Is that the case or are you just asking a rhetorical question?

As I understand it, this is a setting that the user can change. It's pretty standard practice for web sites to fail when a browser setting or missing piece of software blocks them. Frequently this triggers a request to install the software or to change the setting. Regardless of who is doing it, that is the right thing to do.

As I hinted at above, "not evil" would be at least making it clear that you are taking steps to circumvent a privacy control prior to being called out for doing so.

Is there a technical need to take the steps they took other than to make their tracking work when the browser settings interfere? If so, they should have (and I'm sure would have) apologized for the oversight and corrected it. If not, then sorry, the "not evil" thing to do is to ask the user to change the setting. If it's deprecated, there's no reason they shouldn't turn it off.

Are we entitled to something for nothing? No, of course not.

However, it doesn't follow that Google is therefore entitled to disregard an unambiguous request from a user not to collect personal data. If they feel that a user is granting them too little information in exchange for their service, they are free to deny that user access. Making an end run around security settings is sleazy, no matter how you dice it.

I'd have a lot more sympathy for Google if the first story to break was this public complaint, together with a statement of how they were working around it and a warning to affected users that their privacy settings were being circumvented. To make a statement like this /after/ being caught with their corporate hand in the proverbial cookie jar doesn't make a very good defense.

Unquestioning obedience? Some do, most don't.

However, you have hired the doctor to provide his (or her) medical expertise to keep you or your kids healthy. If you're unwilling to cooperate, you are hampering his ability to do that. If you're not going to let him assist you, I don't see why there's a problem with his focusing his energy on patients who will let him use his judgement to provide the best care that he can.

Note that I said cooperate---this doesn't mean blindly obey his every command. Medical care, especially for children, is something where one should be involved in the decision making. However, not /every/ choice is reasonably up for debate based on your gut instinct. Refusing to see patients who refuse vaccines basically says the doctor considers the vaccination so critical to proper care that if you're not going to cooperate on that, he cannot provide you the standard of care that he is required to provide.

If you have this much of a philosophical difference with your doctor, you don't want to be seeing him anyway, so this isn't a grave injustice. If all the doctors react this way, you might want to consider whether you are the problem.

I don't see any reason to avoid a doctor who behaves like this unless you specifically disagree with vaccination. The doctor is not under an ethical obligation to be a hero to protect every patient who walks in the door, and he may quite reasonably feel that he can do more good by working with cooperative patients than by wasting time with patients who won't let him do his job. If I had an employer who would task me with solving a problem, then discard my solution, I'd be inclined to look for work where my efforts could have more impact as well.

Interesting, but I have to point out that the alternative is using a xerox machine to make copies of the exam and handing out pencils at the door. Pretty sure that approach has fewer attack vectors, and doesn't involve suggestions like backing up the students tablets and installing a fresh image before the exam...

No, it's not at all symmetric.

One group wants the freedom to live their own life according to their own preferences. The other wants to deny that choice to those people. These are very different things.

You are free to believe that homosexuality is an abomination. You are free to teach your children that homosexual marriage is a sin. Whether or not James and Matthew can marry each other, you are free to believe what you like and to marry the opposite-gendered person of your choice. All of this is completely OK, even when gay marriage is legal.

On the other hand, you seem to want to tell James and Matthew that because you don't agree with their choice, that they are not allowed to make it. You are denying them the freedom to make their own personal choices, and you are denying them the civil rights and protections that come from legally-recognized marriage.

The only thing you're denied by their attempts to fight for their freedom is that you may occasionally be made uncomfortable. You may have to explain to your kids that some people in the world choose to live and believe differently than you do. You may have to work harder to spread your belief that, even though it's legal, homosexuality is wrong. You know what? You have to deal with these already. Living as part of a free society means that sometimes you don't get everything just the way you like it. You're already free to live as you choose, and yet you want to deny that to others based on your belief. That is simply not OK.

That is a very different debate, one I'm not discussing here.

This is patently false.

While the "civil rights movement" as a proper noun refers to the events you refer to, that is hardly the beginning and end of civil rights.

Gay marriage is a civil rights issue. Freedom to express your love for another human and raise a family and share in the legal protections extended to straight couples/families is a civil rights issue.

You are wrong.

