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Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
11–20 of 171 posts
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#12This is something that I like in Brazillian laws, in Brazil carriers are supposed to always provide "portability", this mean that you can keep your phone numbers when you change your carrier.
The "portability" laws, also say that the carriers themselves have to unlock your phones if you want to change carrier.
This ensures that a carrier cannot make you locked to them by using phone lock or number lock. It is highly interesting. Maybe facilitated by the fact that all carriers here use GSM (people think that CDMA is shit, and like the fact that GSM chips are harder to clone than CDMA phones).
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#13It's funny how you have to petition to have lawmakers pay attention to an issue, when by definition, those people are there to represent the interest of the majority in the first place.
Since when is the President a 'lawmaker?' If you want to get law-makers (i.e. legislators) to take notice just write your representative a letter.
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#14It's funny how you have to petition to have lawmakers pay attention to an issue, when by definition, those people are there to represent the interest of the majority in the first place.
I can't wait for the first petition to get over 160 million votes though ....
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have it in their heads that a successful petition is supposed to mean there will be change but that was never promised. I've always felt petitions were used by lawmakers to help filter noise. If you set a threshold for the amount of support any cause needs before you'll address it (preventing you from having to listen to each person individually) the petition system seems only logical. If the lawmakers now see…
If only there was a website where voters could see how every politician voted on every vote they've ever made when in power. It would cut right through any BS.
Not as much as you'd like. Thanks to massive omnibus bills, converting Yes and No votes into meaningful stands on issues is far harder than you'd like. A no vote on a bill putatively establishing $YOUR_FAVORITE_CAUSE as the law of the land may have been because a rider encouraging $YOUR_WORST_CAUSE was attached and the whole was not judged worthwhile, even before we consider mere politics themselves.
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#16It's funny how you have to petition to have lawmakers pay attention to an issue, when by definition, those people are there to represent the interest of the majority in the first place.
Since when is the President a 'lawmaker?' If you want to get law-makers (i.e. legislators) to take notice just write your representative a letter.
I logged in to post that very message. Why are we petitioning the executive branch to "make it legal?" Last time I checked, the Constitutional authority to write laws is vested in the Congress.
Be careful how much you clamor for Obama to make all your wishes come true, folks. You might just get more than you bargained for.
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#17What exactly do these petitioners expect? A) there are far more important things to do, IMHO, then spending time wrestling telco companies over this, and B) the White House has to do zilch but respond. I love petitions, but people getting angry over e.g. repeatedly not legalizing marijuana after 0.03% of americans signed something I find confusing and frustrating. It's almost as if people are easier to ignore if they…
This was a recent change by made by the copyright office, to revoke "phone unlocking" as an exception to the DMCA. The copyright office is under the President, IIRC, so the White House has the ability to directly affect this.
The other route is to just codify the exception into law, but pushing a law through about this takes time.
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#18It's funny how you have to petition to have lawmakers pay attention to an issue, when by definition, those people are there to represent the interest of the majority in the first place.
If all 100k people chipped in a $100, it would have more effect than this petition. We live in a time where it takes money to get elected.
That's why I think financing campaigns should only be done by individuals and with a cap of $100 each to "equalize" the money vote, just like you equalize the regular vote, by giving a person the same vote everyone gets. But the way the system works now, the "money vote" seems to be much more powerful than the real vote, and because certain individuals or corporations can put as much money as they want on that vote, that ends up skewing the election and the way the politician will fight for certain bills, greatly.
So put a cap on how much you can donate, and ban corporations from donating. Only individuals should be able to donate. I don't care that they think they need $100 million to get elected, and with this they'd only get $10 million. The point is their competitors will only get by with that much, too, but in a much fairer system, where the voices of many more people have to be listened to, instead of just the voices of a few.
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#19What exactly do these petitioners expect? A) there are far more important things to do, IMHO, then spending time wrestling telco companies over this, and B) the White House has to do zilch but respond. I love petitions, but people getting angry over e.g. repeatedly not legalizing marijuana after 0.03% of americans signed something I find confusing and frustrating. It's almost as if people are easier to ignore if they…
Either you are being naive or you are puroposefully misunderstanding or simplifying the issue.
1. It doesn't matter if there are "more important things to do". If it did, Silicon Valley wouldn't exist, and poverty wouldn't exist.
2. If the Whitehouse invents a petition system to allow people to show what is important to them, people expect the Whitehouse to react and do something about those things.
Re: Petition to make unlocking phones legal again passes 100,000 signatures
#20It's funny how you have to petition to have lawmakers pay attention to an issue, when by definition, those people are there to represent the interest of the majority in the first place.
Since when is the President a 'lawmaker?' If you want to get law-makers (i.e. legislators) to take notice just write your representative a letter.
>Since when is the President a 'lawmaker?'
Probably since overriding a veto is a lot harder than getting one more Senator to vote for the bill, which means the President has more say in what makes it into law than any individual legislator.