If it were about IP concerns that they did things, in re Bilski would have had an impact. Specifically, it's an invalid patent that they're infringing upon here.
There are a whole hosts of inconsistencies in the patent law applies to ITC decisions vs. how it applies in Article III courts, which is bizarre to the point of insanity, but a direct result of the way Congress has constructed the patent-related powers of the ITC. Particularly, the ITC is not, as ridiculous as this seems, bound by many aspects of the Patent Act, there's confusing case law on which patent defenses the ITC may or must consider, and ITC exclusion decisions are issued under much looser standards than apply to permanent injunctions in the Article III courts.
Since their role is narrower than that of, say, the regular federal trial courts, and IP is specifically central to it, there's far more reason to expect that the ITC members are IP experts than that the federal judges and juries that would hear cases in Article III courts would be.
You mean "there's far more reason to suspect ITC members are former IP lawyers."
No, thanks for trying to help, but I meant exactly what I wrote. (If they were IP lawyers -- which are a proper subset of what I was referring to as IP experts -- they wouldn't stop being either lawyers or IP specialist when they became members of the ITC.)
It's quite possible the Article III court would be less beholden to industry interests.
That may be true, but its orthogonal to the point I was responding to, which was about expertise and not bias.
why is it all so difficult to come up with some scheme to secure internet accessible resources.
Its not.
Its hard to come up with a scheme to do all of the following simultaneously: * Secure access to internet accessible resources from unauthorized use, * Permit access to internet accessible resources to authorized use, * Have a low per-user cost to implement and support * Be convenient for common users
Can't it be as simple as probing me for dynamic info that only I would know?
If its dynamic (rather than static, in which case its effectively just a password with a -- possibly visual -- hint), and only you know it, how is the system going to get the correct answer in order to probe you for it?
google had already purchased Motorola before the lawsuit..
Google hasn't purchased Motorola yet, much less before the lawsuit.
the DOJ, FTC, hadn't given it their blessing at the time though
Approval from various government agencies is required before the purchase occurs (which is why it hasn't yet, as the Chinese authorities which have to approve it haven't.) So your statement that the purchase had occurred but hadn't yet been approved by the required government agencies is self-contradictory.
I would have thought a ruling by a judge would be needed to render something banned from import.
Its not.
So the power to regulate allows government agencies the ability to make profound and legally binding decisions without need for court systems or due process?
"Government agencies" have very little in terms of inherent power. What they do have is the power conferred on them by Congress acting under its Article I powers, which often include the ability to make decisions of first instance in certain controversies. Due process is required in such proceedings by the 5th Amendment.
These decisions are, generally, subject to review, sometimes by special courts set up for review of agency decisions (Article I courts), and -- either initially or subsequently -- by the regular (Article III) courts.
I was not aware the ITC were experts on IP.
Since their role is narrower than that of, say, the regular federal trial courts, and IP is specifically central to it, there's far more reason to expect that the ITC members are IP experts than that the federal judges and juries that would hear cases in Article III courts would be.
So if the law they are suing under allows a maximum of $10,000 per claimant then how did they ever arrive at $15 billion split between just 21 people?
Its not split between 21 people. It amends and consolidates 21 previously-separate lawsuits; its a class action where the class is "all Facebook users" (or, more specifically, all people who were Facebook users during any portion of the period of time covered by the lawsuit), which is somewhat more than 21 people.
This IPO was today. If this was released and "mediatized" yesterday it would have hurt the IPO quite a bit.
Major media reports of the action (which is a consolidation of actions already filed) were published before trading opened. They probably did hurt the IPO quite a bit.
Slashdot isn't exactly the leading edge of news delivery.
Oftentimes I try to look at "soft" issues as an ethical engineer and I come to the conclusion that you can approach a lot of hotly debated issues from two sides. And, like the limit as x approaches zero in y(x) = -1/x, you can sort of logically come to two extremely different conclusions.
This is certainly the case when there is a genuine disagreement on fundamental moral value propositions. The problem that can be addressed by clearly separating fact claims and moral value propositions is that many real-world political disagreements which seem to be intractable disagreements of values are involve disagreements on fact claims which are embedded in things which are often treated as if they were value propositions.
(More rigor in defining terms in value propositions is also helpful here, as it helps understand where the hidden fact claims are.)
