I have a lot of success with obscure, mostly-undocumented systems. Which models are you using? There's an enormous difference in capability level between the top-tier models and the next step down. Also a pretty big cost difference.

It can be, sure, but it's less reliable and more painful to work with.

If the law is about sale or sharing, not collection, then Google doesn't have to change anything, because Google doesn't sell or share data. That would be wasteful; Google's ad business is all about monetizing the data at Google, not giving someone else a chance to monetize it.

Sure, but isn't it interesting that the number of photos -- fuzzy or otherwise -- didn't massively increase when everyone started carrying cameras all the time? In fact it declined significantly.

The only logical conclusion is that the little gray men realized there were a lot more cameras about and became much more careful.

It's possible the companies are flagrantly ignoring the opt out indication.

It's also possible that webXray is confusing ad/tracking cookies with cookies required for normal site operation, viewing any set-cookie command as a violation.

Based on my experience working at Google, I'm betting on the second possibility. But, we'll see. Either we'll hear some stories about the companies being fined, or sued, or prosecuted (depending how the law works), or this will just quietly disappear when someone educates webXray.

You are absolutely feel free to argue what you think the law *should* say. But the Bill of Rights, including the fourth amendment (which is what you meant, not the fifth), definitely does not restrict what private citizens and corporations can do. It only restricts the government. And, as TomWinTejas said, it didn't even restrict the states or local governments, only the federal government, until the 14th amendment modified the meaning.

When it comes to search and seizure there is a different concept that protects you from private individuals and corporations: property rights. But the way property rights apply to your face is... complicated at best, and under present law doesn't give you the protection you think you should have. The law gives you protection against someone producing images of your face for commercial use, but that's not what's happening here.

And as for privacy rights, the Constitution really doesn't address that except in the narrow case of government searches. SCOTUS did actual find a right to privacy in the "penumbra" of the Constitution in Roe v Wade, but only ever applied it in the context of one very particular medical procedure, and anyway that court opinion is widely considered to be one of the worst examples of motivated legal reasoning in history. It's pretty clear that the court didn't apply that privacy right in any other cases because shining more light on the incredibly shoddy reasoning could only result in Roe getting overturned. As it did.

Anyway, the point is that you can and should advocate for laws that enact the privacy protections you want, but don't fool yourself in to believing that they already exist in the law, because they don't.

...before Linux 7 takes over Linux XP in number of users?

The left wing does its own share of screwing stuff up. The center-left is pretty good at governance, though.

We're talking about manufacturers, whose customers aren't consumers, or even retailers, but distributors who want to keep their pipelines full and their business operating. The worst thing a manufacturer can to do their customers, the thing that is most "disloyal", if you want to put it in those terms, is to be unable to fill orders. Distributors mostly don't really care what the unit price is anyway, they operate on a percentage markup basis. They care about dollar volume, so as long as that stays constant (or rises!) they're good.

So the smart thing for a manufacturer to do, and the thing that their customers (who are businesspeople who understand supply and demand, not end consumers who are confused about how economics work and throw around ridiculous concepts like "price gouging") understand and appreciate is a supplier who responds to increased demand by investing in manufacturing capacity... and it's higher prices that facilitate that.

I hope you're right, but I'm not convinced. I see a lot of people on the right are getting tired of Trump's craziness, but I'm not sure they wouldn't be fine if it were just dialed back a bit, say to Trump 1.0 levels. In a way it may actually be a good thing that we're only a year and a quarter into a four year term. Assuming Trump doesn't keel over he's got a lot of time to convince Americans that it's a really, really bad idea to elect someone like him. Of course, he'll do a lot of actual damage along the way.

And you're absolutely right that we need the Democrats to avoid the temptation to go hard left just because they have a particularly-hated opposition... but I don't think it's at all certain that they will avoid it.

You absolutely can, if you really look at what happened and when. What happened, basically, was that Nixon and Ford left Carter with an incredibly-damaged economy, and Carter fixed it, but the fixes took a while to take effect. If Carter had had a second term, those changes would have taken effect while he was in the White House, but he lost. Reagan is to be applauded mostly for not undoing what Carter did.

What did Carter do? The biggest thing he did was to appoint Paul Volcker as Fed chair. Carter knew exactly what Volcker would do, and knew that it would be painful, but believed the economists who told him that it was necessary. They were right, Carter was right to believe them, and Volcker's medicine of high interest rates got inflation under control and the economy moving in the right direction, even though it caused two recessions. Reagan was smart enough to believe the economists, too, so he reappointed Volcker and made some famous speeches, especially the 1982 one in which he told Americans we needed to "Stay the Course". He didn't, of course, mention that it was Jimmy Carter's course that we were staying, but it was.

The other big thing Carter did was massive deregulation. Reagan is also often credited for deregulation, but he did very little of it while Carter did a lot -- energy, telecoms, trucking, airlines... and more. Carter really was "The Great Deregulator", not Reagan.

