So - ignoring the time he sent a mob to try and overthrow the US government, how about we use the fact that he literally said he’d be a dictator?

Or maybe the fact that his legal defense against trying to overthrow the government was that the President is immune from all crimes. His lawyers even literally said he could have his political opponents murdered, and so long as the surviving politicians don’t impeach and convict him he can’t be held liable for it.

They’re arguing a legal framework under which he can murder the opposition, and then kill anyone that tries to remove him from office.

We should be able to charge them for ad time. You want to paint an advertisement on my car you have to pay me. Why should it be any different when you want to put ads on my work computer screen when I’m working with clients?

I like the bleep-boo sounds of the command prompt scrolling by on computers.

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

Hidden manual releases that still require you to push the door through the windows trim. FFS people have already died because of this shit. Why the hell hasn’t there been a mandatory recall on all Teslas over this?

Yes. But at the same time I’m actually okay with ads for products that are legitimately good and are relevant to me, so long as I know they’re an advertisement.

Products need marketing. It’s reality. I’d rather get my marketing in the form of a recommendation or review from a trusted source than a random video shoved down my throat.

A easy example of a good source for me is MKBHD. He gets free stuff and sponsorships, but is selective regarding what he’ll accept sponsorships from, is very clear when a segment is sponsored, and will absolutely say a product is bad or overpriced even if he got it for free.

Frankly - it’s a lot harder to quantify. “Time at desk” is easy to track. Response times to tickets are much more variable and difficult to measure.

Some jobs necessarily include idle time when you’re waiting for work to come through even if there’s nothing to do in that specific moment. The flip side of that is that the employer is able to require that the worker be available instantly. If they’re leaving their work area because they’re bored then they’re not “at work.”

My Dad was a career firefighter, and he spent most of his time sitting in the station watching TV, cooking meals, or sleeping. He was paid for every minute of that time because at the drop of a hat he could be called to a wreck, fire, or medical emergency.

The reason he had to be paid is federal law requiring that all workers who are “engaged to wait” are on the clock. If someone is installing mouse-jiggler software so they can leave their workstation and do whatever they want, they’re no longer being engaged to wait.

The jigglers keep you online status from changing to “away.”

Some jobs require you to be at your desk, and using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.

It was a backlash to auto manufacturers classifying everything as a truck to get around emissions and fuel economy standards. The fucking PT Cruiser was a “truck” according to Chrysler.

So they started classifying standards based on vehicle footprint with the idiotic hope that would make the manufacturers act better, but the manufacturers realized they could just make cars bigger every refresh cycle to stay ahead of CAFE.

Heck - even the letter is just a sans sarif Swastika.

Also black powder guns or ANY gun made before 1898.

A breaker panel can be a kill switch in a server farm hosting the Ai.

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

All to take away jobs and break the internet.

And now when you card expires, they just change the expiration date on your existing number a few times until it works to keep the subscription going, and that’s somehow legal.

We actually bombed the moon on the day of the Nobel Prize announcement!

Seriously though, it was a middle finger to Bush more than anything.

Steam’s strategy was to be first to market and essentially the only player in the game for a decade, making themselves the default.

“We don’t know how it works but released it anyway” is a perfectly good reason to be sued when you release a product that causes harm.