> If I buy a used vehicle for example, I have exactly zero relationship with the manufacturer. I never agree to anything at all with them. I turn the car on and it goes. They do not have any authorization to touch anything.
Generally speaking and most of the time, yes; however, there are a few caveats. The following uses common law – to narrow the scope of the discussion down.
As a matter of property, the second-hand purchaser owns the chattel. The manufacturer has no general residual right(s) to «touch» the car merely because it made it. Common law sets a high bar against unauthorised interference.
The manufacturer still owes duties to foreseeable users – a law-imposed duty relationship in tort (and often statute) concerning safety, defects, warnings, and misrepresentations. This is a unidirectional relationship – from the manufacturer to the car owner and covers product safety, recalls, negligence (on the manufacturer's behalf) and alike – irrespective of whether it was a first- or second-hand purchase.
One caveat is that if the purchased second-hand car has the residual warranty period left, and the second-hand buyer desires that the warranty be transferred to them, a time-limited, owner-to-manufacturer relationship will exist. The buyer, of course, has no obligation to accept the warranty transfer, and they may choose to forgo the remaining warranty.
The second caveat is that manufacturers have tried (successfully or not – depends on the jurisdiction) to assert that the buyer (first- or second-hand) owns the hardware (the rust bucket), and users (the owners) receive a licence to use the software – and not infrequently with strings attached (conditions, restrictions, updates and account terms).
Under common law, however, even if a software licence exists, the manufacturer does not automatically get a free-standing right to remotely alter the vehicle whenever they wish. Any such right has to come from a valid contractual arrangement, a statutory power, or the consent, privity still works and requires a consent – all of which weakens the manufacturer's legal standing.
Lastly, depending on the jurisdication, the manufacturer can even be sued for installing an OTA update on the basis of the car being a computer on wheels, and the OTA update being an event of unauthorised access to the computer and its data, which is oftenimes a criminal offence. This hinges on the fact that the second-hand buyer has not entered into a consentual relationship with the manufacturer after the purchase.
A bit of a lengthy write-up but legal stuff is always a fuster cluck and a rabit hole of nitpicking and nuances.
I don't really understand the legal arguments here:
> the manufacturer can even be sued [...] This hinges on the fact that the second-hand buyer has not entered into a consentual relationship with the manufacturer after the purchase.
Wait, but the first owner (presumably, for the sake of argument) agreed to this. Why isn't it the first owner's fault for not disclosing it to the second owner? Shouldn't they be sued instead? How is a manufacturer held responsible for an agreement between parties that they could not possibly be expected to have knowledge of?
Because common law is not a general «duty to disclose everything» bludgeon for ordinary used-goods sales, and the «why not sue the first owner» argument can only work in narrow fact patterns.
For example, if the first owner actively misrepresented the position (for example, they said «no remote access, no subscriptions, no tracking» when they knew the opposite), the second owner might have a misrepresentation claim against the first owner. But that is pretty much where the buck stops.
> «How can a manufacturer be liable for an agreement it cannot know about?».
That is not the right framing. The manufacturer is not being held liable for «an agreement between the first owner and the second owner». The manufacturer is being held liable for its own conduct (access/modification by virtue of an OTA update) without authorisation from the _current_ rights-holder because liability follows the actor.
It happens because, under common law, 1) the first owner’s consent does not automatically bind the second owner, 2) consent does not normally run with the asset, and 3) a «new contract with the second owner» does not arise automatically on resale. It arises only if the second owner consciously assents to manufacturer terms (or if a statute creates obligations regardless of assent).
So the manufacturer is responsible because it is the party _acting_. If the manufacturer accesses/modifies without a valid basis extending to the current owner or user, it owns that risk.
I am not saying that «every unwanted OTA update is a crime». All I am saying is that the legal system has a concept of «unauthorised modification/access», and the contention is over whether the access or modification was authorised or not.
Thanks for explaining. I just don't understand how society is supposed to function if laws work like this.
