Technical point here but opinions are not illegal to have.
Besides that your point is missing the fact that you are dealing with outside services that provide a contract for their usage (GPS, GSM). You should be free to program your own devices but if you use an external service, then yes they can specify how you use their service. Those are contractual obligations. Cars on the road have clear safety risks and those are legal obligations. None of those obligations should govern what you do with your device until your device interacts with other people and/or services.
GPS doesn't come with a contract. It's a purely receive only system.
It wouldn't be fit for purpose (letting soldiers know precisely where they are on the globe) if it required transmission of any type from the user. That would turn it into a beacon an adversary could leverage.
The difference is apple doesn’t let you modify your device to use other services. Their contractual obligation goes beyond the service itself. That’s why EPIC won this case.
I don't really understand your point in restating this. Someone who says "X should be true" isn't going to be convinced that X should be false by reminding them that X is in fact false.
>GPS et al would be non-functional if everybody could make a jammer.
Then it should be illegal to make a GPS jammer. Making it illegal to reprogram a GPS receiver in any way is unnecessarily broad.
GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.
It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.
I don't care about closed-course cars, though. Do whatever you want to your track/drag car, but cars on the highway should probably have stock software for functional parts.
> Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering.
Essentially all passenger cars use physical/hydraulic connections for the steering and brakes. The computer can activate the brakes, not disable the pedal from working.
But also, this argument is absurd. What if someone could reprogram your computer to make the brakes not work? They could also cut the brake lines or run you off the road. Which is why attempted murder is illegal and you don't need "programming a computer" to be illegal.
> It would be difficult to catch in an inspection if you could reprogram the OEM parts.
People already do this. There are also schmucks who make things like straight-through "catalytic converters" that internally bypass the catalyst for the main exhaust flow to improve performance while putting a mini-catalyst right in front of the oxygen sensor to fool the computer. You'd basically have to remove the catalytic converter and inspect the inside of it to catch them, or test the car on a dyno using an external exhaust probe, which are the same things that would catch someone reprogramming the computer.
In practice those people often don't get caught and the better solution is to go after the people selling those things rather than the people buying them anyway.
> GPS is a bad example, but there are things that pose a physical threat to others that we maybe shouldn't tinker with. Like I think some modern cars are fly-by-wire, so you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering. If it's also push-to-start, that's probably not physically connected to the ignition either.
I'm not seeing an argument here.
Cars have posed a physical threat to humans ever since they were invented, and yet the owners could do whatever the hell they wanted as long as the car still behaved legally when tested[1].
Aftermarket brakes (note spelling!), aftermarket steering wheels, aftermarket accelerator pedals (which can stick!), aftermarket suspensions - all legal. Aftermarket air filters, fuel injectors and pumps, exhausts - all legal. Hell, even additions, like forced induction (super/turbo chargers), cold air intake systems, lights, transmission coolers, etc are perfectly fine.
You just have to pass the tests, that's all.
I want to know why it is suddenly so important to remove the owners right to repair.
After all, it's only been quite recent that replacement aftermarket ECUs for engine control were made illegal under certain circumstances[2], and that's only a a few special jurisdictions.
What you are proposing is the automakers wet dream come true - they can effectively disable the car by bricking it after X years, and will legally prevent you from getting it running again even if you had the technical knowhow to do so!
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[1] Like with emissions. Or brakes (note spelling!)
[2] Reprogramming the existing one is still legal, though, you just have to ensure you pass the emissions test.
>you could stick the accelerator open and disable the breaks and steering
This is silly. Prohibiting modifying car firmware because it would enable some methods of sabotage is like prohibiting making sledgehammers because someone might use one to bludgeon someone, when murder is already a crime to begin with.
How does being able to reprogram a GPS device make it into a jammer any more efficiently than grabbing three pieces of coal and running a few amps thru it? Or hell just buying an SDR on aliexpress!
The only reason it's "illegal" is because they were thinking people would use it to make missiles easily - but that's already the case even with non-reprogrammable gps. And in big 2025 you can also just use drones with bombs attached to it.
To be fair, millions people walking with guns around are much scarier than a guy which can jam GPS with a receiver. We have GPS jammed on a regular basis (including around airports when planes land/take off) and nothing bad happens.
IANAL but I don’t think OP is breaking any laws by having an opinion on this subject. [At least in the US] pretty much all opinions are completely legal.
• > "If you want to get along, go along." — Sam Rayburn
• > "Reform? Reform! Aren't things bad enough already?" — Lord Eldon
• > "We've always done it this way." — Grace Hopper (referred to it as a dangerous phrase)
• > "Well, when you put it that way..." — [List of millions redacted to protect the compliant]
Rebuttal:
• > "“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw
• > "Yeah, well, ya know, that's just like, uh, your opinion man." — The Dude (In someone's pharmaceutically elevated dream, addressing the Supreme Court.)
"Retarded" is a medical term which properly refers to disabled people. Do you think that is acceptable as petty banter?
I referred to western countries outsourcing their manufacturing elsewhere, which would lead them shifting their pollution elsewhere.
