Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"We would argue that having radio capability on cell phones and other mobile devices would be a great thing, particularly from a public safety perspective. There are few if any technologies that match the reliability of broadcast radio in terms of getting lifeline information to the masses.
So it's now about public safety. Well what is the RIAA involved then? It's a different line every time because originally they said it was "to offer more musical choice".
Total BS.
It's not often you read the phrase "incandescent with rage" in the tech press....
If we reduce this down to its essential elements, a group of people who won businesses want to use violence in the form of the government to force other people to buy the product of their business and pay them.
This is not capitalism, this is the opposite. This is theft.
Let the free market decide. If android phones come with radios and iPhones do not, then that is the choice they get to make and their customers get to decide which they prefer.
Using congress to "mandate" things like this, is a crime. (In the moral sense if not the legal sense, though I think it is in the legal sense as well, given the constitution does not authorize this, and the constitutions authorization of congress only empowers them to carry out a limited list of enumerated powers. But then, when I point that out people seem to think that I am taking the law too literally.)
This is why I find those who both loathe "corporations" and worship the government as a means to protect us from the former to be ... out to lunch. No matter how tyrannical or whatever you might consider Steve Jobs or Balmer, they're in no position to do that to me if I refuse to buy one of their gadgets.
As for the enumerated powers of the government, I agree (except ones like us might say the Constitution is more meta-law than law), but I count our final defeat on that matter in Wickard v. Filburn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn), where in 1942 the Supremes ruled that the Federal government could prevent you from growing wheat on your own land for your own consumption, because otherwise you'd have to buy it, which effects interstate commerce.
(This is also particularly loathsome because it started in a period when the USDA calculated 1/4 of the US was malnourished as the same time it was taking a zillion actions to increase the price of food. WWII conscription confirmed the former estimate, BTW, leading to among other things the Federal school lunch program.)
(He was also the only Justice to drop dead in open court while reading a decision btw which is the reason I remember him)