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The bill says “the responsible digital platform corporation must ensure that the supply of the digital service does not, in relation to crawling, indexing, making available and distributing news businesses’ covered news content ... differentiate between registered news businesses and news businesses that are not registered news businesses ...” I don’t see any distinction between linking and previewing here. I think both involve “making the content available,” and since Facebook legally can’t “differentiate between” news content that is and isn’t covered by the mandatory bargaining code, they are choosing not to make news content available at all to Australian users.

Yes, if you assume that both parts refer to the same “go.” But “have a go” here means something like “work hard and contribute to the economy.” It doesn’t refer to possessing the thing you “get” in exchange, ie. money.

The stated rationale for the law is not copyright infringement, so fair use is not relevant. It’s an attempt by Australia’s competition (antitrust) regulator to address an alleged market failure: “The proposed bargaining code is intended to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms in order to ensure that commercial arrangements between these parties do not undermine the ability and incentives for news media businesses to produce news for Australians.” https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20-%20Mandatory%20...

> Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them?

Yes, that’s part of the definition of ‘addictive.’ Internet and social media addiction is well documented, even though not all users are addicted. Like gambling.

> There is no acknowledgement at all of the value search engines provide to media organisations by the links provided.

The bill deals with this in section 52ZZ(1)(b), which says that in determining the remuneration to be paid to a news business, the arbitral panel must consider "the benefit (whether monetary or otherwise) to the registered news business of the designated digital platform service making available the registered news business' covered news content."

This legislation is supposed to be a kind of antitrust (ie. competition law) regulation. It came out of an inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. The stated purpose of the law is to remedy a 'bargaining power imbalance between digital platforms and news media businesses': https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/em...

I’d say it probably has something to do with the collapse in union membership, deregulation and growth of the finance sector, and capture of the political system by those who can afford billions of dollars worth of advertising, but it’s a complicated story. Are you suggesting that wages haven’t kept up with productivity because inflation has been consistently high since the US abolished the gold standard?

Governments with unstable currencies sometimes impose restrictions on the ability to buy and sell them, and bitcoin makes it easier to evade these.

It looks like there was a listed short squeeze fund, SQZZ [1], which closed in 2018 only for lack of investors [2], so the SEC doesn't seem to have a fundamental problem with the strategy.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1559109/000089109215...

[2] https://www.etfstrategy.com/active-alts-closes-contrarian-sh...

I recommend Schmidt and Frank’s article on the Silurian hypothesis [1] for a surprisingly different take on this. The full text is on arXiv [2]. “We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record” – that is, the record we can observe from a distance of zero!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748

You can’t “counter-sue” for misuse of copyright, nor is it a “normal punishment.” It’s a defence you can use to avoid liability when someone else sues you, and an exceptional one at that [1]. As noted on Wikipedia, the court in Lasercomb [2] made it clear that copyright misuse does not render the copyright permanently unenforceable:

> This holding, of course, is not an invalidation of Lasercomb's copyright. Lasercomb is free to bring a suit for infringement once it has purged itself of the misuse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_misuse

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20100516061057/http://bulk.resou...

I’ve thought about this but I assumed it would be too hard to get Synergy installed on employer or client-provided computers. It sounds like you’ve used this setup with multiple clients – is it normal in your field of work to get local admin rights on corporate devices?

> You can't really reproduce that with any popular desktop operating system.

If you’re running Docker, you’re running Linux, and you can use the same kernel features as Docker to sandbox applications yourself. This way, you only incur the overhead of a separate network namespace and filesystem if you actually need it. Services can be sandboxed with a few lines of configuration in a drop-in unit, and applications can be run with a shell script that calls `systemd-run`, just like the `docker run` shell scripts suggested in the article.

Other people recommended this to me when I was building a tiny home server, but it’s really not in the same league as a Raspberry Pi, 2-bay NAS or i3 NUC. It’s a real server, which is 4 times the size and can draw 10 times as much power.

I like GoodReader for this. It’s the only app I’ve found that stores my annotations in the PDF files themselves, and allows me to keep my PDF library in sync over SFTP, Dropbox, etc. so that I can read and annotate documents on non-Apple devices as well.

> It's waaay more expensive to interpret and render, so it affects battery life.

