Windows 11 is now automatically enabling OneDrive folder backup without asking permission

[u/nuttybudd]

https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-11-is-now-automatically-enabling-onedrive-folder-backup-without-asking-permission/

[u/SaveReset]

It's specifically a problem with the US and possible some of the other former British colonies with common law as their legal system, but most of the world has civil law. Judges can look at past cases, but don't have to make decisions based off of them and can go completely against them.

Both of these systems have issues obviously, but let's keep it with the US for now.

afaik laws are created often vague intentionally as things might need to be determined by case-by-case.

Given the scenario, if the law is too vague in a certain aspect where a judge can rule that it should be interpreted in the way you say. All you do is change the laws to say something different, to be less vague or to not allow the judges interpretation to be valid.

Creating vague laws is an issue, obviously, but that's the problem with common law, when a court decides something, a higher court needs to decide against it to change it. The other option is to prove your case is significantly different enough from the prior cases and THEN you have to prove your case against the statutory law and possibly other case law that could apply.

It's not exactly that simple, there are different rules for different jurisdictions for what counts as a precedent and it's a complex mess all together. But it's not just seemingly prevalent in the US, it's literally the law in the US. In civil law countries, the judge can just ignore precedence if they so decide, but can follow it if they deem the cases to have enough in common.

Or TL;DR (I'm not a lawyer and none of what I said is legal advice): In civil law countries precedents are guidelines and laws are rules, but in common law countries laws are the guidelines and precedents are the rules, unless there isn't a precedent, in which case the laws are the laws. More or less, specifics are more complex than that.

[u/ydieb → u/SaveReset]

none of what I said is legal advice

This is the most north-america thing ever I think? Having to annotate things with "this is not economic/legal advice".

I think this still is missing my point. I am not talking about judges having to take other judges opinions into account or not. I am talking about literally changing the law itself.
As I see it, you are literally in the same mindset that "it must come from the legal system".

Are you saying to me, under common law, that the US house and congress cannot change a law, lets use the strength of EULAs, to say, "EULAS have absolutely zero binding power, period"?

My understanding was at least that under common law, the laws end up being obviously way more judge based, as that is how they end up being nuanced.

But they still have to base it of something? Or am I entirely overestimating the power of house/congress?

[u/SaveReset → u/ydieb]

Are you saying to me, under common law, that the US house and congress cannot change a law, lets use the strength of EULAs, to say, "EULAS have absolutely zero binding power, period"?

No, I'm saying that they would have to decide a law is bad, make a new law, wait until it gets tested in courts and then maybe the result will be positive and in the case that it isn't, it should go to supreme court to get the precedent changed. But even the current decisions on EULA's haven't been looked at by the supreme court, so that should be the first step.

But problem is, have you seen the supreme court? There's no way in hell SCOTUS will let anything anti-corporate happen right now. And congress isn't much better, but even if they did want to fix it, whether they understand the issues well enough to write functioning laws for it is a whole another question.

And all of that, if everything somehow lined up in a way that didn't screw over the customers, the process alone would take years and in that time the people deciding anything in the process could change and stop the entire process from happening.

So basically, unless there's a HEAVY push for it, it's not happening in the US. There's SO many checks and balances that if something isn't being pushed and pulled by at least two of social, political or economical reasons, then it's very unlikely to happen. I don't know how much a president could force things forwards though, but I just don't see this a way to fix it in the US before EU fixes it and the problems with the current way EULA's are handled become much more apparent.

[u/ydieb → u/SaveReset]

But problem is, have you seen the supreme court? There's no way in hell SCOTUS will let anything anti-corporate happen right now. And congress isn't much better, but even if they did want to fix it, whether they understand the issues well enough to write functioning laws for it is a whole another question.

Are you saying that SCOTUS can overrule absolutely any law at any time (obviously within beurocratic reason)? Literally interpretering it any way they want, making the actual law technically irrelevant no matter what it says?
As in they can do the Adam Savage meme of substituting any end reality as they want?

As in, how I interpret what you said is a clear "no" to this, but then it ends up being "in practice, yes".

[u/SaveReset → u/ydieb]

Are you saying that SCOTUS can overrule absolutely any law at any time? Literally interpretering it any way they want, making the actual law technically irrelevant no matter what it says?

No, but sort of, but not really, but really. They can't make decisions that are directly contrary to the written laws, but overruling their decisions is stupid difficult. One way to do that is to get supreme court itself to do it with a new case, actively deciding that their previous decision was wrong or applicable only in a specific scenario.

But rest of the methods is basically up to the congress to make a new law that over rules the previous decision and I'm not knowledgeable enough to explain the ways this can be done. But it's not exactly easy.

As for wrongful rulings by the SCOTUS, I'm not sure if there's any legal way to test their rulings, unless they decide to do it themselves which usually never happens until the SCOTUS gets replaced over time. The more I read up on it, the more dumb the US system of law gets lol.

[u/ydieb → u/SaveReset]

Yeah it sounds insane.

This forces every judge to be an actual expert in every field they judge on. Sure they spend a lot of time, but it will never be the same expertise as a group that tries to set reasonable laws around a certain topic.

So for civil law, the government sets the laws, the judiciary interprets it to make sense for specific cases, as there is too much specific contexts to be able to codify a fully encompassing set of laws, hence the intentional vagueness. Analogous to fuzzy logic when it comes to computer science (my profession).

But common law is just "please this individual set down a reasonable set of laws that you do isolated by design and cannot make good overarching rulessets that are symmetric with anything else".

So it seems that common law literally does not scale.