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• Germany:
  "Ku-Klux-Klan ja, Wikileaks nein"
• Spain:
  "Apoyo a organizaciones racistas"
• The Netherlands:
  'Je mag met je Visa- of Mastercard wel geld geven aan de Ku Klux Klan, maar inmiddels geen donaties meer doen aan WikiLeaks.'
• Turkey:
  "Ku Klux Klan'a bagis var, Wikileaks'e yok" [Sorry for the spelling, but /. filters the characters otherwise]
• Poland:
  "[..]- nie ma za to problemów z donacj np. na róne odamy Ku-Klux-Klanu"

yeah.
here in Poland, people who earn yearly more than 74000 PLN = 18500 USD (roughly) must pay 40% tax. Which makes them earning 11100 USD instead of 18500. Or 30`000`000 instead of 50`000`000 USD ;/

fellow readers from Poland please correct me, I checked here

so. if Gates was about to make his money in Poland we should be able to launch rocket to Mars :) But I guess our crippled government will just lose all that money :>

I agree. I have two Atari 810 cassette drives that are completely DOA. The belts have all but disintegrated and the rest of the mechanical stuff is shot. Even when thay did work (way long ago) the recordings were unreliable at best. I agree with Achacha not to waste any more time on tape. Build or buy an SIO2PC cable instead. Instructions to build this yourself (thanks to Nick Kennedy) can be found here. I built one based on his original design. Also, an ebay seller from Poland seems to be doing decent business selling his own version. It is somewhat easier find a working 1050 disk drive since these were built to much higher standards than the tape drives. Be warned that many ebay sellers are not equipped to test these older components. Whatever the effort, there is nothing like occasionally playing with those old 8-bits.

Yes, server to server connections are a normal thing in Jabber. In fact, a jabber userID (the JID which identifies a user or a service on a server) resembles an e-mail address - it has a form of: user@domain.

For example I've created a simple HOWTO on setting up server to server connections with Jabberd 1.4.2 on OpenBSD, you can read it here.

Moreover, Jabber protocol uses UTF-8 encoding for all communication and config files, so there are no problems with different character encodings - you don't have to mess with anything to write messages with polish diacritical characters, chinese, cyrillic or arabic!

Actually, the Jabber protocol is gaining quite a big popularity here in Poland as more people are getting tired with local proprietary IM system called GaduGadu which provides the official client only for windows (although multiple unofficial have been created for Linux and BSD).

There's also a central web site for Jabber in Poland, and already there are multiple public servers like chrome.pl or jabber.atman.pl.

The largest polish web portal, Wirtualna Polska has even provided its own public Jabber server and has developed official client that supports voice and video chat through Jabber!

It's good to see Australia go in the same direction!

mp3.com (biggest >1.5 million tunes, now owned by Universal Vivendi who, so far, haven't messed it up too much)

IUMA (based in the USA, but international)

Besonic (based in Germany, but international)

mp3.de (based in Germany, but international)

Soundclick (based in the USA, but international)

(Garageband based in the USA, but international)

France mp3 (based in France)

Vitaminic (free + pay - based in the USA, but international)

Washington Post (yup, the newspaper)

Online Rock (based in the USA, but international)

Peoplesound based England

mp3.com Australia (not the same mp3.com - based in Australia, but international)

Emusic (pay and not really indie per se, but smaller label and re-release oriented, based in USA)

Artistlaunch (based in the USA, but international)

mp3 Poland - (Based in Poland - mostly domestic)

Good Google will searches turn up more small sites, thousands of independent artists' sites with free mp3's, some smaller labels that have free samples, many, many links pages. The biggest problem here is that it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff. There is some incredibly good stuff out there and a lot of crap.

Use Google - many local newspaper sites have mp3 sections for local artists and there are many mp3 sites that are specifically for local talent.

If you're not familiar with mp3.com, it can be daunting in the sheer volume of material (no pun intended). And they accept material of all (musical) quality from absolute crap to incredibly good. They have many genre-based top-40 style charts and new-release charts. Walking through those is a natural first step. One concept they have that can be a big help is "stations" - really a euphemism for fan-generated lists of tunes by various artists. The tunes can be played separately or sequentially. So, when you find an artist that you like and get to their page, click on the "stations now playing" tab. On that page could be one to several "stations" where you might find additional good material that someone else has taken the time to comb out and list. I've seen lists from 2 to 200 tunes long - this can expand your options very quickly.

I have looked for ogg sources and found precious few. Unfortunately, Ogg is still a long way from critical mass.

Why did they lose communication ..?

I mean, You guys don't read technomyths or something? The Martians have captured it! They have taken it to the city!

...and can they get it back?

Depends on how our negotiations go, of course. Last time I heard, they were demanding that we design and implement Kazaa for interplanetary internet. Apparently, they're too tired of listening to the same Britney Spears songs over and over again and want to check out Two Towers even before the bootlegs reach Cydonia

Simply no one cares here. For the record companies pirate CD's are a bigger problem than MP3s - those CDs are mass produced in former USSR countries, brought here and sold on the flea markets for $2 - $3. However, mp3s are getting more and more popular and we might see some moves from the record companies soon. There are some MP3 portals (example) and some quite huge FTP servers with music. Also napster and gnutella are quite popular.

On the other hand legal CDs with music are sold for around $10 - $20 - and this is very expensive, especially for young people. Average monthly income here is (according to official government data) $415 and minimal wage is $156. That puts those prices into prospective.