What a waste of the president's time.
White House Response to “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal”
281–284 of 284 posts
Re: White House Response to “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal”
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, almost every time. Shit does happen. But no, I would seem to be the shockingly uncommon American who has some measure of faith in the process of self-governance that has seen us through the last two hundred thirty years.
Cushman, you sound like somebody who believes everything that you were taught in school, and you are unwilling to entertain an idea that has the possibility of destroying the foundation of your world view. Don't try to impose your world view on events as they occur, rather, observe the world and consider all possibilities. Things usually are not what they appear to be. The expert is not always right, even if he think…
You tell this to the guy who's responding to the worlds most common imposed view. That of the internal workings of a system being dictated solely by malice and corruption.
"Why does this computer hate me?!" "The people who built it must be stupid."
It's not world changing in any way at ALL to say some entity or organization is corrupt. Find me an organization that hasn't being called corrupt.
Do you remember in 2011, when OPERA had some experimental results that suggested neutrinos were moving fast than light? I was in the reddit comment thread covering this story at the time. I made the point that there's no way this is actually happening, and that they were just releasing these results to get 3rd party analysis into what was happening.
By the next morning I had a flood of downvotes and comments about how naive stubborn thinkers like me are rejecting science and ruining the world, and that if only I'd open my eyes to the possibility of something new, even if it shook the foundations of my beliefs, then we could make progress as a species. ect. ect. ect.
Turned out it was a measurement error and they were just releasing results to the public to get 3rd party analysis.
Awwwww.
Re: White House Response to “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal”
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
The contract issue is mostly orthogonal to unlocking the phone - most contracts that give you a reduced price have a clause allowing you to cancel early, with a penalty cost that loosely approximates the subsidy that went towards your phone. The problem is that even if you wanted to pay this penalty, the DMCA makes it illegal to unlock your phone.
Except that you might want to unlock your phone even without canceling your contract. Maybe you want service from two cell providers simultaneously for some reason. Why should the DMCA stop you from doing that?
We are in agreement. Orthogonal means the two issues (unlocking being legal under DMCA vs unlocking being prohibited by contract in exchange for a free phone) should be treated separately.
Re: White House Response to “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal”
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he just got off the phone with the White House, I'd imagine he has a pretty good idea of what their response was. Your cynicism is a big part of the reason it's so hard to change things around here.
No it's not. I emigrated from the US after it became clear they weren't going to reinstate the rule of law. Your military-industrial complex is the reason that it's so hard to change things around... there. This is why you have bullshit laws like the DMCA in the first place.
The DMCA has little to do with the military and everything to do with the fact that humanity simply doesn't know how to accurately value software goods, which are non-scarce in their marginal cost of production, next to a world full of hardware goods, which are strongly scarce and sometimes near-impossible to make more of (land, water, air, etc).