These would be the same farmers who fed brain stems from cattle to other cattle and gave the world mad cow disease? Yeah, I guess they're totally the best people to be the gatekeepers of our health and well-being and not at all profit motivated.
Is it not equally likely that poorer communities have more immediate health and social concerns, or even that they can't afford the health costs (even where health care is free or they have insurance, they might not be able to afford the time off work, etc) to investigate relatively minor health problems to the same degree as people in more affluent countries/states/communities? Look at how disorders such as dyslexia, until recently relatively unknown, have become much more widely diagnosed as education and quality of life have improved - there's no suggestion that it's any more widespread than it was in the days of mass illiteracy, just a hell of a lot easier to spot with the change in lifestyle.
I certainly remember people holding protests against (at the very least) pesticides and feed uses (notably BSD, being in the UK), and there are always calls for more clear labelling. Maybe that wasn't as successful (remember, a lot of those practices were put in place before the internet was popular, where you had to be really determined to seek out other like-minded people, or even to find out information about said practices), but it's no reason for people not to try again with GM if it's what they believe. On the flip side, there's nothing preventing these incredibly rich companies from trying to change people's minds, the fact that they're struggling to do that even with their deep pockets is telling in itself about how strongly people feel on this issue.
The difference is, if the drugs turn out to be harmful, we just don't produce them any more. Sure they might do damage, that's a calculated risk where we have some control over the consequences. Alternatively, if I claimed I'd developed a chemical, one drop of which added to any of the earth's oceans would render all water safe to drink, but I can't prove that there's zero chance of it poisoning all drinking water on the planet, we might just want to do some thorough testing, preferably led by someone with no profit motivation, before deploying something that is almost impossible to reverse.
In any event, it's not sufficient to justify dangerous practices today on the basis that someone else did something similar in the past, even if that yielded positive results.
Unfortunately this isn't like, say, cigarettes, where we can easily deal with the consequences if they turn out to be harmful later (ultimately if we banned all cigarette production tomorrow, the consequences of the producers denying knowledge of the effects would not be too long lived in the grand scheme of things). With GM food, there's no way to easily turn back the tide. Once this stuff gets out into the wild it could literally change the face of the planet - even if the companies behind it get sued into oblivion, how do you reverse the effects on nature? And I say this as someone who isn't even vehemently opposed to GM food if it's done right, but when profit is the main motivation, things are rarely done right.
"The best way to find the problems is to put it into mass use." - exactly the same kind of sentiment that led us to radioactive consumer items, including toothpaste, hair cream, food and even radioactive snake oil. The "problems" are self evident to us with the benefit of hindsight, back then it probably sounded like a great idea.
Unfortunately, just as with the other examples you provided, the vocal minority are the ones who the reasonable people have to shape their world around because they know how to play the media/politics game.
Agreed - I think this was intentional, although whether they realised they were doing anything wrong is debatable. They probably had this song sung to them as a nursery rhyme as kids and it's feasible it stuck and they didn't even imagine it might be under some kind of copyright (I realise under the draconian copyright laws we have, intent to infringe isn't necessary).
You're a little confused. Nobody thinks the GPL isn't evil, we merely recognise it's a necessary evil, to prevent us all getting screwed over by the unecessary evil of unfair copyright.
Indeed. The company that ironically plundered every child's tale they could lay their hands on and then used the massive profits from that to ensure nobody else can ever do unto them what they did unto others.
Surely everyone who is present to hear the rendition counts as a lost sale. Number of singers * number of listeners * reasonable amount (let's say $15,000) per song = sue frenzy. I can only imagine not even the labels are greedy enough to commit the public image suicide of suing school kids for singing in assembly.
I'll bet schools do this all the time, I remember when I was at school we used to sing stuff which I'm sure is still under copyright today (I remember singing Beatles songs like Eleanor Rigby, for instance). This almost certainly falls under the draconian rules around public performance, I wonder if the **AAs are just biding their time or if even they realise that suing a school is going to look bad for them. Seriously, though, if we have to have such strict laws they should be made to enforce them consistently (i.e. you don't get away with illegal downloading because you're the kid of a label executive) - as much as that would suck, at least maybe then the average person would speak out more against them, instead of the current system where nobody knows whether they'll get sued at any point for something utterly trivial.
The artist in this case is already dead. The rights to the song were sold after her death, and the song that's claimed to be infringing was released before the rights were sold (i.e. the current rights holder bought the song at a point when they had every reason to know of the allegedely infringing song), that still wasn't enough to prevent them having to pay up. This is the kind of crap people are referring to when they say ridiculously long copyright stifles creativity rather than promoting it - seriously, it's one bit of one song that sounds kind of like a tune someone wrote half a decade earlier.