Air pollution is not the only form of pollution either. China currently has some of the most contaminated waterways in the world.
China is addressing pollution finally, but since it is a dictatorship officials routinely misreport data to please their superiors, and the public cannot discuss such issues properly as they arise.
Yeah, it's very easy to get into a situation of "type is a subtype of a larger version of itself" which obviously grows without bounds.
But the solution is trivial - basically the same as the old mathematical issue "set vs class": only small types are types, large types aren't. Which types are "small"? Well, precisely those, that don't contain abstract types.
See this brilliant paper for a longer treatise (the above is the essential summary): 1ML by Andreas Rossberg
Every actual human with lived experience in society knows, that real life is much more diverse than school. In school, there’s at best a few cliques and mostly a single social hierarchy. After school, even during student years, but even more so when entering the workforce, there’s incredible variety of social hierarchies to climb, skills to learn and excel within, and career paths to take.
1) always return the shopping cart when it's free (it almost never is)
2) rarely return the shopping cart when it's paid - sorry but I value my time more than €1 it cost to rent the cart, and, well, clearly there's no "social contract" - there's an "explicit contract", which says "you rent the cart for €1 and we refund you if you return it" so clearly not returning it is fine (also, someone could earn €1!)
I think you're misreading the situation in (2). There is still a social contract to return the carts - just because you put a coin them doesn't make that go away.
If your interpretation is true, wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts? I have never seen such a person. Of course, if carts are in the parking lot, eventually an employee might come to return them, but it's not the intended way of handling it.
The 1€ is a deposit, and you lose it if you fail to do what is right, but the social contract to return the cart is still there, just because money is involved, doesn't mean all ethical considerations go out of the window. Returning it is still the right thing to do. The 1€ is there as an incentive for those who would just not return it if it wouldn't cost them.
No, it may be intended as a fine of sorts, but the explicit number turns it into a cost that people are willing to pay.
First example I heard of this shift was with daycares that had trouble getting parents to pick up their kids on time, so they put a fine on it for having to stay late. This ended up increasing the problem because now there was compensation instead of guilt, and parents could make the decision that the cost was worth it.
> wouldn't the shop need to have someone there to return all the unreturned carts?
I assume it's like the bottle deposit. If enough people leave a coin in the cart and walk away someone will start returning them of their own volition just to earn the coins.
It's a similar phenomenon to day cares dealing with late pickups. They have a few chronically late parents, so they institute a late pickup fee. Parents who always picked their kids up on time because of the implicit agreement now have an explicit agreement that it's okay to pick them up late if they pay a bit more. So the incidences of late pickups actually increased at the day care. You're exchanging a trust based system for financial interactions and some people have very different motivations.
It's not an uncommon reaction. There's lots of things that people are on average perfectly willing to do for free but are not willing to do for a pittance sum.
Very common and widespread in the UK across all social classes. It is done purely altruistically (you will save a life) and the NHS makes life easier by providing pop-up donation clinics in shopping centres and works car parks.
In the US, people are paid to donate blood (!). This makes the whole transaction feel scummy and is, unsurprisingly, something many people avoid doing leaving only the poor to donate for money.
I agree, but there are some advantages to donating blood regularly. It's a free blood-iron check, they also screen for various diseases and it's probably the most effective way of reducing microplastics in your blood. Also, there's the chance that you might need a blood transfusion yourself, so while you won't be getting your donation back, it means that there's more chance that your blood type will be available if you donate.
Popup blood donation sites are pretty common in the US, too, though run by orgs like the Red Cross. I've done it a few times, there's no payment involved besides some free snacks + drinks.
The mindset makes sense if you see his as an implicit service. The equivalent is if there was a dedicated cart collector every 2-3 spaces and you pay them $1 to return your cart. Now you're paying for a service.
It's like littering in a park vs not throwing your trash in the bin at a fast food restaurant. One is more of a commons that everyone has responsibility to clean up. The other is a private establishment who will clean up after guests if they don't. I'd rather just be clean regardless but I see the perspective.
As someone who has been literally involved in this business (AI support), not very successfully unfortunately, I wouldn't.
They're literally the best suited companies to take full advantage of this new technology!
They have existing customer relationships, training manuals, past call recordings (== training data), and enough humans for fallback / oversight (often legally required!)
But yeah, you have to continue being entrepreneurial or risk being replaced by being complacent
I just posted this a few days ago, but the corporate people at the top won't look at it from a technical perspective, I'm sure. They'll look at how much they can save the company by quicky implementing the latest & greatest AI solution and lay off the people working there.
>> It has gotten to a point that the use of AI has turned life into a literal Kafkaesque nightmare. How soon will AI take the place of customer service for actual necessary services like calling your local DMV to make an appointment or even taking over 911 services? The promises made by AI companies about this software making our lives easier has merely become a drive to implement AI into every possible facet of life, not to benefit anyone, but to drive up profits.
You're legally (and technically) prohibited from re-programming GPS modules, GSM modules, and probably many stuff in cars as well.
(Actually, maybe contractually when it comes to GPS modules.)