But that tiny power can cause a lot of damage if the exposure is for many hours a day for several years. Here's a story about the dangers of microwave radiation. Calling all non-ionizing radiation safe is quite careless.

You can't just say off-hand there is no harmful effects. They need to perform studies to reach that conclusion. And the study should be done by an independent agency, not the FCC or Samsung. That would be like letting the wolves guard the hen house.

No, proximity has a huge impact on harmfulness. Radiation effect is probably proportional to the inverse square of the distance (impact proportional to 1/dist^2). They should redo the test with 2mm distance from thigh skin.

Of course, you can still hire a $250-750/hr human lawyer when your e-lawyer screws up. Hopefully, that won't happen too often.

Is the agent her employer?

In 99.99% of the cases, the public doesn't know the name of an actor's agent. S/he is just a middleman doing some specialized work like contract price negotiation.

When you book a taxi, you choose the taxi based on Uber's reputation, and not on the driver's reputation. This is completely different in the actor's case where you don't care about the agent's reputation as much as the actor's reputation.

Uber handles all these roles:
a) agent of e-taxi drivers
b) marketing and selling e-taxi services
c) billing and payment processing for passengers and drivers
d) hiring and firing taxi drivers

The scope is much bigger than just an agent. Uber is just like any other employer except its employees come and go as they please, and work irregular hours compared to 9-to-5 workers.

So when the guy in the middle leans back to sleep you get to look at him and hear his snoring EXTRA loud

That's the thing, you can't lean back. Zoom in on TFA's seat image and you'll see the last row's window seat back is fused to its previous row's middle seat... all three seats in a row have their backs fused, so you can't lean them back or forward. I guess this is how they achieved extra rows.

What kind of people are you going to get to do that when money is not a requirement?

Maybe they'll work for free, as a hobby. Isn't slashdot and reddit moderated by moderators who work for free? Isn't stackexchange.com filled with Q&A created entirely for free, just like posting slashdot comments does not earn you money? Millions of man-hours for FREE.

Of course, someone will have to pay for travel expenses from the technician's house to the house that needs servicing. But his service after that will be free. My point is, we're already living in the star trek / communistic society but few people notice it.

Enough with the stupid analogies and defending Google. When you uninstall an app, all app-specific components should be deleted, including any background running programs, not just the user facing GUI program.

The photo uploader was not deleted and the question remains whether this was intentional and malicious to allow Google access to photos it was no longer authorized or entitled to.

And if these apps are useful why not offer free downloads from the play store instead of preinstalling them and making them non-removable? Samsung must be getting paid by software vendors to install these apps or the apps are free and Samsung is selling data collected by these apps.

You're not forced to buy a samsung phone.

That's no excuse to install something useless that wastes flash memory and RAM.

Yes, but most weapons today wouldn't be made by one person. Not even designed by one person.

So share the profits with the 10 or 100 designers based on the importance of their contribution. Instead all profits go to the organizers (management), investors and shareholders. These people who had little or nothing to do with the technical aspects of the product. Sure they should get a share of the profits, but not all of it.

And even a sword is often the result of centuries of development in its details. What metallurgy went into the blade, how long it is, the guard, the grip, etc.

I'll repeat the previous point: There's no reason only one person should profit from the development of this weapon. The profits could be shared by multiple innovators.

That's not a subsidy. Instead, it's bundling the monthly rental fee of the phone with monthly phone service charges.

In the US at least, "sweat of the brow" does not by itself allow copyright protection; it is irrelevant how much work is done.

According to wikipedia, sweat of the brow implies:

Designing APIs or instruction sets requires a ton of creativity and originality, since billions of lines of code are going to be using it and since changing them in the future is costly and difficult. The originality comes from improved API design that reduces coding time/debug time as is the case in Java API vs C API. Sweat of the brow type of work means something trivial like creating a database of people's names and phone numbers or printing phone books.

That being said, there is a lot of tedious, sweat of the brow concepts involved in designing APIs. For example, reading a text file still needs something like fileopen(), fileclose(), fileread() that is present in all programming languages in some form. But this API should still be copyrightable since copyright protects creative expression of an idea, but not the idea itself.

The TL;DR version: the API ideas/concepts are similar across many programming languages but the way they are expressed differently means they deserve copyright protection.

IP protection is poor and archaic because it was created in the 1700s where you only had to deal with protecting books and mechanical inventions. API/instruction set are a type of IP that seem like a blend of design patents and copyright. IP law should be extended to protect all types of intellectual property using different tools, not just patents and copyright.

I didn't read the NEC vs Intel case too much but it seems like copyright infringement because copying the body/implementation of a function API is similar to copying the microcode (or subassemly language) of a CPU.

Maybe the law back when Lexra was around was that instruction sets were not copyrightable. It is this hole in the law that allowed Google to reimplement the Java Standard Library without paying any licensing fees. But since SCOTUS has already ruled APIs are copyrightable, it should stand that instruction sets should also be copyrightable since APIs and instruction sets are very similar, conceptually.

I did find something about Lexra on google:

http://probell.com/Lexra/lexra...

I disagree with the Lexra employee since a lot of effort and creativity goes into designing an instruction set. Both x86 and MIPS allow programs to execute common operations on their CPUs. However, there are a lot of design decisions that go into designing the nitty gritty portions of the operations.

You were right that Lexra did something similar to what Google just did. They created a MIPS clone but were sued for patent infringement:

Wait... Are you saying that people who make weapons don't get paid a lot of money for their weapons? Because they do actually make a lot of money.

I'm not so sure about that. Iron Man may make billions from his military inventions, because it's a movie. In the real world, Tony Stark's inventions would make billions, but that money would go to the corporation hiring him, while Tony himself would only make between $200K to $1M max/year for his work.

So my point is, the money goes to the businessmen running these weapon companies and to the govt who profit from winning wars using these weapons. But the person actually responsible for winning the war through good weapon-design makes diddly squat, relatively speaking.

They already are. Here is some legal stuff stating Intel licensing copyright of x86 instructions to AMD:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/ed...

It is therefore logical that Google should also obtain a license to use Oracle's Java API.

The same could be said of pretty much every advancement. Guys with clubs are cowards because the barehanded guys don't have a chance. Guys with swords are cowards because the guys with clubs don't stand a chance. Guys with arrows are cowards because the guys with swords across the field don't stand a chance. So on and so forth.

You seem to agree to the philosophy that:
weapons are of much greater importance than the soldier using it

If that's true, why aren't the inventors (or IP creators) of these weapons not rulers of countries or at least receive a sizable royalties from the spoils of war? Don't these weapons win wars? Why do administrator type politicians and capitalist businessmen divvy up lion's share of a country's output and war profit, leaving only scraps for others?

This is especially true where today's drone operators are not much more than video game players wielding very powerful weapons.