Hit it on the head. Insurance isn't about odds, it's about turning unpredictable liabilities into predictable ones.

No, this is precisely the same sort of criticism that gets leveled against any company which has a history of adopting open-source code without obeying open-source licenses, which justifies a default position of "I'll see it when I believe it" for Google making promises to release code. Or do you happen to know someone who has a device running Honeycomb and was able to follow up on the legal requirement that the source be made available to them?

It's a cache that doesn't overwrite itself or roll every x days.

Meh. You want to nitpick semantics, go ahead. But like I said: how often is the location of a cell tower going to change? You really think that X days from now the tower might have been moved somewhere else, so that you'd better flush your old data and figure out the location again?

2/10, you forgot to get the Bilderberg Group and the reptilioids involved. Try harder next time.

because this information exists when it should not

So far as I can tell, this data is basically just a cache of the stuff the Assisted GPS would otherwise have to go fetch via slower means. That's a tradeoff I'd happily make as a developer (since, really, how often is the location of a cell tower going to change, that you'd need to manually figure it out every time?), and that I have no problem with as an end user.

What if you could be sued for saying something that someone disagreed with?

You can't. "But what if you could" isn't a relevant question, then. If you want to play "what if" I'll just ask what happens if a motivated, well-organized group of people get together and push through a Constitutional amendment (it's happened before -- see the 18th Amendment) repealing freedom of speech? This is actually more relevant because it's something legal scholars actually worry about: technically, it's possible to repeal the whole Bill of Rights, all the bits about voting and representation and then, constitutionally, set up a permanent dictatorship.

Do you even know what free speech is? Speech without limit. The constitution mentions no such limits.

Do you even know what a court is? The Constitution isn't a cut-and-dried "take the literal meaning of the literal text and nothing else" document, and courts can and have upheld punishing people for merely uttering threats. Though perhaps you can point me to the part of the Constitution which explicitly denies to federal courts the right to rule on cases arising under the Constitution (oh wait, it actually has a part that says exactly the opposite, which is why courts get to determine whether laws are in accord with the Constitution or not).

This is about speech, not actions which actually do harm.

If I make up some posters with your name and address on them, and a warning saying you're a registered sex offender who molested children, and then put them up all around your city, all I've done is "speech" -- I've just strung together some words and published them for all to see. But you can bet your ass that speech would do actual harm to you, and you'd be able to sue me to recover damages.

This is why civil law recognizes the idea that speech, by itself with no other actions, can do harm and require a remedy. Which is what slander and libel are all about. But since we've already established that you'd flunk first-year Constitutional law, I don't know that it does me any good to try to explain it to you.

Sorry, but if I could be sued for saying something someone disagreed with, my speech has been effectively limited, in no small part due to the government allowing it.

And you possess no reading comprehension skills whatsoever, because I pointed out that you can't be sued for saying "something someone disagreed with". You can be sued for causing harm to another person, and made to pay damages for that harm, and enjoined from doing further harm.

More to the point, you seem to fundamentally misunderstand what "freedom of speech" means; it does not mean that every sequence of words someone might utter or publish is always and forever immune to intervention. For example, not even the most expansive reading of the First Amendment would protect the sequence of words "give me all your money or I'll shoot you" when uttered to someone you've just walked up to on the street -- in fact, that sequence of words can easily land you in jail.

What the First Amendment protects is the expression of beliefs and opinions, and it actually goes well beyond just protecting sequences of words. But it does not grant a right to threaten or do harm -- as one of our greatest judges said, my right to swing my fist ends where someone else's nose begins.

I certainly wouldn't support (for example) the ability for someone to sue someone else merely because the other person said something that they disagreed with

Fortunately, "I disagree with this" is not grounds for a defamation suit. To sue for defamation you have to show that the statements were false and that they caused actual harm to you.

And while "the government" is involved, it's a civil court, which exists to act as an arbiter in disputes between people, rather than to prosecute and punish crimes. "You have to pay this person damages/restitution for harming him, and stop doing the thing that harmed him" is a very different thing than "you go to prison for committing a crime".

You want to read my explanation in another part of the thread.

Except not really.

Slander and libel are civil torts; basically, when you say or publish something false about someone, and your false statements cause harm to that person, they can sue you. And you can be ordered to pay them for the harm you caused, and ordered by a court to stop saying or publishing the false things that harmed that person.

And this isn't government restricting speech; it's basically no different than, say, a court ordering you to pay someone because you threw a brick through their window, causing damage to their property, and ordering you to stop throwing bricks through the window and maybe even to stay away from that person's property.