None of this is because Carter was some sort of economic genius (though he was an extremely smart man). It's because he got good advisors and took good advice. This is a pretty consistent story, actually. I think there are two main reasons why the economy tends to improve during democratic administrations and decline during republican ones: (1) Democratic administrations make better use of experts and (2) Democrats are less likely to go to war (though they do tend to engage in more small-scale, humanitarian interventions). Those are just my opinions, of course, and this is an incredibly complex space.

I'm a member of the Republican party. I have been on paper for decades, and until 2016 regularly (but not exclusively) voted Republican. In 2024 when the state GOP organization decided to switch from primaries to closed caucus meetings, I decided to get active so I could vote against Trump. I've since decided my participation as a never-Trumper is a good idea, we need more people who are fundamentally conservative (or at least small-L libertarian) to get involved to rescue the party and return it to something approaching rationality.

Anyway, that's background to explain why I just got home from the GOP county convention, which was very interesting in that during the whole three-hour meeting I never heard Trump's name mentioned even once, and there were some rather pointed allusions to how important it is that our elected leaders act with careful consideration and to promote peace. I think a lot of the GOP rank and file are getting pretty pissed off. The first break was the refusal to release the Epstein files. Minneapolis made a lot of them uncomfortable, and they found a lot of things that happened hard to defend. (CECOT should have, too, but early on they all believed Trump when he said they were gangsters.). By the time Venezuela came around, most of them had stopped trying to defend, and Iran actually generated some pretty vocal MAGA-world argument against Trump, while the soaring fuel prices just pissed off a lot of his supporters.

Are they? I don't see that in the summary or the articles at all. All of the counter-filings are coming from the individual's attorneys, not from Reddit. Reddit is certainly to be applauded for not just voluntarily complying, for actually going to court, but it seems like *main* thing they have done is to notify the user in question, so the user could get lawyers from a non-profit, and it's those lawyers who are doing most of the work.

Could be.

But it could also be the case that the DoJ's lawyers just suck. The DoJ has suffered a massive brain drain of competent attorneys since Trump took office last year. First, they explicitly fired or otherwise drove out anyone who'd gotten tapped for the massive and complex January 6th prosecutions. Then they made clear that loyalty to the president had to take precedence over ethics, legality or morality, and that they would fire any attorney who balked at doing something just because it might get them disbarred, all the while making everyone wonder if at some point the administration was going to begin flatly refusing to obey court orders (they haven't, quite, not yet).

That made all the competent and ethical lawyers leave, as well as many who might have been more ethically flexible but were too smart not to realize how badly continuing to work for the DoJ could burn them. To try to fill the massive vacancies, the DoJ then began a hiring spree, openly advertising that no real qualifications were required, beyond a law degree (any law degree) and loyalty to Trump. You can bet that they mostly got what they asked for.

If that weren't enough, the administration also took innumerable illegal actions that spawned rafts of court cases. Many of these were generated by ICE's misbehavior, but there were lots of others. Given the badly-reduced staff, quantity and quality both, this led to the remaining DoJ attorneys being massively overworked. Like Julie Le (who has since quit) who, when faced with a frustrated judge asking why Le came into his courtroom unprepared in a futile attempt to defend indefensible acts, asked the judge to please hold her in contempt and throw her in jail so she could get 24 hours of sleep.

And if all that weren't enough, the continual abuse of the court system by the administration has led to the judges near-universally deciding they have to treat the DoJ's lawyers as untrustworthy, making their lives that much less pleasant.

Given all of that, any DoJ attorney who has a shot at making a living in private practice, i.e. any of them who is any good, has left. What remains is a group of massively-overworked incompetents.

And if you wonder if the DoJ attorneys weren't always incompetents, because clearly the government doesn't pay as well as private practice... in fact, no, they weren't, because the work was considered quite prestigious. In particular, being a US Attorney was extremely prestigious. It has long been very common for talented lawyers to spend a few years in the private sector, making enough money to set them up for life, and then quit and go become a federal prosecutor. Because working for a high-priced law firm and making a lot of money makes you rich, but it doesn't carry the same sort of prestige as being a US Attorney, and then maybe a federal district or even appellate court judge.

But all that has ended. So, yeah, it could very well be that the government is making crap argument based on the wrong laws because their lawyers just suck. And also because there aren't any actually good arguments available and the lawyers are just throwing out anything so they can tell their bosses that they're pursuing the cases vigorously.

Indeed. And the only way this ends well is when voters decide that they don't like government abusing power the way Trump does, regardless of which side does it, and begin hammering those who do it in every election.

Sadly, there is zero evidence that most conservative voters care at all about abuse of office or the rule of law. We're going to have to suffer a lot more pain before people start to wake up, I think. Right now, we're at the stage where most on the right just assume that it always was this way, it was just hidden. We're not going to get any change until they decide that regardless of even if power was always abused and the law was always ignored, it sucks and it has to change.