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PC Repair In Texas Now Requires a PI License
JohnnyNapalm writes "In some shocking news out of Texas, PC repair will now require a PI License. Surely this stands to have a substantial impact on small repair shops around the state if upheld. Never fear, however, as the first counter-suit has already been filed."
In Ontario this is actually the the stance taken. They have set up a telehealth phoneline staffed by nurses and other qualified people so that people don't go down to the emergency room, or run to the doctor every time you have a rash or a cough. We've used their services quite a few times, and the answers they give are quite good. It's really nice to have a nice way to get quick qualified answers to health questions.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm guessing the Geek Squad will just need to have a PI on duty any time the kids are tinkering on other people's computers.
If this story is true, then whatever harebrained idiot thought this one up should have to do penance in the form of having to take the place of one of those undocumented maids for the next twenty years. That said, I don't see anything in that law that suggests that computer repair people have to be licensed PIs. The only people that are covered there are people who are doing forensic analysis on data not available to the general public. If you hire someone to do computer forensics (e.g. investigating the contents of a hard drive), that's a completely different service from merely replacing a defective power supply or even reinstalling Windows. Stretching that law to cover basic computer repairs is a fairly blatant perversion of the law as written and almost certainly won't hold up in court unless I'm either grossly misreading it or the story linked from this one is linking to the wrong law.
In any case, assuming the story is legit, let's take this same logic one step further. A maid finds child porn while cleaning some guy's den. We should, therefore, obviously require that every illegal, undocumented maid working in the state of Texas have a PI license. Similarly, every maintenance crew working for a company, every IT employee, every office assistant who might potentially use his/her boss's computer, every school computer lab administrator, every plumber (child porn could be hidden under the sink, you know), every electrician (going to rewire somebody's entertainment center), and every employee at every hard drive refurbishing center.
In short, this same logic would apply equally to large swaths of our population for precisely the same reason, and I predict this law will be struck down swiftly for precisely that reason. It unfairly singles out one small group for regulation out of a much larger group of people for whom the same conditions apply.
Further, as someone said a couple of posts up, the difference between laws requiring a PI license for this and laws requiring a PI license for someone doing an investigation, a medical license for a doctor, etc. is that in all of the cases where such laws have been considered constitutional in the past, the reason for the license was for the protection of the person hiring out for the work to ensure that the person doesn't get shafted, while in this case, the laws are predominantly for the protection of the state and are in direct contradiction to the needs, desires, and best interests of the person hiring out for the work.
As for planting evidence, there's really no more protection against that just because somebody has a PI license. There are plenty of crooked licensed private investigators, lawyers, doctors, etc. At best, there is the additional disincentive of losing your license if caught, but it's not like a computer repair tech can't get a job doing computer repair in a corporate IT department, which presumably would not entail such licensing requirements, or else there are likely to be a lot of high-tech companies (e.g. Apple, Dell, etc.) telling Texas to go f*ck themselves and moving their operations to another state.
More importantly, computer companies that contract out mail-in repairs are likely to eschew Texas from now on. Why? Too much extra expense. Instead of hiring a minimum-wage person and training them in a week, they'll have to hire someone with an expensive license and/or spend months training them at tremendous expense. I know a couple of businesses that are likely to dry up overnight.
Sounds like yet another stupid law written by stupid people for stupid reasons that won't actually fix what it was intended to fix. Since that describes about 98% of all laws passed in my lifetime, could somebody explain why this is news? :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The liberal mindset is that you are not allowed to choose
That's not a liberal mindset. The original liberalism, Classical Liberalism which stems from The Age Of Enlightenment and The Age of Reason, was all about liberty and small government. Among the USA's Founding Fathers who were Liberals were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine. The father of Capitalism Adam Smith was a Liberal. As used today "liberal" and "liberalism" has been twisted to mean something a lot different than it did.
Then again other words have had the same thing done to them, like "hack" and "hacker". Whereas a hack used to mean something creative and a hacker was someone who hacked, and writers were hacks too, today they are used for crimes and criminals. As used with computers a hacker follows the Hacker ethic.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?