This case boils down to, basically:

1. Person A posts some false things on a website, which cause harm to Person B.
2. Person B sues Person A.
3. Person B wins the lawsuit, and gets a court order to have the false things taken down.
4. The website says "wait a minute, we weren't the ones who got sued, and the court just ordered us to do this without letting us show up and present an argument".
5. Appeals court says "yeah, you're right" and that's the end of the court order.

This doesn't mean websites are immune from defamation claims. It means that if you want, as part of your lawsuit, to get a website to take down defamatory material, you'd better be suing the website. Which does complicate things a bit if somebody goes on a spree posting defamatory material about you on a bunch of sites, but if you've sued that person and won, and have the documentation, then -- one hopes -- most sites wouldn't make you go to the trouble of suing them too. RipoffReport, then, isn't standing up for free speech or any sort of high moral principle; they're just being douchebags and saying "too bad this other person screwed you over royally -- now we're gonna do it too, hope you've got a good lawyer and money to pay him!"

So, you might want to read first this article, by a guy who actually does this for a living, to get a feel for the actual issues. Then you might want to read this section of Anandtech's review in which they take several phones -- among them the iPhone 4 -- and do science to them.

The things you'll learn might surprise you: yes, there's loss of signal, but it's not unique to the iPhone 4 (though it does appear to be worse with the iPhone 4). And that's far from the whole story (hint: the iPhone 4's antenna, it turns out, may be better at coping with low signal strength than previous models).

It really does look as though its a nuke the intruder response to somebody who walked in, without forcing entry, into somewhere they should not have been.

IIRC he was originally offered a pretty sweet deal in return for information on how he did what he did and possibly some help securing things, and he basically responded by thumbing his nose at the US officials who made the offer. Which, predictably, resulted in them deciding to throw the book at him.

Unless you carefully restrict your definition of "online" to rule out any online publication owned or operated by a company which also happens to have non-online ventures, this doesn't hold up: Politifact, a political fact-checking site, won a Pulitzer last year for fact-checking the 2008 US federal election campaigns. Maybe you can make the argument that, because it's operated by a company which also prints papers, it's not really "online", but given that the whole operation was on the Web (and utterly dependent on the Web to work) I'd have a hard time accepting that.

Which they can't do, because the photos are in the public domain. They have no ability to manage the rights on them at all.

If I find a public-domain photograph of you, photoshop it to show you using my product and then run an ad campaign using your name and likeness to promote my product, you know what? You'd get to own my ass in court, because copyright and likeness rights aren't the same thing. And, really, that's what this whole thing is apparently about: people are seeing "public domain" and thinking "that means I can have President Obama in my advertisements!" Which, um, no, no they can't.

I see it differently. All 350 million "Americans" are expendable to me. I won't go out of my way to harm anyone, but I'll never sacrifice myself for "you". I do not exist for your benefit, or to be sacrificed for you as you see fit.

And yet you're basically demanding that I sacrifice for you and your children.

Anyway, there are two problems here, I think. One is the old "what have you done for me lately" syndrome: the diseases which used to kill horrifying numbers of children haven't been prevalent for a couple generations, because we've been routinely vaccinating. There aren't hospital wards full of kids in iron lungs from polio anymore, for example, so the risk of the disease -- and it's a very serious, fatal or permanently crippling risk if you get polio -- seems distant, while that "one in (large number)" risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine seems up close and personal. Given that, typical ass-backwards human psychology kicks in, does a flawed risk assessment ("I heard about someone who had a bad reaction to a shot, but I don't know anyone who's been crippled by polio") and makes a stupid decision.

The second issue is close to what economists call the "free rider" problem: if some other sucker's kid gets vaccinated, then you won't have to vaccinate yours. Your kid can just piggyback off the herd immunity of all those idiots who keep nasty diseases from spreading. Of course, there's a critical point where enough "smart" people realize they can freeload off the system and it falls apart: the UK's already seeing this with serious outbreaks of preventable diseases, brought on by refusal to vaccinate. And, predictably, kids are dying as a result, which will eventually -- once enough little coffins have been filled -- swing the risk assessment back and start people vaccinating again.

For your kids' sake, I hope they don't end up having to be the examples which convince other parents to act rationally (I would say "for your sake", but who am I kidding? I don't care much if your faulty thinking gets weeded out by a preventable disease, but it'd be a shame if you managed to get some kids killed instead).