For instance:
But if you approach from the right you start with something really innocuous as well like governments should enable individuals to follow their dreams and if their dreams are price fixing so be it because the free market will decide whose product is better and the consumer will be smart enough to buy the new product if it is indeed made better and the price fixing will result in a loss to the colluding parties and so therefore we need to make the free market freer and truly free to alleviate all these issues...
There are several embedded fact claims that are susceptible to refutation embedded in here, its not, as you suggest, just pure logic from value propositions. particularly of note "price fixing will result in a net loss to colluding parties".
Basically, two strong narratives will ruin an ethical engineer's best intents.
What an "ethical engineer" needs to do is decompose narratives into sets of atomic propositions, identify the value propositions and the fact propositions. The pure value propositions may be the subject of disagreement, but they aren't really rationally debatable.
The fact propositions can be analyzed in light of evidence, the same as any other fact proposition.
The government should never ever regulate morality.
Every proposition of "should" is moral, and every decision (and certainly every policy) is based on a proposition of "should" (often, but not always, along with empirical considerations.)
Empirical considerations can tell you what outcomes are most likely from a different course of actions, but unless you have a value framework, you have no way of choosing among those actions.
Politicians absolutely should say, 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.'. Because if they say that, that's a falsifiable claim that we can disprove with evidence.
"I want to reduce drug use" is a moral position (or, rather, as part of the justification for a policy proposal, it either expresses the moral position "We should act to reduce drug use", or relies on the implicit moral premise "We should act according to my desires".)
"sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to [reduce drug use]" is a fact claim.
While you can in principle prove or disprove the fact claim, that isn't enough to justify the policy decision, you also have to accept or reject the moral position.
When you say that the person making it should shut up, that is also a moral call.
OP doesn't say anything against moral calls (which would be insane, as you can't make any kind of decision without ultimately reaching back to a moral value proposition). He says that fact claims and moral claims need to be distinguished, and that the former needs to be supported by evidence.
"That's not at moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."
Right there is the problem. Geeks are often, by nature, chock full of hubris. Assuming that you have all the evidence, and that all your evidence is correct, and that you have interpreted the correct conclusion from your evidence, and therefore anyone who questions your evidence should just "shut the hell up", is not conducive to compromise or cooperation.
Nice rant, except nothing in the quote you are responding to presumes that the poster has all the evidence, or any interpretation of the evidence. It simply argues that if a fact claim is to be made, it should be supported by evidence, and if there is no evidentiary support for the claim, it should not be made. It provides an example of a fact claim, but it proposes nothing about what the evidence actually says about that claim.
It may imply a particularly skepticism on the part of the poster that the particular claim given as an example would be supportably by evidence, but its not making an argument about that. It is, instead, saying that in order to be able to meaningfully discuss fact claims that underly policy propositions, those claims (and the counterclaims, which are themselves fact claims) need to be presented with evidence so that they claims and counterclaims can be evaluated.
It is precisely THAT attitude that got the U.S. into Iraq, to cite a recent example ("We KNOW there are WMD's, and we KNOW Saddam is going to use them, so we're going to invade Iraq and the rest of you can just shut the hell up.").
Well, actually, there is considerable evidence that that interpretation of the Iraq war is wrong and that we didn't go to war based on evidence on WMD that decision-makers mistakenly believed to be correct and complete, but instead based on a number of considerations that had nothing to do with WMD, where, at most, mistaken beliefs about the completeness and correctness of evidence on WMDs were in the mind of the public after decision-makers who had committed to war used selective presentation (and outright misrepresentation) of evidence on WMDs as part of the campaign to maintain public support for a decision made for entirely unrelated reasons.
This is a constant problem at my office, where the.Net developers are so bloated with hubris that they think their applications are perfect, and always want to blame the DB2 database first when something goes wrong.
An approach, as the GP suggest, of requiring fact claims (e.g., "the problem is not in the.NET application code") to be supported by evidence would neatly deal with this problem. So, rather than being an analogy that undermines the GPs position, it simply reinforces it.
Massie says. “You know it’s pretty bad when the people who have to deal with the FDA say, ‘Why can’t you be more like the Patent Office?’”
Well, yeah, its probably disturbing to pharmaceutical vendors who have to deal with both that the FDA isn't as much of a blind rubberstamp as the Patent Office, but the only thing "pretty bad" about that is how bad the Patent Office is.
