I can see barring someone who is in a sales position from going to a direct competitor in a small market where they would be able to take their clients with them

They don't exactly need a no-compete for that; they really need a broad no-solicit listing everyone who would be in the sales' peoples contact list.

As for future business prospects in the area; the company has not yet paid the Sales person to sell to them, especially not in companies where the Sales folk are paid on mostly commission, eg 25% per account in good standing -- in this case the company might have let go the Sales person solely to terminate Sales commissions from a number of recurring accounts. If the Sales rep had accumulated hundreds of $K per year in commissions but weren't making new sales often, then the rep can get to be seen by management as a liability.

So maybe you could say this is manipulative as well, and simply Ban no-solicits that don't preserve and include fair commission for the term on that person's active Sales and business referred to the company past the end of employment.

Intercepting letters is also done in the distribution centers based on the metadata.

That only works for letters delivered with the Postal service. I can have a private courier personally carry a lockbox containing a letter to you at point B from point A, and it will never hit the distribution center.

Furthermore, in case the person mailing the letter encrypts it before sending it in the mail; you won't be able to tell what the letter you intercepted contains. I mean: I can AES encrypt some text and print it out as a QR Code. Only my recipient will be able to read that, so long as only that recipient was given the key.

You can do that with electronic E2E messages just the same; it's just a digital payload you won't be able to decrypt without seizing the keys from the end users.

Likewise, I can use a voice encryption technology that encodes the call over the POTS line I am sending you to E2E; even if the link is "Listened in on" from a central dispatch point - it is only garbled noise.

No logging software is able to record the authentications to AAD, Exchange Online, or other cloud services run by Microsoft, Because they're
  Microsoft's servers; Microsoft doesn't provide you the ability to run programs on their servers - you literally Don't have access to the sets of logs, Tools, or APIs necessary to get the log of authentications without Paying extra for security licenses.

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.