This is not California-specific. In common-law countries (the US is one), the one-two punch of land rights ending at a mean tide line, and a public right-of-way to access the sea, are literally *ancient*. As in, the common-law rights go back to the actual Byzantine Empire and have been inherited into legal systems descended from it, of which the US is one.

This is why the guy's trying all sorts of weird arguments in hope of seeing what sticks. IIRC his latest was trying to claim that the land he wants to close off shouldn't have been covered by this because of some random detail of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Most parts of the US which have tidal waters have basically the same rule to guarantee public water access from the land, and unless he can come up with something truly stupendous he's not going to overturn 1500-ish years of how common-law systems work. He's also going to have a hard time arguing for a taking here, since it's not like this is an unknown or new thing. Just as when you purchase land with any other kind of easement or right-of-way, that comes as part of the deal.

Well, as I understand it (as an amateur watcher of the Court), EPIC wasn't so much attempting to "jump the line" as to force a decision on jurisdiction. There are other challenges to surveillance in other federal courts, but the government's position includes an argument that those courts have no jurisdiction to hear such challenges or to issue orders overturning/voiding actions of the FISC. EPIC's line of reasoning here is to try to constrain the government's position into arguing that no other court can review FISC, which would essentially give FISC Supreme-Court-like power, and hope that the Supreme Court, which tends to be jealous of its own power, would smack that down.

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?

No, you're quite correct. GNOME 1.x was a pile of bugtastic arse. It kindasorta worked, but I'm certainly not dewy-eyed about it.

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.