Massie seems to want the FDA to be more like the Patent Office...
He's going to pay taxes on money he may or may not make at a later date? That doesn't even make sense.
I agree.
Which is why I didn't say that. Look, if the concern is people renouncing citizenship because doing so reduces their tax liability on income earned after the renunciation, the simple thing to do to address the problem isn't to assess a special one-time tax at the time of renunciation if they can't prove they aren't renouncing citizenship to avoid future tax liability, and add a further punishment with a permanent entry ban. Its just to change tax law so that renouncing citizenship has not benefit as to future tax liability.
Yes, although if you search for "Persian Gulf", it takes you right there to where the label would be, exactly as when you search for the (labelled) "Gulf of California".
Convincing someone that it's more likely than not that you're leaving for stated reasons rather than for tax purposes means you'd better have a very plausible story; in other words, a valid reason. At least, that's what this law is proposing.
The law doesn't propose a requirement to do that. The law proposes a new tax that you can escape by doing that, which isn't the same thing at all.
Not, as I stated in GP, that I support the proposed law.
You can leave, and you can take all of your valuables out of the jurisdiction of the United States, and give up your obligations and rights as a citizen, but once you do, you can't come back or bring any of the valuables back.
Capital gains are already due when you renounce your citizenship. Placing the burden of proof on someone to prove they aren't renouncing for tax purposes is ridiculous, and possibly unconstitutional. Why would I need a "valid" reason to renounce my citizenship?
You don't need a valid reason to renounce your citizenship.
OTOH, non-citizens have no general right of entry to the US, its a privilege granted to them by the citizens of the US. I can't really see any principle.
That said, to address this issue in law it would be simpler to just pass a law that renunciation of citizenship has no effect on tax liability (and, therefore, on civil and criminal liability for non-payment, evasion, etc.)
That lie (like many lies) was helped by two things: 1. The trust that viewers/readers place in the personalities/authors that were talking about the issue. 2. Repetition. If you keep repeating a lie, it'll stick with some people, no matter how outlandish it is.
You missed a very big 3rd one: confirmation bias. Listeners who have negative feelings about Group G and Person P to start with are quite likely to uncritically accept an accusation that P is secretly affiliated with G.
(Like your two factors, this also doesn't apply to the "serial killer" hoax, since its a fictional person that no one has a preconceived bias about.)
When it makes it to the Supreme Court, they'll affirm the law.
If they side with the administration, they'll affirm that the NDAA detention provisions are constitutional -- because it has no effect and simply restates powers already in the 2001 AUMF and already found Constitutional by the Supreme Court under the 2001 AUMF.
If they side with the challengers, they'll strike down the NDAA detention provisions as unconstitutional, which will render them without effect.
They'd have to strike out pretty far on their own to actually make the NDAA do something as regards indefinite detention power, though.
It was OBAMA who told Congress to add those two sentences for indefinite detainment w/o trial.
There are more than two sentences about that.
The "two sentences" the administration fought to have added, once it was clear that the Congress wouldn't pass the NDAA without indefinite detention language, were the ones that provide that the indefinite detention provisions in the NDAA neither "limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force" nor affect any "law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States".
The President stated at the time that the original language would be unconstitutional and unacceptable and require a veto, and -- in his signing statement -- that with the new language the provisions were still undesirable, and unnecessary since they had no effect beyond what had already been done by the AUMF.
The court in its preliminary injunction disagreed and said that as a principal of construction statutes should be read as doing something, and that the something that the NDAA did on this issue appears to be unconstitutional. The difference between the court on the administration isn't over whether the NDAA doing anything beyond what had been previously been found to be authorized by the AUMF and found constitutional by the Supreme Court in cases challenging actions under the AUMF would be unconstitutional, the difference is over whether the NDAA, on its own terms, actually does anything at all on the issue.
Note that this has set up a controversy under which a court siding with either the administration or those challenging the law would find no new power under the NDAA -- if the administration is right, the NDAA has no effect on indefinite detention powers regardless of its Constitutionality. If the challengers are right, the NDAA's detention provisions are unconstitutional, and, as such, have no effect.
(Probably in Guantanamo... the place Obama promised to close but never did.)
Congress blocking funds from being used for that purpose repeatedly since Obama came to office has nothing to do with that, right?
What about Obama's signing statement in which he decried the very power he was accepting by signing the NDAA?