There's a profound difference between tolerating someone's personal beliefs and tolerating someone's trying to impose their personal beliefs on others.

Great response. If you think this is relevant, you're a fool. Discrimination or persecution because of lack of religion is every bit as foul as discrimination or persecution of a particular religion.

It can encourage creation by increasing the ability to reap profits from works, for one. In fact, this is essentially the whole basis for copyright.

If you can't think of any complications, I'll ask you this. What is the ideal copyright term? Why? What effect, in detail, will this have on authors, publishers, and consumers? How will it affect works created by individuals? How about by businesses? Is it reasonable for fiction markets, magazine markets, online publication, and technical works? Etc. The point is, it's a tricky balancing act.

The courts can't just jump in and rule something unconstitutional because they don't think it's the optimal solution.

You can't just assert that it doesn't. The calculation really is a complicated one. The Constitution doesn't say anything about what is a reasonable profit from a work, so you can't make a flat argument that the author was already compensated. The whole point of copyright is that it creates some confidence that there is a financial profit to be obtained through creative work, thereby encouraging further creation. Maximizing the effectiveness is both (1) difficult and (2) not the job of the Judiciary.

While you can argue whether the present law is a good one, it doesn't seem at all obviously unconstitutional. Congress is granted the power to create copyrights with very few specific restrictions on that power. As far as I can tell, the copyright that is being imposed on the public domain works is still limited in time, so it doesn't obviously violate that principle.

This may well be an example of the fact that not every bad law is unconstitutional.

I agree with you that this is not a good law, and I'm certainly not pleased with the direction that copyright law is heading. However...

This is a very specific and very narrow interpretation of the Constitution that you are making. The power given by the quote you cited is much broader than just allowing a specific law. In addition to the powers specifically granted, Congress has (and must have) the power to employ laws necessary to achieve those goals, even if they're not specifically called out. Furthermore, there's no legal requirement that Congress make particularly wise or effective laws. As long as the law reasonably "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts," it's probably Constitutional, even if there would be a better way to achieve that goal.

I'd certainly like to shorten copyright terms (although this is a more complicated issue than it's often given credit for), but it's not hard to imagine a retroactive copyright law that does qualify as providing "limited Times." A 70 year term that takes effect an arbitrary time after creation is technically a limited time. One could argue whether it's truly limited, but you could add a limit on the time before the start of the enforcement to achieve that.

It's already been established that extensions are legal as long as the terms are limited at each point. This is unfortunate, but I think the logic is correct. This is something that needs to be corrected at the Congressional level.

I agree this is a bad practice, however neither of your points is flatly true. The first is arguable---after all, the very logic behind copyright is that keeping something out of the public domain can be beneficial. One could certainly and reasonably argue that there may be cases in which removal from the public domain has a similar benefit. Your second point is only true for particular laws, it would be quite possible that restrictions on retroactive copyright (or whatever one wants to call it) could ensure that it is only for a limited time.

There certainly are problems, and I don't see how yanking works out of the public domain could possibly be a good idea, but I also don't see that it's inherently unconstitutional. Unfortunately.

The purpose of honoring precedent is not for judicial expediency so much as providing stability and predictability in the judicial system. Without a strong respect for precedent, it would be nearly impossible to understand how the laws are going to be interpreted. Since the interpretation and application of those laws is often complicated, lawyers and decision makers need to be able to expect that future rulings will be similar to past rulings.

Of course, you are correct that precedent is not strictly binding, but to have rulings in two identical cases be different is quite exceptional, and it a higher court has previously considered the issue, the appeals court is almost certain to follow. As the appeals ladder is climbed, reversals are increasingly rare, to the point that Supreme Court reversals are newsworthy events.

No two cases are identical, but when the facts in a case are determined to be materially the same as those in other cases, it's a pretty good bet that the former ruling will be mirrored.

That's the part I don't understand. Although I virtually never do it, I can understand buying one ticket. Your first ticket converts your odds of winning from exactly zero to almost zero. The second ticket is just degrees of almost zero.

And yes, of course each ticket has the same probability of winning, so you do get the same increase in odds for that second ticket. However, those odds are terrible, so doubling your near-zero odds of winning isn't a rational move. The first ticket provides that unquantifiable excitement / entertainment value. The second is just throwing money away.