I’m afraid I have to disagree with your interpretation of the thread here (we are 1-1 today).
Here is the OP:
He’s asking a bunch of questions, all based on his first, general one: “is there some document that, if I have on my laptop in my home, it is fine, but if I back it up online, on some company’s server in another state, I may be violating some law?”
Somebody points out that it’s unlikely he’d have trouble with a backup company because they don’t give a crap.
And he clarifies that his question deals with other parties beyond the backup company. He gives an illustration:
By the way, the rules we are discussing apply in General Questions. Similar questions often get posted in In My Humble Opinion, which has no posted rules.
Also, message boards do not provide full information.
On a message board, you post the symptoms you know about, and you get responses based on what you posted. Ignore, for the moment, the possibility of piss-poor responses, pretend every poster responding is a doctor with House’s encyclopediac knowledge. However, you don’t mention some other symptom, perhaps because you’re not aware of it, perhaps because you’ve had it for years. You’re basically looking for a medical analysis based on incomplete information.
The same is true for legal advice. There are general rules that we can certainly discuss, but your specific case may have all sorts of complications that make it different from the general rule.
In short, a Message Board is fine for getting general information, but not for getting a specific solution to your specific problem – we don’t know all the details.
I see nothing wrong with asking for or giving advice on a message board, but it would be unwise to use that as the only source if it affected an important decision of yours.
Nor as the main source. Advice from Message Boards are not much different from advice from your friends at the bar or (say) consulting an encyclopedia. The medical encyclopedia (or message board) can tell you that chest pains are one potential sign of heart attack [general advice]; but it can’t tell whether YOUR chest pains are [specific advice.] The legal encyclopedia can tell you that gender discrimination is not legal [general advice], but can’t tell you whether your employer is guilty of it [specific advice.]