For example suppose I ask someone to come demolish my fence next week when nobody is home. And then I sell the house in between. So is the company supposed to run a title check the moment they arrive, because the owner may no longer have the authority they once had prior to that moment?
Or say I click Accept on an agreement, sleep/hibernate the device right as installation is about to start, and then transfer the rights to the device. Now the vendor is responsible for not running a title check or asking for confirmation a second time before the first confirmation? And I'm in the clear because I never claimed there's no installation pending?
I can't imagine the law really works this way... these sound absurd. Surely there's gotta be much more to it than what you're describing?
It is the clear separation of property and contractual rights, which I find to be pretty logical.
In fact, the separation of concerns actually makes things simpler as the property rights do transfer with the property sale (a car, a house, a computer, etc.), and the contractual obligations do not travel with the asset (unless the law or a properly formed new agreement makes it travel – jurisdiction dependent). It is also important to note that the contract between the former owner and the manufacturer does not automatically lapse with the property sale.
Let's pick the two examples apart.
> […] I ask someone to come demolish my fence next week when nobody is home. And then I sell the house in between. So is the company supposed to run a title check the moment they arrive, because the owner may no longer have the authority they once had prior to that moment?
They are not required to, but it is very prudent of them to ascertain that the person who signed the contract happens to be the current owner of the house before they commence the demolition works – unless dealing with a litany of lawsuits is their core business. By doing so, they save time and money.
Now, imagine that, as the previous owner of the house, you also instructed the company to demolish the fence and demolish the entire house after. It is hard to imagine that the new owner would be delighted or feel ecstatic about finding their newly acquired house to have been wiped out of existence.
From the legal perspective, the demolishing company would be trespassing on the property that now belongs to somebody else, and they are in no position to proceed as the contractual rights stay with the previous owner and not with the property [0]. So in this situation, it creates a dispute (and – not unfathomably – a legal action) between the previous owner and the demolishing company, which the new owner is not privy to. Again, such a separation appears logical to me. Otherwise, the new owner would inherit a barrage of clandestine or dodgy contracts that the first owner might have signed in the past.
> Or say I click Accept on an agreement […]
Same separation still applies:
1. The vendor’s contract with the first owner can remain on foot.
2. That does not automatically authorise a post-sale access/modification of the second owner’s device.
In real litigation, what happens next turns on how «authorisation» is evidenced and managed. If the system is designed so that the physical device is still cryptographically tied to the old account, a court may treat that as strong evidence of practical authorisation, but it is not the same as legal authorisation by the current owner if the current owner never agreed. Practically, however, the new owner simply wipes the device out or resets it, and I do not think that it is commonplace for new owners to sue the manufacturer for merely applying an update, although the possibility is there.
All of the above segues into… the practical implications of separating property and contractual rights. Especially in the case of computing hardware (and EV's as well!), they have become particularly important in today's world, where vendors have been increasingly trying to move towards the rent-seeking model, where they want the device sale to be seen as a lease or a licence to use but not the right to own the device.
Common law insists on the separation between property rights in the physical asset and contractual or statutory rights governing any assented or connected services (including the software). Vendors/manufacturers may market modern computing hardware as an inseparable «hardware–software package» and frame the transaction as a licence to use rather than ownership, but that characterisation does not, by itself, displace the purchaser’s ownership of the tangible chattel (e.g. a car or a laptop). The line common law draws is therefore real, but the contemporary contest is about how far licensing and service dependency can be used to diminish the practical incidents of ownership.
[0] Unless the new owner has acknowledged and agreed to the demolishing works in a separate contract.
This is the kind of nitpicking that I love to see on HN, it is establishes the boundaries of the relationship between manufacturers and owners and tries to lay bare the need for (informed) consent and what the legal basis for that is.
The issue is that XSD came along much later, and its use did not become binding in XML validation scenarios, hence partial success, even when the XSD-based validation tooling was available at the time.