If you read the actual signing statement, he didn't deride the indefinite detention power, largely because the NDAA did not create any new indefinite detention power. Specifically, while he objected to earlier language regarding indefinite detention than was in the final bill which would have expanded indefinite detention power -- and objected to other provisions in the bill -- his signing statement made clear with regard to indefinite detention power that he viewed the provisions in the final bill as unnecessary because, on their own terms, they had no effect since they expressly simply restated powers which had been exercised under the 2001 AUMF and which the Supreme Court had already found had been granted by the 2001 AUMF.
The crazy thing is some people actually bought the argument that this clause was forced on him by Congress.
The President opposed any inclusion of detention power in the NDAA, and strenuously objected to to earlier language which would have extended the power. He accepted -- while still, in the signing statement, objecting to it as unnecessary -- the final version, which expressly limited itself to not expand the power already granted (as determined by the Supreme Court when previous detentions were challenged) by the 2001 AUMF.
The fact that he's defending it in court makes it absolutely clear what his stance on infinite detention is.
His stance is fairly expressly that its Constitutional within the bounds within which the Supreme Court has already ruled that it is Constitutional, but that it is, even within those bounds, generally undesirable.
You haven't had to register copyrights in the US for decades. Ever heard of the Berne Convention?
Its true that copyright exists upon creation and doesn't require registration, but you do have to register them prior before instituting almost any civil action for infringement of copyright, see 17 USC Sec. 411.
So, registration isn't required to have a copyright, but it is required to sue someone to recover damages for violation of a copyright.
How often do you find yourself needing to dial a number when you have no service?
As I understand (and my personal experience bears this out), at least on non-4G connections, voice and data connections are separate, though they usually have a rough correlation. Its possibly to have a reliable voice connection in a location and no or unreliable data, and possibly vice versa (I've experienced the former, and at least seen the connection icons on my phone indicate the latter.)
Eh yeah sure, searching for "web browser best" makes so much more sense than "what is the best web browser?"
Yes, it does, though searching for "web browser reviews" makes even more sense.
"Searching for" is not the same thing as "asking". And you asking a subjective question is not a good way of getting the objective information necessary to determine what the correct subjective answer for the question is for you, anyway, since while a third party may have access to the objective facts, they are unlikely to be better at applying the objective facts to your own subjective tastes to get the subjective answer than you are.
Eventually, online services that track vast amounts of personal data may get good enough to do that for some things, but the natural language processing needed to understand the question isn't the hard part of that.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a whole hosts of inconsistencies in the patent law applies to ITC decisions vs. how it applies in Article III courts, which is bizarre to the point of insanity, but a direct result of the way Congress has constructed the patent-related powers of the ITC. Particularly, the ITC is not, as ridiculous as this seems, bound by many aspects of the Patent Act, there's confusing case law on which patent defenses the ITC may or must consider, and ITC exclusion decisions are issued under much looser standards than apply to permanent injunctions in the Article III courts.
No, thanks for trying to help, but I meant exactly what I wrote. (If they were IP lawyers -- which are a proper subset of what I was referring to as IP experts -- they wouldn't stop being either lawyers or IP specialist when they became members of the ITC.)
That may be true, but its orthogonal to the point I was responding to, which was about expertise and not bias.
Its not.
Its hard to come up with a scheme to do all of the following simultaneously:
* Secure access to internet accessible resources from unauthorized use,
* Permit access to internet accessible resources to authorized use,
* Have a low per-user cost to implement and support
* Be convenient for common users
If its dynamic (rather than static, in which case its effectively just a password with a -- possibly visual -- hint), and only you know it, how is the system going to get the correct answer in order to probe you for it?
Google hasn't purchased Motorola yet, much less before the lawsuit.
Approval from various government agencies is required before the purchase occurs (which is why it hasn't yet, as the Chinese authorities which have to approve it haven't.) So your statement that the purchase had occurred but hadn't yet been approved by the required government agencies is self-contradictory.
Its not.
"Government agencies" have very little in terms of inherent power. What they do have is the power conferred on them by Congress acting under its Article I powers, which often include the ability to make decisions of first instance in certain controversies. Due process is required in such proceedings by the 5th Amendment.
These decisions are, generally, subject to review, sometimes by special courts set up for review of agency decisions (Article I courts), and -- either initially or subsequently -- by the regular (Article III) courts.