Interesting – I never noticed a difference in battery life when I was reading MOBIs and PDFs on my Kindle, but the slow refresh rate made scrolling through PDFs a nightmare. I do notice that reading PDFs on my iPad is very light on battery compared to reading web pages, but that’s because those web pages are running a bunch of JavaScript and using my internet connection, whereas with a PDF I download it once and then read it for hours.

The government expressly disclaimed any such burden. See Ulbricht’s (unsuccessful) petition for certiorari [1] linked elsewhere in this thread:

> The sentence was based on judicial findings related to allegations of serious crimes that not only were never found by a jury but were not even among the charges leveled at trial. During closing argument, the U.S. attorney explicitly advised the jury: “[T]o be clear, the defendant has not been charged for these attempted murders here. You’re not required to make any findings about them. And the government does not contend that those murders actually occurred.”

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-950/34432/20180...

How is it “natural” for many industries to coalesce into oligopoly? This requires a legal system with strong property rights for corporations and lax competition law enforcement. These conditions have not always existed. You can argue that the status quo is welfare-optimising, but I don’t see what’s natural about it.

50 years ago the two top companies in that list had just started defending expensive and long-running antitrust cases. IBM changed its behaviour to settle these cases, transforming the computer industry, and in AT&T’s case the litigation led directly to the breakup of the company. These companies didn’t lose market share “organically.”

I’m an average person buying a Pi and slapping a media centre distro on there with default settings. I’m pretty sure LibreELEC takes care of the logging issue: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/15079-rpi-logging-to-ram/

The distinction is the existence, from the developer’s perspective, of a separate step called “compilation,” which produces an executable artefact which can be distributed but not converted back to the source code. It’s about programming in practice, not fundamental computer science principles.

Interesting – I had assumed this was a state responsibility, like vehicle registration, driver’s licences, and road rules. After all, the constitution doesn’t give the federal government the power to regulate cars. But it seems that it does assert the power, as you suggested, to override state vehicle standards using the interstate trade and commerce and corporations powers: https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/mvsa19892...

I think you want the “delete” button.

Yes, that is my assertion – it’s impossible to verify that you have considered and correctly interpreted all relevant law, although it should be rare for professionals to make a mistake, especially after extended research. I’m curious as to what makes you think this problem can be solved trivially? Formal verification is hard enough for algorithms over the integers.

Work is being done on this – here’s some in the human rights context: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10506-019-09255-y

But the outcome of high-stakes commercial litigation is much more complex than “win or lose.” Most cases settle, so the ones that result in published legal judgments which can be fed into a machine learning tool are an unrepresentative minority. Participating in this kind of litigation also costs millions and attracts public attention, leading to innumerable second-order effects (eg. public relations damage, law reform) that are hard to predict and may be more significant than whatever specific legal decision a judge makes. So being able to put a numerical probability on the legal opinion “we think the company has a good chance of winning this case” may not be that helpful.

The last century has seen a huge increase in the quantity of law that is written out explicitly in statutes [1], rather than being worked out on a case-by-case basis according to the common law method. This is an attempt to “improve the language” as you have suggested, but it has not made the law easier to comprehend. Detailed statutes make it harder for lawyers to build up a coherent picture of the entire legal system, because there’s a much greater risk that a solid argument based on general principles collapses due to a specific statute that the lawyer has never heard of.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/when-laws-become-...

The current buzzword for this is “rules as code” and many governments are exploring it. You’re right that it is particularly relevant to complicated financial laws like the tax code, and necessarily has been done in a limited way by tax software for many decades now. I am skeptical that this technology can meaningfully assist us in resolving contentious legal questions – it’s more about generating wizards that can help you navigate a 1,000 page tax statute by only showing you what’s relevant to your problem.

Check out http://austlii.community/wiki/DataLex. In Australia we are fortunate enough to have AustLII publishing virtually all Australian laws and court decisions (at least from this century) for free in a somewhat consistent HTML format. DataLex is the name for the “computational law” research AustLII staff have been doing since the 1980s. It’s interesting, but the real value of AustLII’s work is in getting the courts and legislatures to allow them to collect all the raw data and publish it in a free database with full text search. Just getting to that point is a huge improvement over what’s freely available in the US and the UK.