There's a long history of oppressive regimes pretending to be listening to the will of the people. This is just more of the same (and as you point out, there's even already a precedent in the UK of a site purporting to allow people to talk directly to the government which then just gets ignored).
Well often what happens is they simply get superceded by later law which renders them moot. They no longer apply, but it costs money to repeal them, so they just stay on the books forever but it doesn't matter until someone five hundred years later digs them out and uses them as absolute proof that the laws of the country are insane. It doesn't really matter that you're technically allowed to shoot a Welshman using a longbow within the city walls of wherever if the murder laws have basically overruled that.
They already know which laws are unpopular, so if they're not going to use the strict measure of that unpopularity to eliminate said laws, why even have the theatre of the site? I agree a site that auto-repealed laws would be silly, but how about they commit to saying if X number of people speak out against a law on the site then they promise to have a referendum on that law, with informed public debate, and then abide by the public's decision. All they've offered is vague posturing, exactly as Labour did before they started ignoring petitions on their website while in power.
It's far from a "real opportunity to be involved in politics", unless by that statement you mean it's "an opportunity to have their views ignored by politicians". If our government (and I'm aware that it's a different government, I've seen enough to know they're all basically the same) could ignore the views of 750,000 - 2,000,000 people who turned up in person to protest the Iraq war, what makes you think they won't ignore people who are only posting on the internet? We already have the precedent of government ignoring mass e-petitions on the number 10 petition site, so far as I can see this is no different, they'll cherry pick the laws they want to repeal, find a handful of petitioners and use that to justify that they're following the will of the people, meanwhile they'll conveniently ignore any large petitions to repeal laws they actually want to keep.
Even if they were offering continued support for every iPhone they've made, it'd still be a drop in the ocean compared to what the other phone OS vendors support. They could afford to have a dedicated OS for each phone and probably still come in under on the development cost front, just in what they save on not having to test against so many variables.
Your argument amounts to "you only get 90% more freedom to do what you want, unless it's 100% more you may as well stick with what you have". I've not run into any constraints with my Desire despite not having root access, I've either managed to find a market place or third party app for everything I've needed to do so far (including tethering, but I'm in the UK on O2, YMMV).
I'm guessing that would screw around with things like multitouch and pinch to zoom, and if you're only lightly brushing your cheek the surface area that's actually touching the phone might be small enough to register as below x%.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I meant BSE - sorry, having a "mad cow" moment.
These would be the same farmers who fed brain stems from cattle to other cattle and gave the world mad cow disease? Yeah, I guess they're totally the best people to be the gatekeepers of our health and well-being and not at all profit motivated.
Is it not equally likely that poorer communities have more immediate health and social concerns, or even that they can't afford the health costs (even where health care is free or they have insurance, they might not be able to afford the time off work, etc) to investigate relatively minor health problems to the same degree as people in more affluent countries/states/communities? Look at how disorders such as dyslexia, until recently relatively unknown, have become much more widely diagnosed as education and quality of life have improved - there's no suggestion that it's any more widespread than it was in the days of mass illiteracy, just a hell of a lot easier to spot with the change in lifestyle.
I certainly remember people holding protests against (at the very least) pesticides and feed uses (notably BSD, being in the UK), and there are always calls for more clear labelling. Maybe that wasn't as successful (remember, a lot of those practices were put in place before the internet was popular, where you had to be really determined to seek out other like-minded people, or even to find out information about said practices), but it's no reason for people not to try again with GM if it's what they believe. On the flip side, there's nothing preventing these incredibly rich companies from trying to change people's minds, the fact that they're struggling to do that even with their deep pockets is telling in itself about how strongly people feel on this issue.
The difference is, if the drugs turn out to be harmful, we just don't produce them any more. Sure they might do damage, that's a calculated risk where we have some control over the consequences. Alternatively, if I claimed I'd developed a chemical, one drop of which added to any of the earth's oceans would render all water safe to drink, but I can't prove that there's zero chance of it poisoning all drinking water on the planet, we might just want to do some thorough testing, preferably led by someone with no profit motivation, before deploying something that is almost impossible to reverse.
In any event, it's not sufficient to justify dangerous practices today on the basis that someone else did something similar in the past, even if that yielded positive results.
Unfortunately this isn't like, say, cigarettes, where we can easily deal with the consequences if they turn out to be harmful later (ultimately if we banned all cigarette production tomorrow, the consequences of the producers denying knowledge of the effects would not be too long lived in the grand scheme of things). With GM food, there's no way to easily turn back the tide. Once this stuff gets out into the wild it could literally change the face of the planet - even if the companies behind it get sued into oblivion, how do you reverse the effects on nature? And I say this as someone who isn't even vehemently opposed to GM food if it's done right, but when profit is the main motivation, things are rarely done right.