Since their role is narrower than that of, say, the regular federal trial courts, and IP is specifically central to it, there's far more reason to expect that the ITC members are IP experts than that the federal judges and juries that would hear cases in Article III courts would be.
Its not split between 21 people. It amends and consolidates 21 previously-separate lawsuits; its a class action where the class is "all Facebook users" (or, more specifically, all people who were Facebook users during any portion of the period of time covered by the lawsuit), which is somewhat more than 21 people.
Major media reports of the action (which is a consolidation of actions already filed) were published before trading opened. They probably did hurt the IPO quite a bit.
Slashdot isn't exactly the leading edge of news delivery.
Every proposition of "should" is moral, and every decision (and certainly every policy) is based on a proposition of "should" (often, but not always, along with empirical considerations.)
Empirical considerations can tell you what outcomes are most likely from a different course of actions, but unless you have a value framework, you have no way of choosing among those actions.
"I want to reduce drug use" is a moral position (or, rather, as part of the justification for a policy proposal, it either expresses the moral position "We should act to reduce drug use", or relies on the implicit moral premise "We should act according to my desires".)
"sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to [reduce drug use]" is a fact claim.
While you can in principle prove or disprove the fact claim, that isn't enough to justify the policy decision, you also have to accept or reject the moral position.
OP doesn't say anything against moral calls (which would be insane, as you can't make any kind of decision without ultimately reaching back to a moral value proposition). He says that fact claims and moral claims need to be distinguished, and that the former needs to be supported by evidence.
Nice rant, except nothing in the quote you are responding to presumes that the poster has all the evidence, or any interpretation of the evidence. It simply argues that if a fact claim is to be made, it should be supported by evidence, and if there is no evidentiary support for the claim, it should not be made. It provides an example of a fact claim, but it proposes nothing about what the evidence actually says about that claim.
It may imply a particularly skepticism on the part of the poster that the particular claim given as an example would be supportably by evidence, but its not making an argument about that. It is, instead, saying that in order to be able to meaningfully discuss fact claims that underly policy propositions, those claims (and the counterclaims, which are themselves fact claims) need to be presented with evidence so that they claims and counterclaims can be evaluated.
Well, actually, there is considerable evidence that that interpretation of the Iraq war is wrong and that we didn't go to war based on evidence on WMD that decision-makers mistakenly believed to be correct and complete, but instead based on a number of considerations that had nothing to do with WMD, where, at most, mistaken beliefs about the completeness and correctness of evidence on WMDs were in the mind of the public after decision-makers who had committed to war used selective presentation (and outright misrepresentation) of evidence on WMDs as part of the campaign to maintain public support for a decision made for entirely unrelated reasons.
An approach, as the GP suggest, of requiring fact claims (e.g., "the problem is not in the .NET application code") to be supported by evidence would neatly deal with this problem. So, rather than being an analogy that undermines the GPs position, it simply reinforces it.
Well, yeah, its probably disturbing to pharmaceutical vendors who have to deal with both that the FDA isn't as much of a blind rubberstamp as the Patent Office, but the only thing "pretty bad" about that is how bad the Patent Office is.
Massie seems to want the FDA to be more like the Patent Office...
I agree.
Which is why I didn't say that. Look, if the concern is people renouncing citizenship because doing so reduces their tax liability on income earned after the renunciation, the simple thing to do to address the problem isn't to assess a special one-time tax at the time of renunciation if they can't prove they aren't renouncing citizenship to avoid future tax liability, and add a further punishment with a permanent entry ban. Its just to change tax law so that renouncing citizenship has not benefit as to future tax liability.
Yes, although if you search for "Persian Gulf", it takes you right there to where the label would be, exactly as when you search for the (labelled) "Gulf of California".
The law doesn't propose a requirement to do that. The law proposes a new tax that you can escape by doing that, which isn't the same thing at all.
Not, as I stated in GP, that I support the proposed law.
I thought it was pretty clear that I was referring to computation of future tax liability, not tax liability that existed prior to the renunciation.
Pretty much the opposite:
You can leave, and you can take all of your valuables out of the jurisdiction of the United States, and give up your obligations and rights as a citizen, but once you do, you can't come back or bring any of the valuables back.
You don't need a valid reason to renounce your citizenship.
OTOH, non-citizens have no general right of entry to the US, its a privilege granted to them by the citizens of the US. I can't really see any principle.
