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Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets (ars technica)Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets (ars technica)Posted Oct 27, 2012 19:52 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets (ars technica) by skvidal Parent article: Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets (ars technica)
Quite. It's certainly not always true of the UK: a lot of our parliamentarians are lawyers, and given the amount UK lawyers can earn, they're likely taking a substantial salary cut to be an MP instead (even if they are still earning twice the average wage). If they get into senior positions they can often earn a lot after they leave (directorships, consultancies, the old revolving door), but this is by no means guaranteed.
Power is almost certainly the attractant more than money. (Not that everybody is motivated by power any more than everybody is motivated by money -- but it is certainly *not* true that money is the root of *all* evil.)
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Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets (ars technica) Posted Oct 28, 2012 12:12 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]
Representatives will tell you, and I have no reason to doubt, that most of them, most of the time, actually seek to do a good job governing. But governing is hard, and what is obvious to someone else is not necessarily obvious to anyone in government, let alone everyone in government.
The history of government reform shows that even when reform is against the short and medium term interests of some individuals in government, they will often support it if they see that it's the right thing overall. If you squint hard enough you might imagine that they see reform as preferable to some sort of bloody revolution, but in the case of a lot of historical UK reforms, at least, there was no realistic prospect of such a revolution. The Suffragettes for example, could have continued to be annoying, to cause unpleasant spectacles, march in the streets, but they did not have the means, nor any hope of securing the means, to overthrow the government of the day. Nevertheless they eventually succeeded in their aims, an all male government passed a bill giving (some) women the vote.
Women's suffrage also provides illustration that a government regulation can be arbitrary and unfair without being ill-meant. In 1929 a young woman (Jennie Lee) was able to stand for election (and win) but couldn't vote for herself because although a bill equalising the voting age for men and women had passed it had not come into force before the by-election at which she won her seat and so she was too young to vote but not too young to be elected. This situation obviously makes no sense, but you can't point your finger at any individual who planned for things to work out this way, it was an accident.
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