"The best way to find the problems is to put it into mass use." - exactly the same kind of sentiment that led us to radioactive consumer items, including toothpaste, hair cream, food and even radioactive snake oil. The "problems" are self evident to us with the benefit of hindsight, back then it probably sounded like a great idea.
Unfortunately, just as with the other examples you provided, the vocal minority are the ones who the reasonable people have to shape their world around because they know how to play the media/politics game.
Agreed - I think this was intentional, although whether they realised they were doing anything wrong is debatable. They probably had this song sung to them as a nursery rhyme as kids and it's feasible it stuck and they didn't even imagine it might be under some kind of copyright (I realise under the draconian copyright laws we have, intent to infringe isn't necessary).
You're a little confused. Nobody thinks the GPL isn't evil, we merely recognise it's a necessary evil, to prevent us all getting screwed over by the unecessary evil of unfair copyright.
Indeed. The company that ironically plundered every child's tale they could lay their hands on and then used the massive profits from that to ensure nobody else can ever do unto them what they did unto others.
Surely everyone who is present to hear the rendition counts as a lost sale. Number of singers * number of listeners * reasonable amount (let's say $15,000) per song = sue frenzy. I can only imagine not even the labels are greedy enough to commit the public image suicide of suing school kids for singing in assembly.
I'll bet schools do this all the time, I remember when I was at school we used to sing stuff which I'm sure is still under copyright today (I remember singing Beatles songs like Eleanor Rigby, for instance). This almost certainly falls under the draconian rules around public performance, I wonder if the **AAs are just biding their time or if even they realise that suing a school is going to look bad for them. Seriously, though, if we have to have such strict laws they should be made to enforce them consistently (i.e. you don't get away with illegal downloading because you're the kid of a label executive) - as much as that would suck, at least maybe then the average person would speak out more against them, instead of the current system where nobody knows whether they'll get sued at any point for something utterly trivial.
The artist in this case is already dead. The rights to the song were sold after her death, and the song that's claimed to be infringing was released before the rights were sold (i.e. the current rights holder bought the song at a point when they had every reason to know of the allegedely infringing song), that still wasn't enough to prevent them having to pay up. This is the kind of crap people are referring to when they say ridiculously long copyright stifles creativity rather than promoting it - seriously, it's one bit of one song that sounds kind of like a tune someone wrote half a decade earlier.
There's a long history of oppressive regimes pretending to be listening to the will of the people. This is just more of the same (and as you point out, there's even already a precedent in the UK of a site purporting to allow people to talk directly to the government which then just gets ignored).
Well often what happens is they simply get superceded by later law which renders them moot. They no longer apply, but it costs money to repeal them, so they just stay on the books forever but it doesn't matter until someone five hundred years later digs them out and uses them as absolute proof that the laws of the country are insane. It doesn't really matter that you're technically allowed to shoot a Welshman using a longbow within the city walls of wherever if the murder laws have basically overruled that.
They already know which laws are unpopular, so if they're not going to use the strict measure of that unpopularity to eliminate said laws, why even have the theatre of the site? I agree a site that auto-repealed laws would be silly, but how about they commit to saying if X number of people speak out against a law on the site then they promise to have a referendum on that law, with informed public debate, and then abide by the public's decision. All they've offered is vague posturing, exactly as Labour did before they started ignoring petitions on their website while in power.
It's far from a "real opportunity to be involved in politics", unless by that statement you mean it's "an opportunity to have their views ignored by politicians". If our government (and I'm aware that it's a different government, I've seen enough to know they're all basically the same) could ignore the views of 750,000 - 2,000,000 people who turned up in person to protest the Iraq war, what makes you think they won't ignore people who are only posting on the internet? We already have the precedent of government ignoring mass e-petitions on the number 10 petition site, so far as I can see this is no different, they'll cherry pick the laws they want to repeal, find a handful of petitioners and use that to justify that they're following the will of the people, meanwhile they'll conveniently ignore any large petitions to repeal laws they actually want to keep.
I've never had this, but I use a thin silicone case and I've noticed I do have to press the power button a little more firmly as a result.
Even if they were offering continued support for every iPhone they've made, it'd still be a drop in the ocean compared to what the other phone OS vendors support. They could afford to have a dedicated OS for each phone and probably still come in under on the development cost front, just in what they save on not having to test against so many variables.
Since yoy asked
Sweet irony.
Wait, are we "flipping out" because we love them or because we hate them? You seem... conflicted. You do realise it's just a phone?
Your argument amounts to "you only get 90% more freedom to do what you want, unless it's 100% more you may as well stick with what you have". I've not run into any constraints with my Desire despite not having root access, I've either managed to find a market place or third party app for everything I've needed to do so far (including tethering, but I'm in the UK on O2, YMMV).
I'm guessing that would screw around with things like multitouch and pinch to zoom, and if you're only lightly brushing your cheek the surface area that's actually touching the phone might be small enough to register as below x%.