That said, to address this issue in law it would be simpler to just pass a law that renunciation of citizenship has no effect on tax liability (and, therefore, on civil and criminal liability for non-payment, evasion, etc.)
You missed a very big 3rd one: confirmation bias. Listeners who have negative feelings about Group G and Person P to start with are quite likely to uncritically accept an accusation that P is secretly affiliated with G.
(Like your two factors, this also doesn't apply to the "serial killer" hoax, since its a fictional person that no one has a preconceived bias about.)
If they side with the administration, they'll affirm that the NDAA detention provisions are constitutional -- because it has no effect and simply restates powers already in the 2001 AUMF and already found Constitutional by the Supreme Court under the 2001 AUMF.
If they side with the challengers, they'll strike down the NDAA detention provisions as unconstitutional, which will render them without effect.
They'd have to strike out pretty far on their own to actually make the NDAA do something as regards indefinite detention power, though.
There are more than two sentences about that.
The "two sentences" the administration fought to have added, once it was clear that the Congress wouldn't pass the NDAA without indefinite detention language, were the ones that provide that the indefinite detention provisions in the NDAA neither "limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force" nor affect any "law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States".
The President stated at the time that the original language would be unconstitutional and unacceptable and require a veto, and -- in his signing statement -- that with the new language the provisions were still undesirable, and unnecessary since they had no effect beyond what had already been done by the AUMF.
The court in its preliminary injunction disagreed and said that as a principal of construction statutes should be read as doing something, and that the something that the NDAA did on this issue appears to be unconstitutional. The difference between the court on the administration isn't over whether the NDAA doing anything beyond what had been previously been found to be authorized by the AUMF and found constitutional by the Supreme Court in cases challenging actions under the AUMF would be unconstitutional, the difference is over whether the NDAA, on its own terms, actually does anything at all on the issue.
Note that this has set up a controversy under which a court siding with either the administration or those challenging the law would find no new power under the NDAA -- if the administration is right, the NDAA has no effect on indefinite detention powers regardless of its Constitutionality. If the challengers are right, the NDAA's detention provisions are unconstitutional, and, as such, have no effect.
Congress blocking funds from being used for that purpose repeatedly since Obama came to office has nothing to do with that, right?
If you read the actual signing statement, he didn't deride the indefinite detention power, largely because the NDAA did not create any new indefinite detention power. Specifically, while he objected to earlier language regarding indefinite detention than was in the final bill which would have expanded indefinite detention power -- and objected to other provisions in the bill -- his signing statement made clear with regard to indefinite detention power that he viewed the provisions in the final bill as unnecessary because, on their own terms, they had no effect since they expressly simply restated powers which had been exercised under the 2001 AUMF and which the Supreme Court had already found had been granted by the 2001 AUMF.
The President opposed any inclusion of detention power in the NDAA, and strenuously objected to to earlier language which would have extended the power. He accepted -- while still, in the signing statement, objecting to it as unnecessary -- the final version, which expressly limited itself to not expand the power already granted (as determined by the Supreme Court when previous detentions were challenged) by the 2001 AUMF.
His stance is fairly expressly that its Constitutional within the bounds within which the Supreme Court has already ruled that it is Constitutional, but that it is, even within those bounds, generally undesirable.
This is a half-truth:
Its true that copyright exists upon creation and doesn't require registration, but you do have to register them prior before instituting almost any civil action for infringement of copyright, see 17 USC Sec. 411.
So, registration isn't required to have a copyright, but it is required to sue someone to recover damages for violation of a copyright.
As I understand (and my personal experience bears this out), at least on non-4G connections, voice and data connections are separate, though they usually have a rough correlation. Its possibly to have a reliable voice connection in a location and no or unreliable data, and possibly vice versa (I've experienced the former, and at least seen the connection icons on my phone indicate the latter.)
Yes, it does, though searching for "web browser reviews" makes even more sense.
"Searching for" is not the same thing as "asking". And you asking a subjective question is not a good way of getting the objective information necessary to determine what the correct subjective answer for the question is for you, anyway, since while a third party may have access to the objective facts, they are unlikely to be better at applying the objective facts to your own subjective tastes to get the subjective answer than you are.
Eventually, online services that track vast amounts of personal data may get good enough to do that for some things, but the natural language processing needed to understand the question isn't the hard part of that.