XSD provides a clean abstraction for the technical validation that sits separately from the application / business / processing layers and dramatically increases the chances of a «clean» request reaching the aforementioned layers without having to roll multiple defensive checks in there.
Granted, an XSD can become complex very quickly, especially if indulged in too much, but it does not have to be.
AT&T did not ship with the kernel source code, but they often shipped with the compiled object files of the kernel and a command line utility that allowed to change the kernel configuration parameters, after which the kernel would get re-linked into a new one.
Not open source by any definition, but it was a viable way to obtain a new kernel image. The practice has become obsolete after the adoption of loadable kernel modules across nearly all UNIX flavours, with the exception being OpenBSD (if my memory serves me well).
You have just described OSF/1 (and later – Tru64) – a certified UNIX with a hybrid kernel operating over a Mach microkernel, BSD userland, POSIX conformance etc.
This could be a great fit for Prolog, in fact, as it excels at the search.
Each resolved record would be asserted as a fact, and a tiny search implementation would run after all assertions have been made to resolve the IP address irrespective of the order in which the RRsets have arrived.
A micro Prolog implementation could be rolled into glibc's resolver (or a DNS resolver in general) to solve the problem once and for all.
Finnish case markers vary a lot from word to word, because of not only vowel harmony but other features of the word stem, and consonant gradation which is a weird feature of Uralic languages.
For the subtraction example, some numbers would be 50:tä 5:llä and others 6:tta 3:lla. Of course you could encode for all those possibilities and successfully parse them, but it would feel weird for a compiler to reject an expression because it's ungrammatical Finnish.
Also it would feel weird if you first write (vähennä muuttujaa 256:lla) but then realise you made an off-by-1 and have to change it to (vähennä muuttujaa 255:lla) but that doesn't compile because it should be 255:llä, so you have to remember to change two things.
But on the other hand, that's just how it is to write in Finnish, so in prose we don't really think about it. In natural language, it's normal to have to change other stuff in a sentence for it to continue making sense when you change one thing.
A grammatical mood indicates the modality of the verb, and some languages possess rich inventories of the grammatical moods. They are called differently in different languages, but mood is an established term in English.
English has indicative («go», «is going» etc), subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»), imperative («go!»).
German has two conditional moods – Konjunktiv I and II, for example.
> English has ... subjunctive / conjunctive / conditional («went» in «as if they went»)
That isn't the English subjunctive.
You're correct that this construction expresses the same thing that another language might express by marking a non-indicative mood on the verb, but it would not conventionally be said to use a non-indicative mood. That went is a normal past-tense indicative verb and the modality is expressed by the whole structure of the clause, not just by the inflection of the verb.
In linguistics there's a whole set of parallel vocabulary where one set is for grammatical forms and the mirror set is for the semantics usually expressed by those forms. So you have grammatical "tense" and semantic "time" or grammatical "mood" and semantic "modality". You got the modality right, but not the mood.
Compare the conventional analysis that he will be there tomorrow expresses future time, but is not in future tense because there is no English future tense.
No, it is not a proper English subjunctive (a correct example would have been «as if they were» – past subjunctive) or «[we suggested] that they go».
I deliberately lumped subjunctive, conjunctive, and conditional together for brevity. Part of the problem is that many English speakers do not differentiate between subjunctive and conjunctive (conditional) and incorrectly label the latter as subjunctive, but that happens because English does not have a conjunctive (conditional) mood.
English subjunctive is translated into other Indo-European languages either as the conjunctive or indicative mood, as there is no 1:1 mapping in existence.
> Chinese novels are on the other side of the spectrum. The sentences simply can't be very long and but often don't have any connecting words between sentences. The readers have to infer.
There is no grammatical ceiling on sentence length in Sinitic languages, Chinese languages (all of them) can form long sentences, and they all do possess a great many connecting words. Computational work on Chinese explicitly talks about «long Chinese sentences» and how to parse them[0].
