Get with the times, even C has a bool type now.

I think you out a verb.

If your idea of a copy is exactly what the law considers a copy, your initial post is meaningless. You're saying the law should be changed to only restrict copying, and by copying you mean exactly what the law currently considers copying. So you want the law to... what? Remain unchanged?

And no, I absolutely did not claim (nor did I intend to claim) that reading a legally purchased book infringes on anyone's copyright.

Yes, and cosmetic features are important when you want the result to look nice.

Congratulations, you just advocated killing the possibility of releasing works into the public domain, and you probably don't even realise it.

If you record your voice, you create a copy of your voice. If your voice, when reading a book, is not producing a copy of that book, then if you record your voice, you're not copying that book. Since you seem to agree that the conclusion is flawed, either the premise or my logic must have a flaw, so how would you explain it?

Reading a book aloud is copying the copyrighted material. Should it be legal to buy a book, record yourself reading it, and sell that on a CD? Perhaps you will say yes, but plenty of people will say no. As for the story, this should be legal not because it isn't copying, but because copyright shouldn't restrict all forms of copying.

We can tell whether " is an opening or closing quotation mark, but computers can't, so they look awful when printed.

A criminal offense will not be a dispute between you and Netflix. It will be brought to court by the prosecutor.

No, that's not expected behaviour. Extensions can share information with websites, but if they don't, websites should not be able to get anything.

Aside from that, shell history doesn't contain anything not entered into the shell. Particularly, it doesn't contain anything entered into another remote shell.

Wikipedia is not and is not supposed to be a credible source by itself. It does, however, link to a credible source, which would have been better to use in your message.

You're lucky to easily figure out for 90% of your downloads. If I consider potential downloads (including the ones that I don't download because I can't figure out why it needs certain permissions), I don't even get to 50%, and at that point, it becomes enough of a pain to investigate each and every possibly useful app that I wish the default would be to have an explanation in the description.

You're absolutely correct in that ideas are not patentable, but your suggested change no longer makes the point I was trying to make. It's conceivable that someone might come up with a patent-worthy new process of recording a bird song. The patenting of the idea or concept of recording bird songs was meant to be absurd.

But users cannot sanely determine whether they should give the app permissions, unless the app explains why it wants those permissions. If I install a clock widget and it asks for permissions to send text messages to pay numbers, I don't trust it. If the clock description lists a feature to send text messages to another phone when a user-defined timer goes off, I might trust it. (And it would take more than just that description to make me trust it.)