you imagine if they allowed you to install ram directly into a slot somewhere, and skip the need to hide it in the SSD

They designed their CPU so system RAM is incorporated into it. Changing a CPU design is a massive cost. I'm sure they wouldn't even think of it.

Anyways, no matter how much RAM you have - you still need Swap, because applications are still going to manage to use all the RAM. It makes sense to have a way of Incorporating the optimization of Swap in the storage and utilizing Less-expensive RAM there within that next Tier of memory.

and how, exactly, do you plan to accomplish that

It's not what you Do by plan. It is what happens automatically.

People's time spent on Youtube will be less In the absence of your actions causing them to go looking on Youtube's website for something.

My suggestion would be that the government Impose Restrictions on how these are advertised.

If Two different units for Sale have a different amount of RAM, then it should be Prohibited from Selling the two units under the same name from the same link or product page, except if the RAM is a modular addition that can be changed.

What I'm saying is that the unit with different "Options" which are actually integral changes to a model Should not be allowed to share the same marketing - the product should be Required to have a different title and not orderable from the same Buy button.

For example: "Macbook Pro 2024 Model B with 16GB of RAM and 4 TB Storage"

Right now they have a generic Buy button for "Macbook Pro", and then when you go through the check-out process they High pressure you by making you pick options that can't be changed after the unit is delivered. That part is what I suggest should be illegal. Giving an option to buy additional "ADDONS" which are not actually separable addons, But a change to the core product itself that you already clicked Buy on.

that also comes with the caveat that swapping on SSDs is a stone cold cycle killer.

A lot of SSDs have 4GB RAM cache. I wonder if a SSD Volume type couldn't be created for "Non-persistent/Ramdisk/swap-optimized partition".. then start expanding how much RAM SSDs have to support the Ramdisk function.

Hardware support for this would entail that changes are not guaranteed persistent across power-off, But no cycles occur as long as the SSD has enough spare RAM.

You could imagine then having a SSD that plugs into a USB port that has 32 GB of RAM cache, and thus no cycles are spent as long as you aren't swapping more than 32 GB out to disk.

Since it cannot be trademarked, we can now all be Escobar!

Well it means they cannot formally register the trademark with the EU.

Some countries, even some EU countries grant common law protection for unregistered trademarks.

In those places you can sue over infringement of an Unregistered trademark; they might not currently meet the criteria to do so.. but the situation doesn't put it automatically Public Domain worldwide.

They may also be able to register their trademark locally within some countries even in the EU.

Any original (or otherwise eligible) work..

This is false, Because there are Non-copyrightable works.

You cannot even copyright a "good morning"
"hi there, everybody", the same for short phrases and titles, etc.

Originality is required but is not enough. There is a threshold of both creativity and originality that have to be reached, and most one-line text messages are likely to fail.

Also, even if it's automatically copyrighted: it must be registered promptly with the copyright office within a short time of publication to effectively assert the right. Failing to register the copyright in a timely manner is a quick way of losing the ability to sue and win damages -- If people register it late, then the most one can sue for generally is an Injunction ordering infringement of that work to stop.

nobody else has the rights to distribute copies of your text

In theory.. Only if the bit of text you are trying to control is copyrightable and the distribution is not fair use.

Much of the chatter that happens on Discord servers would never qualify for copyright protection.

Even if it does: enforcement is an issue. Generally you will Not have registered a copyright on your chat messages before distributing them freely - that means if you try to sue them The money damages are limited to actual damages - you don't get statutory damages, no attorneys' fees or court costs, etc. It's unlikely their indexing system costs the author money, So all that time and energy just to file for a Judgement ordering them to Stop distributing that 1 Offending chat message of yours.

The next day when you send more chat messages and they start including them.... you would have to start that same process all over again.

Discord needs to find a way to block this..

I believe the proper method for that would be legal process.

If Discord can't identify whose doing it, then they can serve a lawsuit by public notice. They can allege any valid claim that would Entitle them to an injunction if true. Whatever person is running the service would then be required to come forward and File papers that include their Name and contact information in order to make a defense. If whoever is running the service DOES NOT Identify themself and file a response, then Discord get a default judgement. As soon as they have that judgement they can file for Injunctions to be sent to Domain registrars, Hosting Providers, etc,
  ordering them to disconnect all services and access to that customer, And turn over all records and property that belonged to them.

It's probably a Cybercriminal gang with a Botnet methinks.

That means their MO can potentially include running bots on stolen Discord accounts, Or malware on compromised Discord users' devices to mine all the servers those users happened to be a member of.

Note how they only accept cryptocurrency payments and their Mail hostname DNS infrastructure use Switzerland-registered names.

The website is fronted by a service named Cloudflare that is Infamous net-wide for signing up the most questionable of websites; providing Reverse proxy service for hosting anonymity, and giving free protection.