However, many Chinese varieties and writing styles often rely more on parataxis[1] than English does, so relations between clauses are more often (but not always) conveyed by meaning, word order, aspect, punctuation, and discourse context, rather than by obligatory overt conjunctions. That is a tendency, not an inability.
Sure. You can try to create arbitrarily long sentences with nested clauses in Chinese. Just like in English you can create arbitrarily long sentences like: "I live in a house which was built by the builders which were hired by the owner who came from England on a steamship which was built...".
But it feels unnatural. So most Chinese sentences are fairly short as a result. And it's also why commas, stops, and even spacing between words are a fairly recent invention. They are simply not needed when the text is formed of implicitly connected statements that don't need to be deeply nested.
To give an example, here's our favorite long-winded Ishmael: "Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas—entire strangers to them—and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table—all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes—looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains." The Chinese translation is: "是的，这里坐着的是一群老水手，其中有很多人，在怒海中会毫不畏怯地登到巨鲸的背上——那可是他们一无所知的东西啊——眼都不眨地把鲸鱼斗死；然而，这时他们一起坐在公共的早餐桌上——同样的职业，同样的癖好——他们却互相羞怯地打量着对方，仿佛是绿山山从未出过羊圈的绵羊"
Or word-for-word: "Yes, here sitting [people] are the group of old sailors, among them there are many people, [who] in the middle of the raging sea can/will without fear on the whale's back climb. That whales were something they knew nothing about".
The subordinate clauses become almost stand-alone statements, and it's up to the reader to connect them.
I can see your point now, and we are in agreement that nested clauses are uncommon and at the very least sound unnatural in Sinitic languages, but it is distinct from «The sentences simply can't be very long and often don't have any connecting words between sentences».
Strictly speaking, complex nested clauses are slowly on the way out of English as well due to the analytical nature of its present form, which is what the cited article partially laments, and remain a distinctive feature of highly inflected languages (German, Scandinavian, Slavic, etc.).
Generally speaking and most of the time, yes; however, there are a few caveats. The following uses common law – to narrow the scope of the discussion down.
As a matter of property, the second-hand purchaser owns the chattel. The manufacturer has no general residual right(s) to «touch» the car merely because it made it. Common law sets a high bar against unauthorised interference.
The manufacturer still owes duties to foreseeable users – a law-imposed duty relationship in tort (and often statute) concerning safety, defects, warnings, and misrepresentations. This is a unidirectional relationship – from the manufacturer to the car owner and covers product safety, recalls, negligence (on the manufacturer's behalf) and alike – irrespective of whether it was a first- or second-hand purchase.
One caveat is that if the purchased second-hand car has the residual warranty period left, and the second-hand buyer desires that the warranty be transferred to them, a time-limited, owner-to-manufacturer relationship will exist. The buyer, of course, has no obligation to accept the warranty transfer, and they may choose to forgo the remaining warranty.
The second caveat is that manufacturers have tried (successfully or not – depends on the jurisdiction) to assert that the buyer (first- or second-hand) owns the hardware (the rust bucket), and users (the owners) receive a licence to use the software – and not infrequently with strings attached (conditions, restrictions, updates and account terms).
Under common law, however, even if a software licence exists, the manufacturer does not automatically get a free-standing right to remotely alter the vehicle whenever they wish. Any such right has to come from a valid contractual arrangement, a statutory power, or the consent, privity still works and requires a consent – all of which weakens the manufacturer's legal standing.
Lastly, depending on the jurisdication, the manufacturer can even be sued for installing an OTA update on the basis of the car being a computer on wheels, and the OTA update being an event of unauthorised access to the computer and its data, which is oftenimes a criminal offence. This hinges on the fact that the second-hand buyer has not entered into a consentual relationship with the manufacturer after the purchase.
A bit of a lengthy write-up but legal stuff is always a fuster cluck and a rabit hole of nitpicking and nuances.
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